The Portuguese found village institutions already in place and brought them under colonial rule, turning existing customs, rights, and land systems into tools of governance
On September 16, 2026, five hundred years will have passed since the Foral associated with Afonso Mexia was issued. Its anniversary deserves serious historical attention from scholars. What it does not justify is the categorical claim that “500 years ago, Goa got its first constitution.”
This formulation converts a colonial document into a foundational gift and Portuguese-held Tiswadi into Goa. The Foral is important, but its importance does not make it a constitution, and commemoration cannot change the political circumstances in which it was produced. The first problem is territorial. Portugal conquered the Ilha de Goa in 1510. The 1526 Foral concerned the Ilhas—essentially Tiswadi and its associated islands—and the village order there. Bardez and Salcete entered Portuguese possession only in 1543, while territories forming much of present-day Goa remained outside Portuguese sovereignty for much longer. Calling an instrument for conquered Tiswadi the “first constitution of Goa” therefore projects a later territorial Goa backwards into 1526.
Tiswadi was not Goa, and Portuguese possession of Tiswadi was not sovereignty over Goa. Goa did not begin its political history in 1510. Its history extends through earlier indigenous and regional formations and from Satavahana, Bhojas, Chalukyas, and Kadambas to Vijayanagara, Bahmani, and Adilshahi rule. The Portuguese conquest introduced another ruling power into Goa’s history; it did not create Goa’s political existence. A European monarchy cannot retrospectively acquire authorship of Goa merely because its officials wrote down the selected customs of the territory won by force. The second problem concerns gaunkari. It existed before the Portuguese rule. Baden-Powell’s study of the 1526 document describes inquiries into existing usages, rights, and revenues, including what inhabitants had paid to rulers before Portuguese possession.
The Portuguese, therefore, encountered functioning village institutions and sought to understand them. Recording an institution does not create it. The conqueror must not receive credit for the institutions found among the conquered. Angela Barreto Xavier clarifies the process. Portuguese officials drew upon earlier information, village books, Gaunkar decisions, and fresh knowledge obtained from Gaunkars and village scribes, many of whom were Brahmans. The Gaunkari order belonged to an indigenous Hindu social world involving established caste groups, temples, land, cultivation, hereditary relationships, and customary obligations. Such information was politically valuable: to govern villages, the new rulers needed to know who controlled the land, who owed what, how succession operated, and where local authority resided.
Pinto likewise helps us understand incorporation without romanticising it. The Foral brought existing land governance structures under Portuguese authority. Recognition can coexist with modification and subordination. Administrative pragmatism should not be mistaken for administrative benevolence. The Portuguese had every reason to preserve arrangements that made conquered territories governable and revenue collectible. Recognition is not synonymous with liberation. Therefore, the circumstances of the consultation are decisive. Whatever the Gaunkars told the Portuguese officials, this occurred sixteen years after the military conquest. They were not representatives of a sovereign Goa meeting Portugal as equals to frame the constitution. We cannot know the private fears of individual Gaunkars, but neither can we erase the coercive setting or imagine constitutional equality between conqueror and conquered. To do so would romanticise the conquest itself.
A further problem for the “first constitution” thesis appears when the wider documentary family is examined in detail. Cibele Aldrovandi identifies separate Forais for Ilhas de Goa, Salcete and Bardez. The earliest surviving Foral de Salcete is dated 1567, only forty-one years after Mexia’s Foral. Yet nobody calls the Salcete Foral the “second constitution of Goa.” If the category Foral automatically conferred constitutional status, consistency would demand that such a conclusion be reached. The absurdity of this proposition exposes the anachronism of the original claim.
The Salcete evidence also prevents these documents from being detached from the colonial power. Aldrovandi describes Forais as legal or municipal charters concerned with conquered lands, rights, duties, and especially taxation. Her study shows that Salcete, Ilhas, and Bardez Forais preserve records of properties belonging to Hindu temples and their subsequent transfer after temple destruction. She places the 1567 Salcete manuscript amid evidence of devastating religious transformation, including the destruction of temples. These were instruments embedded in an expanding colonial order, not milestones in Goa’s progressive constitutional history.
Fiscal characteristics are equally important. Xavier notes that the surviving 1526 text represents only part of the original compilation; the missing first part concerned taxes payable to the Crown. The surviving Foral contains forty-nine clauses, not forty-seven. The treatment of cultivation, inheritance, offices, and village obligations made local society more legible to the colonial administration. The sword could seize territory; information was required to administer it. None of this diminishes the Foral’s historical significance. It should be translated, preserved, studied, and debated alongside the other Forais.
However, scholarship must not become retrospective coronation. A royal instrument issued after a conquest cannot be transformed, on its quincentenary, into an act of popular constituent sovereignty. Five centuries later, these distinctions must remain clear. Tiswadi was not Goa. Gaunkari was not a Portuguese invention. Consultation under conquest was not constitution-making among equals. The 1567 Salcete Foral further demolishes the myth of a unique constitutional beginning in 1526. Codification does not create. Recognition is not synonymous with liberation. The Portuguese did not give the Gaunkari to the Goa. They found it here, learned from it, regulated it, and subordinated it to the Crown’s authority. The sword conquered the territory; knowledge made the conquest governable.
(Dr Nandkumar M Kamat, who has a doctorate in microbiology, is a scientist and science writer)
