Portuguese Colonial Research Articles

Governance by Perpetual Conflict: How Early Colonial Political Practices Undermine Democracy in Post-Civil War Sri Lanka

Abstract The 1978 Constitution of Sri Lanka established a semi-presidential system within the country with constitutional provisions for a powerful executive presidency. Three decades later, practices of the presidents in the post-war period show commonalities with the Sinhala monarchy that prevailed in early colonial Sri Lanka. To substantiate this argument, this paper focuses on four kings from the Sithavaka and Kandyan kingdoms who reigned in Sri Lanka during the Portuguese colonization and the early years of Dutch colonization, i.e. from 1521 to 1687. These kings governed by feeding off perpetual conflict, using such as a political tool to retain their dictatorial authority and political relevance. Despite being formally constrained by the 1978 Constitution, presidents in the post-war period engage in a similar form of governance. However, this local conceptualization of the executive as a monarch clashes with the substantive democratic rationality of the office of president, which requires constitutional and political checks that apply beyond elections. Due to this clash between governance by perpetual conflict, which gains legitimacy from and has been instituted since Sri Lanka’s early colonial past, and democratic governance, the establishment of democratic constitutional norms within the country has been unstable.

Smugglers, Pirates, and Patriots: Free Trade in the Age of Revolution

This is not so much a book about pirates or smugglers, or even patriots—although all appear—as it is about national divergence. Intrigued by the different paths taken by the early United States and its largest southern neighbor, Brazil, Tyson Reeder sets out to show what these colonies turned nations had in common and how they differed in the decades on either side of the year 1800. Political and commercial leaders of the fledgling US, Reeder shows, tended to imagine Latin American independence as the creation of sister republics, united in their embrace of free trade and rejection of empire. What a surprise, then, to see Brazil become the seat of the Portuguese empire in 1808, reaffirmed in 1822 as an independent empire, and still ruled by the House of Braganza. Mexico traced a similar, imperial path, and monarchist urges resurged throughout the hemisphere. How could this seeming anomaly be sorted?.Coming on the heels of Caitlin Fitz's much-discussed Our Sister Republics (2016), Reeder's book provides a more fully Latin American counterpoint, or comparison. The narrative is still centered in the early US, but it is deeply comparative in its examination of free trade as a notion that US patriots felt had to be connected to political freedom, or something approaching it. The Portuguese Crown's unexpected opening of Brazilian ports after 1808 seemed anomalous, especially as trade wars blossomed in the Río de la Plata estuary, sparked by British aggression. US traders’ involvement in the transatlantic slave trade also entered the mix, as did a US attraction to privateering opportunities as Imperial Brazil countered its southern neighbors, principally the Cisplatine Province, or future Uruguay.Divided into nine chapters in four parts, Smugglers, Pirates, and Patriots traces the seemingly shared frustrations with monarchy and mercantilism that gave rise to Brazil's so-called Inconfidência Mineira (1789) and Tailor's Revolt (1798), continuing in Pernambuco long after 1808. Reeder provides the backstory, showing how the old British-Portuguese compact was challenged by colonial traders and then by US traders, a story of smuggling centered on the commerce in wheat and Madeira wine. As Portugal shut out US traders in alliance with Britain, the attractions of Brazil shone: providing wheat and enslaved Africans might win them access to cotton, sugar, and other tropical crops, in addition to gold. Reeder then shows how diplomacy and war upset the aims of US free traders, putting their “sister republican” hopes on pause until 1815.Section 3 traces the last cycle of anticipation and disappointment, and here smugglers turn pirates. But first there was a real glimmer of hope again in Pernambuco, a region that was chronically rebellious against Braganza centralism and economically capable of going its own way. It did not break away, however, and Reeder follows the story south to the future Uruguay, where US mercenaries received patents from the rebel José Artigas. US privateers did quite well against Luso-Brazilian shippers, souring US-Portuguese relations until March 1819, when the US Piracy Act rendered this brand of “freedom fighting” a capital crime.Portugal was not satisfied with subsequent prosecutions, but Brazilian independence in 1822 abruptly shifted the focus. Suddenly the US was in the odd position of having to recognize a monarchy, an empire, to the south. As Reeder shows, the US recognized Brazilian independence with surprising gusto given all the republican talk of the previous four decades. Hopes for a “sister republic” dimmed and US traders (many of them Yankees) became Brazil's number-one slave suppliers in defiance of both US and British law: “brothers” in racial despotism. Officially, Brazil came to be regarded by US officials as one of several disappointing neighbors, in part for favoring British commerce and credit. A racist discourse, as Fitz showed, displaced the earlier sense of republican camaraderie.Smugglers, Pirates, and Patriots makes a valuable contribution to a new Atlantic or “greater American” historiography, in part by reaching across borders and into multiple archives but also by offering a model for hemispheric comparison. Historians of the US will have a better grasp of Brazil's (and Portugal's) gravity and significance in this era, and historians of Latin America will gain a better sense of US interest in and ambivalence toward Latin America at a time when the young republic's bark was much bigger than its bite. Reeder is to be commended for providing a well-written and convincing “twin-engine” narrative, hardly an easy feat given the complexity of the material covered. The pirate tales are good, too.

