Kon: बेनौलिम benaulim
‘Forest Village’ Village/Beach, Goa
From Kan: vana(m)/bana, ‘forest’, ‘garden’; and Kan: halli/valli →auli, ‘village’, ‘hamlet’.
An alternative derivation is Kan: bāṇa, ‘arrow’ and has a myth to match. Parashurama (Vishnu’s sixth incarnation, ‘Rama with an Axe’: Skt: paraśu, ‘axe’, ‘hatchet’) fired an arrow into the Arabian Sea and conjured the new lands of Goa by drawing the waves back to the point where it had landed. Many low-lying coastal areas and islands in India are surely in need of their own Parashurama right now in this era of climate change.
Benaulim/banav(al)li, the name is a Portuguese corruption (the final -m indicates that the preceding vowel is nasalized), is famous for its carpentry and sandy beaches.
Benaulim, Goa Klaus Nahr