GOMANTAK
Savarkar's verse narrative of Portuguese forced conversions and Inquisitions on Maharashtra's Konkan coast, translated into English for the first time.
Overview
On the Konkan coast of Maharashtra, where the land meets the sea in a landscape of extraordinary beauty, a village lived under Portuguese rule that turned paradise into an arena of terror. Gomantak — Savarkar's narrative poem about this place and its people — recounts how the Portuguese conducted forced mass conversions of Hindus to Christianity and held Inquisitions that destroyed temples, persecuted dissenters, and remade an ancient culture in the image of their own faith.
Originally written in Marathi verse, the work has now been translated into English by Manjula Tekal, making it accessible to a wider audience. Savarkar's choice of verse is not incidental: the form carries the emotional register of the Konkan's beauty and the weight of what was done to its people in a way that documentary prose cannot. The Goa Inquisition is one of the less-examined episodes of colonial religious violence, and Savarkar's account — written by a man for whom the history of Hindu resistance was both scholarly interest and personal conviction — gives it the sustained narrative attention it rarely receives.
For readers of Savarkar, of Goan history, and of the literature of colonial religious coercion, Gomantak stands as a significant work of witness in verse.
Gomantak is translated in English by Manjula Tekal. This book is a story written in verse by Swatantryaveer Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. The story is about an idyllic village on Maharashtra's Konkan coast, which graphically describes the Portuguese misrule, during which they forcibly converted Hindus to Christianity en masse and held bloodcurdling Inquisitions terrorizing Hindus, destroying their places of worship, etc.
