Story of Goa told by Goans

Hindustan Times

23-04-2025

For Elisha D'Souza, a photographer and student of arts, this was an opportunity to tell a story, one of the many that was narrated to her by xapai (grandfather). It goes like this.
A famous trading voyager named Inacio de Vales, set sail from Portuguese-occupied Goa to the Philippines, where his crew noticed craftsmen fixing large oyster shells to window frames.
Inacio remembered that the king had announced a reward for the best idea to replace glass, as it was very expensive. He returned to Portuguese Goa, met the king, and presented the idea of using these shells. The king was impressed and instructed the fisherfolk to start collecting these shells in large quantities. Over the years, in Bardez, Ilhas, and Salcette, the houses of the wealthy upper class featured traditional windowpanes and crafts made from these shells.
Elisha's story, The Oyster Shell Window Panes, done along with collaborator Bhawana Jain, a photographer-researcher, is one of 18 stories that are part of an online exhibition titled Goa Water Stories that went live last month. The exhibition is an initiative of the Living Waters Museum to bring to the fore stories told by locals of their own experiences with water and how it has changed over time.
The Living Waters Museum is a hybrid museum that engages youth in visualising water heritage and re-imagining sustainable, inclusive, and equitable water futures through the power of storytelling and technology by co-building a digital repository as a source of learning for the future.
The Goa Water Stories came about when the Living Waters Museum offered a fellowship, Flowing Rivers, in 2022. World Wildlife Fund-India came on board as a partner on urban waterscapes and thus, digital exhibitions were created on Mumbai, Pune, Jodhpur, Kolkata, and now Goa.
In March 2023, an open call for stories from Goa sought research on water, ecology, climate change, and its impact on local communities. Each selected fellow had about eight months which included a mentoring and skill-sharing process, to create media-rich multimedia content, encompassing text, images, audio, and video.
The resulting digital archive, metadata-tagged, geo-tagged, and translated into English, with further auto-translation enabled for additional languages, is now community-curated. Through this online archive, users can engage with multi-narrative storytelling, explore and learn from these experiences, and connect with the environment and communities on the ground.
For centuries, windowpane oyster shells adorned upper caste Goan homes giving their windows the unique look. The practise was banned because the species is now threatened. For Elisha, this was an opportunity to not just conserve a childhood memory but to also 'conserve the memory and pass down the knowledge of these cultural markers to the coming generations, who will not know of the importance."
'The species of oysters that are found in the Zuari bay is itself threatened by industrialisation, the marina and other threats. There is nothing to replace it and even though some are using imitation plastic shells, they do not offer the same ventilation and breezy atmosphere that the oyster shells brought alongside privacy,' she said.
'We wanted to bring out the stories of Goa told by Goans, with a focus on otherwise unheard voices through visual storytelling towards building an online interactive and immersive archive,' Wenceslaus 'Wency' Mendes, the programme's curator said.
They include stories revolving around the otters of Goa's rivers, the state's salt pans, the mangrove ecosystems, the Mhadei River, the state's biodiversity rich plateaus, traditional wells as well as tourism's impact on villages like Morjim and Anjuna and several others.
'When I went to Anjuna, which I did after a gap of many years, I was shocked at the state of the beach,' Saachi D'Souza, whose story, Where is Anjuna, examines the ecological impact of development along the shoreline of Anjuna, said.
'The beach is completely eroded, what's left is littered with construction debris, there's barely any space left for fishing -- all this in the place considered the birthplace of Goa's tourism dating back to the hippie era -- a tourism that's disinterested in local culture,' D'Souza said.
According to Mendes these interdisciplinary multimedia projects present hyperlocal narratives striving to amplify voices from the ground, that are traditionally repositories of oral traditions and community knowledge.
'These ethno-technologies and intangible cultural heritage have played a crucial role in preserving ecologies and enabling sustainable community living,' Mendes said.
'The media objects produced by the cohort include illustrations, photographs, texts, videos, audio recordings, and maps. This initiative aims to raise awareness of Goa's diverse water heritage and promote sustainable and equitable solutions for managing shared water resources for future generations,' Mendes said.
As part of the project, the chosen researchers were asked to understand concerns related to water and climate change, their effects on livelihoods and the environment and conservation efforts. The stories that emerged were linked to the Western Ghats, the monsoon water cycle and watershed, water bodies such as rivers, lakes, tanks, wells, the khazan lands, and the coastal ecosystem.