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Hello Goodnight: A Life of Goa
Goa became a landmark on the hippie trail through India in the 1960s, thanks to its too-good-to-be-true beaches and laidback lifestyle. But the first western visitors to reach this idyllic locale arrived much they came from Portugal in the sixteenth century and claimed Goa on behalf of their King and their God. David Tomory explores the outside influences at work on Goa from the time of the Portuguese to the present day and how they have fused with local culture to produce a distinctly different India state. From the horrors of the Inquisition to the rise of Génération Techno, he provides an entertaining and informative tour through the life of Goa. He reveals what Goa is actually like for both westerners and Goans, and catches Goa as it stands on the brink of a complicated future.
243 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 2000
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September 14, 2017
David Tomory’s Hello, Goodnight is a book about the history of Goa, that Indian region that was a Portuguese colony for centuries, forcibly taken by the newly independent India in 1961, and then a huge destination for foreign travelers from the initial waves of hippies to more conventional backpackers and charter tourism.
Long interested in the 1960s counterculture and its international mobility, I read David Tomory’s earlier book A Season in Heaven, a collection of oral histories about the Istanbul-Kathmandu route of the Sixties and early Seventies, which took in Goa as well. That is one of the best travel books I have ever read – extremely detailed, deftly organized, and based on a large number of interview subjects so you really do feel like you are getting a vast view of a whole era. I was hoping that Hello, Goodnight would offer something of a continuation of Tomory’s preceding work, but I was rather disappointed.
This time, instead of interviewing many others, Tomory simply writes his own impressions and what he has picked up in his readings in a very fragmentary, elliptical fashion. The book feels like a jumble of factoids and half-told anecdotes where you sometimes can’t entirely pick up what he’s on about. The first half of the book, a history of the Portuguese invasion and colonial rule, cannot compete with more serious academic or popular-history treatments of this era. Tomory isn’t really a historian (at least, not a historian of these centuries ago) and his heart doesn’t seem to be in this part of the book.
Things do get a little better in the second half of the book. Tomory’s first visit to Goa was 1976 (after an initial visit to other regions of India in 1971) and he went back a number of times over the years. With this longterm, firsthand acquaintance with the region, he does trace pivotal moments in its evolution as a traveler destination. Goa remained a backwater in the Indian context for a long time after the end of Portuguese rule, but the early 1980s finally saw development of new infrastructure. Then, one fateful year was 1987, when charter tourism took off. Suddenly, people were flying directly in to a place that formerly could only be reached by an overland journey, and it has a profound effect on the vibe of the region and the sort of travelers one met there. That’s not to say Goa was completely a hippie paradise before that; Tomory also writes of how the early hippie communities were only welcoming and egalitarian because no one had any money, but as wealthier people found their way to Goa in the 1970s and early 1980s, uneasy class differences among the foreigners became visible.
Yet even in this second half where Tomory was there to see it, the book continues to feel bare-bones and badly organized. Tomory does mention the existence of dance parties, producing the famous “Goa trance” genre, but we don’t get any specific information on the rise of this phenomenon which produced a Goa very different than that described in A Season in Heaven. There is also nothing about hard drugs, as mentioned in other treatments of this place and time like the late Cleo Odzer’s. A major impact on the backpacker demographic came from Israelis coming to unwind after their obligatory military service, but there’s nothing about it here. Finally, it is a pity that this book was published in 2000 and not just a few years later. The early 2000s saw a local government increasingly hostile to shoestring backpackers and those looking for parties, and by the time I was in the region in 2009, it was a complete shadow of any former self.
Tomory isn’t concerned only with foreign travelers, however. He writes at length about the culture of the locals, noting many distinct customs of the region and Goa’s mixture of Christianity and Hinduism. A substantial part of the book is dedicated to how working in the Persian Gulf changed Goa. Goans were going to Dubai to seek their fortune long before that Arab emirate became a hip destination for Europeans and North Americans. Unfortunately, because Tomory only mentions three specific locals as his interlocutors, it’s hard to get a sense of how deeply he engaged with local society and to what extent he should be considered authoritative on local life and customs.
Even if it was a jumble of trivia, I did learn many things from this book, and some features of local life that I missed during my own time in (a much later) Goa, so I cannot completely knock it. However, it could have been so much more, and one wonders where Lonely Planet’s editor was in all this.
