In the oldest part of Mexico City, the Plaza de Las Tres Culturas, is an amazing historical site surrounded by urban sprawl. This is the ancient Aztec city of Tlatelolco, the last significant holdout against the Spanish invasion led by Hernan Cortes.

          Just a few years after Goa had fallen to the
          Portuguese (in 1510), the same thing happened on a
          much more devastating scale to the giant Aztec
          empire. On August 13, 1521, the Spanish overran
          Tlatelolco, slaughtering perhaps 40,000 warriors, a
          massacre so bloody that even the Conquistadores
          were shaken. Wrote Cortes himself, "So loud was the
          wailing of the women and children that there was
          not one man among us whose heart did not bleed at
          the sound."

A few years ago, I stood on that very spot with bright sunlight dappling the surrounding buildings. In front, original Aztec ruins, on one side a rugged colonial-era church (dedicated to Santiago, the patron of the Spanish invaders), and all around us the sounds and sight of snarled traffic that characterizes modern Mexico.

All of us present were riveted by the message on a plaque that marked the spot. Roughly translated from Spanish, it read "heroically defended by Cuauhtémoc, Tlatelolco fell to the power of Cortés. This was neither a triumph nor a defeat. It was the painful birth of the nation that is Mexico today."

          Reading this, my mind immediately turned to my own
          homeland that had fallen to the Iberians in the
          same era, and I could not help but be struck by the
          wisdom displayed in those last two lines written in
          the name of the Mexican people. They display
          maturity which is still largely absent on all sides
          of the Goan identity divide.

We Goans are still beset by the most fundamental questions, and cannot agree on the answers. Who are the Goans? What is Goan culture? Nearly 50 years after decolonization in Goa, and more than 60 years after Independent India came to life, the ideological divides show no signs of fading away, and the sides arrayed against each other have only increased their bitter attacks.

Even as we move into a hopeful new millennium, even as information technology erases the significance of borders, Goans are still divided into camps which will pelt each other with the same old canned accusations -- like "liberation" and "invasion" -- without pausing to understand the real validities of each others position.

But the truth is never a zero sum game.

It is not our fault alone. Until very recently, it has been a very great failure of the Indian intelligentsia to comprehend and assimilate the Goan colonial experience, which was markedly different and occasionally diametrically opposed to the variant exercised in much of the rest of India during the British Raj.

Ironically, the main substance of the Indian intelligentsias response to the Goan experience is directly cobbled and cribbed from British prejudices against the Estado da India, (as articulated in Richard Burtons bilious, hilarious 1851 book, Goa and the Blue Mountains), ugly and simplistic stereotypes which have been sustained all the way into Bollywoods perennially louche Makapaos.

To a large extent, this caricature is the mainstream Indian
view: Goans are inauthentically Indian, deracinated, denationalized and pitiable. And of course -- especially if they have Catholic names -- they can never ever be "really Indian" no matter what.

Un-amusingly, this is almost exactly the same viewpoint taken by Portuguese colonialist propaganda . Throughout 451 years of occupation by Portugal, the authorities attempted to insert a wedge between their subjects (especially, but not only, the converts) and the rest of India.

These attempts never succeeded no matter how zealous or heavy-handed the efforts .Thus, Hinduism was not stamped out but instead flourished. And rather than eliminating Hindu customs from the convert, these customs (such as caste) actually became centrally significant to Goan Catholicism.

Even the mother-tongue bounced back with great vigour, despite scorched-earth policies against it arguably emerging stronger than before to enjoy full official status as a national language of India, with a resurgent literature. The record of resistance and refusal to capitulate is long and detailed and inarguable.

          Our story, the Goan story exists at the margins of
          much grander, and perhaps more compelling,
          narratives. The nuances and twists of the Goan
          tryst with destiny can thus seem quite
          insignificant and even opposed to the blockbuster
          Indian nationalist story, which comes complete with
          patriotic soundtrack and that familiar, stirring
          narrative of satyagraha, self-reliance and the
          saintly, charismatic leadership of Mahatma Gandhi.

But these are just perceptions which do not even come close to accurately representing the historical reality. The truth is that Goans have generated nationalist heroes aplenty -- like Francis Luis Gomes, who was talking about an independent India to a European audience a solid 50 years before Vivekananda.

Besides, the Goans have taken a back seat to no one in the making of modern India before and after 1947. And their role is especially visible in the formation of a post-colonial cultural expression for modern, independent India. To understand why, we have to explore the seeds of globalization which were planted in the Konkan. After all, the Estado da India was not simply the passive object of a "civilizing exercise" by the Portuguese.  It became a "civilizer" in turn, and Goans have played the role of sophisticated culture brokers ever since.

A ready-made example is available for our analysis thanks to the painstaking efforts of Dr. Pedro Monteiro, graduate of the Escola Medica Ciugica de Goa, now Goa Medical College, the very first institution of its type in Asia.

