"A Book full of Rice - Portuguese Colonialism, Food and Society in Goa: 1900-1961 in the JOÃO ROQUE LITERARY JOURNAL (September 2025)

 

Once an Assistant State Librarian at Goa’s Krishnadas Shama State Central Library, Maria de Lourdes Bravo da Costa also served as a Reference Librarian whose specialty was Indo-Portuguese History. Accordingly, the focus of da Costa’s latest book comes as no surprise, its title being Portuguese Colonialism, Food, and Society in Goa: 1900-1961 (Bloomsbury 2025).

Attending to the final decades of Portuguese rule in Goa, da Costa’s book looks closely at rice production in the capital of Estado da Índia, arguing that despite being a dietary staple, the crop regularly fell short of the requirements of Goans, and especially those from marginalized backgrounds. In her book, da Costa examines how the problem of rice insufficiency was emblematic of entrenched social hierarchies, especially in the context of bhatkar-mundkar (landlord-tenant) agrarian economies in Goa. Yet, as da Costa also finds, the failure to meet the basic needs of its people evidenced the decline of Portuguese India.

As is clear, da Costa’s book delves into social, economic, and political concerns related to Goa’s twentieth century history. Nevertheless, da Costa’s research also includes cultural and literary perspectives, topics she says more about in this interview with R. Benedito Ferrão.

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RBF: What led you to the study of rice and especially in the period of Goan history you cover in your book?

MLBC:  Rice is the staple food of the Goan people, and any serious study of the region’s history must acknowledge its central role within the community. In my own writing and research, I’ve explored how rice shaped not just daily sustenance, but also systems of power and survival. When this basic cereal was in short supply, it wasn’t just hunger people faced — it was vulnerability. Those who had no land of their own to grow rice, especially the subaltern classes, found themselves increasingly dependent on landowners. That dependence became a tool — a way to control, exploit, and dominate. And it wasn’t just individuals who used it to their advantage. The very institutions that governed agrarian life — our Comunidades, and the colonial rulers behind them — all played their part in reinforcing these hierarchies, with rice as both the currency and the chain.

The sixty years I chose to explore were marked by events that left a lasting impact on Goa and the wider world — two World Wars, the Great Depression, the long struggle for freedom from colonial rule, and ultimately, the end of Portuguese control in Goa, Daman, and Diu. What drew me to this period wasn’t just its historical significance, but its nearness. I had lived through the final years of Portuguese rule as a child, and the memories of that time have stayed with me. More than that, I grew up listening to stories from elders — people who had experienced those events firsthand. Their recollections, shared around the home or in conversation, made history feel vivid and alive. That intimacy, that sense of lived experience, made working with contemporary history far more meaningful to me than delving into the distant past.

RBF: An intertext you rely on quite a bit is one by another writer with whom you share a surname: O Signo da Ira / The Sign of Wrath (1961) by Orlando da Costa (1929-2006). Quite symbolically, this work of fiction in Portuguese was published (in Portugal) in the same year as the end of Portuguese rule in Goa. Inasmuch as da Costa’s novel is set against the backdrop of Goa’s rural agrarian economy and portrays the hardships encountered by mundkars, it coequally represents the stratification of caste-ridden social hierarchies in late Portuguese Goa.

In employing O Signo da Ira, you parallel this work of fiction and the historical realities of the period of its setting. What role does historical fiction play in helping us understand the past?

MLBC: O Signo da Ira serves as a literary archive of a time when Goan society was on the point of transformation. Da Costa's portrayal of rural and urban settings, the complexity of caste and class, and the prevalent atmosphere of fear and inertia, all contribute to a textured historical understanding that goes beyond facts and timelines.

Historical fiction invites us to see history not just as a series of facts, but as a human story — layered, subjective, and alive. It allows us to question dominant narratives, reclaim silenced histories, to feel the past, and to better understand the forces that shaped our present and, in this particular case, continue to shape Goan (and lusophone) identity today.

My interest in O Signo da Ira stems from its focus on rice cultivation and the power dynamics between the
bhatkar and mundkar. Although the author briefly notes that the story is based on this relationship, the novel deeply engages with these themes. It begins with the preparation of fields for the winter rice crop (vangana), grounding the narrative in agrarian life. However, rice is not just a crop — it becomes a symbol of survival and a tool of exploitation in the story. The bhatkars control land and, by extension, the mundkars, reinforcing caste and class hierarchies. Through this lens, the novel exposes how food and land are central to systems of oppression. O Signo da Ira thus functions as both historical fiction and social critique, giving voice to the often-silenced realities of rural Goan life under colonial rule.

