https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/goa/what-we-learn-from-goan-history/articleshow/64325487.cms
Very welcome news this week from the Goa Board of Secondary and Higher Secondary Education, which announced it will revamp its history curriculum to include meaningful episodes from Goa’s own past. Chairman of the board, Ramkrishna Samant said the new topics could include the 18th century Pinto conspiracy, and the historic 1967 Opinion poll that averted post-colonial merger of the state with Maharashtra. He added, “at present, only a small chapter exists on Goa’s history, freedom struggle and liberation. The new content will be more detailed, including the liberation of Dadra and Nagar Haveli, history of Goa’s freedom struggle, Operation Vijay, and the history of Goa attaining statehood.” The board has established an impressively credentialed academic committee to advise on this important task, which is made especially vital because the existing set of of topics for students barely connects with Goa’s extraordinary and unique history. Currently, there is a great deal about the tectonic processes which shaped North India, as well as the Mughals and the Marathas, all leading up to the British Raj face-off against the Congress-led freedom struggle thus begetting “freedom at midnight” in 1947. But very little of this is actually directly relevant to our tiny slice of the Konkan coastline’s very different experience of remaining open to world trade from time immemorial, then rising to international prominence as the first crucible of East-West globalization, before annexation to independent India via conquest in 1961. The alternate idea of India that emerges from the marvellous span of Goa’s history is of immense value not only for students in the state, but for the rest of the world. The state board’s new committee should strongly consider beginning with the astounding petroglyphs of Usgalimal/Pansaimal on the banks of the Kushavati river, a rich collection of laterite carvings that is one of the most profound and important prehistoric sites on the subcontinent. Engraved into laterite roughly 25,000 years ago, this site is a convenient way to situate the tremendous antiquity of human settlement and society in the state. Fast-forward to just around 1300 years ago. All Goan students would benefit greatly from learning about the Shilahara dynasty that extended rule throughout the Konkan and much of Maharashtra during the Rashtrakuta period which unified an immense swathe of territory from the Ganges river all the way to Cape Comorin in the extreme south of the subcontinent. It is pretty clear that the Shilaharas originated in Loutolim, and it’s also readily evident that soldiers and statesman from what is now Goa predominated in the upper ranks of its administration that was ended only in the 13th century by the rising Chalukyas. It is in the period of the Rashtrakutas that a defining characteristic of Goa’s cultural and social identity comes sharply into focus. This is its essential nature as an entrepot – a heavily trafficked centre for trade and cultural exchange, capable of comfortably accommodating diversity of all kinds. Writing about this curious aspect of Goan history of 1000 years ago, Goa University’s Dr. Nandkumar Kamat has put it most succinctly, “nowhere else we find in India a model of governance created by the nexus between local Hindu Kings and foreign Muslim traders. This happened in a century when crusades over possession of Jerusalem were continuing and the idea of secularism was still centuries away.” Goa’s students are taught non-stop that their history is identical to the broad-strokes narratives that are painted from the North of India’s experiences of invasion and conquest, rapacious exploitation, and endless episodes of bloodletting. But that’s not what happened here, where cosmopolitan rulers gave way to even more cosmopolitan rulers, all adding up to the wildly globalized present. Here it should be recalled that the Portuguese seized the territory from the Adil Shah who was himself from the Meditteranean (probably from what is now Georgia), whose fleet was commanded by a Jewish man from Poland.
