Before the Portuguese
The Goa coast was ruled by the Kadambas of Goa from about the tenth to the fourteenth century, and then by Vijayanagara and the Bahmani sultans, who fought over its port, an outlet for the horse trade from Arabia and Persia. By 1510 it belonged to the Adil Shahi sultanate of Bijapur.
The Portuguese capital
Afonso de Albuquerque, the Portuguese governor of the Indies, attacked Goa in 1510, lost it, and retook it in November of the same year. It became the capital of the Estado da India, the Portuguese network of forts and ports from East Africa to Macau. The city, now called Old Goa, grew rapidly in the sixteenth century and was called the Rome of the East for its churches and convents.
The Basilica of Bom Jesus, consecrated in 1605, holds the body of the Jesuit missionary Francis Xavier, who worked in Goa and Asia from 1542 and died off the coast of China in 1552. The Se Cathedral, completed in the early seventeenth century, is among the largest churches in Asia.
Religion and the Inquisition
Portuguese rule brought large-scale conversion. From the 1540s Hindu temples in the territories then held were destroyed, Hindu rites were restricted, and many converted. The Inquisition was established in Goa in 1560. It prosecuted converts accused of keeping Hindu or Jewish practices, and its regulations reached into dress, language and ritual. It was suspended in 1774, restored, and finally abolished in 1812. Many Hindu families moved temple images to the neighbouring territories outside Portuguese control, and those temples survive today. The later conquests of the eighteenth century, the Novas Conquistas, were treated more tolerantly and remained mainly Hindu.
Decline and Panjim
Portuguese power in Asia declined in the seventeenth century under pressure from the Dutch. Old Goa suffered repeated epidemics, and its population fell. The government moved gradually to Panjim, which became the official capital in the mid-nineteenth century, and Old Goa was largely abandoned except for its churches.
Annexation and after
After 1947 India asked Portugal to give up its territories, and Portugal refused, declaring them overseas provinces of the Portuguese state. Within Goa a nationalist movement had been active since the 1940s, and many of its leaders were imprisoned or deported to Portugal. In August 1955 unarmed satyagrahis from India crossed into Goa, and Portuguese police fired on them, killing a number of marchers. India broke off diplomatic relations. In December 1961 the Indian army entered Goa, Daman and Diu in a short operation, and the Portuguese governor surrendered. Portugal did not recognise the annexation until 1974. Goa became a union territory and, in 1987, a state, with Konkani as its official language. The churches and convents of Old Goa were listed by UNESCO in 1986.
Further reading
- Keay, John. India: A History. HarperCollins, 2000
- Wink, Andre. Al-Hind: The Making of the Indo-Islamic World. Brill, 1990
- Wolpert, Stanley. A New History of India. Oxford University Press, 2009
See also
- Portuguese India — Portuguese India was the first and the last European territorial presence in the subcontinent, from Vasco da Gama's arrival in 1498 until the Indian annexation of Goa in 1961.
- Kadambas of Goa — The Kadambas of Goa ruled the Konkan coast from the tenth to the fourteenth century, and their Mahādeva temple at Tambdi Surla is the only pre-Portuguese temple in Goa to survive intact.
- Adil Shahi Sultanate of Bijapur — The Adil Shahis ruled Bijapur and the western Deccan for nearly two centuries, and built the Gol Gumbaz, whose dome is among the largest ever raised.
- Vijayanagara Empire — Vijayanagara was the last great empire of southern India, founded on the Tungabhadra in 1336, ruling most of the peninsula for two centuries until its defeat at Talikota in 1565, and leaving the ruined city at Hampi.
- Bahmani Sultanate — The Bahmani Sultanate ruled the Deccan from 1347 to 1527, the first independent Muslim kingdom of the peninsula, and split into the five sultanates that followed it.
- Vasco da Gama — Vasco da Gama was a Portuguese navigator who in 1498 became the first European to reach India by sea, opening a direct maritime route that led to Portuguese trade and, eventually, colonial presence on the subcontinent.
This entry was last revised on 12 November 2026.