Ferreira, Ana Paula. Mulheres Escrevendo o Colonialismo Português na África

O livro de Ana Paula Ferreira é uma obra de fôlego que percorre a escrita de várias mulheres portuguesas, desde finais do século XIX até ao século XXI, enquadrando-as nas diferentes conjunturas políticas de Portugal ao longo deste período. Esta visão ampla, que relaciona o trabalho de várias autoras, consegue demonstrar o relevante contributo da escrita de um conjunto de mulheres que, cada qual a seu modo, se envolveu nos principais debates da sua época, deixando através da escrita um testemunho desses mesmos tempos.

Exhibiting Faith against an Imperial Background: Angola and the Spiritans at the Vatican Missionary Exhibition (1925)

Abstract In 1925 the Vatican Missionary Exhibition took place, presenting thousands of objects sent by Catholic missions around the world. Resulting from substantial efforts by the Church, the exhibition had a significant public impact, with an estimated one million visitors. It marked a critical moment in the international affirmation of the Church, as well as the reformulation and expansion of its missionary policy in the aftermath of the Great War. Catholic missions and congregations in the Portuguese colonial empire participated in the exhibition. This article focuses on the Angolan case, where the Congregation of the Holy Spirit was the main protagonist of Catholic missionisation. I examine the organisation process, the circulation of norms and objects across imperial borders, and their exhibition at the Vatican. I discuss the tensions between the pontifical message and Portuguese missionary politics, as well as the intermediary position that the Spiritans occupied.

The influence of German science on Cinchona and quinine research in Portugal in the second half of the 19th century.

This paper examines the contribution of three Portuguese scientists to Cinchona cultivation in the former Portuguese colonies in the second half of the 19th century, while discussing the importance of their studies in Germany to their professional lives. Portuguese pharmaceutical, medical, and botanical literature from the 19 th and 20 th century was reviewed, as well as books and articles regarding the history of pharmacy and medicine in Portugal. Cinchona bark, source of the antimalarial alkaloid quinine, is obtained from a South American plant, and was an important commodity in the 19th century. Many European nations (including Portugal) tried to acclimatize and cultivate Cinchona plants in their colonies. Pharmacist Joaquim dos Santos e Silva (1842-1906) performed chemical analysis of Cinchona bark samples from the Portuguese colonies in Africa. Forester Bernardino Barros Gomes (1839-1910) wrote a book with practical instructions for Cinchona cultivation and chronicled the history of Cinchona plantations in the British and Dutch colonies. In that work he also encouraged private planters to cultivate Cinchona. Forester Adolpho Frederico Möller (1842-1920), as inspector of the Botanical Garden of Coimbra, managed Cinchona plants' cultivation in the garden's nurseries, which were later sent to the colonies, and answered queries from Cinchona planters. Silva's chemistry studies in Germany were crucial to his career and the work of the three scientists was influenced and guided by their knowledge of German science and scientific culture.

The unintended consequences of liberalization and austerity on higher education in Mozambique

AbstractChronic shortages of resources to run the state have been a feature of Mozambique since the colonial period. Even before the adoption of structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) in the late 1980s, conditions were austere due to the effects of Portuguese colonialism, a decade of liberation struggle, prolonged civil war and policy mistakes following independence in 1975. Drawing from archival research and oral accounts, this article analyses the impact of the liberalization of higher education in Mozambique. It explores the strategies adopted by intellectuals and academics to navigate reduced state support and donor conditionalities accompanying austerity measures from the late 1980s. It also highlights the paradoxical effects of austerity measures on fundraising, intellectual production, and the expansion of educational institutions. Austerity measures brought about by SAPs have forced universities and faculty to reinvent themselves by commercializing and privatizing higher education and seeking external funding for research. At the same time, scholars are now intellectually freer but more dependent on donors’ research agendas. Finally, the introduction of privately owned higher education institutions and the marketization of public institutions have increased divisions between the elites and the majority of Mozambicans who cannot afford to pay the fees charged.

