Heritage, Humour and Regional Identity in Goa

Since the 1980s, pictures by the late Goan cartoonist Mario Miranda have been used to adorn and confer ‘local’ flavour on a variety of public settings in Goa. Today, Miranda’s work is a familiar sight to travelers in Goa. While some of the pictures selected for display – including by the government in spaces that it controls – are historically and regionally evocative illustrations, others are cartoons, that is, metaphorical and funny drawings. Beginning in the 2000s, these illustrations and cartoons were also adapted to regional circuits of souvenirs and memorabilia, giving vision and voice to an essential ‘Goanness’.

In this episode Kenneth Bo Nielsen is joined by Prakruti Ramesh to discuss her work on the emergence of a public aesthetic in Goa, perhaps India’s best known tourist destination. Drawing on her doctoral research, Ramesh discusses the factors that prompted the diffusion and acceptability of this aesthetic, and the political, economic and social conditions in Goa’s history that prepared the grounds for these pictures to emerge as significant. Through this, she offers fascinating insights into the politics of memory and representation in the fashioning of subnational Goan identity.

Dr. Prakruti Ramesh recently defended her PhD thesis entitled Making a Public Aesthetic: Heritage, Humour and Regional Identity in Goa at the Department of Global Studies at Århus University in Denmark.

The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo.

We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.

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