Goa:
A Journey
Through Crafts

What counts as a craft here

A skill that shapes material by hand, transmitted within a community or a workshop rather than through a syllabus, and still practised by someone in Goa today. That definition lets in quarry carving and gold-foil beating, and keeps out revived hobby practice with no inherited line.

Where the entries come from

Three layers. The GI Registry's state list, which is authoritative but narrow. State ODOP, handloom and handicraft cluster records, which are broader but commercial in framing. And published documentation — craft council surveys, museum and university records, and reporting on individual clusters.

What this document cannot yet claim

It has no artisan headcount. Loom censuses, cluster registers and co-operative rolls disagree with each other and with the ground, and publishing a wrong number is worse than publishing none. It has no verified list of living practitioners — that is Volume II.

The known gaps

Goa is small enough that this volume aims at completeness, and honest enough to say where it falls short. Nine entries carry a field-check flag: in every case the question is whether anyone in the state still makes the object, or whether it is now bought in finished from Karnataka. The household crafts — crochet, coir, mats, star lanterns, fish traps — are certainly undercounted, because they are made by women, made at home, and made for use rather than sale.

Significant crafts with no protection

These are practised, documented and commercially significant, and hold no geographical indication of their own.

The raw material squeeze

Gold, silver, coloured stone, natural indigo and good quarry stone have all risen faster than the price a finished object commands. When a printer switches from madder to a synthetic, the craft has not been abandoned — it has been priced out of its own specification.

The margin the maker never sees

Between the cluster and the shelf sit anywhere from one to four intermediaries. In a tourist economy a fifth appears: the shop that pays a commission to whoever brought the customer through the door.

What actually shortens the chain

Direct selling at fairs. Producer companies that hold their own stock. Authorised-user registers under a GI. Workshop visits and craft tourism at the cluster itself. None of these is a subsidy; all of them are structure.

A coarse cotton check in red and white, with a dobby border in white silk, worn knotted over one shoulder with no blouse and no pleats. It is the only garment in this volume that is indigenously and unambiguously Goan, and the one craft here that has already finished the journey the others are on.

It was woven on pit and frame looms at Paliem, Bastora and Candolim for the Kunbi and Gawda cultivating communities. Between the 1930s and the 1950s three families held the trade: the Shettigars of Candolim, the Rasquinhas of Bastora and the Kamats. Loom accessories came over the ghat from Belgaum, Gadag and Hubli.

After 1961 the dyes became difficult and expensive to import; in the 1970s powerloom units in the surrounding villages finished it. Wendell Rodricks reconstructed the drape and the palette from the early 2000s and put it back on a national stage. But the cloth now sold as Kunbi is woven in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. The design came back. The loom did not.

Kaavi is not painting. Nothing is applied in colour: the red is the ground, and the design is what is cut away to let the white beneath show through. That is sgraffito, and in the Konkan it was chosen for a practical reason — a painted mural does not survive a monsoon, and an incised lime one does.

The technique is thought to be four to six centuries old, probably brought by Saraswat families migrating down the coast. It is worked on temple walls inside and out, and also on churches, mosques, Jain basadis, shrines and the fronts of substantial houses — one of the very few things in Goa that crossed the religious divide without changing.

By the end of the twentieth century it had no living practitioners. Not a declining number: none. The technique survived only in the walls themselves, which is why the revival had to begin with a survey rather than with an apprenticeship.

Before glass was affordable, the Goan house was lit through oyster. Thin translucent panes cut from the windowpane oyster, Placuna placenta, were set into a wooden lattice to make a window that admitted light and refused heat and glare — exactly what a house on this coast needs.

They survive in the Latin quarters: Fontainhas in Panaji, the old houses of Chandor and Loutolim. What does not survive is the material. Sedimentation, changed coastal ecology and heavy barge traffic have destroyed the local oyster beds, and collection is now unsustainable where it is not illegal.

So a broken pane is replaced with glass, or plywood, and each replacement is permanent. The skill of cutting and setting nacre into batten is held by a dwindling number of craftsmen — but the skill is not the binding constraint. The shell is.

Chitarop is Konkani for 'to draw'. The Chitari families of one ward of one village in South Goa are what is left of a trade that once put a painted object into every Goan house — a cradle, a toy, a mirror frame, the throne the Ganesh idol is installed in.

The method is lacquer, gum (dink) and ground pigment laid on turned or carved wood. Colour goes down in flat bold fields, the drawing goes over it, and the family signature is a plank of hand-painted parrots on a raised ground.

It survived the Inquisition, which suppressed the imagery without stopping the trade. It has not survived plastic as well. Two sentences from the workshop state the position better than any statistic: the children don't want to learn, and people don't want to buy. The last state award to a Chitari artist was the Shilpi Kendra, in 1965, to Pundlik Govind Chitari and Balu Sakharam Chitari.

Perni Jagor is a night-long masked theatre performed by the Perni community across Ponda, Sanguem, Quepem and Canacona. The masks are called rupdi. They are kept in a cane basket, a peth, and handed down.

Most of the surviving masks are over a hundred years old and fragile, for a reason that is itself a craft fact: the Chari carvers who made them no longer make them. That branch of the woodcarving tradition has ended, so the masks in use are the masks that exist.

In 1999 the Jagor was performed at sixty-eight places across five talukas. In 2023 it was performed at fourteen, by three families in the whole of Goa. The troupe at Poinguinim still does about twenty-five Jagors a year; Molcornem is the other surviving centre; Vaghurme is named as the village the tradition came from.

What this comparison does and does not show

Not that Goa makes less. Gujarat and Rajasthan are large states with old, organised craft economies and decades of institutional support behind their filings; Goa is the smallest state in India and its craft trades are correspondingly small. What the bar does show is that the gap is total rather than proportional — not fewer, but none — and that it is a gap in organisation, not in skill.

The honest conclusion is not that Goa should hurry to file. It is that the three crafts with a defensible case — Kaavi, Chitari painted wood and the Kunbi weave — first need producer bodies that do not currently exist, and that forming them is the slower and far less visible half of the work.

Cover and openers

5 region openers need one horizontal hero each: a working hand, not a finished object. Shoot at the printing table, the lathe, the kiln, the pit loom, the quarry face.

Every craft card

One object frame, square, plain mid-grey ground, single soft key light from the left, no props. Consistency across forty-three objects matters more than beauty in any one.

Process sequences

Four to seven frames each for Kaavi incision, Chitari lacquer laying, brass casting at Sanquelim and a hodi hull going together at Cutbona. These four sequences are the volume's highest photographic priority.

Detail macros

The cut edge of a Kaavi line where the white ground shows through; the lathe tiers on a samai; nacre against the light in a Fontainhas window; the braid of a hodi's coir caulking.

The people

Portraits at the workplace, environmental, eye level. Name, age, years at the craft and consent recorded for every single frame — no exceptions, including for children in shot.

The places

Mapusa and Margao on market day, the Demani ward at Cuncolim, the Cutbona jetty before dawn, a Morjim chitrashala in July, and the Mangueshi lamp tower lit.