Long interested in the 1960s counterculture and its international mobility, I read David Tomory’s earlier book A Season in Heaven, a collection of oral histories about the Istanbul-Kathmandu route of the Sixties and early Seventies, which took in Goa as well. That is one of the best travel books I have ever read – extremely detailed, deftly organized, and based on a large number of interview subjects so you really do feel like you are getting a vast view of a whole era. I was hoping that Hello, Goodnight would offer something of a continuation of Tomory’s preceding work, but I was rather disappointed.
This time, instead of interviewing many others, Tomory simply writes his own impressions and what he has picked up in his readings in a very fragmentary, elliptical fashion. The book feels like a jumble of factoids and half-told anecdotes where you sometimes can’t entirely pick up what he’s on about. The first half of the book, a history of the Portuguese invasion and colonial rule, cannot compete with more serious academic or popular-history treatments of this era. Tomory isn’t really a historian (at least, not a historian of these centuries ago) and his heart doesn’t seem to be in this part of the book.
Things do get a little better in the second half of the book. Tomory’s first visit to Goa was 1976 (after an initial visit to other regions of India in 1971) and he went back a number of times over the years. With this longterm, firsthand acquaintance with the region, he does trace pivotal moments in its evolution as a traveler destination. Goa remained a backwater in the Indian context for a long time after the end of Portuguese rule, but the early 1980s finally saw development of new infrastructure. Then, one fateful year was 1987, when charter tourism took off. Suddenly, people were flying directly in to a place that formerly could only be reached by an overland journey, and it has a profound effect on the vibe of the region and the sort of travelers one met there. That’s not to say Goa was completely a hippie paradise before that; Tomory also writes of how the early hippie communities were only welcoming and egalitarian because no one had any money, but as wealthier people found their way to Goa in the 1970s and early 1980s, uneasy class differences among the foreigners became visible.
Yet even in this second half where Tomory was there to see it, the book continues to feel bare-bones and badly organized. Tomory does mention the existence of dance parties, producing the famous “Goa trance” genre, but we don’t get any specific information on the rise of this phenomenon which produced a Goa very different than that described in A Season in Heaven. There is also nothing about hard drugs, as mentioned in other treatments of this place and time like the late Cleo Odzer’s. A major impact on the backpacker demographic came from Israelis coming to unwind after their obligatory military service, but there’s nothing about it here. Finally, it is a pity that this book was published in 2000 and not just a few years later. The early 2000s saw a local government increasingly hostile to shoestring backpackers and those looking for parties, and by the time I was in the region in 2009, it was a complete shadow of any former self.
Tomory isn’t concerned only with foreign travelers, however. He writes at length about the culture of the locals, noting many distinct customs of the region and Goa’s mixture of Christianity and Hinduism. A substantial part of the book is dedicated to how working in the Persian Gulf changed Goa. Goans were going to Dubai to seek their fortune long before that Arab emirate became a hip destination for Europeans and North Americans. Unfortunately, because Tomory only mentions three specific locals as his interlocutors, it’s hard to get a sense of how deeply he engaged with local society and to what extent he should be considered authoritative on local life and customs.
Even if it was a jumble of trivia, I did learn many things from this book, and some features of local life that I missed during my own time in (a much later) Goa, so I cannot completely knock it. However, it could have been so much more, and one wonders where Lonely Planet’s editor was in all this.
July 7, 2014
This unusually fine travel book, written in a taut, literate prose, is a contemporary portrait of Goa -- that tiny and eccentric nodule on the Indian coast facing out across the Indian Ocean toward Arabia. David Tomory gives us a complex sense of how the Goa of today is woven out of the brightly colored if often clashing strands of the bizarre historical events that brought it into being. The place was conquered (more or less) by the Portuguese in 1510, not because they wanted to create the sort of colonial empires they had in Angola and Brazil but because they sought an outpost from which they could control the Indian Ocean and so the spice trade that sailed across it.
Goa attracted the Portuguese precisely because it was so out of the way, so cut off from the rest of subcontinent; they knew they did not have the military strength to hold it otherwise. And, in fact, their invasion was not only completely unnoticed at the time but remained a non-event to the rest of India for entire centuries. As colonialists, the Portuguese were not all bad -- more often than not their policy in Goa was to go along to get along. But the forces of the Inquisition that they brought with them were as implacably hostile to native culture and native temples as today's rulers of Afghanistan are toward Buddhist statues, and the havoc they wrought makes for depressing if instructive reading.
