The contemporary political discourse on the history of Goa frequently depends on rigid binary frameworks. One prominent example is the recurring claim that temples in Goa would have remained intact if the Portuguese had never arrived. This idea was recently advanced by the Chief Minister, who presented the era of the Kadamba dynasty as a golden age marked chiefly by religious flourish and the construction of temples.
The record of Portuguese colonial violence is firmly established by critical studies. Yet reducing the long span of history before colonial rule to a story of temple building alone, and reducing the colonial period itself to a single campaign against religion, creates a serious problem of historical interpretation. In this setting, the practices of ethical disobedience and epistemic disobedience become essential for protecting true history, intellectual honesty, and social cohesion.
The reductive narrative operates in two damaging ways. First, it collapses the intricate political, maritime, economic, and administrative achievements of the Kadamba dynasty, which ruled the region from the tenth to about the twelfth centuries, into a single aesthetic of religious devotion centred on temples. Second, it imposes a modern sense of territory onto the past. The geographic, cultural, and political space now recognised as Goa took shape in part through the boundaries fixed during the Portuguese presence. Removing the colonial centuries from the picture produces an anachronistic vision of what the region would resemble today.
Epistemic disobedience, as developed by thinkers such as Walter Mignolo and adapted by me in my work, consists in the refusal to think inside the conceptual boxes supplied by dominant power structures. When an official state narrative works to cultivate a selective history of collective victimhood, epistemic disobedience requires a shift in the geography of knowledge.
This form of disobedience questions the war paradigm. It dismantles the framework that presents colonisation as a simple contest between two religious blocs. Instead, it examines the material, socioeconomic, and imperial motives of the Portuguese as well as those of the local dynasties that contended for control of Goa’s profitable ports, including the Kadambas, the Vijayanagara Empire, and the Adil Shahi Sultanate. It also reclaims a plural heritage. Rather than viewing the past through a lens of absence and speculation about monuments that might have been built, epistemic disobedience attends to decolonial abundance. It embraces the historical hybridity, structural syncretism, and complex multi-faith realities that form modern Goan identity.
Ethical disobedience supplies the moral counterpart to this intellectual stance. Drawing on the Socratic tradition upheld by local public intellectuals, it represents a refusal to remain silent when historical narratives are deployed to intensify communal polarization in the present. Ethical disobedience insists on a holistic study of the Kadamba period. The so-called golden age must be assessed not only for its physical monuments but for its trade networks, legal systems, social stratifications, and patterns of governance. It further demands resistance to presentism (Logocentrism/ metaphysic of the present), the habit of judging historical actors solely by contemporary ethical standards to serve current political agendas.
To examine the Kadamba dynasty critically is not to deny its contributions or to minimise the traumas inflicted by Portuguese colonialism. It is to reject the conversion of history into an ideological instrument. By refusing to reduce the pre-colonial past of Goa to an exclusive chronicle of temple architecture, Goans safeguard the true and complex landscape of a region whose hybridised identity continues to resist rigid classification.
The Kadamba rulers maintained extensive maritime connections that linked the Konkan coast with distant markets across the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean. Ports under their control facilitated the exchange of spices, textiles, horses, and precious metals. Administrative records and inscriptions reveal a sophisticated bureaucracy capable of collecting revenue, regulating trade, and maintaining order across a diverse population. Social structures of the period included hierarchies of caste and occupation, yet they also allowed for forms of local autonomy and cultural exchange that later colonial accounts often overlooked. Legal codes addressed questions of inheritance, taxation, and religious endowment in ways that reflected both upper caste influence and pragmatic adaptation to regional conditions.
Portuguese arrival introduced new systems of land tenure, urban planning, and religious policy that altered the demographic and architectural face of the territory. The Inquisition enforced doctrinal conformity with severity, and local converts suffered the most. Certainly, conversion led to the bringing down of temples, but this issue is much more complex and is attached to ganvkarism and Casteism in Goa. At the same time, the colonial centuries produced architectural forms, linguistic borrowings, and culinary traditions that became integral to Goan life. The very boundaries of the modern state of Goa were drawn through successive treaties and military campaigns of that era. To imagine a continuous and unaltered Hindu landscape stretching from the tenth century to the present is therefore to erase the processes of aggregation and transformation that actually shaped the region.
Decolonial abundance, as articulated by me in my recent book, Goan-ness Unbound, directs attention away from narratives of pure loss toward the creative mixing or hybridisation that occurred across centuries. Churches built in Goa retained local aesthetic elements. Festivals and worship absorbed motifs from multiple traditions. Everyday speech blended Portuguese vocabulary with Konkani grammar. These hybrid formations do not erase the violence of the past; they demonstrate that identity is never static or singular. Epistemic disobedience keeps such evidence in view and prevents the past from being conscripted into contemporary identity politics.
Ethical disobedience further requires that scholars and citizens alike refuse selective memory. The Kadamba period included military campaigns against neighbouring powers, internal succession disputes, and may have included the subordination of certain communities. Acknowledging these realities does not diminish the dynasty’s achievements; it restores proportion. Likewise, acknowledging Portuguese contributions to cartography, education, and legal institutions does not exonerate the excesses of the Inquisition. Both forms of obedience to evidence protect public discourse from the simplification that feeds polarisation.
In the end, the practice of ethical and epistemic disobedience preserves the intellectual integrity necessary for a healthy civic life. It insists that history remain a field of inquiry rather than a storehouse of slogans that can be used to create political capital. Goa’s past is neither a pure golden age interrupted by foreign destruction nor a seamless colonial creation. It is a complex sequence of political formations, economic exchanges, religious negotiations, and cultural syntheses. Only by holding that complexity in view can residents and observers resist the reductive historiographies that threaten social cohesion and inter-religious harmony today. The work of disobedience is therefore not an academic luxury but a practical necessity for anyone who values a truthful account of the region’s unique trajectory.