A Dissenting Voice: The Clash of Trade and Warfare in Giovanni da Empoli's Account of His Second Voyage to Portuguese Asia

AbstractGiovanni da Empoli's second voyage to Asia (1510–1514) was eventful and violent, characterised by the emergence of conflicting agendas among different groups of Portuguese. The Florentine merchant's long letter about the voyage is an extraordinary document, and provides insights in three important areas. First, it allows us to fill some of the gaps in the history of the early phases of Portuguese empire building, questioning the extent to which the Crown was pursuing a clear and coherent strategy that included the conquest of Malacca. Second, it problematises further our conception of “the Portuguese” by reporting episodes of Portuguese-on-Portuguese violence and opposing views on the objectives of Portuguese fleets in the Indian Ocean. Finally, Giovanni unequivocally expresses admiration for the international markets of Eastern city-ports and openly criticises the militarist attitude and lawless tactics of the Portuguese viceroy, Alfonso de Albuquerque, thereby inviting us to reconsider the chronology of a “cosmopolitan reaction” among Italian writers visiting South Asia.

Spatial Genealogies: Mobility, Settlement, and Empire-Building in the Brazilian Backlands, 1650–1800

Abstract This study examines the territorial expansion of Portuguese colonization in South America by analyzing the spatial practices of Luso-Brazilian families in the captaincy of São Paulo, Brazil during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. After the 1690s, successive discoveries of mineral wealth lured thousands of colonists to scattered settlements in the interior of the continent, challenging the long-established maritime orientation of the Portuguese empire. Given obstacles posed by distance and lack of infrastructure as well as the near absence of formal institutions, this study asks how the Portuguese extended the occupation into the backlands and what mechanisms enabled the integration of these new pockets of settlement into the rest of the empire. It combines different computational methods, such as text mining, data modeling and analysis, and digital mapping to examine a large corpus of genealogical writings about prominent families of colonial São Paulo, reconstituting patterns of geographic mobility of more than 3,000 individuals. These patterns indicate that mobility was shaped by family ties, which allowed colonists to marshal resources, share geographic knowledge, and forge alliances for travel and exploration. Because kinship was an enduring form of social relationship, it provided lasting linkages that connected distant settlements to the consolidated areas of occupation and gave a sense of spatial cohesion that sustained the empire inland.

Um dos cativeiros da liberdade

The present work seeks to deal with the Brazilian land structure, ruled by the maxim of “captivity of the land”, as one of the founding elements of structural racism in Brazil. The distribution of land has as core the concentration, from the Portuguese colonization to the present day. From the exploitation of the work of the enslaved black population for more than three and a half centuries, a model of agricultural production through huge estates was founded, turned to the exportation. After slavery ended, black people, in addition to not being assisted or repaired by any of the material and moral damage caused by this phenomenon, had their lives depreciated in many ways, one of these was the deprivation of access to land. When considering the importance of territoriality for the reproduction of the lives of these populations, the study aims to point how racism and the historical evidence of land concentration, which remains until today, constitute the same social structure; counting on the direct interference of Brazilian political institutions. This discussion is important at a time when the agroindustry expands itself territorially at an increasing speed and the debates about structural racism gain popular and media attention - except, however, when it comes to the advance of expropriations (agricultural frontier) in the lands by quilombola and/or indigenous peoples, as these issues are not usually treated in a relational way.

The Demography of Slavery in the Coffee Districts of Angola, c. 1800–70

AbstractThis article uses demographic data from nineteenth-century Angola to evaluate, within a West Central African setting, the widely accepted theory that sub-Saharan Africa's integration within the Atlantic world through slave and commodity trading caused significant transformations in slavery in the subcontinent. It specifically questions, first, whether slaveholding became more dominant in Angola during the last phase of the transatlantic slave trade; second, whether Angolan slave populations were predominantly female; and third, whether slavery in Angola expanded further during the cash crop revolution that accompanied the nineteenth-century suppression of the Atlantic slave trade. Besides making a significant contribution to understanding the demographic context of slavery in the era of abolition, the article aims to display ways in which historians can use the population surveys the Portuguese Empire carried out in Africa from the late eighteenth century.

