He believed every laterite stone, lime-plastered façade, and crumbling fort battlement was a sentence in an irreplaceable story, and losing them carelessly was a cultural amnesia
On the morning of April 5, 2026, Goa lost a man who spent his life fighting to ensure that Goa would not lose itself. Ketak Prabhu Nachinolkar, my neighbour from Bondir, Santa Cruz—conservation architect, scholar, tireless advocate who chased something far more consequential: the truth embedded in old walls. He believed that every laterite stone, every lime-plastered façade, every crumbling fort battlement was a sentence in a long and irreplaceable story, and that losing them carelessly was an act of cultural amnesia from which no society fully recovers.
In a state where heritage is simultaneously celebrated as a tourism asset and quietly demolished for convenience, Nachinolkar was the rare conscience that refused to look away. He worked with my brother interior designer and filmmaker Gurudas, to restore the old GMC complex in Panaji for the first IFFI during 2004. Expressing deep anguish on his death, Gurudas recalled how Ketak minutely documented the old building and took pains to create an identical mixture of mortar for the restoration work.
To understand Ketak, one must understand the house he came from. The Nachinolkar mansion in Bondir ward of Santa Cruz—documented by historian Dr Teresa Albuquerque in her monograph on the village—is itself a piece of living history. A spacious bungalow built early in the twentieth century, it carries the unmistakable traces of a Portuguese town house in its gabled roof, fine woodwork trellis and decorative wrought-iron grills, yet inside it is Hindu to the core. The family hailed originally from Nachinola in Bardez and had been deeply rooted in Santa Cruz for generations. Growing up in that joint family household, surrounded by layered architectural memory, Ketak absorbed something no university alone could teach—that buildings are not merely structures but repositories of a community’s identity.
The household was also shaped by the towering example of his grand-uncle, Dr Raghunath Vishram Prabhu Nachinolkar—freedom fighter and beloved family physician of Santa Cruz for three decades, who served ordinary Goans with a quiet, unyielding commitment to public good. That ethic of placing expertise at the service of the community was something Ketak carried into every project he undertook. His formal training matched this inheritance. He completed his Bachelor of Architecture in 1998 from the Goa College of Architecture—an institution he would later return to as visiting faculty—and his Master of Architecture with specialisation in Architectural Conservation from the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi in 2002.
With his practice established from 2002–03, his work ranged from conservation policies and planning, condition assessments and conservation plans, to actual hands-on restoration and new design. He was, in the truest sense, a complete conservation professional: equally at home drafting policy frameworks for governments, climbing scaffolding to assess deteriorating masonry, and standing before students explaining why lime mortar is not quaint but correct. His professional appointments were consequential.
In 2016 the Goa government assigned him to produce the foundational study for a comprehensive masterplan for the Old Goa UNESCO World Heritage Site—a commission that required him to delineate historic sites, reconstruct the area’s pre-Portuguese history, and frame a viable future for one of Asia’s most significant heritage precincts. His diagnosis of what ailed it was unflinching. He served as conservation architect for the restoration of Chapora Fort. Through the Museum of Christian Art Goa, he prepared the detailed assessment and restoration proposal for the 450-year-old Church of Santa Monica—working alongside internationally recognised Portuguese conservators Miguel Mateus and Jose Pestana—a proposal subsequently approved and funded by the state government.
He collaborated with INTACH on St Anne’s Church at Talaulim, where his examination exposed critical gaps in an earlier report and enabled a more thorough and correct intervention. Yet the most poignant document of his career is his very first major project report, submitted in November 2003 to the Corporation of the City of Panaji: a proposal for the restoration and revitalisation of the abandoned Cistern at Altinho, near the Lyceum precinct. The cistern—a massive laterite masonry structure built by the Portuguese administration around 1905–15, capable of storing nearly 6.5 lakh litres of rainwater—had been abandoned and decaying for nearly half a century after piped water was introduced in Panaji around 1956–57.
He proposed a phased programme of structural restoration and revitalisation that would return the cistern to active service, harvesting rainwater from the Altinho hillside and meaningfully reducing the burden on Panaji’s stressed reservoirs. The estimated cost was a modest Rs 23 lakhs. The proposal was never acted upon. Since 2010 I followed up his proposal with various MLAs of Panaji, CCP, GSIDC, and Smart City planners but none showed interest. As a valued member of the State Heritage Policy Committee, Ketak contributed meaningfully to shaping Goa’s approach to its built heritage. He highlighted the importance of preserving village mansions, rebuilding the ecosystem of skilled craftsmen, and creating institutional mechanisms for heritage management. His ideas found their way into policy, making his contribution both substantive and lasting. His passing leaves a silence that will be felt most in the spaces he fought to protect. Santa Cruz, and indeed all of Goa, must not allow that silence to deepen into forgetting.
(Dr Nandkumar M Kamat, who has a doctorate in microbiology, is a scientist and a science writer)
