Dear friends, Delighted to share my debut (fortnightly) column for the newly relaunched Mumbai Mirror (currently bundled with its parent Times of India) under the apt tagline of Born-Again Bombayite. Link not available until mid-week, but please see the PDF attached.
----- Lady Liberty By Vivek Menezes Libia Lobo Sardesai received by far the warmest ovation at the 2025 Padma Awards on April 28 in New Delhi. The sprightly, radiant 101-year-old stood up to sustained applause, which grew into an unexpected chorus of whoops and whistles as she briskly walked up to President Droupadi Murmu to receive the Padma Shri for having “played a pivotal role in Goa’s Liberation from Portuguese Colonial Rule [and] remained dedicated to Goa’s process thereafter”. After the ceremony, the diminutive icon with striking red hennaed hair was besieged by her new fan club of fellow awardees: “Most of them and their families came to take photographs with me. I was the last person to leave Rashtrapati Bhavan.” It has been an inexplicably — and to some extent unforgivably — long route back into the limelight for Libby (as she is popularly known to all) after her late husband Vaman Sardesai received the same award in 1992. In fact, their achievements were always in parallel and partnership, as daring comrades in the freedom struggle before marriage, and then in important roles in the postcolonial administration of India’s smallest state. They had a famous arc of adventures, from the clandestine radio station in the Western Ghats they operated for six years in isolation, to circling the skies to broadcast the message of freedom at the pivotal moment of decolonisation. But far less understood is that all this is actually a Mumbai story. Libby Lobo grew up in the teeming Goan diaspora in South Bombay, on the third floor of Tyabji Building overlooking Gokuldas Tejpal Hospital near Crawford Market. While still very young (she used to take trams back and forth to Antonio de Souza High School in Byculla) she recalls standing aghast in her home balcony — “we could see everything from there, and it had a severe impact on me” — while dead and injured protesters from the Civil Disobedience Movement were trucked to casualty wards just below. Stirred into action, she began joining Quit India rallies while still a teen and became an office-bearer of Tristão de Bragança Cunha’s anticolonial Goan Youth League. There is plenty unique about how this self-described “little chit of a girl” pushed way past her family’s conservative comfort zones, but she also embodies Bombay’s potential in those most exciting years at the cusp of India’s Independence. Constantly probing what the city could offer her within walking distance — by this point her family had moved to Marine Lines — she joined Siddharth College in 1945, to the delight and personal approval of Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar. Soon afterwards, her youthful lecturer Nissim Ezekiel (actually, they were the same age) took her to listen to MN Roy, and that great revolutionary became an important influence as Libby landed a good job at All India Radio and began studying for yet another degree at the Government Law College. Looking back, she says that “Bombay had all the possibilities for anyone to take. And when I go there even now, I become young all over again.” By this point, colonialism had been routed out from most of the world, but that message never penetrated the addled imagination of António de Oliveira Salazar, the closed-minded dictator of Portugal. Growing impatient with his delays, the Bombay Goan diaspora entered the Goa liberation struggle in sizable numbers — both satyagrahis and saboteurs — and now Libby led from the front. She went underground in a secret plan hatched at AIR and spent six years alone in the jungles above Goa with Vaman Sardesai, continuously transmitting the hugely influential Voice of Freedom (*Sodvonecho Awaz* in Konkani) radio broadcasts that turned public opinion decisively in their homeland. When the Indian flag went up officially for the first time on December 19, 1961, the elated couple was sent aloft via the personal intervention of Krishna Menon to broadcast the good news from a tiny Air Force aeroplane. That was an indelible moment in a lifetime of highlights, and it is what came back to Libby with the news of her 2025 award: “Such moments are very rare in one’s life. I am as happy as I was on the day Goa was liberated from Portuguese rule. Today I feel a similar happiness.”
