NLS Faculty Seminar | The Foral of 1526 and the Politics of Land in Goa

We begin the new term with a faculty presentation by guest speaker Dr. Rochelle Pinto from Azim Premji University.

Abstract 

This essay revisits the historiography around the Foral of 1526, the initial document that embedded the Portuguese colonial state within the gāuṇkārī, a form of agrarian landholding in Goa. In the centuries that followed, complaints about revenue arrangements concerning the gāuṇkārī held the state accountable to the terms of the Foral as a pact that had been violated. These complaints appeared frequently enough to be an impetus to reread the document. The essay suggests that while these invocations of the Foral may have disingenuously over-read its pact with the gāuṇkārs, the issuing of the document implied a political relation between the monarch and the gāuṇkārs that tends to be elided in economic histories. Rereading the Foral against both, other kinds of sixteenth-century documents issued by the state in Goa, and against prior forais, helps revisit the political connotations and structures that the document may have introduced to its codification of the claims of the gāuṇkārī.

About the Speaker

Rochelle Pinto teaches English at Azim Premji University, Bangalore. Her interests include nineteenth century land disputes, and the relation between ethnography and the colonial novel. Her two books are Between Empires – print and politics in Goa (OUP, 2007) and Translation, Script and Orality – becoming a language of state (Orient BlackSwan, 2021). She was research fellow at the L’Institut d’Études Avancées, Nantes, 2019-20, the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi, 2015-2017, and CSDS, Delhi, 2014-2015. She taught English at Delhi University, and at CSCS, Bangalore, where she co-directed a project, ‘Archive and Access’, between 2009-2011.