Fado de Goa: a singular case of decolonial sounding

Abstract

On August 15, 2019, the Indo-Portuguese Arts Center based in Panjim, capital of the Indian state of Goa, opened the first Casa de Fado e Mando in India. It is called Madragoa, the name of a traditional Lisbon neighbourhood where fado was also performed in the past and where today we can find many fado houses (restaurants or bars where fado is presented). The resurgence of fado in Goa is due to several factors, some of them strictly related to the measures developed by Portuguese institutions to provide facilities for Goans to learn Portuguese guitar in the 1990s. But the movement around fado in Goa increased exponentially and gave rise to the emergence of schools, festivals, and different kinds of shows that culminated, in 2017, with the classification of fado as an Indian musical genre by the Society for the Promotion of Indian Classical Music and Culture Among Youth (SPIC MACAY) as a Musical Genre of India under the name of Fado de Goa. Considering that Goa is a post-colonial territory that, after 491 years of Portuguese colonial sovereignty, was integrated into India without achieving independence, the performance of music linked to the colonial past generates a very sensitive situation, especially in relation to Indian institutions regulated by political orientations of the Hindu nationalist BJP party. This paper aims to discuss the apparent contradictory dynamics that gave rise to the Fado de Goa label, putting into dialogue the risky appropriation of a musical practice from the colonial past as a post-colonial identification and how this process can be understood as a political process and an aesthetic tool of decolonial representation in a post-memory context.