Cultural Landscapes of Portuguese India

CULTURAL LANDSCAPES OF PORTUGUESE INDIA* David Sopher Sacramento State College The existence on the Indian subcontinent of three parcels of land which have long been under Portuguese dominion provides data of particular value in the study of the shaping of landscapes by culture. By discovering to what extent landscapes, in this case in the Portuguese territories of India, have become different as a concomitant of evolution in a special political-cultural situation, we will be able to look further at the processes of interaction between culture and habitat. That a "unique personality" is expressed in the landscape of Portuguese India, particularly of Goa, has become a cliché of geographical literature, making the area an especially promising vehicle for an investigation of this type. Portuguese India consists of three small, widely separated territories on the west coast of the subcontinent: Goa, with an area of roughly 1400 square miles on the Konkan coast some 250 miles south of Bombay; Damao, about forty square miles in area, on the Gujerat coast north of Bombay; and Diu, a minute holding, eight miles long and a mile wide, off the Kathiawar coast. The total population is 600,000. Damao here will refer only to the coastal portion of the territory having that name; part of it, the interior enclave of Nagar Aveli, having come, de facto, under Indian control in 1954. A comparison of the three territories provides a striking illustration of diversity in cultural landscapes—the kind of diversity that is the keynote of the cultural geography of India. The landscapes of Damao and Diu, at least, are patently Indian in almost all respects. The slight impression of Portuguese cultural forms on people and land is clear, although there are, in fact, some conspicuous products of Portuguese construction: the fortresses, the walls and gates around the towns of Damao Grande and Diu, a few baroque churches—but of the three in Diu, two are falling into ruin—some streets in Damao that are lined with houses in the Portuguese style, to be described later for Goa. These, and some dispersed government installations, appear as alien culture forms superposed discordantly on the prevailing indigenous base. Christians are a small minority, many being actually Goans, and knowledge of Portuguese is extremely limited. Cultural Geography of Goa In describing the interesting cultural geography of these two territories, Goa must receive more attention. The territory of Goa corresponds roughly to an embayment in the 3,000-foot scarp front of the Western Ghats, the * Field work on which this paper is based was carried out in Portuguese India during the summer of 1959, and was incidental to a study of Indian strand communities done under contract to Office of Naval Research. 34 main mountain mass being here recessed some 25 miles inland from the coast. The low land between the Ghats wall and the sea, interrupted in part by granitic outliers, consists of two contrasting land forms. Areas of flat alluvial fill make up less than half of the total; the larger part is in roughly horizontal platforms at varying elevations, commonly between 100 and 250 feet above sea level, everywhere mantled with a crust of latérite, tens of feet thick. These platforms do not usually have backslopes, but appear as low, wide mesas, dropping off on all sides into intersecting linear depressions, which, though partly filled with alluvium, accommodate streams with fairly deep channels. GOA S(OGKAFM(C F£Aru*£S Fig. 1. Physical Features of Goa This is, for example, the character of Ilhas ("the islands"), the central part of the territory where the site of Old Goa is located. The islands are not deltaic, but isolated low blocks, sporadically bordered by an alluvial flat. The fragmentation has the effect of keeping the two different surface forms, alluvial plain and raised latérite platform, in close proximity, so that they constitute, as a rule, two well-differentiated parts of a single areal unit of agrarian economy, rather than-forming the basis of two contrasting economic modes pursued by separate, and hence distinct, populations. Almost all the large towns of Goa have sites at the immediate foot of these mesas, with houses straggling up the...