November marks the opening of the festive season in Goa. A sense of barely contained excitement hangs in the air, around the time that paddy fields begin to wear a misty blanket in the mornings. It’s a time of muted grace, the quiet before the exuberance of Christmas and the eventual high notes of incoming tourist traffic.
Part one of the season begins with the International Film Festival of India, now in its 55th year. This time around, cinephiles that wear their lanyards with great pride and discuss cinema at Joseph Bar, are rubbing shoulders with the faithful, lugging their bulky suitcases around cordoned paths in Old Goa. They’re here for the decennial exposition of the relics of St Francis Xavier, a 45-day celebration of faith that occurs once every ten years. Last week, time collapsed when over a thousand people formed a human chain to witness the movement of the remains of Goencho Saib – Goa’s patron saint and protector – from the Basilica of Bom Jesus to Se Cathedral.
As the electric carriage bearing the four-century-old casket made its way across the church complex, it carried with it not just the mortal remains of a 16th–century Spanish Jesuit missionary, but the weight of countless personal histories: of answered prayers, of desperate supplications, and of unshakeable faith. The church expects over eight million pilgrims to visit during this exposition, a number that speaks not just to Goan religiosity, but to how deeply intertwined St Francis Xavier is with Goan identity, both sacred and secular.
A community scrapbook
The saint’s story itself reads like a medieval thriller. After his death on Shangchuan Island in 1552, the saint’s body made its way – via Malacca – to Goa in 1624, where the legend of his “incorrupt” body began to draw thousands of devotees. Some of them took their fervour to extremes, including one Portuguese woman who famously bit off his toe, which allegedly bled fresh blood. These stories of passion and preservation have become part of Goa’s collective memory, passed down through generations in souvenirs, artefacts, and treasured photographs of past expositions. These intimate archives of faith and memory come together in Sacred Archives: Memories & Objects, a new exhibition from Goa Familia, an archival project, on view at the Museum of Christian Art.
The exhibition offers a lateral way of experiencing the exposition, through the lens of personal devotion and memory. The items on display are a little like a community scrapbook: cherished souvenirs like glasses and embroidered handkerchiefs from past expositions, stamps and postcards, photographs, and family memorabilia. Little cards and figurines share space with old magazines and newspaper articles. Each of these go back decades.
The objects are less important than the fact that they’ve been carefully preserved and bequeathed – along with faith – among families over generations. When viewed together, the collection paints a fine portrait of Indo-Portuguese cultural fusion, and how Goencho Saib came to embody the cosmopolitan spirit of Goa itself. The exhibition also reveals how sacred relics can become private talismans… and as with every Goa Familia project, how the personal intersects with the historical.
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Migration and transformation
Goa Familia began in 2019 when Rahaab Allana, then photography curator at the Serendipity Arts Foundation, called upon photographer Akshay Mahajan and curator Lina Vincent to set up an archive of photographs from the state. But the curators soon realised that it would be better suited as a research-based project which looks at family archives and oral histories of Goans and Goan diaspora. “Instead of taking a macro approach, we decided to take the micro approach,” Mahajan told me.
“We talk to people, collect their stories, and use their family albums and archives as a kind of excavation of Goan history. We highlight regular people who are usually invisibilised, because only famous individuals get coloured into history.”
The result is a rich repository of personal histories that capture everything from major social transitions to intimate domestic moments. The project puts out open calls for participation, reaching out to families willing to share their photographs and stories. As Mahajan describes it, these interactions often turn into “balcao conversations”, those quintessentially Goan exchanges that linger on the front porches of old homes.
For the first year, Goa Familia had a little bit of an uphill battle to get people to trust them with these memories. But the project has evolved – taking on themes like the significance of the Mandovi river in the life of Panjim, and the annals of Goan music – and the stories and photographs continue to flow. Each year at the Serendipity Arts Festival, these collected memories come together in exhibitions that tell larger stories about identity and belonging, proving that sometimes the most profound narratives of a community are found not in official histories, but in faded photographs and cherished keepsakes.
The project also reveals the complex relationship Goans have with memory itself. Women are the primary “memory keepers”, preserving family albums despite Goa’s unforgiving humidity and holding together the threads of family history. But nostalgia isn’t always warm and sepia-tinted: For some, like the sisters Mahajan interviewed, old photographs are too painful to look at. For others, like the 90-year-old jazz musician who witnessed his story documented before his passing, the exhibitions offer a chance to be “seen”. These contrasting responses to memory offer an understanding of how people process change and hold onto identity.
Migration and transformation are recurring themes in the archive, given Goa’s maritime history and the deep connection to ancestral land shared by most Goans. But these often go beyond the usual narratives of loss and displacement. These physical journeys were often bundled with complex emotional maths – of leaving and returning, of holding on, and letting go. Mahajan recalled interviewing a family from Saligao that moved to East Africa and was later expelled by then-president of Uganda Idi Amin, before returning to become “a different kind of Saligaocar.” Migration emerges not as a straight line from here to there, but as a continuous dialogue between the past and present.
This year’s Goa Familia exhibition at the Serendipity Arts Festival, of which Sacred Relics is a part, looks toward potential Goan futures that, in a few years, will soon become archives. It is a fitting evolution for a project that began by excavating the past. After all, what are archives if not repositories of possibility? As Goa wrestles with questions of identity and development, these personal histories remind us that change has always been constant. And that the future, like memory itself, is something we actively shape through the stories we choose to preserve and pass on.
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 Aamaan Alam Khan)