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.
For related place names see Indian Place names and Goa place names.
Benaulim, Goa Klaus Nahr