City of Facades: Archaeology, History and Urbanism in Velha Goa

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City of Façades: Archaeology, History, and Urbanism in Velha Goa revisits early modern colonial urbanisms through an archaeological project conducted in 2012 at the Portuguese colonial site of Velha Goa, India Histories written about the city's growth and decline from 1510 to the current day are unavoidably structured by elite, top-down understandings of social processes, owing principally to the limits of the colonial archives themselves. As a result, quotidian material transformations, essential to urban processes, remain largely unconsidered. The archaeological data explored in this volume allows us to reflect on these transformations and how they shaped colonial life, both during and after Portuguese rule.

By unravelling the biases about the existing descriptions of Goa and its hinterland, analyses of the archaeological data argue that the dominant historical narratives characterizing it as the 'Rome of the East' substantiate a vision of the city that erases other social groups and cultures. Historical tropes of ruination in the description of Goa from the seventeenth century onwards mask the rich and varied archaeological evidence of enduring forms of urbanisms.

This book, while questioning overarching narratives of urban decline, allows for a characterization of the concealed failures of colonial urban governance and its legacies in perpetuating ideal urban forms that still influence both heritage management and urban planning in Goa todey.

Brian C. Wilson is a historical anthropologist and archaeologist with a PhD from the University of Chicago. He has held several academic and administrative positions at the University of Chicago and has been visiting faculty at Northeastern Illinois University. He has participated in survey and excavation projects in India, Oman, and the American Midwest, South and South-west. His work demonstrates how South Asian colonial urbanisms are inextricable from their constitutive human-environment interactions. Some of his recent publications have appeared in Cross-Cultural Networking in the Indian Ocean Realm, c. 100-1800(2019) and Historical Archaeology (with Mark Hauser, 2016).

THE END OF PORTUGUESE rule in its colonial enclaves in South Asia can be clearly defined in 1961 when Goa was incorporated into the Indian state after a brief battle. The date on which Portuguese rule began in India is more difficult to chart, though the granting of a concession by Calicut's Zamorin in 1498 can be used to mark a beginning of the colonial relations that came to define the Estado da India. In between the two dates there is a world of relations in which its capital Goa Velha was at its centre. Brian Wilson's wonderful study documents this early modern colonial seat of power by mapping the porous boundary between the urban and rural from the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, through physical surface remains of sixteenth-century structures and archival work.

Early modern colonial seats of power were built in many places of the world through which Europeans began to assert control over global commerce. In these places, they mortgaged the lives of human subjects for manufactured goods, precious metals, and the production of agricultural commodities in service of global markets. In the archaeology of the modern world, 1.e. the past 500 years, there is a relative surfeit of studies that examine these colonial seats of power. This lacuna is not due to a lack of interest, nor effort. Rather, the majority of other early colonial-era cities scattered throughout the world tend to have been continuously occupied and are densely populated today, including Mexico City, Dejima, Macao, Rio de Janeiro, and Manila. In only a few cases have these conditions not precluded extensive archaeological work through survey.

LOCATED MIDWAY DOWN the coast of peninsular India in the modern state of Goa, the city of Velha Goa quickly grew economically, demographically, and in prestige after the Portuguese gained control of the port in 1510. Under their administration, the city of Goa became known as one of the largest and wealthiest trading entrepôts in the Indian Ocean. Nearly all historical accounts agree that the dramatic rise of the city was, however, followed by an equally precipitous decline beginning sometime in the middle or late seventeenth century- even though the Portuguese would continue to rule the small state until 1961.¹ The quote above, written by José Nicolau da Fonseca about Velha Goa as it appeared in the late nineteenth century, reveals the common perception of European travellers when visiting the once magnificent capital of the Portuguese Astan Empire.

Yet, Fonseca's narrative does much more than simply describe and lend credence to the historical decline of a once great city: It exposes an underlying conception of what constitutes urban colonial space, of how cities are imagined to exist, and what defines them as such. His evocative descriptions of a creeping, dangerous nature reducing the impressive built edifices of the city to a 'wilderness' reveals an inherent understanding of a separation between nature/culture, rural/urban, and uncivilized/civilized spaces. These particular binaries have a long history in both South Asian and European thought, but they were reinforced in particular ways through colonial encounters during the last 500 years. One could argue that in some form all societies make a distinction between the urban and the rural, the civil and the uncivil. What is especially salient, however, is the way that these distinctions are reinforced and change over time. These distinctions reveal much about social processes, cultural interactions, and the politics of inclusion versus exclusion so prevalent in colonial encounters.

Fonseca's description goes further by also revealing the specific nature of the Portuguese engagement with Goa. It highlights the often contentious duality of the secular and ecclesiastical aims of the colonial enterprise (embodied in the quote above by Alfonso de Albuquerque and St. Francis Xavier, the sword and the Gospel, respectively). At the same time, it specifically ignores vast, influential segments of the indigenous colonial population-the tensions between the seen and unseen, the heard and unheard played out in the governance of the colony and had deep impacts on both the social and spatial landscapes of the city. These inherent conflicts in colonial rule, specifically the differences between elite discourses and the material practices within colonial spaces, both motivate and provide the questions that structure this work.