By Selma Carvalho
Issue no 19
There is a kind of secular light which washes over Siddharth’s collection of poems titled A Moveable East (Red River, 2021), its 136 pages divided into seven sections. I say secular not because it shies away from the sacred but rather because he embraces the sacred with a purity of heart, embraces the universal goodness that lies at the core of each faith tradition, and claims as his own the unique voice of these faiths, their many moments of shadow and space.
In conversation with Rochelle Potkar
Issue no 19
As these stories organically came about, I gleaned that the common thread was Bombay, later Mumbai. As one consumes the ebb and flow, sea-breeze, buzz and bustle, march and spring, it puts you into the rhythm of its heartbeat and the city speaks to you. There is a hum that I have not felt in other cities of the world, rare like Bombay blood group. This hangover is one of memory, in and outside the city then. More so, of the joint march of its citizenry of all classes—industrious as bees and ants.
By Selma Carvalho
Issue no 19
Neema Shah joins this sparse but important canon of Asian-African literature with her debut novel Kololo Hill (Picador, 2021), the focus of which is also the interrupted and scattered lives of the Asian exodus. It has fallen largely to the sons and daughters of those who left Africa and settled in the new worlds of Canada and UK to tell this story. Shah’s mother was born in Kenya and her father in Tanzania who migrated to the UK.
By Jugneeta Sudan
Issue no 19
National award winning artist Vitesh Naik, who began from humble beginnings in Jan 1974, has been awarded the 2021-22 Pollock–Krasner Foundation grant. Considering his passion and perseverance, the outcome has been most satisfying. It began with a sketch of his teacher in history class for which he was suspended for 3 months.
By Selma Carvalho
Issue no. 19
Maria Augusta Elvira de Sousa is lost to history. She wanders its corridors, unclaimed. In accounts by European chroniclers, her ethnicity remains a shadowy unknown to be guessed at, presumed most likely to be a Portuguese woman. But I am determined to reclaim Elvira’s rightful place, because Elvira was a Goan.
Compiled by Selma Carvalho
Issue no 18
In a year when lives were disrupted in a most unexpected manner, 17 of Goa’s literati spread across the world, tell us of the books, in 2020, they found comfort and meaning in. This splendidly diverse list which includes everything from love, sex, spirituality, self-healing, decolonisation, and displacement to World War II and queer writing, makes for curious reading.
By Augusto Pinto
Issue no 18
In 2013 a poetry collection came out which in my opinion is a jewel of Konkani literature. There are those who might dispute this view and indeed regard this collection as not merely valueless but even pornographic. Be that as it may, one thing is true: anyone who has read this particular poetry collection will agree that it is the most controversial work of literature ever produced in Konkani.
By Selma Carvalho
Issue no. 18
I am what I call a pocomomo—a postcolonial modern mongrel. I am Goan thanks to my mother and Anglo-Indian thanks to my dad and am fortunate to be claimed by both communities. Without meaning to sound precious, my lived experience contains many exiles. So there is always the yearning for Goa that many in the Goan diaspora feel.
By Malavika Neurekar
Issue no 18
The book is about people who want to belong and yet can't; that is to say the liminal subject. Now I know all about being the liminal subject. My mother is Mangalorean and my father was Goan, and so when I grew up in Goa, this liminality, of being not quite Goan, was an important part of my life.
By Jugneeta Sudan
Issue no 17
A plurality of self forms the signature line for artworks by Eleanor Viegas. A language of interconnection and a holistic consciousness impregnates her works. Lasting impressions from art museums, architecture of visited landscapes and the expansiveness of western thought into eastern philosophy lend a polyphonic edge to her artwork.
By Yvonne Vaz Ezdani
Issue no 17
The sun has just waved a glorious goodbye, leaving lingering light for my path. I latch the gate behind me as I step out on my evening walk. Clusters of crimson bougainvillea slipping over our white-washed garden wall make me stop to let the beauty soak in. More warmth, as passersby smile and friendly neighbours wave from balcãoes as I walk on.
By Selma Carvalho
Issue no 17
Nowhere in the history of nation states are the victims of an injustice or their descendants called upon to atone for that very injustice. This happens only when the narrative is distorted beyond recognition by special interest groups keen on creating a perpetual sense of victimhood.
By Selma Carvalho
Issue no 16
the home has always been a special place, one we take for granted perhaps, but which dwells in our imagination—the geographic specificity of it, the relationships which unfold within it, the momentous events we share and celebrate—and particularly the homes of our childhood remain with us, becoming an indelible part of our consciousness.
By Selma Carvalho
Issue no 16
My great-grandfather Ignatius Borges was from Sadashivgad in Karwar; he worked as a motorman for the railways and travelled often. His younger son, Stephen, my grandfather, served briefly in the army, before moving to Bombay in the 1940s, where he lived in a kudd, a short distance from Cavel. He got married to a Goan bride, my grandmother, Anna Vaz, and got himself a job as a tailor, and settled on Grant Road.
By R. Benedito Ferrao
Issue no 16
I was the first-born son in the family. My sister Ruth was born when I was over four years old, and so I was in effect a lone person. My father had a lot of books in our house, including joke books. He was well known by Goans for giving fine speeches and always including a joke in the speeches.
By Victor Rangel-Ribeiro (preview only)
Issue no 16
What was the state of literature in Goa, a hundred years ago? With no radio or TV, and only one movie theatre in distant Panjim, surely people spent a lot of time reading? Yes, they read a lot of newspapers, that sprouted like mushrooms, and died almost as quickly. And what about books? Seventy-three long years had passed between the publication of Os Brahmanes and Chord and Discords. What were people reading in the intervening years?
By Selma Carvalho
Issue no 16
The Goan club is that identifiable marker wherever a sapling Goan community exists. It is a representation, a microcosm of our larger society, it is home to the peccadilloes of our eccentric characters, a gatekeeper of our inclusions and exclusions, and the fulcrum on which our history pivots.
By Selma Carvalho
Issue no 15
Film-maker and poet Jonas Mekas has presciently noted, ‘In the very end, civilisations perish because they listen to their politicians and not to their poets.’ So come, let us listen to our poets. Poets are the quivering heart of a nation, its pulse, its very essence. Let us listen to the words of our very own major Goan poet, Armando Menezes.
By Rachana Patni
Issue no 15
Joshua and his father sat with a book on dinosaurs. On the first page there was a timeline which indicated that first there were water-creatures, then came dinosaurs, and then finally, came human beings. Joshua looked at this timeline, heard the description of it, and immediately asked his father, ‘Papa, what will come after human beings?’
