A green revolution in Goa

“I think of Goa as a beautiful woman draped in a green sari,” said Debbie, my guide to Goa’s hinterland, when I was writing a travel book on Mumbai and Goa, and gathering information for my novel. But that was 17 years ago and much has changed in Goa since. As a frequent visitor (and sometime resident) since childhood, I have seen the Goan landscape changing. According to a recent report, the State has lost 90 square kilometres of tree cover in the past decade. Plastic pollution, irresponsible tourism, development at the cost of the environment, mining, rampant construction fuelled by a rising population of urban refugees, have all contributed to the ecological crisis that the beautiful State faces today.

Goa attracts people for various reasons. For creative folk, its natural beauty serves as an inspiration and refuge, with its liberal, progressive-minded milieu fostering artistic growth. This has led to the State hosting a thriving community of artists from inside and outside Goa. Meanwhile, with the climate crisis becoming a reality, the dominant colour in art around the world is green. In Goa, too, the voices of protest are steadily rising.

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On Panjim’s shoreline along the river Mandovi, lights from casinos shine brighter than the stars in the night sky. On beaches like Morjim, volunteers and forest guards struggle to keep tourists at bay as they lead Olive Ridley hatchlings into the sea with artificial light which mimics the horizon’s natural glow now lost to the glare of beach shacks. Meanwhile, the ocean, rivers and lakes heave with trash, reflecting a nation afflicted by a deeper social malaise. In the midst of all this gloom, the forests of Mollem still stand triumphant, thanks to a people’s movement that has been protesting against their proposed destruction in the name of development.

Aamche Mollem

The ongoing campaign Aamche Mollem (My Mollem), bringing together environmentalists, students, teachers, farmers, fisherfolk, scientists, hoteliers, artists, and people from all walks of life, is famous for resisting a proposal for constructing a railway line, a transmission line, and a highway inside the forest that was announced conveniently at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Their efforts resulted in the Supreme Court appointing a Centrally Empowered Committee to scrutinise the projects, annulling one and modifying the other two.

Mandalas for Mhadei—found Objects, Miramar Beach, Goa. | Photo Credit: Mili Mukherjee

The travelling exhibition Kaghazi Pairahan (Clothes made of Paper, from March 22 to June 1) at the newly opened Arthshila Goa is a tribute to such protest movements. Exhibits include photobooks, zines, unpublished dummies and pamphlets, audio recordings and film footage that have played a role in shaping social and political dissent across South Asia. The materials used by Aamche Mollem, wherein artists from various disciplines got together to engage with the people and mobilise support through art, film, music, poetry, puppetry and campaign literature, form a part of the show.

“Art can ignite local citizenship. In this case, it became the entry point for dialogue,” said artist Svabhu Kohli, who played a prominent role in the campaign and whose practice is inspired by the natural world. Along with Trisha Dias Sabir, Nishant Saldanha and Deepti Sharma—key figures of the campaign—Kohli was awarded the Serendipity Arts Festival Public Art Grant 2022 for the installation, The Island that Never Gets Flooded.

Some of the protest literature is enshrined in an interactive installation at Arthshila that includes a zine library and community table: the centrepiece is a map of the forest that traces the projects, inviting people to participate with their memories of the affected regions. It also showcases samples of communication, like postcards with illustrations of various forest species, that were distributed among people to write on and send to political leaders. The installation was launched with readings and activities themed on citizenship.

Meanwhile, towards the end of the pandemic, the mangroves along the Panjim-Bambolim highway mysteriously took ill. The phenomenon, caused by the dumping of debris, led to the birth of the Earthivist Collective. Comprising artists, musicians, filmmakers, photographers, performers, scientists, journalists, academicians, and environmentalists, the collective proclaims that it “use[s] art to draw attention, provoke emotion, drive action, and galvanise social change”.

Mhadei Aamchi Mai 

The seeds of this were sown by Mangrave, an interactive public art project created alongside the dying mangroves by artist, curator, gallerist and the collective’s founding member, Miriam Koshy. Entry was through a chakravyuh or spiral made of bamboo, leading to a machan (platform) from where visitors could view the destruction around them. This was accompanied by swamp poetry, Baul music, and other performances.

The Mangrave project. | Photo Credit: Miriam Koshy

Its success paved the way for the festival Mhadei Aamchi Mai (The Mhadei is Our Mother/MAM), held in collaboration with the Goa Heritage Action Group led by author and heritage activist Heta Pandit, and with Save Mhadei Save Goa Front. It was a response to the ongoing dispute between Goa and Karnataka over the diversion of the waters of the Mhadei to Karnataka. If actualised, the diversion would unleash vast ecological destruction in Goa.

