Fifty years later, a frank and personal appraisal of the people and events that went into Goa’s anti-colonial struggle against the Portuguese struggle Goa-born Suresh Kanekar spent his childhood in Panaji and mapusa. He was doing his M.A. in Pune at the age of twenty when he read about Pundalik Gaitonde’s arrest in February 1954, which spurred him into joining the freedom movement. He says now, “My decision to join the Goa freedom movement was a matter of escapism at worst and romanticism at best, with hardly any idealism or patriotism involved. Conceivably, in my case, patriotism was the *first* refuge of the scoundrel. I became seriously committed to the freedom movement only after I was arrested and put behind bars.” He was arrested in 1954 and sentenced to five years of imprisonment. He was released in 1959 and then arrested again in 1960, when he was kept in police custody for twenty-nine days. After the 1961 Liberation, he was briefly a member of the executive committee of the National Congress (Goa) — which had been converted from an anti-colonial campaigning group into a regular political party — along with better known stalwarts like Pundalik Gaitonde, Peter Alvares, Gopal Kamat, and Pandurang Mulgaonkar. This memoir includes a view of Goa during his childhood in the 1930s and 1940s, his experiences in the freedom struggle, and his departure from Goa after Liberation for a life i academics in India and the US. It is notable for a fascinating account of his long stay in the military prison of Aguada, and an equally riveting description of the formal Portuguese surrender to the Indian army in 1961, of which he was one of the few witnesses. His post-Liberation experiences as a citizen of free India are perhaps less dramatic but no less thought-provoking.
