Goa Chitra Museum

Extraordinary ethnographic museum of traditional Goan material culture

Goa Chitra Museum, in the village of Benaulim a couple of kilometres south-west of Margao, is one of the most compelling museums in India — not for its building or its setting (both are modest) but for what it contains. Founder Victor Hugo Gomes collected over 4,000 objects from across Goa: hand tools, ploughs, fishing equipment, pottery, furniture, palanquins, ox-carts, and the accumulated material of Goan agricultural and domestic life over several centuries. The result is less a conventional museum than an attempt to preserve an entire way of life before it vanished.

The collection is divided into three thematic sections: Goa Chitra covers the relationship between Goan people and the land; Goa Chakra presents non-mechanised vehicles from bullock carts to sedan chairs; and Goa Cruti focuses on objects from the Portuguese colonial period. An organic farm on the grounds grows traditional Goan vegetables and spices. The museum is self-funded and entirely the work of one obsessive individual — which gives it an energy that institutional collections rarely have.

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A story
Artist and restorer Victor Hugo Gomes spent nearly a decade travelling across Goa buying objects that were being discarded as villages modernised — farming tools, ox-carts, pottery, liturgical objects, looms, and traps. The result is a collection of over 4,000 artefacts that the Archaeological Survey of India has called the finest contemporary museum in the country. TIME magazine singled out a restored five-metre-tall sugarcane grinder that took two years to reassemble.