Centre for the Study of Culture and Society

This book reopens the debate on the relationship between print culture, public sphere, and colonial rule. This work, as part of the SOAS series, is the first of its kind on modern Goan cultural politics. It offers an analysis of several categories of print material including pamplets, newsprint, novels, and commentaries among others. Drawing succinctly from available studies that tell the story of pring, reading publics, and linguistic hierarchies elsewhere in colonial India, this work constructs a persuasive account of the possibilites opened up via print and the manner in which it attempted to reorder social, cultural or political ties within Goan society. The author brings in a range of texts to bear on the analysis and goes beyond dominatnt paradigms that seek to fit cultural production by Goans either into accounts of Portuguese imperialism or Indian nationalism.

This book discusses print production and politics in nineteenth and early twentieth century Goa. It points to the comparative paucity of academic studies of this period, and suggests why it is necessary to address political and cultural developments of the time. Through a reading of newspapers, pamphlets, novels, and other print ephemera generated by other groups of Goans, it also indicates how this vision was contested in the nineteenth century itself.