It is always exciting to see little bit of India in another part of the world.
Why not, It is normal to see Indian restaurants, the incense sticks, the Indian cosmetics, or Indian motorbikes, the pashmina Shawls, the gems stones, the Indian jewellery etc. I saw myself around the world from flea market, to restaurants, to street shops, to supermarkets.
But sometimes the Indian thing is so much that there is no limit to the happiness. The heart beat raises, the ear releases hot air and the skin has goosebumps. It is the happiness to something of your country abroad. It is the little influence India has everywhere. A little bit of your country or a little bit of you.
This Sharing is Caring is probably very special as it is about India in Lisbon. It is about the changing Lisbon and the influence of Goa. This article is from www.cntraveller.in.
Finding Goa in Europe
Midsummer in Lisbon couldn’t be more picturesque: elegant locals and delighted tourists criss-crossing plazas and parks dappled with the city’s characteristic white light, young families sitting in the sun outside one of the innumerable Moorish-style kiosks that have gone from selling tobacco and newspapers to artisanal limonadas and homemade snacks. It seems like much of the best of what the world has to offer is available at a price that can’t be beaten anywhere else in Europe. The greenest big city on this continent is also statistically the safest, and is quietly transforming into one of its most liveable. Its diverse blend of people from all over the world are enjoying an impressive city-wide renaissance that spills right down to the formerly grimy Tagus riverfront. The latter is now a series of wonderfully conceived esplanades and cycle tracks, boatyards, museums, bars, restaurants and nightclubs. There are even brightly coloured tuk-tuks that do the rounds.
Why not, It is normal to see Indian restaurants, the incense sticks, the Indian cosmetics, or Indian motorbikes, the pashmina Shawls, the gems stones, the Indian jewellery etc. I saw myself around the world from flea market, to restaurants, to street shops, to supermarkets.
But sometimes the Indian thing is so much that there is no limit to the happiness. The heart beat raises, the ear releases hot air and the skin has goosebumps. It is the happiness to something of your country abroad. It is the little influence India has everywhere. A little bit of your country or a little bit of you.
This Sharing is Caring is probably very special as it is about India in Lisbon. It is about the changing Lisbon and the influence of Goa. This article is from www.cntraveller.in.
Finding Goa in Europe
Midsummer in Lisbon couldn’t be more picturesque: elegant locals and delighted tourists criss-crossing plazas and parks dappled with the city’s characteristic white light, young families sitting in the sun outside one of the innumerable Moorish-style kiosks that have gone from selling tobacco and newspapers to artisanal limonadas and homemade snacks. It seems like much of the best of what the world has to offer is available at a price that can’t be beaten anywhere else in Europe. The greenest big city on this continent is also statistically the safest, and is quietly transforming into one of its most liveable. Its diverse blend of people from all over the world are enjoying an impressive city-wide renaissance that spills right down to the formerly grimy Tagus riverfront. The latter is now a series of wonderfully conceived esplanades and cycle tracks, boatyards, museums, bars, restaurants and nightclubs. There are even brightly coloured tuk-tuks that do the rounds.
Just a couple of decades ago, Lisbon had felt uncomfortably stuffy and conservative to me. Even postcard-perfect Alfama (the labyrinthine oldest neighbourhood in the city) was unwelcoming and more than a little seedy. But this was a newly young, unmistakably hipster, entirely different city. So why did I feel so instantly at home, like I belonged here?
The thought nagged me until one particularly glorious afternoon spent adrift in the Brooklynesque neighbourhood of Príncipe Real. Here, I found boutiques selling bespoke shirts, custom-roasted coffee beans and exquisite porcelain all nestled together in a crumbling old theatre. A rooftop lounge, Park, was perched atop a parking lot. Everywhere, acute-angled city streets threw up panoramic views of the city. In another terrace café, called LOSTIn—Esplanada Bar, I found at least half the clientele sporting kurtas and desi cotton shawls, mostly bought from the in-house store that sources entirely from North India. A weathered Rajasthani door faced the back wall, which was painted with a huge mural of Bal Krishna. The menu welcomed me with “Namaste! Sit back, relax and enjoy! Shanti. Shanti.” And it came to me in a flash, that the pinching sense of recognition I had been feeling for days was because this gorgeous, charming city is undeniably the Goa of Europe.
Irony abounds here, because even Goans born long after Nehru’s conquest of the Portuguese Estado da India, in 1961, have often heard the saying “Quem viu Goa excusa de ver Lisboa” (He who has seen Goa need not see Lisbon). It is a boast borne out of the longest colonial episodes in history: Vasco da Gama arrived in India before the Mughals and soon, what is now India’s smallest state became the glittering centrepiece of a maritime empire stretching from Mozambique to Malacca to Manaus. From 1510 on, Portugal’s self-image was inextricably linked with Goa’s grand architecture (including the largest church and convent in Asia) and pioneering institutions (the first public library, medical college and printing press in Asia).