São Luiz do Paraitinga: The Image of São Paulo State in the 18th Century

São Luiz do Paraitinga it is a city anchored on time, a unique register of São Paulo State about modern concepts reformulation, proposed by Marquês de Pombal in the 18th century for Portugal and its colonies. Isolated between mountain-chains with strategic position, it was built as a trading post to favour the gold and other products transportation to Portugal and also to increase Portuguese Empire control over the Brazilian goods production. It remains generally preserved due to its forgetfulness, after the favourable periods of the local economy, remaining static. But its heritage degradation and destruction was also due of forgetfulness and lack of protection of the Brazilian State. São Luiz do Paraitinga constructive process and culture of 18th century is a singular case that will be analysed in this paper, bringing evidences about the common people life in the Portuguese colony, and not only about State Rulers and great owners.

AS INSTÂNCIAS GRECO-ROMANAS NA COMPOSIÇÃO DE MUHURAIDA, DE JOÃO WILKENS

This article reflects on the creative aspects of the epic Muhuraida (1785), by Henrique João Wilkens. In it, three instances of composition are identified: Judeo-Christian, Greco-Roman and hybrid, which merge the previous ones. Despite being considered a "Christian epic", whose approaches alternate between the wonderful (Christian mythical) and the historical (the advance of Portuguese colonization in the Amazon), the evocation of European culture in the literary plane is highlighted, moving away from the readings carried out so far that extol the wonderful Christian plan of epic materiality and its paradoxical consequences of context; in other words, it deals with Greco-Roman instances, illuminating three forms of use by the poet: as a conductor of his voice, as a construction of the image of the enemy Mura, and as a construction of the image of Amazonian nature. To achieve this goal, the theoretical foundation of Silva (2017) and Ramalho (2004) is listed on the Arcade-Neoclassic Epic Model; Graves (2018), Kury (2008), Snell (2005), Brandão (1991) on Greco-Roman mythology and culture, and a small critical fortune Grizoste (2018; 2017), Góis (2013), Silva and Ramalho (2011), Bogéa (2011), Caldas (2010; 2007).

Deirdre MEINTEL, Race, Culture, and Portuguese Colonialism in Cabo Verde, Syracuse, N.Y. : Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University, 1984. 201 pages

Deirdre MEINTEL, Race, Culture, and Portuguese Colonialism in Cabo Verde, Syracuse, N.Y. : Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University, 1984. 201 pages. An article from journal Culture (Volume 6, Number 1, 1986, pp. 3-90), on Érudit.

'A man can only be truly known in drunkenness and war.' An anthropological perspective on alcohol use during the Portuguese Colonial War.

To understand the use of psychoactive substances, one must consider the context and the social circumstances in which the substance use occurs. This paper discusses alcohol use from a socio-cultural perspective, based on the use of alcoholic beverages among the Portuguese servicemen who fought in the Portuguese Colonial War (1961-74). In-depth interviews were carried out with 17 former Portuguese soldiers. Simultaneously, extensive bibliographic and documentary research was carried out based on a broad set of biographical and autobiographical texts by former military personnel. Finally, an on-line survey (n=210) was conducted among ex-combatants of the Portuguese Colonial War. Alcohol drinking among Portuguese servicemen was high during the Portuguese Colonial War. Socio-cultural factors (such as regarding alcohol consumption as therapeutic and affirming masculinity) explain why alcohol drinking was so intense and frequent, and why repeated drunken behaviour was tolerated and undervalued by the military authorities, who considered it normal and not a health problem or disorder. The use of alcohol in the Portuguese Colonial War is an empirical example of how what is considered 'acceptable', 'normal' or 'pathological' may depend more on socio-cultural norms than on objective and measurable criteria, including clinical criteria.

