O desassossego goês: cultura e política em Goa do liberalismo ao Acto Colonial

In the present thesis, I approach some aspects of the History of Goa, since the Constitutional Monarchy until the foundation of “Estado Novo”, viewed by its intellectual elites. The paths and standings of these elites were built in the crossroads produced by the construction of the post-Enlightenment currents of thought and of political and cultural practices, by the affirmation of contemporary colonialism and its questioning by the anticolonial nationalist movements, as well as by the evaluation of local, national and international contexts in which they were inscribed. In these crossroads, these elites contributed to the construction of the Goan currents of political and cultural thought and to the edification of its modernity, in a period marked by the growing discussion of the relations between politics and culture. Within these frames, they thought about the Goan condition, the Goan identity and about the local, Portuguese and Indian future in a continuously changing world. Constituting an approach of local history, this thesis represents an effort to contribute to contemporary Goan reflection, but also represents the intention to underline how contemporary history, in a permanent dialog between theory and practice, edified itself in an unstable balance between ideals and principles of universal aspiration and the impulse to distinguish inheritances, constrains and individual goals of particular societies. As such, this local was also assumed as a relevant perspective in the debate around the construction of contemporary thought and political action in general and Portuguese in particular, having specially in mind the discussion of liberalism and democracy, in face of the colonial question and in face of the imposition of modernity as the proper temporality to evaluate societies and peoples and to project their futures.