Panjim native chef Jesus of the Jesus é Goês restaurant. Photo: Michel Figuet
Fast-forward to 2014, and it seems the opposite scenario is unfolding. Long-standing ties between Lisbon and Goa have profoundly redoubled and unexpectedly deepened in the post-colonial era. A new, self-confident generation of Goans in Portugal is steadily blazing a historic, unique track record for Indians abroad. The three-term mayor of Lisbon (and quite likely Portugal’s next prime minister) is António Luís dos Santos da Costa, son of ferociously anti-colonial Goan writer Orlando da Costa. The popular secretary of state for culture is Margao-born Jorge Barreto Xavier.
The country’s universally acclaimed contemporary architectural masterpiece is the moody, spectacular part-medical research facility, part-clinic, part-auditorium Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown, located on the Tagus waterfront. It was designed by ace Indian architect, Goa’s very own Charles Correa.
Reading the headlines from afar, the overwhelming impression you get of Portugal is of an economic collapse. But very little of that is visible in Lisbon, which has led Portugal out of a recession, and where the streets are buoyantly crowded with young people enjoying themselves. “A lot of the credit for this city’s success is due to António Costa”, I was told by Rosa Maria Perez, one of Portugal’s foremost scholars on India (and a visiting professor at IIT Gandhinagar). She is an old friend and strong supporter of the charismatic politician who was first elected mayor in 2007. “Nobody can deny that Costa has changed Lisbon in many good ways,” she said.
Sitting in his very grand office in the ornate, neo-classical Sitio de Camara (City Hall), with portraits of his predecessors dating back to the 17th century grandly looking down their noses at us, the mayor charmed me by first asking the appropriate Goan question about which village my family comes from. Then, gesturing emphatically with his hands, he explained his roadmap for Lisbon to weather the ongoing economic storm. “Precisely because we are in a severe crisis, we focused on increasing the visibility of the city,” said Costa, “so we invested in public spaces and culture.” Lisbon has become a major hub for travellers from Brazil and South America, and the regional base for budget airlines such as EasyJet and Ryanair. Simultaneously, the city government dramatically expanded its higher-education programmes to draw thousands of new students from around the world, and is now working to improving the quality of life here to get graduates to stay.
Costa is particularly keen on fostering what he hails as “a new generation of entrepreneurs behind a new generation of tourist products”. So Lisbon actively supports low-risk business ventures, such as those kiosk-turned-cafés and zippy tuk-tuks, as well as flexible, innovative public-private partnerships that continue to renovate old buildings across the city into new cultural spaces. This is an unusually open-minded mayor who even encourages graffiti. I was impressed to see him tour an exhibition by New York-based ‘tagger’, André Saraiva, at the Museu do Design e da Moda (MUDE), without raising an eyebrow at an installation of Mickey Mouse showing off a huge erection.
Like almost everywhere in Lisbon, the new industrial-chic MUDE features a web of connections to Goa and India’s long-shared history with Portugal. Its light-filled galleries occupy the former headquarters of the Banco Nacional Ultramarino (BNU), once the sole official bank for all Portuguese overseas territories. Generations of my—and every other Goan—family deposited their savings and valuables with BNU. That original hoard is the source of one of Portugal’s most-visited museum’s highlights of 2014. ‘Esplendores do Oriente’ (‘Splendours of the Orient’) at the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga is a magnificent display of gold- and gem-encrusted precious jewellery, all shipped to Lisbon from the bank’s vaults in Goa, a few days before Indian troops stormed the Estado da India. While half a ton of these treasures were returned to its rightful owners as per a bilateral treaty signed in 1991, the items that remain unclaimed are showcased in Lisbon.
The intricately worked necklaces, anklets, combs, brooches and pendants displayed at Arte Antiga are three-dimensional examples of the creative dialogue between Eastern and Western tastes and traditions that centred in Goa over 450 years, and continues today. In the exhibition catalogue, Nuno Vassallo e Silva, chief executive of Patrimonio Cultural, the government agency with broad overreach over all cultural institutions, proudly notes these beautiful pieces of jewellery “display unique characteristics in the history of civilisation”, which had “important repercussions” not just for India and Europe, but all of global cultural history.
Vassallo e Silva himself has indelible ties to India. His grandfather, Manuel António Vassalo e Silva (the last Governor-General of Portuguese India) defied orders from dictator Salazar to destroy Goa’s infrastructure and fight to the last man, rather than surrender to Indian troops.