In reading the novel through the lens of rice cultivation, I found it became much more than a historical fiction set in colonial Goa. It served as a critique of agrarian injustice, a document of lived realities, and a reminder of how sustenance — something as essential as rice — could also be weaponised in maintaining systems of inequality.

RBF: O Signo da Ira is not the only literary or cultural text you work with in your book. You also analyze Leslie de Noronha’s The Mango and the Tamarind Tree (1970), work by the Moraeses (Francis or “Frank” and his son Dominic or “Dom”), and also themes in Goan folk songs of the dulpod variety. In all of these examples of cultural production, you seek out how they represent food. How are sustenance and memory intertwined in these expressions of Goan (and diasporic) cultural life?

MLBC: In Goan and diasporic cultural expressions, food represents more than sustenance — it is a vessel of memory, identity, and belonging. Traditional dishes like fish curry-rice or sarapatel carry stories of home, family, and heritage, often passed down through generations. In the diaspora, preparing these foods becomes a way to reconnect with Goa, preserving cultural identity in new environments. Another interesting example is the chouriço–churisas or linguisas de Goa. For many, it is one of the most cherished foods in Goa, as well as for expatriate Goans.  An ode to it was written by far and nearby Goan writers, maybe closer in Bombay or far away in Canada.

RBF: Even though your book is about Goan food history, in many ways it is also about the significance of fiction, poetry, and music by Goans in the establishment and maintenance of Goa’s culture. Now that you are retired after many years of service as a librarian, what do you reckon has changed in the way that Goans engage with literature by Goan writers? To be plain, this question arises from my own interest as a scholar of Goan literature and the observation that it is a subject that does not receive adequate attention in academia in Goa.

MLBC: I would agree with you — for a long time, Goan writers were not recognised as having a serious place in literature. We see that while Goa did produce literature in Portuguese during the colonial period, full-length novels were few and far between. What we do have, however, are short stories and significant contributions by Goan writers in Marathi and Roman Konkani.

After the annexation of Goa in 1961, the literary scene diversified further. We began to see works in English, Konkani (both Romi and Devanagari scripts), and Marathi, along with a handful of publications in Portuguese — mostly short stories, a few novels, and some essays. I am speaking specifically about Goan literature in Goa.

Although my own work has drawn on fiction, poetry, and music by Goans to understand how culture was established and maintained, this approach hasn't always been widely accepted. Many conservative historians still regard archival documents as the only legitimate source for historical inquiry. That said, this trend is gradually shifting. More scholars are beginning to see the value of alternative sources — including fiction — in capturing the emotional and cultural realities of a society.

In this spirit, I have used newspapers as a kind of “people’s archive” — a living record of voices, opinions, and everyday experiences that formal archives often overlook. While this approach may not be accepted by all, it is heartening to see a growing openness toward literary and cultural texts as valid sources of historical understanding.

Fiction is often undervalued in academia for lacking factual credibility, yet it offers deep insight, especially when official records are limited or biased. It is up to the researcher to critically engage with fiction as a cultural and emotional archive. Meaningful analysis requires depth — not simply citing many sources, but closely examining a few relevant texts within the research context. When approached thoughtfully, fiction can powerfully complement or challenge official historical narratives.

I would like to add that the São Paulo University, Brazil, academic group, Pensando Goa, and the  GIEIPC-IP - Grupo Internacional de Estudos da Imprensa Periódica Colonial do Império Português, based in Lisbon, are responsible for opening up new dimensions of research, and I am happy to be an active member of both groups.

RBF: In closing, how would you like to see your book engaged with in Goa and elsewhere?

MLBC: I’d like my book to be seen as part of an effort to rethink how we engage with Goan history — not only through documents and state archives, but through the textures of everyday life: food, fiction, music, memory. In Goa, I hope readers connect with the work personally — especially those whose families have lived the realities I explore, like the politics of rice cultivation or the bhatkar–mundkar relationship. These are not just economic structures, but deeply emotional and cultural ones, shaping how people experienced power, identity, and survival.

I’ve used fiction, poetry, and song not just as background or context, but as sources — as living archives. And I’ve treated newspapers as “people’s archives,” where voices often excluded from official records could still be heard. I hope that readers and researchers begin to see these forms as essential to understanding history — particularly in postcolonial and regional contexts like Goa.

