In the riverine landscapes of South Goa, where the Kushavati flows through verdant hills, lies a silent testament to one of India’s most ancient human settlements. The Usgalimal rock engravings, also known as Usgalimol or Pansaimol petroglyphs, sprawl across a vast laterite bedrock spanning thousands of square meters. Discovered in 1993 by alert local farmers and archaeologists, these carvings...
Contesting Subhash Velingkar’s Claims
In a recent speech at a Marathi Rajbhasha Samiti meeting in Panaji, Subhash Velingkar alleged that six BJP MLAs were “recommended by the Church” and lacked alignment with the party’s ideology, yet succeeded in Hindu-majority constituencies due to external influence. These remarks, framed around language politics, risk reviving communal divisions in Goa rather than addressing genuine issues. Velingkar’s assertion...
Radhika Vaz and the Quiet Power of Out-Ironying: Deconstructing Goa’s Contradictions in an Age of Noise
Contemporary Goa, where rapid commercialization clashes with fading susegad traditions, the voice of comedian Radhika Vaz cuts through with deceptive gentleness. Born in Mumbai to Goan-Catholic parents, Vaz carries forward a distinctly Goan inheritance of satire that does not scream but whispers devastating truths. Her brand of comedy, self-described as “Older. Angrier. Hairier,” employs what can be termed “out-ironying”,...
Out-Ironying Goa: The Quiet Power of Polite Agreement
Goa has never been loud. Its resistance, like its landscape, moves in gentle curves, coconut palms swaying before a storm, a quiet wave that eventually reshapes the shore. In recent years, a particular form of political and cultural pushback has re-emerged in public discourse, one that feels uniquely Goan: out-ironying. Instead of frontal confrontation, it involves agreeing with an...
Zaiat Zage: A Frankfurt School Reading of Manohar Sardesai’s Call to Awakening
Manohar Rai Sardessai’s Zaiat Zage (Arise, Awake), published in 1964, is far more than a collection of Konkani verses from a newly liberated Goa. It is a poetic intervention against resignation, a demand for collective consciousness at the precise historical moment when formal political freedom threatened to freeze into new forms of domination. Viewed through the lens of Frankfurt...
Goa’s Gentle Mirror: Satire for the Unhomed Pobre Fidalgos
While the Mandovi, Zuari , Sal, and other rivers meet the Arabian Sea, Goa finds itself in a curious rerun of history. The old irony returns: Popre Fidalgos, once the titled gentry of Portuguese times, have shape-shifted into modern forms, where many native Goans feel like being exiled in their backyard. This unhoming is not dramatic exile by ship...
The Spectral Imperative Haunting Goans
One can clearly discern that in Goa, a distinct form of political subjectivity is emerging at the intersection of national aspiration and regional memory. The Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) sustained influence in the state, often through coalitions and pragmatic absorptions, operates not merely through policy or electoral machinery but through a deeper psychopolitical command: the superegoic injunction to enjoy...
Ethical Resistance in an Age of Conformism and Exaggerated Enjoyment
In a world saturated with ready-made identities and scripted pleasures, philosophy begins with a simple yet radical act: disobedience. To philosophize, as Frédéric Gros reminds us, is to refuse the automatic obedience that sustains unjust orders. It is not mere rebellion for its own sake, but an ethical stance, a deliberate reawakening of conscience and judgment against the quiet...
Reconsidering Priolkar’s Legacy
In an era when discussions about Goan history often grow deeply polarized, the sharing of A.K. Priolkar’s 1968 biographical sketch of St. Francis Xavier offers a valuable opportunity for thoughtful reflection. Priolkar, whose earlier book on the Goa Inquisition remains widely referenced, presents in this Mandovi magazine (written in Marathi ) article a portrait of the saint that is...
Who Remembers, Who Forgets: Goan Catholics, the Inquisition, and the Postcolonial Present
In Goa today, two conversations about the past seem to move in opposite directions. Many Goan Catholics live their faith quietly, without daily reference to the Inquisition that ran from 1560 to 1812. At the same time, a section of society speaks publicly, and often with urgency, about ancestral pain from that same period, claiming a continuity of victimhood...