As it turned out, the Portuguese never really made a success of Goa, and they surrendered it to the Indian Army in 1960 with nothing more than a token struggle. Nehru then decreed that the Goans should be allowed to continue to follow their idiosyncratic ways, with their rebuilt Hindu temples incorporating stylistic elements of the European Baroque, and their music, which blended the sad laments of Portuguese far from their homeland with traditional Indian instruments and musical phrases. Had it not been for the conspicuous isolation of the place and its beautiful beaches, it would have remained a mostly unnoticed and rather sleepy backwater.
Instead, as anyone who grew of age in the sixties will remember, Goa became a major destination for hippies from both America and Europe, who found in the combination of pristine shoreline, a plentiful supply of marijuna, and the Goan attitude of saudades -- minding your own business and tolerating your neighbor's eccentricities -- the perfect recipe for paradise. Soon, local entrepreneurs were organizing bus tours so that Indian businessmen could stroll the beaches in groups and gawk at naked Western women. So did the seeds for Goa's ultimate (or at least current) destiny as "Touristhan," get scattered broadside.
Today, Goa caters to all: Saudi Arabians looking for rain and access to booze; high-class tourists drawn to the exclusive resorts; the discount charter-flight vacation crowd picking up bargains in the bazaar; and, albeit in a less perfectly distilled form, the hippy element as well. Peering down a beach at a distant cluster of reclining forms, a souvenir seller inquired of the author, "Are those hippielog or charterlog?" Charter people are worth the hike across the sand; hippy people, however, don't buy anything.
All of this would be interesting enough simply recounted, but Tomory is excellent at capturing the local atmosphere -- the lizards on the walls and the snakes under the bed, the outhouses with their resident pigs, the bakery boys on their bicycles peddling through the streets at dawn. He also allows the concerns and character of contemporary Goans to shape his narrative. Many of them have had a taste of the money economy from employment in Bahrain; others have returned from entrepreneurial adventures in Africa. Both groups came back to find their homeland irretrievably changed. However, even as they lament the loss of the old, quiet, and familiar Goa, they are not exactly immune to the temptations of the new, much more cosmopolitan one. It's a rare travel writer who simultaneously gets you to feel the sand of a place in your shoes and the spirit of a place in your heart. Tomory, self-effacing, open-minded, and endlessly curious, pulls it off.
Goa attracted the Portuguese precisely because it was so out of the way, so cut off from the rest of subcontinent; they knew they did not have the military strength to hold it otherwise. And, in fact, their invasion was not only completely unnoticed at the time but remained a non-event to the rest of India for entire centuries. As colonialists, the Portuguese were not all bad -- more often than not their policy in Goa was to go along to get along. But the forces of the Inquisition that they brought with them were as implacably hostile to native culture and native temples as today's rulers of Afghanistan are toward Buddhist statues, and the havoc they wrought makes for depressing if instructive reading.
As it turned out, the Portuguese never really made a success of Goa, and they surrendered it to the Indian Army in 1960 with nothing more than a token struggle. Nehru then decreed that the Goans should be allowed to continue to follow their idiosyncratic ways, with their rebuilt Hindu temples incorporating stylistic elements of the European Baroque, and their music, which blended the sad laments of Portuguese far from their homeland with traditional Indian instruments and musical phrases. Had it not been for the conspicuous isolation of the place and its beautiful beaches, it would have remained a mostly unnoticed and rather sleepy backwater.
Instead, as anyone who grew of age in the sixties will remember, Goa became a major destination for hippies from both America and Europe, who found in the combination of pristine shoreline, a plentiful supply of marijuna, and the Goan attitude of saudades -- minding your own business and tolerating your neighbor's eccentricities -- the perfect recipe for paradise. Soon, local entrepreneurs were organizing bus tours so that Indian businessmen could stroll the beaches in groups and gawk at naked Western women. So did the seeds for Goa's ultimate (or at least current) destiny as "Touristhan," get scattered broadside.
Today, Goa caters to all: Saudi Arabians looking for rain and access to booze; high-class tourists drawn to the exclusive resorts; the discount charter-flight vacation crowd picking up bargains in the bazaar; and, albeit in a less perfectly distilled form, the hippy element as well. Peering down a beach at a distant cluster of reclining forms, a souvenir seller inquired of the author, "Are those hippielog or charterlog?" Charter people are worth the hike across the sand; hippy people, however, don't buy anything.