The ecological carnage in a State in whose culture nature is revered and conservation is deeply entrenched is ironic. Goa’s devrais or sacred groves, belief in rakhondars or guardian spirits, and practices like the khazan system have existed for millennia. The latter, simply put, is a sustainable farming system balancing fresh and saline water that dates back over 3,000 years; considered to be one of the solutions to climate change, khazans—known for their biodiversity—would be severely impacted by the diversion of the Mhadei waters, creating a domino effect.

Held at the riverfront in Miramar in May 2023, the festival was a smorgasbord of performances, art installations, plant walks, sketchwalks, poetry, etc. It kicked off with Hema Sardesai’s song “Mhadei Aamchi Mai”, featured jazz by Italian musician Matteo Fraboni, and poetry readings. An art exhibit with clay from the riverbank, and a Bharatnatyam performance by dancers wearing plastic ghungroos highlighted the problem of plastic pollution and the need for conservation. It ended with a prayer exhorting Goans to be the river’s rakhondars.

“MAM was a gathering to celebrate and honour the river. We realised that it needed to evoke community and be on a bigger scale to have more impact,” said Koshy. Thousands turned up in response to the call for a 7 kilometre-long human chain; it included luminaries like environmentalist and Mhadei activist Dr Rajendra Kerkar, and Goa’s most prominent writer, Damodar Mauzo. Coinciding with the Assembly election in Karnataka, the celebration garnered tremendous attention.

“Nhoi: The Goa River Draw”

Bookworm Trust and Library’s ongoing community project, “Nhoi: The Goa River Draw”, has been documenting the Mhadei from 2018 through drawings and personal histories of riverside communities. The Nhoi river drawings were the result of workshops held over a period of nine months, across 13 libraries along the river.

Bebeanchem Kaxar (Wedding of the Frogs) by Dr. Manoharrai Sardessai, illustrated by Shilpa Mayenkar. Bebeanchem Kaxar was published by Bookworm in 2011 but the illustration and the poem from the book were used as a cover image for the worksheet folders of each group in the Nhoi River Draw workshops as the poem is in Konkani and is set along the river Mandovi. | Photo Credit: Bookworm

The project retrieved forgotten river words in Konkani and documented story artefacts, among other things, and its community art panels resulted in an exhibition. A part of MAM and featured in the digital archive, Goa Water Stories, the project is moving forward through collaboration with other libraries, by documenting the riparian flora of their villages, and generational and scientific knowledge through artworks, handmade art herbariums, and zines. The aim is to compile a publication that can go back to these libraries.

Goa Water Stories

In the newly launched digital archive, Goa Water Stories, 18 young Goans use art as a medium to map and document the State’s waterbodies. Curated by filmmaker Wency Mendes and supported by the Living Waters Museum, Sunaparanta Goa Centre for the Arts, and institutions attached to Goa University and the Goa Institute of Management, this community art project has watercolours with pigments sourced from rocks and soil of the khazans, oral histories, family recipes, village folklore, sustainability practices, and more.

Public wall art engagement with the soil of Goa as part of Expressing Ecology II (research as display), an interdisciplinary interaction. | Photo Credit: Goa Water Stories/ Wency Mendes

The latest in Goa’s artistic engagement with community, with ecology at its heart, the ambitious multimedia project comprising interactive “story-projects” covers the gamut of Goa’s waterbodies, from its famous beaches to its lakes, rivers, khazans, wells, salt pans and groundwater sources. These are documented in the form of illustrations, photographs, cyanotypes, field recordings, interactive maps, film and text, all meta data-tagged and geo-tagged, with options for translation. The project is vast in scope, presenting, among other things, the challenges for Goa’s mangroves, wells, traditional oystershell windowpanes, and exploring its tricky relationship with tourism, starting with the hippie legacy.

“The beautiful aspect of Goa Water Stories is its transdisciplinary nature and the collaborative work by these young people of Goa who came together in various ways to engage and interact with each other and narrate these stories. This meant regular field visits, leaving at 4 in the morning, returning late in the evening, coming back covered in leeches. More importantly, it was about sharing positive energy with one another,” said Mendes.

Sensible Earth

When entrepreneur Sanjiv Khandelwal set out on a bike trip across Africa hoping for self-discovery, the last thing he expected to find was a plastic gutkha packet. It was a moment of realisation. “I decided to stop complaining and do something,” said the founder of Sensible Earth, a collectively driven organisation that promotes a range of sustainable practices in Goa. It is best known, perhaps, for its upcycling initiative, the Maka Naka Plastic campaign, seeking a plastic-free Goa, with a focus on single-use plastic bags. For this, old clothes are repurposed into cloth bags by 66 local women who have made over 150,000 bags so far, preventing the use of approximately 35,00,000 plastic bags, and 140,000 garments from going to landfills. The organisation also works extensively with schools across Goa, educating them about plastic through various activities.

“The most joyous part has been working with 5,500 children. Adults are often unmoved but kids are enthusiastic. They really get it,” said Khandelwal.

