Last week, a snippet in a financial paper reported that a global auction house has listed a six-bedroom villa in Moira for over Rs 105 crore. That number makes jaws drop even in Delhi and Mumbai, where 50-crore apartments are sold out even before they hit the market. But in a state like Goa, despite the unbelievable escalation in land prices, it beggars belief. I’ve tossed that number around in my head a few times, but I still cannot grapple with it.
The article compared Goa to the Cotswolds with its “winding rivers and grand homes with balcaos built for conversation, not content”. It noted that the auction house is courting “global buyers who prefer their wealth low-key and their neighbours uncurious”. It eventually attributed the price to Moira—and neighbouring Aldona’s—wealthiest residents that include pharma baron Hari Bhartia, actor Kalki Koechlin, and designers like Abu Jani and Sandeep Khosla.
Not every house in the Moira-Aldona belt is worth Rs 105 crores, but the steady thrum of gentrification has been pushing inland for a few years. Land prices haven’t quite reached coastal levels, but they are poised to get there. If the pandemic brought in an influx of settlers to the coast-adjacent Assagao and Siolim, Moira with its proximity to Panaji and easy access to the highway, was always going to be next.
Santosh Desai, author and columnist, who also owns a house in Moira, has a theory about the Rs 105 crore price tag. “The price and object have no relationship with each other,” he told me. “All that it signifies is that you have 105 crore.” At a certain level of wealth, Desai said, what you aspire to is your blood turning blue. “Royalty is the ultimate fantasy, but the tag eventually has no meaning or connection with reality.”
When Desai moved to Moira in 2020, many taxi drivers didn’t quite know where the village was. Assagao had already become the headquarters of expat north Goa, cast as “GK III” and overrun with restaurants. Moira was still sleepy and green. A self-created image accompanied it. Desai said that the Moira-Aldona settlers viewed themselves as a little more conscious, a little more respectful of the local environment. “Moira shuns the overly materialistic energy that Assagao has come to represent,” he said. “But the ultimate paradox is that even if this haven ever existed, it begins to disappear the moment you talk about it.”
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An idealised village
These villages—Moira, Aldona, and the smaller ones like Ucassaim, Nachinola, and Olaulim that flank them—were long considered the territory of writers and artists seeking what Goa once promised. Slowness, quiet, anonymity, and seclusion denied by the city. Novelist Amitav Ghosh was considered Aldona’s most famous literary resident, along with Padma Shri winner Maria Aurora Couto.
In Goa: A Daughter’s Story, Couto recounts her life in the ward Carona, Aldona with intense fondness and pride. “For the Goan, his corner of the village is the centre of the world… The old houses are built at a level high enough to escape being flooded out in the rains but low enough to yield water. Each house has its own well, one side of which opens into the house from a strategically placed window.” Each house looked after their patch of green. “Another feature of Goan villages which never ceases to amaze the visitor is that every house, no matter how modest, has its own little orchard, a patch of vibrant colour: the flaming orange and yellow of abolim bushes, the ubiquitous, sun loving abundance of bougainvillea, a palm or two, mango, jackfruit and cashew trees…”
That vision of Moira and Aldona seems almost antiquated now. It exists only in fragments, but you catch glimpses of it between the uniform grey of under-construction villa projects bearing adequately foreign names like Quinta D’Oliveira and Chiado De Moira. The limbs of gentrification are visible in the mushrooming of modish cafes and restaurants, cultural spaces like Arthshila, and private, members-only clubs like Solene. The last has come up in a restored house from the 1910s, about which, The Hindu grudgingly admits, “Private clubs can sometimes feel like impenetrable bastions for the well-heeled to mingle. Most offer exclusive spaces where one can relax with like-minded people.”
Insia Lacewalla, writer and founder, WE, a social members’ club for women in Goa, who moderates panel discussions at Solene, sees these spaces as the natural evolution of Goa’s “comunidade”, a centre where people can come together, showcase their work, and exchange ideas. The panels she hosts draw people who’ve been in the state for several years, the 35-plus crowd with established businesses. “Goa has allowed them to do that,” she tells me. “It’s kind of an experimental ground.” Private clubs, in her view, aren’t closed-door systems but opportunities for networking.
