My city is better than yours: Panjim

My city is better than yours

Vivek Menezes on Panjim

The hidden secret behind Panjim’s catalogue of charms is that it is a new city that has been created with the advantage of planning. Unlike almost every other important urban entity in India, this riverside capital city of the country’s smallest state was rigorously conceived, planned and built in a spate of energy that sustained itself all through the nineteenth century and into the early decades of the twentieth.

Previously, the site of the present city had been an outlying, swamp-ridden ward of the village of Taleigao near the confluence of the Mandovi and the Zuari rivers. So it slumbered while magnificent port-cities came into being further upriver, and still slept on when they crumbled back into red laterite mud.

The last of these cities upriver was the original capital city of the Portuguese, which shot to global prominence in the sixteenth century and was larger and much richer than Paris or London of the time. But plagues sapped Old Goa, and the native elites (both Hindu and converted Catholic) wanted the seat of power to be shifted away from under the nose of the religious orders controlling the capital. These elites found support in the anti-religious prime minister of Portugal in the latter half of the eighteenth century, the Marquis de Pombal. So little Panjim became the de facto capital of Goa even before it was officially declared a city, which only happened many decades later. That curiously outsized, in-between state of being persists, with Panjim continuing to wield disproportionate clout despite its minuscule proportions. Its population is just about 60,000, far less even than Goan cities like Vasco and Margao. But everything important seems to take place in Panjim nonetheless.

The city remains astonishingly pocket-sized even compared to Goan villages. You can stroll its entire length in less than an hour. A most un-urban everyone-knows-everyone culture still reigns across the city’s neighbourhoods, where a good proportion of the houses are still occupied by the families that built them a century ago.

Though the distinctive architecture of Panjim is routinely called “Portuguese”, there are no buildings remotely like these in Portugal. Instead, the aesthetic here is Indo-Iberian, a self-confident Latinate variant, a native means of cultural assertion and pride. The story of Panjim is also the story of the assimilative, ceaselessly adaptive triumph of the Goans coming into their own within the colonialist entity – they took what they needed from their contacts with the greater world, and then shaped a unique space that is all their own.

I feel the difference every day, especially when I make my daily visit to Farm Products on Azad Maidan right in the heart of Panjim, where there are only three seats. One might be occupied by a bishop, and another by a rag-picker, but all of us will gobble delicious egg chops while conversing with the genial proprietor, the 84-year-old Alvaro Pereira, whose courtly manner doesn’t betray the years he spent being sadistically tortured in a colonial jail for the crime of refusing to take off his Gandhi topi, nor his heroics after the Liberation of Goa where he stopped a lynch-mob from attacking the same policemen who had tormented him in jail.

Quite often we are joined by other freedom-fighters from those heady years of struggle that finally ended 450 years of colonialism. I listen to them switch effortlessly from liquid Portuguese to animated Konkani and back again while I sip my strong coffee, these men of principle no more pleased with the current leadership than they were 50 years ago. The cup drains, time stands still. Panjim endures, its original charms intact for another era.   (ENDS)

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First published in Time Out Bengaluru ISSUE 15, February 05, 2010