Prutha Goa

The Museum of Christian Art is a pleasure to anyone interested in museums, artefacts and all things to do with history and culture. Located at the world heritage site which boasts of the ruins of St Augustine’s Church, the museum is housed in part of the Convent of St Monica. It is a project of the Archdiocese of Goa, Daman and Diu and was initially funded by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH). The museum is not vast in its collection, with two floors (the ground floor is 350 square metres and the upper floor is 150 square metres) devoted to artefacts, but the items are intriguing and must be given careful study to understand their true value. The antiquities have more to do with Christianity as a religion and its observances rather than being strictly Indo-Portuguese objects of art. There are ornate priestly garments and Bibles, as well as vessels used during Holy Mass, aside from statues, paintings. Indeed, the Chur

Goa Cruti is a new addition to Victor Hugo Gomes’ increasing number of museums showcasing Goa’s history. Earlier there was Goa Chakra, highlighting the wheel and its significance in Goan culture and history. The future looks to another museum in Betul celebrating boats and the fishing community of Goa. Victor has long been driven by his passion to salvage Goan heritage and relics of the past. He believes this is essential to create and develop a sense of responsibility among the Goan youth and to whet their thirst for knowledge of the past. Goa Cruti Museum is a totally different concept from his previous endeavours and focuses entirely on the different professions of Goa’s colonial past. ‘Cruti’ means ‘work’ and some of the areas covered are medicine and law. There is ornamental furniture, exquisite crockery, bottles, priests’ vestments, musical instruments, guns and other weapons, cameras and so on. Why are the professions of medicine and law of consequence? The reason is that they w

He talks of a ‘madness’ that has driven him for years to salvage the cultural history of this verdant land called Goa. Its versatile heritage has been curated by Victor Hugo Gomes with painstaking perseverance and attention to detail. With his degrees in art and conservation, Victor has moved from village to village documenting trades that have disappeared or are slowly vanishing and has been curating a vast storehouse of Goa’s past in various symbols of her culture. It all began with excursions into forbidden areas. Always a curious child with a questioning mind, Victor would explore attics, storerooms and even the dark rooms used to punish him for misbehaviour, to find strange and intriguing items of interest like different types of clay pots, baskets, tools, old altars and wooden chests filled with clothes belonging to a bygone era. This childhood fascination for gleaning commonplace items, which have shaped Goa’s cultural history, and a questioning mind, nurtured by his grandmother