The Goa We Don't See

A spring festival turns grotesque. Corpses exhumed. Women are punished even in death. Dadu Mandrekar's essays rip open Goa's postcard image to reveal caste, cruelty and resilience.

- DIYA MARIA GEORGE

Every year, in parts of Goa, the Shigmo festival turns villages into carnivals of music, dance, and color. In most places, it's a celebration of spring's arrival, smeared in joy. But in the villages of Amone, Sal, Kudne, Karapur, Pilgao, and Bicholim, Shigmo in the 1990s, the festival took a grotesque turn. Here, the dead are not left to rest. Graves are exhumed. Bones, tied to sticks, are paraded before the village deity in a dance of desecration.

This detail appears in Untouchable Goa, a collection of essays by the late journalist and writer Dadu Mandrekar. The book, now available in English through a translation by Nikhil Baisane, published by Panther's Paw Publication, urges us to look beyond the postcard image of Goa—to look at its stories of caste violence, erasure, and resilience.

"What you see in this text is only a fraction of what I experienced and recorded," Mandrekar writes. "Objectivity is the foundation of this work. I have tried to avoid exaggeration."

Translating horror & humanity