Outside Goa, I’d like the book to challenge the more superficial or romantic views of the region. Goa is not only a tourist destination or a footnote in Portuguese colonial history — it is a place of deep literary, linguistic, and social complexity. If the book can help spark more interest in Goan literature — whether in Portuguese, Romi or Devanagari Konkani, Marathi, or English — and open up new ways of thinking about cultural memory and resistance, then I’ll feel it has done meaningful work.

In the end, I hope it encourages others — students, scholars, and general readers — to look more closely, to read more deeply, and to question the boundaries between history and culture.

From the João Roque Literary Journal.  

"Colonial and Post-Colonial Goan Literature in Portuguese: Woven Palms" [reviewed] in SOUTH ASIAN REVIEW 42.3 (2021)

As Paul Melo e Castro notes in the introduction, this edited volume takes Goa to be “a product of manifold influences … from both East and West and a global history connected to … the Indian Ocean and beyond” (1-2). Attentive to these confluences, contributors to this book explore Goan literature in Portuguese as the expression and making of Goan identity over the period of Portuguese colonialism and its afterlife in Goa. The primary focus of this volume is literature produced by Goans – both in the colony and the metropole – in the last centuries of Portuguese rule in Goa. Goan literary production in Portuguese tapered off after 1961, the year in which Goa was annexed by the Indian union, ending 451 years of Portuguese colonialism in South Asia. In part, the occlusion of Portuguese in post-annexation Goa occurred due to the region’s “traditions and institutions … [being] largely overlaid and displaced by those of [formerly] British India” (3), bearing witness to the limits of Indian decoloniality. While the book is a formalistic and critical study of literature, its contributors additionally “provide a discontinuous cartography of Goan attitudes to colonial rule and the possibility of escaping its bounds, [as well as] European intellectual currents and changing autochthonous traditions” as encompassed in the written word (4). This underscores the importance of studying Goan writing in Portuguese as a form of South Asian cultural production (by those of such origin who employ(ed) literature to limn the particularities of their homeland) even as that very language places Goa within a pluricontinental Lusophonic network. Accordingly, the book would be of use to postcolonialists and sociologists, scholars of European and Asian literatures and linguistics, and historians of South Asia and Iberia.

In the introduction, and along with Hélder Garmes in a second essay, Melo e Castro makes the case for
redefining Indo-Portuguese literature as Goan Literature in Portuguese, an important consideration of terminology that then allows the region’s canon to be seen as its own autonomous creation. Even as Portuguese colonialism may have given Goan writers its tongue, literature by the Catholic elite – but not exclusively – spoke to local concerns having to do with struggles between South Asian and European world views, caste, religion, internecine conflicts, and other local concerns that stood alongside and sometimes intersected with colonialism. Such specificities at once separated these works from the literature of the Portuguese metropole and, even as they were produced against a colonial backdrop, at times were unrelated to Portuguese colonialism itself. Coincidentally, a subtle strand of analysis in this collection chronicles how the literary works evidence transcolonial linkages across the Lusophone world or between British and Portuguese post/colonialities. Goan literature in Portuguese as a field of study thereby is part of a distinct constellation of worldwide literatures in Portuguese while still being germane to its own regional contexts.

The publication of feuilletons that were borne of, and which evinced, local circumstance further proves the autonomy of the Goan literary scene from its metropolitan counterpart despite the shared use of Portuguese. By the nineteenth century, Goan journalism became a font of literary production that centered on identity-making. Sandra Atáide Lobo takes up the episodic writing of Francisco João da Costa, who published fiction in the local press under the pseudonym GIP. A satirist whose short fiction lampooned how local elites uncritically copied the extravagant habits of the Portuguese, Lobo believes that da Costa’s ultimate purpose for such disparagement was to correct the upper echelon for they could be viewed poorly by (and were setting a bad example for) the rest of Goan society. In contrast, Luís Pedroso de Lima Cabral de Oliveira focuses on how José da Silva Coelho’s law-themed fiction in the press highlights the struggles of non-elite Goans who tried to ascend the social ladder by becoming lawyers. Revealing the restrictions of class and caste in colonial Goa, de Oliveira also uses da Silva Coelho’s writing to show how the under-resourced Portuguese empire deputized inadequately trained local talent to run its provincial affairs. Accordingly, this volume crosses disciplines in demonstrating how literary studies may also apply to other fields like colonial law and sociology.

