Author: Maria Aurora Couto
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Publisher: Penguin
Year: 2004
Language: English
Pages: 436
ISBN/UPC (if available): 047004984
Description
In December 1961, Indian troops marched into Goa putting an end to over 450 years of Portuguese rule, the longest spell of colonialism on the subcontinent, and Goa became part of the Indian union. In popular imagination, however, Goa has remained a place not quite India, and sterotypes about Goa and Goans abound.
Maria Aurora Couto’s unique blend of biography, memoir and social history brings us the Goa behind the beaches and booze culture that is projected for the tourist and which ahs unfortunately come to define Goa for the vast majority outside the state.
Starting with an account of the immediate aftermath of Liberation, Couto goes back and forth in time to examine the fundamental transformations in Goan society from 1510, when Afonso de Albuquerque conquered Goa, up to the present. Drawing upon the experiences of her own family and those of others, both Hindu and Catholic, she writes of the influences that have touched all Goans-the Luso-Indian culture, conversion and changes in Europe such as the French Revolution and the ideals of republicanism; folk traditions, music and the Konkani language, and, ultimately, freedom and integration with India.
In the process she reveals how Goa, which combines the best of traditional and cosmopolitan lifestyles, has evolved into India’s twenty-first-century model of economic development and communal harmony.
Written with sensitivity, insight and scholarship, Goa: A Daughter’s Story is at once expansive and intimate: a moving narrative about home, the village and the world, in which the author crosses the boundaries between history and memory, truth and imagination, to evoke personal and community experience. It is as much an appraisal of Goa’s past as it is an examination of its present and a vision for its future.
MARIA AURORA COUTO is the author of Graham Greene: On the Frontier: Politics and Religion in the Novels. She has taught English literature in India, and contributed to periodicals in India and England. She has lived in Goa, Dharwar (Karnataka), Patna (Bihar), Delhi, London and Chennai (Tamil Nadu) and now makes her home in Aldona, a village in North Goa, with her husband, Alban Couto.
Contents
PROLOGUE
And Behold There was Land
Homecoming
The Persistence of Memory
Contested Territory
Conversion: The Onslaught
Synthesis
Land, Language, Identity
Keeping the Faith
Transformations
Mind and Soul, Word and Song
Myth and Reality
The New Elite
La Grande Illusion
Awakenings and Dead Ends
Epilogue
References and Select Bibliography
Acknowledgments
List of Photographs
Index