One of the very few surviving structures of Goa‘s Muslim era, the Safa Shahouri mosque in the town of Ponda was built in 1560 during the reign of Ibrahim Adilshah, sultan of Bijapur. The photograph below was shot on a serene winter morning in 2007. Notice the Goan touch, such as the tiled roof and…
Arabó is a tiny ward of the village of Dhargal on River Chapora in north Goa. The name, a Goanized form referring to “Arab,” furnishes a clue to its past. Arab merchants sailed here in their dhows in mediæval times trading goods with the locals. It is a blink-and-you-miss-it kind of place, a sleepy outlier…
This is the third and final installment in the Taj Mahal sequence. The Taj is seen at its refulgent best in the moments immediately after sunrise and preceding sundown when the marble glows in the honeyed light of the sun. Outside of these two fleeting windows, the exterior of the monument takes on a flat,…
PS: The muck at the bottom of the pool, the obscene sidewalk, and the uninspiring shrubbery brought to you by the boors of the Indian government (Archaeological Survey of India).