MAXAMBA and Memory-Making Amid Traumatic Displacement

In this edited interview, psychologists Eric Greene and Nisha Gupta converse with filmmaker and psychologist Suzanne Barnard about her film MAXAMBA. MAXAMBA was created as a sensory ethnographic memory of inhabitants of Lisbon’s Quinta da Vitória neighborhood as they awaited the neighborhood’s final demolition. The film focuses on the daily life of an Indian Portuguese couple who emigrated from Mozambique (a former colony of Portugal) to Lisbon in the 1970s. The husband and wife both work out of their home in the neighborhood. As tailors, they have a close relationship with the other inhabitants, and they are especially integrated into the Hindu community that lives in this neighborhood. In this dialogue, Suzanne describes the film as constructing a virtual or living memory out of coexisting planes of past, present, and future—a memorial process that seeks to honor the everyday life of the couple prior to their traumatic displacement. She also explores how the film attempts to mobilize an intervention in the neighborhood’s representation in the city, and reflects on opportunities and limitations for art activism through the vehicle of filmmaking.

Liberated Africans and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1807–1896

Nearly 50 years since Robert Conrad's pathbreaking article on the emancipados of Brazil—published in this journal (volume 53, issue 1)—the history of the Africans liberated from slave ships as the result of measures for suppressing the slave trade has taken a global turn. Yet the scholarship produced as part of this trend has tended to focus on the Anglophone Atlantic.This collection of essays on liberated Africans organized by Richard Anderson and Henry Lovejoy, two historians of Africa and the African diaspora, brings together for the first time studies covering groups settled in territories of the British, Spanish, and Portuguese empires as well as independent Brazil and Liberia. Treated as a special and somewhat extraneous group in national histories until the early 2000s, liberated Africans gained renewed attention after the bicentennial of the British abolition of the slave trade in 2007. Then a number of conferences on the circumstances surrounding and conflicts over abolition in various regions counteracted the excessive focus on British actors and events and highlighted the importance of considering the continuation and transformations of the slave trade after 1807. As the unexpected byproduct of the trade's suppression, recaptive Africans settled or resettled in Sierra Leone, Cape Colony, Saint Helena, the British Caribbean, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Suriname, Martinique, Brazil, Angola, or Indian Ocean territories had similar statuses that stemmed from legislation or treaties aimed at abolishing the slave trade, which required them to serve for a certain period before attaining full emancipation. Liberated Africans stood out as the ideal category for comparing and evaluating the abolitionist campaign's effectiveness.The collection unites some longtime specialists on liberated Africans, many newcomers to the subfield, and others for whom the theme is marginal to their research agendas. The 19 chapters are divided into 6 sections organized according to a mix of chronological, geographical, and thematic approaches: “Origins of Liberated Africans,” “Sierra Leone,” “Caribbean,” “Lusophone Atlantic,” “Liberated Africans in Global Perspective,” and “Resettlements.” In the introduction, Anderson and Lovejoy set the collection within the context of the current debates on the British campaign for the slave trade's abolition and the growing importance of digital humanities initiatives for studying the African diaspora. To be sure, the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (https://www.slavevoyages.org/), particularly its section on the liberated Africans' names, and the extensive digitization of the Sierra Leone archives have greatly affected recent scholarship. Anderson and Lovejoy estimate that 200,000 men, women, and children were “liberated” during the Atlantic and Indian Ocean phases of the suppression campaign, from 1808 to 1896; the coeditors present a fair overview of how many African recaptives were settled and resettled, where, and on what legal bases. In Latin America, the 11,000 africanos livres of Brazil and 27,000 emancipados of Cuba were included in the editors' count, but smaller groups in Puerto Rico and Martinique were not.British records have been fundamental for this collective endeavor, given the centrality and ubiquity of British institutions and bureaucracy, scattered all over the world, in the abolition campaign. The fairly regular series of documents allow for panoramic, comparative, and also microhistorical approaches. There is a mix of those in this volume, with essays covering the seizure and adjudication of ships in vice admiralty courts, mixed commission courts, or local legal venues as well as the disposal of the Africans for their compulsory terms of service, their daily lives amid slavery or postemancipation and also their resettlement, following intra- and interimperial policies. An integrated history of the slave trade's abolition is taking shape in which the people who were the campaign's object appear at the forefront, their collective experience becoming comparable and in turn giving a new perspective to policymaking and trends in labor, citizenship, migration, gender, international law, cultural transformations, and many other aspects of nineteenth-century history. The great reliance on British archives in this collection is both a strength and a weakness. The book includes chapters on recaptives in Liberia, Cuba, Brazil, Angola, and the Indian Ocean that draw from other documentary collections and reveal the imbalance: outside the British Empire, the continuation of the slave trade well into the 1850s and 1860s made for developments not sufficiently integrated into the narrative of abolition, which is still centered on the British Atlantic. The initiative to compile such a volume is to be praised; it is hoped that the debate will surpass the tunnel vision that frames it for now.This collection will be useful for scholars of the African diaspora, abolitionism, and global history, and a number of the essays will be of keen interest to those studying British diplomatic engagement in Latin America.