But Lacewalla is clear-eyed about what’s happening on the ground. “The problem is, there is no integration,” she says. “People build such high walls that you no longer have any connection with your neighbour.” There’s a severe water shortage, partly due to the private plunge pools in the villa projects. Waste management is a crisis that Goa wasn’t prepared for. In Moira and Nachinola, Lacewalla told me, some residents have started composting, which is something. But these are state government problems, she points out. “All the money that’s coming into the state, where is it going?”
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The first wave of gentrification
For settlers who arrived before the latest wave, watching the transformation unfold has been disorienting. Novelist and professor Rupleena Bose moved to Aldona around 2015, “a choice to fall off the map”. Back then, Aldona offered a model for non-city living and she and her partner didn’t even think about amenities. “You were making your way into a community. What Aldona had, and still has is immense beauty,” she told me. “The image in front of your eyes, the kindness of people, how everyone gathered to help. It felt a little like living on another planet.”
Bose said that the changes over the last few years have been stark. “People used to be much more reconciled to the everyday economy, not in a vegan-yoga way,” she said. “But suddenly, Goa is a rich person’s place.” She remembers a time when the children in her community could play on the roads with abandon. But scooters have given way to huge SUVs and speeding is a persistent problem. Waterlogging is now a feature of the monsoon, signalling the lopsided logic of development.
Still, this is neither the first wave of gentrification that Moira-Aldona has seen, nor will it be the last. Solano Da Silva, educator and author of The Great Goa Land Grab, traces the shift back several years. Bardez villages like Moira, Saligao, Socorro, and Aldona, were historically dominated by upper-caste Christians, the old bhatcars (landowners), who enjoyed both cultural privilege and a sophisticated western outlook. Alliances existed between these families, a tight tapestry of old money and older names.
That changed with what Da Silva calls the arrival of the “new bhatcars”, or settlers from other places who brought their own sets of exclusionary practices to the mix. He draws a parallel with Arun Saldanha’s Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race, which examined how the hippie movement found its grounding in Goa in the 1970s. It was premised on universal brotherhood and the flattening of all distinction. But when the hippies actually landed, a different dynamic emerged. The local Goan was tolerated, considered a service provider, but never truly part of “us”.
“I was intrigued with the new forms of exclusion emerging in these settlements, which have outpriced locals from these villages,” Da Silva told me. The properties have simply changed hands between the old and the new elite. He is blunt about this: “The old elite who held feudal and cultural capital, were able to have these fabulous Goan-Portuguese houses. They now bemoan the new settlers and their ‘crass’ behaviour, which is unlike the genteel ways of older elite Goans, but they are the ones who have made a killing.” The result is a state where, according to the 2011 census, a quarter of the homes are unoccupied.
Shedding the outsider tag
But for the settlers themselves, there’s a different preoccupation: The underlying anxiety about being “outsiders” and the desire to escape the “Delhi expat” label. Desai said the attempt is doomed from the start. “I can understand the local resentment,” he said. “And any attempt by outsiders to pretend that they are not outsiders is doomed. Goa is not a metropolis and to impose that sensibility is impossible.”
A recent micro-controversy crystallised this absurdity perfectly. A few months ago, a young filmmaker from Aldona put out a crowdfunding appeal to finance a film about how she still felt like an outsider, even though she considers herself Goan. The appeal was well-meaning and earnest. It was also tone-deaf. The filmmaker was roundly criticised for her troubles. Writer Kaustubh Naik responded with a piece titled “How to belong in Goa” that cut to the heart of it: “Why is this urge to belong such an obsession for the new settlers in Goa? These are people who have come here with comfort, capital, and options. They have gentrified small villages to a point where even Goans now feel they do not belong… The scale of real estate development is unimaginable. Moreover, these homes are neither built for the local Goans nor can they afford them.”
The pluckiness of crowdfunding your feelings of exclusion, while living in one of India’s most expensive postcodes is admirable. But it reveals something essential about how every wave of settlers has tried to distinguish itself from the previous one as less boorish, more authentic, and more attuned to the “real Goa”. The problem is, we all want to escape to the same place. And what happens when everyone arrives? A Rs 105 crore villa.
This article is part of the Goa Life series, which explores the new and the old of Goan culture.
Karanjeet Kaur is a journalist, former editor of Arré, and a partner at TWO Design. She tweets @Kaju_Katri. Views are personal.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)