Living on the edge

Abstract

The New Conquest districts of Goa were seized by the Portuguese between 1763 and 1819, about 250 years after the Portuguese first colonised Goa. The villages of the New Conquests were contested terrains between quite a number of polities during that 250-year period, including the Bijapur Adilshahi rulers, the Mughals, the Marathas, the Kolhapur kings, the Sawants of Wadi, the Sonda kings and the Portuguese. The records for these villages have heretofore never been studied in any depth. My analysis of these records reveals the myriad ways in which the villages are both penetrated by state rule and retain their own structures. I conclude that the villages were able to persist over time within the context of the regional culture in varying degrees and under peculiar circumstances, but were not immune to the state penetration that transformed them to a degree. There is no one principle that can properly account for all cases, and no single formula for understanding village-state relations in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century India. The records show the multiple discourses of state rule, local agriculture and social practices, and the complexity of village-state relations.