Coffee Frontier in Proto-Colonial and Colonial Angola

Coffee plantations were unquestionably one of the defining features of Angola’s colonial landscape. From the 1870s to independence, coffee was the main export of this former Portuguese colony, barring a couple of intervals during which rubber and diamonds held first place. During this time, Angola ranked consistently among the world’s largest robusta producers, which it might still have been today had the country’s civil war (1975-2002) not made commercial farming all but impossible. In Angolan popular memory, coffee occupies an ambivalent position: for some people it brings up memories of colonial forced labor, while others recollect stories of successful family farms. My research project, “Coffee and Colonialism in Angola, 1820-1960,” aims to reconstruct the multiple, intertwined realities behind these contrasting memories. Focusing on northern Angola, where smallholding and estate farming always coexisted, it investigates how African farmers, colonial settlers, foreign traders, and global consumers shaped one of the oldest commercial coffee frontiers in sub-Saharan Africa. In doing so, it reflects on the question to what extent “colonialism” is the proper lens through which to study the history of coffee cultivation in Angola.

Doing Family, Gender, Religion and Raced Identities Across Generations: A Narrative Ethnography on Ismaili Women of Indian East African Heritage

Drawing from a narrative ethnography, this paper provides insight into the ways Nizari Ismaili women of Indian East African heritage constructed and performed their mutually-constitutive identities in specific networks of power and hierarchy, and the local knowledges they have produced and passed on to their children. Having lived in Mozambique during the final decades of Portuguese colonialism, the six women interviewed were exposed to contradictory and ambivalent modernizing forces amplified by postcolonial migration processes. The analysis of their biographies and caregiving repertoires involved an intersectional framing to explore the links between identities, boundaries and hierarchy, combined with a multilevel conception of ambivalence addressing the dialectic intersection between the multiple sources of ambivalence in social life. The conclusion highlights how the contradictory structures and ideologies they navigated offered them resources for producing intergenerational transformative outcomes.

The Revitalization of the Portuguese Language in Timor-Leste

Timor-Leste is a multilingual nation, comprising its indigenous languages, yet also languages from abroad, which all coexist within the boundaries of the country. As a former Portuguese colony, the country has showcased a Portuguese language as its official language during its colonial era. However, since that period, and hence throughout its history, the country has transited through the use of several official languages. With the country’s independence in 2002, the newly formed constitution instituted Portuguese and Tetum as the official and instructional languages, although the Portuguese language is currently spoken by only part of the population. The study finds that, through decipherment of the language ideologies of the sample set cohort, the use of the language appears to correlate with the myth of national origin, with the construction of national identity, and the establishment of the (nation) state, presenting a transcendental signifier, or at least master narrative. I also include ‘mystics’ as a category, that is, those who bind the Portuguese language to the invisible and miraculous forces construed as resurrecting a dying national ideal. Those with pragmatic intentions seek evidence for progress in the implementation of the language and its policies, while those with idealistic intentions view any movement as a journey towards progress. This confidence in the future of the language and nation state, mediated by language ideologies, is multi-layered, and conceptions vary substantially.

Grinding Songs from Goa

The aim of this paper is to bring an analysis of oviyos, folkloric songs that Indian women from the Hindu community of Goa, former Portuguese colony in India used to sing while working at the grinding stone. These songs, a sample of Goan folklore, were collected by Heta Pandit in the book Grinding Stories. Songs from Goa (2018), based on her field work with singers Subhadra Arjun Gaus, Saraswati, Dutta Sawant and Sarojini Bhiva Gaonkar. The songs, sung in a dialect of Marathi-Konkani, were transcribed into English. These elaborate songs are of psychological and social significance as they provide a release from a sometimes harsh reality, at the same time they are an invaluable cultural document. They have been analyzed from the perspective of Goan folklore as discussed by Phaldesai (2011), the meaning of folkloric narratives (Dundes, 2007) and a reflection on the genre oviyos (Jassal, 2012).