Water cartographies of Goa: Khazans, sedimentation and dissolution of coastal cultural landscapes

Abstract

Goa's landscape is an encounter between dry and wet materialities, the Indian Ocean world and the Western Ghats of Konkan, the distant and the localized, open seas and deep currents and floodplains, estuaries and muddy soils. Reordered in geometric geographies, these curvilineous cultivated lowlands, named khazans, surrounded by villages, temples and churches are part of the landscape and crucial sensorial layers of this Indian state. Village neighbourhoods (named waddi in Konkani) are organized not around a solid centre, but along several interconnected paddy fields, creating particular territorial maps of each village. Can our perception change, thus, if we see the Goan territory having water as its defining element, instead of a land-based perspective, and consider these lands as cultural landscapes? The aesthetic and heritage dimensions of cultural landscapes are essential to perceive Goa as a place of simultaneous dissolution and sedimentation along time and cultural geographies. Based on recent research on Goa and the Indian Ocean, this text proposes khazans to be recognized both as natural elements and cultural signifiers and as the main cartographic layers of inclusive Goan cultural landscapes.