Velha Goa

It sounds like a guidebook and it looks like one too. But the text of this snappily packaged pocketbook betrays its lineage: Marg Publications, a venerable house of coffee-table tomes on art history. Which is not necessarily a bad thing. In and around Old Goa contains a selection of pieces, mostly by Heta Pandit with five contributions by other writers. They range from the general (a detailed tour of See Cathederal; a potted history of the career of St Francis Xavier and his corpse) to the very particular (an account of the search for the relics of Ketevan, a 17th-century Georgian queen, martyred in Persia). It is a slightly motley volume with little consistency of style and approach. The obscure poetic fragments heading each chapter and no less than three pictures of Pandit hardly amount to an editorial stamp. The book seems to be torn between academic and popular aspirations. The extensive ‘Further Reading’ section is a puzzle—it includes journal and newspaper articles, several books in Portuguese and entire volumes of Subaltern Studies. Why? But the photographs by Tushar Rao are consistently pleasing. If you want a good-looking, bookish companion rather than a chatty guide for your Velha Goa tour, you should have no complaints.