What may also be made of these Goan literary developments, and the provincial matters they ensconced,
is that they ran parallel with the centrifugal nature of later periods of the Portuguese empire which in its multicontinental fragmentation could not sustain a transcolonial canon of literature even as its numerous literatures were written in the common lingua of the empire. Identifying an effort by the declining Portuguese colonial state to belatedly create a genre titled literatura ultramarine, or the literature of Portugal’s Overseas Provinces, Duarte Drumond Braga reads the oeuvre of once-Portuguese resident Goan multi-genre writer Vimala Devi as evading such attempts. Braga contends that “in claiming a ‘spiritual’, literary and cultural autonomy for Goa,” Devi “[valorizes] … an Indo-Portuguese Goa, albeit not a colonial one” (125-126). Published in Portugal in the aftermath of the Indian annexation of Goa which signaled the demise of the Lusitan empire, Braga regards Devi’s poetry collection Súria (1962) as “a work of exile and an elegy for Goa” that is not devoid of exoticism for “Western consumption” (133). Such awareness notwithstanding, neither Braga nor Cielo G. Festino, who writes about Devi’s short story collection Monção (1963), adequately delve into the question of why Teresa da Piedade de Baptista Almeida, an upper caste Catholic, would give herself the obviously Indic Hindu pseudonym associated with her life’s work. The curiousness of such high caste self-identification would seem to require enquiry given Festino’s honing in on Monção’s representation of the plight of lower caste people in Goa’s feudal agricultural system. 

As forewarned by its title, caste is a major preoccupation of the first Goan novel in Portuguese, Os Brahmanes (1866) by Francisco Luis Gomes. A parliamentarian who represented his native Goa in Portugal, Gomes’ novel is not about Goa. Writing about the novel and its allegorical critique of colonialism in nearby British India (meant to serve as a cautionary tale to the Portuguese), Everton Machado argues that Gomes’ disavowal of colonialism is of that of the British variety, his preference being for the Portuguese version and its championing of equality through Catholicism. Deriving from the laws that gave Goans the same citizenship rights as Portuguese metropolitans – something that was not true for British subjects – Gomes’ position, Machado avers, is an overstatement of the enlightened nature of Portuguese colonialism. Nevertheless, Machado holds that Gomes’ self-identification as a Portuguese person – paralleled by his South Asian characters’ embracing of Christianity – is to only be seen as the “wear[ing] of a ‘white mask’” (50). Here, Machado’s view contravenes the ethos of this volume which draws out multiple yet contradictory aspects of Goan writing in Portuguese (the language) even as it is not Portuguese (the identity of the metropolitan center). Coincidentally, the inherent making of Portuguese identities in a disjointed empire cannot simply be understood as having a single geographic origin nor existing in their multiplicity only as imitation.

Other essays in the book provide broad overviews, as with David K. Jackson’s survey of Goa-related
poetry in Portuguese, while Edith Noronha Melo Furtado inspects women’s writing from the territory in relation to patriarchy. Joana Passos likewise considers gender in her comparative analysis of poetry by Devi in Portuguese and Eunice de Souza in English. Yet, the calling out of gender in these specific contributions about women’s writing sets in relief the lacking intersectional analysis in many of the other essays. For example, M. Filomena de Brito Gomes Rodrigues might have attended to Orlando da Costa’s Sem Flores Nem Coroas (1971) not only as a critique of nationalist patriarchy but also in how it parallels the suppression of women in the domestic sphere of the play. This essay also troublingly states that upon arrival in Goa, the Portuguese found societies that were “more developed than … in Africa” (200). Unlike Rodrigues, Eufemiano Miranda and Melo e Castro successfully spotlight the intersections of gender, caste, religious difference, and regionality in Agostinho Fernandes’ Bodki (1962). Another observation is that, throughout the volume, the unfortunate characterization of women as having “fallen pregnant” makes it sound like they have suffered an affliction.  

While Melo e Castro finds that the discontinuation of the widespread use of Portuguese in Goa has led to literature in that language being understudied, the editor equally calls for scholarly efforts that situate themselves within an ecosystem of Goan literature that includes the Lusophonic as well as the region’s “other major bodies of writing in Konkani, Marathi and English” (5). Funded by the Brazilian project “Pensando Goa” (Thinking Goa), one wonders how this volume and others supported by this scheme might have reached these very goals had they included editors of Goan origin. Inasmuch as the volume under discussion makes the study of Goan writing in Portuguese available to readers in English, thereby expanding the reach of South Asian Lusophonic studies, as Melo e Castro suggests, Lusophone scholars would gain much from post/colonial studies of Goa’s multilingual literary traditions.