While his grandfather left India in disgrace—only to be rehabilitated after Salazar’s death, when he returned to be honoured in Panjim—Vassalo e Silva is one of the leading scholars of the Estado da India’s art history and retains considerable affection for Goa. “Of course, I am not surprised you feel so comfortable and at home in Lisbon,” he told me, giving me a warm welcome at his office in the former royal residence, the neo-classical Palácio Nacional da Ajuda. “This city was completely shaped by overseas adventures, especially those in India.” He pointed out that every family in Portugal cooks Lusitanian versions of classic Goan curries, and that textiles, furniture and decorative objects from India can be found in almost every household. He helped me understand that Goa and India are not just another example of European multiculturalism; instead, they still lie at the heart of Lisbon and Portugal’s contemporary identity.
Luís Vaz de Camões is Portugal’s most celebrated writer. His writing is often compared to the works of Shakespeare, Dante and Virgil, and he wrote most of his epic masterpiece, Os Lusíadas, in 1572, while in Goa. As I ambled down the gorgeous Gothic carved-stone corridors of Mosteiro dos Jerónimos with Landeg White, who is responsible for translating Camões’s iconic works, White tells me: “If India can embrace Kipling, Camões should pose no problems.” He continues that “it was the experience of being in India that changed him into one of the most original poets of the period.”
Even Jerónimos, where the Portugese royal family lies buried, has indications of how integral India was to the kingdom—starting with the fact that the building was funded by taxes on the pepper trade along the Malabar and Konkan coasts. The entranceway is dominated by massive marble sarcophagi of the twin Portuguese icons—Vasco da Gama and Camões—both of whom made their names in India. And the caskets of the royal family, arrayed behind the altar, are ceremoniously borne by stone elephants with real ivory tusks.
On another evening of impossibly pleasant weather, I met my friend Constantino Xavier—a bright, young Goan-Portuguese academic—and headed into the streets of the trendy Chiado district to have dinner with Barreto Xavier. Here, Hermès and Hugo Boss, as well as some of Portugal’s most beloved traditional shops, were selling delicate porcelain, hand-made gloves and butter cookies. Tucked around the corner are both the Teatro Nacional de São Carlos and the Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea do Chiado.
This district also boasts outstanding restaurants and cafés, marked by five separate concepts from Portugal’s most celebrated chef, José Avillez. He serves Michelin-starred haute cuisine at Belcanto and rather spiffed-up versions of Portuguese home-cooking at the intimate Cantinho do Avillez, which is where we joined the youthful (he showed up in a leather jacket) minister of culture for a superb Asian-inflected meal—tuna wraps with a kimchi emulsion and meatballs in green curry.
Barreto Xavier told me Portugal is now home to the fourth-largest Indian community in Europe, and catalogued the affordable luxury that makes the country a tremendous opportunity for businessmen and travellers from the subcontinent. He seemed perplexed that the vast majority of Indian tourists to Europe bypass Portugal, despite our long and complex shared history, and Lisbon’s world-class offerings. I confess I hadn’t an answer for him. Why would you skip the Goa of Europe?
On one of my last evenings in Lisbon, I ascended to the very highest point in the city, Miradouro da Nossa Senhora do Monte, and spent half an hour contemplating its phenomenal vantage above the 11th-century fort, Castelo de São Jorge and the oldest parts of the city. Suddenly inspired, I did a very Goan thing and took a sunset cruise along the Tagus. On board the curvaceous skiff, Whatever, I headed upriver towards the city centre. High, cloudless skies tapered to amber, the city’s cascading tiled roofs glowed in the setting rays of the sun. The captain gestured towards new promenades built by António Costa, with fishermen lined up just like at the Mandovi riverfront near my home in Goa’s Miramar. He told me how (unlike in Goa) Lisbon’s clean-up has included the river, which has even caused dolphins to return.
Then we turned back towards the unworldly, ethereal Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown. Viewed from the Tagus, as a steely dusk fell over the city, the centre throbbed and shone from within, almost like an extra-terrestrial installation. I realised with a start that Charles Correa’s design incorporates elements of an ancient architectural vocabulary—cut-out windows, stand-alone pillars—directly quoting Indian traditions that have evolved over millennia. Then I looked over to the Torre de Belém, one of the most potent symbols of the Age of Discovery, the time when Europe first came into prolonged contact with India. From that exact spot, caravelas and crusaders had once set off downriver, to sail around Africa, brave the Capes and cross the vast expanse of the Indian Ocean, only to cruise up the river that flows in sight of my balcony back home. The Tagus and the Mandovi, Lisbon and Goa, are twin points on the compass that remain inextricably, irresistibly linked. Perhaps it’s time to say, “Quem viu Lisboa, excusa de ver Goa!” (He who has seen Lisbon need not see Goa.)
GETTING THERE
Fly to Lisbon with Air France (stopover in Paris) or Lufthansa (stopover in Munich) from Mumbai or New Delhi. Indian passport-holders can apply for a Schengen visa through VFS Global. It takes up to 10 working days to process and costs €60 or Rs4,830.
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