February 2024
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The advent of farming has undeniably transformed the bond humans shared with land. Permanent settlements and ownership of land were the direct outcome of farming. But the sense of ownership that existed in the past is vastly different from the one found today. Goa, a Southwestern coastal state of India, boasted of a unique self-sustaining system of governance where land was held under common ownership of a village community-the 'gaunkari'-which remained largely unaffected by periodical changes in the ruling dynasties. As described by Gomes Pereira in the opening lines of his book, Goa-Gaunkari: the Old Village Associations, "Gaum is a village. Gaunkar was its freeholder and gaunkari, his association, a small Republic." (1) It was primarily an autonomous body, the system governed by the unwritten codes of village assemblies that functioned independently. But the advent of the Portuguese and the following imperial hegemony of Portugal over Goa for over 450 years permanently altered the social fabric of this coastal state.