A Goa seeped in sepia

An online vintage photography project is providing a fascinating glimpse into Goa’s layered cultural history.

For Goa-based artist Sonia Rodrigues Sabharwal, collecting old family photos, objects that would remind her of her grandparents like an old spectacle, glass bangles, a diary, was part and parcel of her life. She has been assembling them for more than 30 years now. However, she never thought that her collection would be one day part of The Goa Familia Project — a visual archive of Goan social and cultural history.

However, in 2020, as the world moved indoors, Sabharwal got time in hand to re-look at her family history. “The lockdown did give me time to go back to my collection and put things like date, names of my ancestors and a few anecdotes too,” says Sabharwal, who has shared through images the story of her maternal grandfather, Menino Fernandes (1900-1965), who hailed from Benaulim in South Goa.

For better prospects, he then moved to the capital city, Panaji, where he learned the art of master cutting and tailoring. In the 1940s, he started his own unit. Among his many customers was the Portuguese Governor of the time, who would send him the material for the suits to be stitched, by him and him only! Sonia’s mother, Maria Isabella, took after him and in her own time, became one of the best seamstresses in Ponda.

The Instagram page of Goa Familia is filled with such rich details about Goan families. They do manage to give a glimpse into the state’s layered cultural history. Such visual documentation is no less than a treasure.

Moving online

Goa Familia, which has been conceived and funded by the Serendipity Arts Foundation, is part of the annual Serendipity Arts Festival, held in Goa for more than three years now. Like many festivals, it has now moved online (www.serendipityartsvirtual.com).

The major part of the first edition of the Goa Familia project involved meeting and interviewing people at their homes, especially senior citizens. This was not possible last year due to the pandemic. But, it did turn out to be a blessing in disguise.

They invited people to send entries online on their social media pages. “Our online following has increased, and therefore, local participation has also become more visible. One of the prominent developments is that we now have a dedicated website (www.goafamilia.com) that hosts longer versions of the stories we upload on Instagram, as well as the collections that are formally part of the Goa Familia digital archive,” says Lina Vincent, curator of the project.

Akshay Mahajan, creative collaborator of this project, said because of the pandemic, they got the time to look at their last year’s documentation and dig deeper. “We had a lot of leftover material from 2019 — we wanted to expand in long-form on the stories and share the full archive of digitised photographs on our website. Nishant Saldana and Manashri Pai Dukle, who are our associates on this project, are working with their own family archives. We thought it would be a perfect opportunity for them to do the in-depth telling of their family histories in their own voice.”

Unusual tales

As the Goan community is spread all across the globe, the online presence of the project made it easier to connect with such people. During such a process, Mahajan discovered Goan Jazz musician, Amancio D’Silva, while interviewing his wife Joyce D’silva. As Vincent puts it, “[This story] is something that films can be made of!”

Joyce, who was then a young Irish teacher, met D’Silva at a restaurant in Shimla in 1964. “We walked into the restaurant and there was a quartet playing with this handsome guitarist in the front, I took one look at him and I thought to myself that’s the one!” recollects Joyce. Mahajan adds that Amancio D’Silva, who spent most of his musical career in London’s open-eared Jazz scene of the 60s and 70s — is one of the early evangelists of fusion music and still not-so-known in Goa.

The team also found some interesting stories back home. Vincent narrates a story shared by Apana Tarcar, about his great grandfather Vishnu (Apana) Kamat Tarcar — one of the first entrepreneurs in Goa and the stories behind his name. Tarcar mentions in his note an anecdote related to his surname. It is actually derived from the Portuguese term “Tar”, which means canoes as the family was involved in the business of making fishing canoes. Not only that, even his first name, Apana, is a combination of typically used suffixes for referring to respected people (‘Appa’and ‘Anna’).

Apana Tarcar successfully executed businesses in the fields of trading, hospitality and construction. During the early mining upheaval, he also invested in a dealership of jeeps from a company named ‘Willis Jeep’. Browsing through the Goa Familia page, you will also come across Mahatma Gandhi’s Goan dentist, Dr Christopher Barretto. His son, Cecil Barretto, talks about his father, who was Mahatma Gandhi’s personal dentist for many years at Sevagram, Maharashtra.

There’s also a forgotten chapter from Goan maritime history. The tragic story of SS Britannia, with a crew of 203 — which included over 60 crew members from Goa — and 281 passengers, that sailed from Liverpool on March 11, 1941 and was bound for Bombay (Mumbai), but sank 14 days later. With many crew members and passengers killed, the remaining survivors jumped into lifeboats in a desperate bid to remain alive. This six-decade-old story was uncovered by journalist Melvyn Misquita in 2006.

Such rich and diverse documentation holds a lot of relevance in such uncertain times. In many ways comforting, it gives a perspective of our own history.

As Mahajan puts it, “Photographs not only remind me of this delicate thing we run both toward and away from time — but they also hold something else. The humbling, steadying truth that one day, that’s all we’ll be; a photo.”