My Family and Other Globalizers | Finding echoes in the cultural chutney of Goa

Everywhere we looked, the hand-painted ceramic nameplates in front of Goan homes – Vivenda Pinto or Diaz or Pereira, helped “normalize” the Arias Camison-Aiyar that is our own family’s appellation. (Photo by Jocelyn Erskinekellie via Pexels)

Note to readers: My Family and Other Globalizers is a weekly parenting column on bringing up global citizens.

My family has done a lot of moving. My older son was born in China and the younger one in Brussels. They went to kindergarten in Indonesia, primary school in Japan, and are now in Spain. Consequently, a place-based identity has eluded my boys. Even in Madrid, their sense of self remains free of the nation state. When asked where they are from, they struggle to answer. Ishaan says he’s “from his family.” Nico prefers to state that he’s “from the world.”

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Being half-Spanish and half-Indian, while having spent most of their lives in third countries, our boys are a khichdi. Which explains why we, as a familial unit, finally felt like we had found our place, when we spent two weeks visiting Goa in August. For this bite-sized state on India’s western Konkan coast, is the embodiment of cultural chutney: Virgin Marys in sarees, chorizo bathed in Indian spices, Catholic Brahmins named Braganza.

For thousands of years, outsiders from Sumerians to medieval Arabs, washed up in Goa atop the waves of the Arabian Sea, creating a fiercely cosmopolitan culture. And then, in 1498, the Portuguese explorer Vasco Da Gama, landed on the Indian subcontinent. When asked by the locals what he wanted, the explorer (apocryphally) answered, “Christians and spices.” Less apocryphally, the fortunes of Goa were radically transformed, with the Portuguese going on to rule the region as a colony for over 450 years (1510- 1961). By way of contrast, the British held sway over India in varying degrees only between 1757 and 1947.

The result is an Iberian-Indian mélange that felt tailor-made for our family. We spent our days eating foods that in their peripatetic exuberance, rejection of purity, and joy in agglomeration embodied the values that my boys have grown up with. We feasted on Luso-Goan dishes like Amêijoas à Bulhão Pato - clams cooked with white wine, and Balchão de Camarão - cooked prawns in a shrimp and coconut feni sauce.

At Petisco, a tapas joint in Goa’s capital, Panjim, we contemplated innovative dishes like Splitfire fried fish, dusted with gunpowder and accompanied by mushy peas, tadka sukhi bhaji and bimli tartare. This was a menu that spoke the language of my family, a patois replete with parental instructions to the offspring like, “put on your chanklas (slippers in Spanish) and tie your nara (pajama drawstrings in Hindi).”

Everywhere we looked, the hand-painted ceramic nameplates in front of homes – Vivenda Pinto or Diaz or Pereira, helped “normalize” the Arias Camison-Aiyar that is our own family’s appellation.

The ceramic tiles, known as azulejos, were reminiscent of decorations in Andalucía, in the south of Spain, a region that I had always felt strangely at home in. But visiting Goa made me realize why this was perhaps not strange after all. There was so much kinship in the aesthetics, the ubiquity of azulejos being the most obvious example.

The art of these tiles goes back to Arabia from whence they travelled to the Iberian Peninsula and were eventually brought to Goa. We visited the Menezes-Braganza centre in Panjim, a building that dates to 1871 and has had a polymorphic past from public library to Portuguese army headquarters. Today, it is a cultural centre, with its foyer as principal attraction. The hall is lined with the blue and white ceramic artwork of Jorge Colaço (1868–1942), the artist also behind the 20,000-tile decoration of the vestibule of the São Bento railway station in the Portuguese city of Porto –the current favorite travel destination of the international jet set.

In Panjim, the Colaço azulejos depict scenes from Os Lusíadas, the Homeric epic Portuguese poem by Luís Vaz de Camões (considered to be Portugal’s greatest poet) that sings the tale of Portugal’s 15th and 16th-century voyages of discovery to Asia. My Iberian-Indian family posed in front of a panel depicting Vasco de Gama’s arrival in Calicut - a quintessential moment in Iberian-Indian history. It was all most apposite.

Today, Goa has made the art of azulejo painting its very own, and popular scenes from rural and urban local life, of fisherwomen, boats, vegetable vendors and churches abound. The state, as India (and our family) more broadly, has been adept at domesticating foreign influences and transforming them into its own. Another example are the shrines to the Virgin Mary that dot every other street corner, but that are often garlanded with marigold malas in the Hindu-way.

When our vacation came to an end, we departed with the conviction that we’d be back. For we are ready to be adopted by Goa, if it will let us shelter in its syncretic bosom, like it has those of so many cultures before.