Nandkumar M Kamat nandka...@gmail.com On April 26th two immensely important, extremely well researched and lucidly written books by local resident and Indo-Portuguese historian Celsa Pinto on Panaji will be released by local BJP MLA and chairman of EDC Siddharth Kunkolienkar. The beautiful, picturesque and romantic capital of Goa, Panjim or Panaji, entered the 175th year of its official recognition as a "cidade" or city on March 22. Historian A K Priolkar called British Bombay and Portuguese Goa the two "gateways of India".
Panaji is gateway of Goa into which Portuguese lovingly poured all their ideas to create a fine aesthetic tropical urban monument for posterity. For them, Panjim was a piece of Indo-Mediterranean art to be enjoyed from the Alto de Conception, Guimares hill, the Mandovi waterfront or Miramar. Panaji is poetry, poets B B Borkar, R V Pandit and Shankar Ramani had declared to me. With dedicated writings on Panaji coming before us, it becomes clear that Portuguese invested their heart and soul in an urban idea called Panjim to make the city a nursery of sustainable ideas. Vasco Pinho provided a chronological and factual history of Panaji through the ages in his first volume *Snapshots of Indo-Portuguese History* (2007). Engineer Vitorino Pinto from Altinho who settled in Geneva had revealed to me what ambitious modernisation plans he had made in 1959 for Panaji. In the 21st century, misguided politicians, ill-informed planners, culturally alienated architects and engineers and expensive foreign consultants ignorant of ecological, hydrological setting of this fragile island city and its colonial microhistory are busy in distorting, damaging and dismantling the original city. Therefore, factual, authentic documentation becomes essential to thwart these new alien business models of urbanism. Celsa Pinto has produced two volumes, more than 550 pages, on microhistorical aspects of colonial Panaji. After her original highly readable contribution *A revolt of the natives of Goa -- the forgotten martyrs* (2013) to the history of anti-colonization struggle in Asia, the former director of Education turned her attention to archival material on colonial Panjim. She has painted more details into the pictures offered by Vasco Pinho. Her first volume *Anatomy of a colonial capital* has 14 chapters, among which the last seven chapters could serve as eye opener to City Survey, Town and Country Planning Board, the North Goa Planning and Development Authority (NGPDA), the City Corporation of Panaji (CCP), PWD and GSIDC, because all these agencies have immensely hurt the city due to their ignorance about land acquisition, land use and public works in the capital. All the facts and figures revealed by historian Pinto are novel and show the importance of objective use of original archival material in writing microhistorical development of a city. Can we believe this -- what the Portuguese did in 1879 to protect trees in Panaji -- the 'postura' of April 25, 1879 prohibited people from attaching and tying anything to the trees and climbing on pain of penalty of one Reis. The throwing of stones or any such materials that would break the twigs and branches of trees or cause damage to the trees was also banned on pain of penalty of two Reis. If anyone plucked fruits, leaves and flowers, they faced a fine too. As a post-graduate teacher in urban ecology I found this volume outstanding in providing glimpses of holistic and integrated planning for a small urban area with examples from an era which had not heard of the environmental movement. It needs to be noted that Panaji has already lost more than 50 per cent of colonial tree cover not due to ageing or diseases but removal for 'development'. Pinto's second volume Colonial Panaji* comes as a culture shock. Universities in Europe and in the rest of the Anglo-Lusophilic world would instantly understand that Pinto has gently dropped a bombshell in form of this book which offers "the other side of Asian Colonialism". The pain she has taken to make all the 14 chapters readable and easy for teachers, students and common readers is visible. Anyone born and brought up in Panaji would be pleasantly shocked to read the details she provides at micro level with interesting tabulated data on such surreal aspects like statistics on rats caught in Panjim to marital composition of 45 years. With this single volume Celsa Pinto has elevated the entire discourse on urbanism in Colonial Asia to a new intellectual and objective level. It would be difficult to negate her hypothesis because she has picked up the facts from original documents. After reading this volume we may ask ourselves: what more has Panaji achieved after Liberation? Why couldn't democratic rule adopt the best practices of Portuguese urban planning and administration? When did we resolve that the Portuguese were poor urban planners and administrators and that we need to start all over again from American and British models? Why were we busy to make Panaji a photostatic copy of any other city in rest of India? One really needs intellectual courage to finish this volume because it is first such bold demystification of Portuguese urbanism at the micro level which explores and exposes certain bitter truths. Post Liberation Goa saw a jungle of legislations. Panaji is governed under a huge CCP act since 2003 but politicians are absolutely scared to form the statutory seven ward committees. Pintos' book shows why among all the 7,935 towns in India Panaji as urban local body was best and most suited to get all the powers under 74th amendment transferred to CCP. Pinto shows legal dynamism of the city's administration and its efficiency in micro-governance. It was 365 days 24 hours city governance. Of interest is the 'house to house garbage collection system' introduced in March 1859 in which periodic improvements were made till 1879. Consultancy on Solid Waste Management (SWM) and projects on its treatment has become a lucrative business in Goa, so the SWM managers would be stunned to see the appropriate solutions found by the Portuguese 158 years before them. Throughout both the volumes by Celsa Pinto, we see how Portuguese had adopted a common-sense approach to Panaji's urban issues. After Liberation, this common-sense approach became very uncommon. We knew that local people hate to pay for parking but still went ahead and built a white elephant -- a Rs 52 crore virtually empty parking complex at Pato. After you read both the volumes then, if you love Panaji, you would feel like crying because Panaji lost its innocence in past 50 years -- and it can't be regained now. ###