Goa

Kon: गोंय gōyā

 ‘Land of the Cowherds’

From Skt: gō, ‘cow’, ‘cattle’

The Goa and Konkan region appears in the Mahabharata epic under a variety of names: Goparashtra, Gomantak or Govarashtra; and it was also commonly known as Gōwa/Gōva. The syllable gō is common to all these and suggests a ‘nation’ or ‘region’ of ‘cowherds’, perhaps indicating that it had been settled early on by pastoral tribes. 

Two other, less likely, derivations have been suggested: (1) Kon: goy(an), ‘(patch of) tall grass’ or (2) goemoat, ‘fertile or refreshing land’ – this is suggested by the Portuguese historian Diogo do Couto (1542-1616) but, unfortunately, without specifying the language or citing any evidence. 

Goa was a Portuguese colony from 1510, when Afonso de Albuquerque seized it from the Bijapur Sulatanate, to Independence in 1961. The Portuguese influence is noticeable in many aspects of Goan life: religion, language, food, and architecture. Just over one-quarter of the population is Christian and there are hundreds of churches across the state; the churches and convents in Old Goa even have UNESCO World Heritage status.

Goa is India’s richest but smallest state. It is nicknamed the ‘Land of Surf, Sea and Sun’, three reasons for its annual haul of two million tourists.

Its place names show four key influences: Konkani, a Western coast Indo-European language spoken in Maharashtra, Goa and Karnataka; Marathi, an Indo-European language spoken in Maharashtra, its northern neighbour; Kannada, a Dravidian language spoken in Karnataka which shares Goa’s southern and eastern borders; and Portuguese, the colonial language which has peppered the original local place names with its own pronunciation, spellings, and proper names.

Goa Map