From the 1850s onwards, Dr. Monteiro notes that trained doctors flowed out of the Estado da India to serve overseas across the arc of Portuguese colonial outposts stretching from Cabo Verde and Sao Tome e Principe to Guinea and Angola and Mozambique all the way to Timor. But even before that, it was trainees from Goas Hospital Real who opened the first western-style hospital in Japan, and several similar institutions in Osaka, Nagasaki and other cities, thus introducing allopathic medicine to Japan.

It is impossible  to ignore the differences between British and Portuguese colonialism. The Goans have intimate experience of both, absorbed cultural influences from both, and with particular devotion followed the former power (which could much better afford their services) around the world for more than two centuries. The primary difference from the Goan perspective is that the Portuguese came to India possessed with a fearsome religious zealotry which repeatedly disrupted life in the territory with the equivalent of pogroms and ethnic cleansing.

Unlike most previous invaders, there was no modus vivendi offered to most of the early subjects -- the choice was conversion (and retention of lands and privileges) or expulsion (or worse).

To make matters more interesting, the new Estado da India was awash in profits from the new sea routes to Europe. With push and pull factors like these, it is not surprising that many stakeholders of sixteenth-century Goa chose to stay in their homeland. Within the span of a single generation, these individuals became the first Westernized Asians. Today, we should celebrate them as great pioneers of the globalized world.

After everything, this is the legacy of the colonial period in Goa. It brought hardship and heartbreak, and there can be no excuses for the crimes committed on our soil, but the story does not end there. Because of the colonial experience the Goan was thrust into contact with Europe (itself entering a period of centuries of global dominance) long before the rest of the subcontinent  (the Portuguese held Goa before the Mughals took Delhi), and the nature of this experience led to unusual, even uncanny, cultural fluidity.

          If the Goan had to be fully Portuguese while in
          Panjim, and wholly Konkani while at home, it was
          not too much to assimilate other cultures, even to
          become exemplars and standard-bearers of other
          cultures! Thus we begin to understand Pio Gama
          Pinto and Aquino Braganza, African nationalists who
          died for identity politics that had nothing to do
          with Goa, or Dinesh DSouza , who became an
          American in adulthood, yet occupies the vanguard of
          the nativist right wing of the Republican party.

Fascinating and rich as it is, the global diaspora story of the Goans is minor in comparison to the Goan dispersal in India itself. During the Raj, combination of powerful push and pull factors again came into play, with the result that Goans poured out of the state in significant numbers in order to take advantage of increasing British demand for their services -- cooks and tailors and clerks, but also seamen and clerks and musicians. Goans took to English education and Western certifications very early, and their proximity to the Rajs rulers gave them opportunity to develop close familiarity with yet another European culture.

The example of my  beloved maternal grandfather, W. X.
Mascarenhas is illustrative. He was a rare native member of the Indian Corps of Engineers and presented himself impeccably as a brown sahib to his colleagues, while continuing to play the favoured son in fluent Konkani to his mother.

When nationalist politics became pointed, and egged on by his fervently patriotic brother, the priest H. O. Mascarenhas, he and came out on the side of the Congressmen seeking to rule an independent nation. Perfectly accoutred once again in resplendent bandgallah, we have favourite family photos of him stalking through the site of the NDA in Khadakvasla
(Pune) with Nehru. This time the images project a wholly different persona -- the nation-building Indian nationalist.
And then in his old age, there he was, wearing a linen suit and solar topee to his club every day.

Rather then seeing these images (which are plentiful in all of our memories) as evidence of cultural schizophrenia, or worse (like that obsolete concept, "denationalized"), they emerge as a great strength of the Goan character.

          An amazing adaptability allows him to shuffle and
          restructure his projected identity almost at will.
          This is not unknown in the rest of India -- Nehru
          comes to mind, the Harrovian and Cambridge-educated
          millionaires son who quite accurately described
          himself as "the last British ruler of India" but
          for parochial reasons the Goan cultural fluidity is
          derided, while Chacha Nehru and his ilk are
          iconized as great Indians. The double standard is
          palpable, and it still hurts.

It was during Nehrus own time that the Goan provided his greatest services to modern India. The nation-in-waiting came into being, and there was an immediate need for a clean break from the past, for self-confident, post-colonial voices to emerge to speak for this new country.

Very often, it was the Goans who seized the day. Already comfortable with shifting identity roles, already fluent in European languages and comfortably global in outlook, they were perfectly situated. Looked at this way, it is only natural that Frank Moraes took over the reins of the Times of India after the last British editor, or that the nascent Indian advertising sector was dominated by Goans, or even that the BCCI came into being as the personal fiefdom of A.
S. de Mello.

The outsized role played by Goans in the development of contemporary Indian culture comes most sharply intro focus in the case of art, as also the perennial problems of denial and obfuscation.

