Goa, through the eyes of travellers…

Goa has been closely connected with the outside world for centuries now, but how do travellers to this place view Goa itself? To answer this question, scholars from the region looked at travel narratives dealing with Goa over the centuries and wrote down their observations in a book Goa, Through the Traveller’s Lens noting that quite a few see Goa through stereotypes and archetypes. But there have also been accounts going back literally hundreds of years which give an insight into lives lived here in remote times. 

Edited by Dr Nina Caldeira, professor and head of Department of English, Goa University, the 254-page book was released recently at a seminar held at the university. The book is based on the papers presented at a seminar held in 2017 and consists of papers published by 14 researchers.

“I feel academia needs to have a closer link with the society it serves, and the wider society should keep abreast with the ideas emerging from academia,” expresses Frederick Noronha, publisher.

Travel writing comes packaged as documentary, or as literary and journalistic works. Travel writers have increasingly been associated with tourism and their output finds its way into guidebooks too. Such work can be found on websites, in periodicals, in books and increasingly, in blogs. But the situation was different in the past. Across the centuries, travel writing has come from a wide variety of writers - travellers, anthropologists, spies, military officers, missionaries, explorers, pilgrims, social and physical scientists, educators and migrants.

For a region like Goa, such writing carries with it a lot of implications. Not only does it interpret this tiny region to the outside world, but it even influences Goans’ perceptions of themselves.

The book focuses on how travel writing depicts the small, historic, often hard-to-understand region called Goa. “For a change, scholars from the area turn the magnifying glass onto those who have long presented Goa to the world,” states Dr Neena. 

In the book, Dr Isabel Santa Rita Vas looks at how Goa was a meeting point for ideas and writers, studying Portuguese researcher Anabela Mendes (who had a deep interest in the work of Garcia Da Orta), and Spanish scholar Jose Paz (who studied Rabindranath Tagore). Both came to Goa en route their intellectual journey.

Dr Sushila Sawant Mendes has viewed the research of Jewish anthropologist Robert S Newman, and how he understood the AVC (Assolna-Velim-Cuncolim) villages of Salcete in the 1980s. Her conclusion on the accuracy of Newman’s work is interesting.

Historian Xavier M Martins writes on 17th century maritime Goa, as viewed by Pyrard de Laval, while librarian-historian Maria de Lourdes Bravo da Costa looks at how French travellers Francois Pyrard de Laval and Rev Dennis L. Cottineau de Kloguen described the food habits of Goa of another century.Dr Prema Rocha (St  Xavier’s College) analyses the narratives of travellers depicted in the anthology Goa Travels edited by Manohar Shetty and Inside/Out from the GoaWriters. 

She describes how in the late 20th century Helene Derken-Menezes found her family in Goa.

Sunita Mesquita sees Goa through the mirror of Sir Richard F. Burton, Maurice Collins, Luis Santa Rita Vas and others, while Dr Glenis Mendonca looks at the Goa depicted through recent travel blogs (expatblog.com, global-gallivanting.com, Goa Travel Blog, Hippie in Heels, etc).

Dr Brian Mendonca tells the story of change in Goa through his poetry, while Irene Silveira and Natasha Maria Gomes (both teaching French at the Goa University) study the depiction of this small region in the podcasts of French journalist Anne Bonneau.

Akshata Bhatt and Nafisa Oliveira study writings from Shetty’s Goa Travels, Palia Gaonkar looks at Goa in Naipaul’s A Million Mutinies Now, Ambika Kamat analyses Tome Pires’ description of Goa in Suma Oriental, and Frederick Noronha gives an account of Goa’s unusual rendering of Goa in the world of fiction.