Goa Chitra - Presenting Goa's Ethnographic history to you

Earthen Pots that inspired many a poets 

Located somewhere between Benaulim beach and Madgaon, in a quaint street is Goa Chitra – an ethnographic museum that intends to show you the life in Goa as it used to be.  This is the second ethnographic museum that I have seen after Big Foot Museum. While Big Foot focuses on the macro level showing you the houses and the professions of the Goans, this one has collected and documented the stuff used in day to day life of the agrarian society of Goa before tourism, mining and bit of other industries took over.

Extracting Oil from Dried Coconuts

I have already written about the Goa Chakra part of the museum. Let me give you a glimpse of the ethnographic part of the museum that has a huge collection of many unsual things. At the entrance there is a collection of Christian prayer items followed by the Hindu prayer items – that shows the peaceful co-existence of two communities in the state.

Extraction of Sugarcane juice to make jaggery

For making the Kaju Fanny

Weights and Measures

Farming Equipment

Women doing their Daily Chores on a Chair

An Old Telephone

Stone Crushers that added their own taste to the chutneys

The beautifully designed museum has a central courtyard that is occupied by displays and a water pond that has fishes living in it. Various rooms are filled with aesthetically arranged items. Some of them you might have seen in your grandmother’s house. In fact I felt a tinge of sadness when I saw the Banta Bottle or the bottle with a marble stuck in its neck as a museum piece which was just a couple of decades ago was pretty much a part of growing up.

Soda Bottles

Visiting these kinds of museums across the country tells me that all the communities in different corners of the country were bound by a common thread in the way they lived, the way they lived what would today be called ‘100% Organic living’ and the commonalities in their tools, equipments and daily wares.

A Well Adorned Cradle for the Kids

The museum collection is huge, this is a small sample of what I saw.

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