Goa 2011: Reviewing and Recovering Fifty Years

This book is the outcome of the national seminar, ?Goa 2011: Reviewing and Recovering 50 years?, organised on the occasion of the golden jubilee of Goa?s liberation from Portuguese rule. The seminar intended as the first of a series of multi-disciplinary seminars on Goan themes and issues, was convened by the Xavier Centre of Historical Research (XCHR) and the Thomas Stephens Konknni Kendr (TSKK) to begin a process of self-education and knowledge-creation to comprehend how the people of this state have shaped and directed their post-colonial history and how specific socio-political and cultural contexts have influenced that contemporary history.
The book underlines the rapid and at times traumatic social changes Goan Society is undergoing today. Whether it be in regard to the construction of their past or the preservation of their culture, including that of the subalterns and the marginalized; whether in controversies over their collective identity as Goans, expressed in their language or their politics, whether in relation to the land and its commodification by the market or its objectification with unsustainable development; whether in the search for a relevant education or the struggles of civil society movements?everywhere there is evidence of the complex and multiple impact of rapid change at various levels. What surely is the need of the hour is now to find a horizon of hope within which to understand our world so as to be able to change it as subjects, rather than just coping with it as objects of our own history.