Look at the case of  Antonio Xavier Trindade, a prodigiously talented painter who managed to gain a prized position in the faculty of the J. J. School of Art in Bombay at the turn of the 20th century.

Trindade was celebrated as Rembrandt  of The East for his portraits. The rest of his work is startling to view even today -- his approach is far more modern than you might expect, and his technique and chosen themes very strongly reflect his Goan upbringing. But no one seems to have perceived this (other than his family, and now 21st century
viewers) so -- typically for a Goan artist -- his very obvious identity is flat out denied. For all intents and purposes in Indian art history, Trindade has nothing to do with Goa and is instead the best-appreciated member of the Bombay School of painting.

Its not much different  for the powerhouse pair of Vasudeo Gaitonde and Francis Newton Souza, who remained friends for life, an are two of the handful of Indian artists whose works now break auction records.

          Souza gained notoriety as the so-called "enfant
          terrible" of Indian art, but he died without ever
          selling a painting for even one-hundredth of the
          price some of them get at auction today. Souzas
          work reflected Goa and his Goan childhood all
          through the fifty years of his career -- his most
          recent big-seller at auction is a straightforward
          rendition of the Saligao-Calangute road.  You
          cannot even to begin to understand his work unless
          you spend time exploring his ancestral village, yet
          this has never been done by any of the
          establishment critics who have emblazoned his
          status as "Indian Master".

Much worse is Gaitondes case, where conventional wisdom has it that he isnt even Goan! Though born to a family in diaspora in Maharashtra, no one was more aware of his connections and debt to Goa than the artist himself.  He acknowledged this by dedicating his painting Monsoon
(embedded with images derived from the prehistoric rock carvings of Goa) to Souza, and you can literally see the tones of the Konkan countryside in his work.

Gaitonde is now classified as part of the Progressive Artists Movement, and that is meant to be the final word. Goa and the Goan connection wasnt even mentioned when he died. What is more, even today the Indian art establishment is highly resistant to reminders of the Goan connection.

And so to Angelo da Fonseca, whose life and death in obscurity neatly encapsulates the urges and energies, and failures and humiliations, of the Goan Indian nationalist.

Born to one of the richest land-owning families of Goa, Fonseca was swept along with nationalist sentiment while studying medicine at Grant Medical College in Bombay. When he decided to become an artist, he spurned offers to study with Trindade at the JJ School, instead dedicating himself to being a truly Indian artist by becoming a sisya of the Tagores at Shantiniketan. Fonseca was a prodigy, a prized pupil of both Abanindranath and Rabindranath Tagore, as well as the head of the art department, Nandalal Bose.

Fonseca did everything a Goan could do to become an Indian painter -- he studied miniatures, and absorbed the lessons inherent in the paintings of Ajanta and Ellora. He slowly developed his own formal style within the Shantiniketan school of Bengali painting.

          All of this was to bear on what he considered his
          lifes work -- a wholly Indian Christian
          iconography that is organically derived from the
          ancient artistic traditions of the subcontinent.
          It is an eye-popping and unforgettable oeuvre,
          which has caught the eye of significant individuals
          including Gandhi, and, believe it or not, Adolf
          Hitler.

Alas, this attention was a rarity in a life spent in near-total obscurity. For the first thing that happened to Fonseca upon his return home to Goa, after Shantiniketan, is that the colonial church objected to his Konkani Madonnas and sadhu-looking saints.

The resultant clamour led to his ignominious flight from Goa
-- all for being too Indian for the Portuguese. Alas, his treatment in British India was not much better; the Catholic Church still hounded him wherever he went, and he soon found that he was too Portuguese for the British, and simultaneously too Western for the Indians. Instead of trying be all things to all people -- also a common Goan trait-- Fonseca found himself ignored, and treated as disreputable by all sides.

It would have destroyed a lesser man. But Fonseca turned back to the work, and upto his death in 1967 he produced one of the greatest, most unique and powerful bodies of work of any artist anywhere in the 20th century. In the light of 2008, he appears to be a great genius whose importance in the development of early modernism in India is rivaled perhaps by only Raja Ravi Varma.

          Fonseca was lucky. His legacy heroically defended
          by his widow, Ivy. She held on to his work, as
          doggedly as he pursued it.

In a magnificent gesture, she has endowed the entire collection into the safe hands of the XCHR in Porvorim, which has undertaken to establish a world-class museum in Fonsecas name. The XCHR has already begun to acquire important works by other Goan artists. The intention is to start to reclaim our story from the narratives that have intervened to subvert our own.

This is essential spadework that the Goans have lacked in the contemporary era. The lack of it has contributed to the myths that bedevil us, and confuse those who attempt to come to terms with Goa. The lesson is that we have to write our own story, because no one else has any interest in getting it right. This compilation of essays and images is one attempt to do just that.

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This article was written for Semana de Cultura, Goa, 2008.