Negotiating Economic Blockade: Consumption of Goan classes and masses as portrayed in local press of the 1950s

Abstract

Soon after India’s independence in1947, the Government demanded that Portugal handover the Portuguese territories on the western coast. However, the Portuguese Prime Minister Salazar refused to oblige from his stated policy that the territories were not colonies, but an integral part of metropolitan Portugal, which were renamed ‘Overseas Provinces’. This paper is an attempt to analyst effects of India’s economic blockade on Goa from 1955 to 1961, and its influence on the transformation of food habits of the urban Catholic Goans. I will use content analysis of the local press, supplementing it with ethnographic as well as archival records.