All of this would be interesting enough simply recounted, but Tomory is excellent at capturing the local atmosphere -- the lizards on the walls and the snakes under the bed, the outhouses with their resident pigs, the bakery boys on their bicycles peddling through the streets at dawn. He also allows the concerns and character of contemporary Goans to shape his narrative. Many of them have had a taste of the money economy from employment in Bahrain; others have returned from entrepreneurial adventures in Africa. Both groups came back to find their homeland irretrievably changed. However, even as they lament the loss of the old, quiet, and familiar Goa, they are not exactly immune to the temptations of the new, much more cosmopolitan one. It's a rare travel writer who simultaneously gets you to feel the sand of a place in your shoes and the spirit of a place in your heart. Tomory, self-effacing, open-minded, and endlessly curious, pulls it off.
September 19, 2021
Quite an interesting book on Goa. David Tomory has traveled a lot in Goa and has done a bit of research, as well.
Although the book is mainly on costal Goa (I did not wandered a lot in inland Goa but by what I've seen it has nothing to do with beaches and resorts) it is interesting because one who has been to India and not to Goa does not figure out what Goa is and how it became popular.
All the transformations in Goa since the sixties (when Portuguese left Goa to India) are explained in this book. Even if Goa today has nothing to do with Goa when the Portuguese ruled, it's curious how all the events created a sort of a paradise inside India, where the fusion of christianity and western culture with local culture and hinduism made Goa a special corner within the great India.
Although the book is mainly on costal Goa (I did not wandered a lot in inland Goa but by what I've seen it has nothing to do with beaches and resorts) it is interesting because one who has been to India and not to Goa does not figure out what Goa is and how it became popular.
All the transformations in Goa since the sixties (when Portuguese left Goa to India) are explained in this book. Even if Goa today has nothing to do with Goa when the Portuguese ruled, it's curious how all the events created a sort of a paradise inside India, where the fusion of christianity and western culture with local culture and hinduism made Goa a special corner within the great India.
August 3, 2011
I took this with me on a tour of Goa. It contains a well-written history of the Portuguese reign and of the customs of the people that I found very helpful. However, the current life of Goa is put together from interviews with a small collection of people, mostly in the author's path, that is along the tourist belt (Anjuna - Candolim). Therefore, the book is not comprehensive. I would recommend climbing away from the beach; Goa is not a small strip along the coast.
The author is inclined to think that the new Indian rule (since 1961) solved many problems and is overall a good thing. And it probably is. But most of the older people I've talked to tell of the Portuguese time as more secure and crime free, when common needs were generally provided for even when jobs were few. The great influx of people coming into the state for the new jobs is, in my opinion, corrupting what was once an isolated and pristine paradise. Things are filthy, now.
Then, there is a streak of anti-Christianity, where the work of the sixteenth and seventeenth century missionaries is given as counter-cultural. The Portuguese were zealous in installing Christianity as a way of creating loyalty to the State, says the author. The part of the Church is ignored. The author would have preferred the pagan culture to have survived in the Old Conquests (Bardez, Ilhas and Salcete). Here is a typical quote: "Hindus, whose lack of charity the Christian missionaries denounced, practised the toleration for the beliefs of others that the Christians of intolerant Europe could not." Such is this great tolerance of the Hindus, that the current anti-Christian mayhem in India is attributed to a certain undefined fundamentalism. I will stand with the missionaries. It is their good work that has created the atmosphere of peace and coexistence that exists in Goa today.
To the good people of Goa, I have had a wonderful holiday.
The author is inclined to think that the new Indian rule (since 1961) solved many problems and is overall a good thing. And it probably is. But most of the older people I've talked to tell of the Portuguese time as more secure and crime free, when common needs were generally provided for even when jobs were few. The great influx of people coming into the state for the new jobs is, in my opinion, corrupting what was once an isolated and pristine paradise. Things are filthy, now.
Then, there is a streak of anti-Christianity, where the work of the sixteenth and seventeenth century missionaries is given as counter-cultural. The Portuguese were zealous in installing Christianity as a way of creating loyalty to the State, says the author. The part of the Church is ignored. The author would have preferred the pagan culture to have survived in the Old Conquests (Bardez, Ilhas and Salcete). Here is a typical quote: "Hindus, whose lack of charity the Christian missionaries denounced, practised the toleration for the beliefs of others that the Christians of intolerant Europe could not." Such is this great tolerance of the Hindus, that the current anti-Christian mayhem in India is attributed to a certain undefined fundamentalism. I will stand with the missionaries. It is their good work that has created the atmosphere of peace and coexistence that exists in Goa today.
To the good people of Goa, I have had a wonderful holiday.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews