Saligao Serenade

by Fr. Nascimento Mascarenhas

Many Christians dream of making a pilgrimage to the Holy Land someday. For some the dream actually becomes a reality. My school companion and friend Salvador Isidoro Mascarenhas from Mollebhatt, counts himself among those fortunate ones, when, about a year ago in April 2009, he, along with another couple from Saligao (Epifanio and Perpetua Fernandes from Tabravaddo/Bairro Alto) and twenty other Goans flew to Israel for a pilgrimage tour of the Holy Land.        

A few days before the pilgrimage, Salvador paid me a visit at the Holy Spirit Church in Margao. During the conversation I reminded him that Marie Dantas and her husband from Saligao/UK had placed a marble plaque, with the Our Father inscribed on it Konkani, in the Church of the Pater Noster (also called Church of Eleona – Mount of Olives, in Greek),  which Queen Helena, mother of the Roman Emperor Constantine, built in the fourth century. Read the rest of this entry »

by Fr. Nascimento Mascarenhas

Prior to the Portuguese conquest of Goa in 1510, Goan villages had schools that were known as patshalas.  According to George Moraes, “There was no village but had a school, be it in the shade of a grove or in the porch of the temple where the children were taught the three R’s.” The teachers were known as Sinai or Xenney or Shenvi Mama. (In Saligao we had Sinai Salgaokars – remember Xinn-vaddo in Mudd’davaddi). The Sinais would teach in the entrance hall of the temples, big residential houses and even verandahs of comunidade houses. The medium of instruction was Konkani, the native language of Goans, and it was written in the Alkannadi script. Marathi was used in Goa only in the late fifteenth century when the Sultan of Bijapur ruled Goa. The Sultan even recognized Konkani as the official language of the territory [Coutinho 1987 : 153].  Besides the patshalas, there were agraharas, matas, brahmapuris and gurukalas – institutions located in the principal centres where education of an advanced type was disseminated in all branches of knowledge and finally completed at Vidyashalas. Read the rest of this entry »