India's smallest state spent roughly 451 years as a Portuguese capital
Goa is India's smallest state by area, a strip of coast between the Western Ghats and the Arabian Sea. For about four and a half centuries it was ruled from Lisbon, serving as the capital of Portugal's eastern empire until India took it in December 1961. Churches, ruined convents and Portuguese-style towns still mark the landscape.
People lived here long before any empire. Rock engravings of animals and designs cut into laterite and granite at Usgalimal and Kajur are among the earliest traces of human life in India, and tools and petroglyphs roughly 10,000 years old have turned up across the state; UNESCO has placed the engravings on its tentative list. Ancient texts gave the area names such as Gomantak and Govapuri, and nobody is certain where the word Goa comes from.
A parade of rulers followed. In the 3rd century BC it lay within Ashoka's Maurya Empire, when Buddhist monks arrived. Later came the Bhojas, the Chalukyas of Badami, the Rashtrakutas and the Kadambas, who favoured Jainism, then the Delhi Sultanate in 1312, the Vijayanagara Empire and finally the Sultanate of Bijapur.
In 1510 Afonso de Albuquerque captured the city with help from a local privateer, Timoji, and made it capital of the Portuguese State of India. Old Goa grew into one of Asia's great cities in the 16th century, only to be abandoned in the 19th after epidemics; in 1843 the capital moved to Panaji. Portuguese control was not unchallenged. In 1787 a noble Catholic family protesting racial discrimination in government and the church launched the Pinto Revolt, and one relative who escaped, Abbé Faria, later joined the French Revolution.
The legacy is a distinctive place. Konkani is the official language, Panaji the capital and Vasco da Gama the largest city. Goa has India's second-highest GDP per capita, more than double the national average, ranks first among states on the Human Development Index, and a national population commission once rated its quality of life the country's best. Tourism and the biodiversity of the nearby Ghats underpin its economy.
Source: Goa