 

 

 

From South Asian Review.

"António by Way of Alexandria" - THE GOAN: I'm Not Here (29 November 2015)

St. Catherine of Alexandria’s feast day links the Portuguese conquest of Goa and António Costa’s rise to power. But what are the pitfalls of believing in such coincidences?

Much will be made of the fact that António Costa became Prime Minister of Portugal on 25 November, 2015, his ascension to power occurring on the anniversary of the conquest of Goa, just over 500 years ago. On that day in 1510, Afonso de Albuquerque defeated Adil Shah, then ruler of Goa, and dedicated his victory to St. Catherine of Alexandria, whose feast day it was. Five centuries later, and on such a significant date, that a person of Goan descent should now be at the helm of the nation that had previously colonised the homeland of his ancestors is an interesting fact, but it would be erroneous to think of this political event as being a reversal of the colonial past. In other words, Costa’s Goanness may be undeniable, but his rise to power should not be seen as a Goan takeover of Portugal. 

Indeed, the major difference between de Albuquerque’s defeat of Adil Shah and Costa’s ascent in Lisbon is that the latter was born in the country he now runs and came to power via democratic process. On the other hand, de Albuquerque seized power in Goa, having come to the region in the aftermath of Portugal’s search for the sea route to the Indies. Rather than continue to allow traders who happened to be Muslim to control their access to, and the price of, spices and other desirable commodities from the East, the Portuguese attempted to navigate to Asia themselves. Having once been ruled by the Moors who were African by origin and Muslim by faith, cutting out the Muslim middlemen in the early modern sea-trade game may have allowed the Portuguese to feel like they were avenging that past, even though there was little more than a shared faith that connected Iberia’s former rulers and the Eastern tradesmen. In addition to its Moorish past, Portugal shared Europe’s fears of an “Islamic threat”, the Crusades having played their part in widening religious differences amidst power struggles prior to the Age of Discoveries. Thereupon, that the Portuguese would have encountered a ruler in Goa who was Muslim and that victory against him came to them on the feast day of a saint whose defence of her Christian faith led her to be martyred in Alexandria – a Middle Eastern site of mercantile importance – would have borne much portent for the Iberians who were now poised to start an empire in Asia.

Yet, there is a deep irony to be found in the choice of Catherine as the patron saint meant to herald the imperial pursuits of the Portuguese in the East because of the steadfastness of her faith. The Roman Emperor Maxentius, who was pagan, had decreed that Catherine should be put to death as she refused to recant her Christian faith. The daughter of a Roman governor in Alexandria, she is believed to have lived around the third or fourth centuries, AD. However, the similarities between Catherine’s life story and that of the pagan figure Hypatia of Alexandria, caused the Christian martyr’s legend to come under scrutiny. This resulted in a removal of her name from the Catholic calendar in 1969, a decision that was reversed following popular protest.

The Church’s flip-flopping on Catherine occurred within a few years of the change in Goa’s colonial status in 1961. Following the short war waged between Portugal and formerly British-colonised India in December that year, Goa went from being an overseas territory of Portugal to then being a colony of a postcolony. It was also the year of the birth of António Costa, the son of writers Maria Antónia Palla, who is ethnically Portuguese, and Orlando da Costa, the renowned Goan author of mixed race origins. Like the once celebrated Catherine, da Costa, too, had links to Africa, having been born in Portuguese Mozambique. And it is precisely the Portuguese citizenship of both his parents, in addition to his own Portuguese birth, that makes the current Portuguese Prime Minister distinctly Portuguese. Despite being of mixed race origins, Costa is no less Goan, but his ethnicity is still the product of a past when being Goan was tantamount to being Portuguese, albeit in geographically distant locations. Simultaneously, Costa’s contemporary Portuguese identity harkens to Goa’s past, one written about by his father. Just as America’s Obama cannot be seen as a Kenyan simply due to his ethnicity, it is still arguably his African heritage that makes the world view him as being better informed about more than just his nation. So too one might hope for António Costa, a leader whose heritage crosses continents while he leads a country whose multicultural legacy he epitomises.  

From The Goan.