On the 50th anniversary of Goa's liberation from Portuguese rule, a Goan looks back at the relics of its colorful and troubled history. Photographer Frederick Noronha is into journalism, book publishing, photography, and cyberspace. He has a collection of 40,000 copylefted and sharable photos online at http://photosfromgoa.notlong.com and dreams of building an archive of old Goa photos.
Till date, a little of the old impress remains in places like the colonial capital of Old Goa.
In the 1960s, a "Liberated" Goa drew many disaffected youth and hippies from the West. Photo of Hippies in Goa by Lui Godinho.
Some of Goa's Portuguese charm lingers on in statements made by this modern car.
Azuleijos, the blue tiles influenced by Portuguese tiles, are still visible, though in only a few parts of Goa. Recent years have seen a revival of interest in things Portuguese, now with less of the colonial smear of the past and what some describe as "Lusostalgia".
Another reality: Colonialism in western India was a different reality from much of the rest of South Asia. Parts of it are still waiting to be understood. Photo shows a hunting expedition from British-ruled Sindhudurg, just outside the Goa border.
Luís de Camões, the Portuguese national poet, spent quite a bit of his life in Goa. After 1961, nationalist campaigners sought to dynamite his statue at Old Goa, and it had to be shifted to a museum
Silvia Braganca poses before the portrait of her husband Aquino Braganca, one of those rare Goans who took the side of the nationalist Black cause in mainland Africa, and died in the very plane crash which killed Mozambique president Samora Machel in the 1980s.
While some parts of Portugal's long colonial rule in Goa is seen by historians as notoriously corrupt, at other times there was also an attempt to ensure fairplay in the small things that mattered. In the photo, peg-measures for alcohol (including the local brew feni), with five-decade-old seals from the Portuguese era, are still maintained by a small village bar in Anjuna, now more as souvenirs.
Goa has one of the best archives and earliest of libraries. But today this is falling to neglect, poor maintenance, high humidity and the trying weather here.The land of the first printing press in India too. Frederick Noronha
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