By studying a period of nearly four centuries and examining houses over the entire region of Goa, this lavishly illustrated book, with architectural drawings, attempts to define the specific identity of Indo-Portuguese architecture. It is possible to observe, particularly during the 17th and 18th centuries, a progressive cross-influencing of Indian and Portuguese aesthetic tastes: the resulting mixture has produced a fascinating style of architecture, which this text has captured with more than 200 colour photographs.

This much anticipated volume looks at the historical evolution of towns and cities in medieval India from the early thirteenth to the late eighteenth century. The selection is based on the availability of documents. These include the narratives of European travellers in English, French, Italian, Dutch, and German with the exception of Ibn Battuta in mid-fourteenth century and also Middle Bengali literature in case of towns in Bengal. While the coastal towns and cities have been looked at, the interior ones are also described on the basis of the writings of later historians and archaeologists. Care has been taken to explain the rise, growth and the decline of some towns and cities in which the changing courses of rivers had played a crucial role. Attempts have been made to search other factors responsible for such eventualities. The delineation of physical features within the city has been given due emphasis including the different quarters of the city and the manners and customs of the local population with reference to craft production and commercial links. The morphological differences between the cities of eastern and those of the western or northern India have also been described. This is clear from the observations of port towns described here. All these would show that India was one of the most urbanized area in the medieval period before advent of the British.

The Rough Guide to Goa will guide you through this colourful former Portuguese colony with reliable, practical information and clearly explained cultural background. You'll find detailed accounts of every major tourist sight, along with candid reviews of all the best places to sleep, eat, drink and shop, for all budgets. The Rough Guide to Goa includes first-hand coverage of the region's resorts, beaches, markets, monuments, temples and wildlife sanctuaries, as well as its more offbeat sights; from prehistoric rock carvings deep in the forest to colonial-era mansions. The introduction and inserts, along with inspirational photography, give you a flavour of this region's Portuguese legacy. Make the most of your trip with The Rough Guide to Goa.

This book chronicles the visual history of the Basilica of Bom Jesus, one of the longest-surviving churches from Goa’s Portuguese colonial era. In the sixteenth century, this baroque church in Old Goa was constructed to house the sacred relics of St. Francis Xavier and is emblematic of Goa Dourada or Golden Goa. Despite their early modern origins, monuments like the Basilica continue to influence visual culture that pertains to Goa. Accordingly, this book uncovers the traces of architectural images of Goa’s sixteenth- and seventeenth-century monuments and conducts a genealogical study of how uses of religious architecture shift over time. Thus, even as the Basilica originally functioned to portray or recall a grand empire by evoking the notion of Goa Dourada, its iconicity has been employed in marking Goa’s difference from the rest of India thereafter. By employing an analysis of historical texts, illustrations, photography, film, and pageantry, this volume demonstrates how the image of the Basilica has been employed to create a discourse on Goan identity. In fact, right from the colonial period, when Goa was heralded as the Rome of the East, to the post-Portuguese period, when Goa became an idyllic destination for leisure tourism, architectural images of Bom Jesus have been central in shaping Goa’s identity. Goa’s Bom Jesus as Visual Culture will be useful to students and educators in the fields of architecture, history, anthropology, sociology, history of architecture, and colonial/postcolonial studies. Finally, the long history of a single monument that the book documents highlights how Goans have been shaping their unique culture. At the same time as Goans imbibed Portuguese and other European influences, they also domesticated and remade such colonial heritage in South Asian fashion and, in turn, contributed to global aesthetics.