Song Of Goa Crown Of Mandos
- Author: Dr Jose Pereira, Micael Martins, Antonio Costa
- Publisher: Broadway Publishing House
- ISBN: 9789380739038
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Rs. 450.00
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Of all the world's civilizations only one, the Western, has succeeded in creating the framework for fostering the unity of mankind. Originating in Western Europe, it almost entirely supplanted the cultures and civilizations of America and Australia. Africa and Asia continue to proclaim their loyalty to their traditional ways of life, but they do so through the use of concepts borrowed from the West. They have all adopted the Western institution of the nation state, and their artists, writers and musicians express themselves in forms created by their Western counterparts. Many African nations conduct their business in European languages, English, French and Portuguese. Only Asia and North Africa have resisted total assimilation, but some of their regions, like Japan, have developed a kind of cultural ambivalence where, on the one hand they excel the West in its own skills, like technology, and on the other, self-consciously maintain a measure of traditional culture. Yet it is nothing that they themselves generated which now unites them -- as for instance Buddhism or Islam -- but only their acceptance of Western ideas and institutions. This westernization of the world, an event of transcendental importance, was initiated by a nation of minuscule proportions, Portugal. The westernization of Asia was begun successfully by the Portuguese and by the Indian converts to their way of life in the even more minuscule land of Goa. It was in Goa that the first (abortive) attempt was made to create a political entity independent of European control, but on the European model, in the Conjuração dos Pintos (Conspiracy of the Pintos, 1787). It was in Goa that was first advanced the rationale for an independent India, by Francisco Luis Gomes (1829-1869), when he declared, in his letter to the French Romantic poet Lamartine in 1861, that India was the cradle of poetry, of philosophy and of history, and today their grave ; that the Indian was the race which composed the Mahabharata and invented chess, a nation which recorded her laws in poems and formulated her politics but was now lying exhausted of all her fecundity, in obscurity amid the dazzling brilliance of her own glory. Exclaimed Gomes at the end of his letter: I demand liberty and light for India! It was in Goa that a successful synthesis of European and Asian styles of architecture was first achieved, in the grand structures of Indian Baroque, some of the best of which still survive in the former capital of Portuguese India, Velha Goa. It was in Goa that European literary forms were first embodied in any Asian language, the language of Goa, Konkani. And it was in Goa that the first symbiosis of any Asian tradition of music with the European was realized, in Goan Song, of which the Mando is the consummation. This book gives a detailed overview and exhaustive coverage of this form of Goan music -- the mando.
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