Community gatherings at the Sensible Earth Centre, housed in a traditional Indo-Portuguese Goan home, see a range of activities promoting sustainability, like workshops on Shibori dyeing, origami and creative upcycled craft, as well as film screenings and pay-it-forward “gratitude” lunches made with local produce. The space hosts informal discussions as well as theatre. Who Stole the Water? a play about Goa’s water issues, produced by Mustard Seed Art Company and directed by theatre stalwart Isabel de Santa Rita Vás and Kiran Bhandari, was staged in November 2023.

Ironically, a stone’s throw from the Sensible Earth Centre, the once-pristine fields along Torda creek—a protected migratory bird site in the village of Salvador do Mundo—are lined with garbage, much of it plastic.

An idea for installations along the creek that was in the works between incubatees (Sensible Earth also organises sustainability-focused initiatives) and artist Hanif Kureishi, who was a local resident, was cut short by the latter’s sudden demise in 2024. Kureishi, co-founder of St+art, had previously created the installation Why—a giant question mark made of 3,00,000 recycled plastic bottles, on the Hussain Sagar Lake in Hyderabad, in response to the problem of single-use plastic.

Goa Green Brigade

A motley group of audience members and activists sang a familiar song, “We shall overcome”, in three languages—Hindi, English and Konkani—at the private museum founded by artist Subodh Kerkar, Museum of Goa. It followed a presentation by the environmental activist group, Goa Green Brigade, as a part of an event called MOG Sundays, which includes discussions on books, art, social issues and, increasingly, environmental concerns.

Work in progress (based on ghost nets) by Annabel Schenck. Drypoint on synthetic glass. | Photo Credit: Annabel Schenck

“As someone who has worked with Greenpeace and been actively involved in the environmental sector, I strongly believe that dialogue and action must go hand in hand,” said Nilankur Das, curator of MOG Sundays. “Art,” he added, “has the power to provoke thought, evoke emotions, and inspire action. By bringing social issues into cultural spaces, we ensure that these conversations remain active and urgent.”

Meanwhile, at Sunaparanta, artists-in-residence Annabel Schenck and Sourav Chatterjee drew comparisons between Panjim’s coastline and that of Marseille in France. Chatterjee’s soft, expressionist-style paintings portraying community life in Goa are made using pigments from the earth of Luberon. Printmaker Schenck’s work, in contrast, comprises stark metal engravings. Among her works, inspired by Goa’s ghost nets (“Do you know that a 3x3 ft net can kill 300 sea creatures?” she asked), is an engraving featuring the Porvorim flyover—a project embroiled in controversy over the translocation of a sacred banyan tree —trapped in a ghost net. “What’s happening in Goa today is what happened in Marseille in the name of development after the Second World War,” she said. “Today, only 5 per cent of our original forest cover is left. Is development always progress?” she asked.

Folk theatre

But art galleries and museums are not the only spaces engaging with environmental themes; Goa’s traditional practices are rooted in the region’s ecology. According to Tanvi Bambolkar, a specialist in Goan folk culture, most Goan folk art invokes the local flora and fauna.

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The folk theatre form of Ranmale, exclusive to the Sattari and Sanguem talukas, has begun to address contemporary environmental concerns consciously. “Sattari is a densely forested area and there have been issues with the presence of tigers there. This has reflected in performances lately,” Bambolkar said, adding that a recent performance was a fun satire on irresponsible tourism at the waterfalls in the region.

The much-awaited annual competition of tiatr—Goa’s famous Konkani musical theatre—at Panjim’s Kala Academy saw environmental themes creep in with plays like Oh Goa! and Odruxtta Fattlean Odruxtt (A Disaster of a Disaster) this year.

Reaching the right audience

The arts have often been catalysts for socio-political change but how does one reach the right audience to make an impact?

“Debating on (digital) platforms is not enough. People power is the most potent. We need people to come on the street,” said ex-journalist and co-founder of Goa Green Brigade, Avertino Miranda. He lauded the success of Aamche Mollem but said that fighting for the environment should be a continuous process.

The success of Aamche Mollem and MAM was largely due to the emotional connection forged through art and local culture. But they are not without their challenges. “There is burnout,” said Koshy. “It takes a lot of work and energy to mobilise support and get funds.”

“Success stories don’t happen in a generation,” said Kohli, emphasising that Aamche Mollem will be an intergenerational campaign. “Art allows for a sense of pause, to reflect upon who we are or were, and where we are going.”

As I wrote this piece, villagers in Loutolim protested the impending destruction of khazan lands for the Borim bridge project while those in Socorro, Guirim and Sangolda celebrated a court order demanding the restoration of illegally filled paddy fields, brought about by the efforts of Goa Green Brigade.

There is hope but more participation is required and much more work needs to be done. For now, despite the rapid destruction, Goa’s woods are still lovely, dark and deep. At the same time, its contemporary art is a sobering reminder that there are miles to go before Goans can sleep peacefully.

Janhavi Acharekar is an author, a curator, and creative consultant.