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Vijay Maria: What the Porguguese did to Goa
A five-generation Goan family lives through the Portuguese Inquisition — forced conversion, temple destruction, and resistance.
Overview
When Afonso de Albuquerque seized Goa for Portugal in 1510, the conquest inaugurated nearly 450 years of colonial rule — and with it, the systematic persecution now recorded in history as the Goa Inquisition. Conducted in the name of religious conversion, it reached into homes, temples, and families across Goa's islands, dismantling centuries of Hindu life.
Asheesh Santram follows this history through the Kamat family of Diwar island, across five generations of the sixteenth century. Vijaya Kamat watches her grandfather Sanfu die protecting the Saptokoteshwar Temple from demolition. Her brother-in-law Pandu is martyred in the same cause. The family is forcibly converted and subjected to the Inquisition's machinery until the moment they choose to resist. Santram draws on a record that the Portuguese themselves partially destroyed when they were expelled from Goa in 1961 — making this novel a recovery as much as an imagining.
Vijay Maria gives form to an episode of Indian history that has been covered up and minimised, asking what it means to survive five generations of organised erasure.
Following the conquest of Goa by Portuguese under Afonso de Albuquerque in 1510, a period of colonisation and atrocities befell on the simple folk of Goa, India's 'golden island', continuing for nearly 450 years. All in the name of conversion and commerce, that has come to be known as the Goa Inquisition. A historical fiction, Vijaya Maria, tells the saga through the eyes of the Kamat family, a witness to this horror through five generations in 16 th century Goa. Vijaya Kamat belongs to the island of Diwar, just across the River Mandovi from Ella, which is now called Velha Goa. Her Grandfather Sanfu Kamat died saving the Saptokoteshwar Temple from demolition, her brother-in-law, Pandu Kamat, too was martyred while protecting the temple. Her whole family is forcefully converted and has to bear the tortures of the Inquisition until it is time for them to fight back. Not much remains of this tortuous aspect of our past as Portuguese, when being driven out of Goa in 1961, burnt many of the records, Vijaya maria attempts to narrate the horrors of the Portuguese Conquest and one of the biggest cover-ups of history.
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