Panaji

Panaji began as a fishing settlement at the mouth of the Mandovi, guarded from the early 16th century by the riverside fortress of the Adil Shahi sultans of Bijapur, which the Portuguese took with Old Goa in 1510 and converted into the governor's residence. For two centuries the town was a landing point and customs post for the capital nine kilometres upriver, and little more.

Old Goa's decline changed that. Epidemics, silting of the river and the shift of trade left the capital depopulated, and from the 1750s the viceroys began spending their time at Panaji. In 1843 it was formally made the capital of Portuguese India under the name Nova Goa. The 19th century built the city that is visible today: the reclamation of marshland behind the waterfront, the Campal promenade, the causeway to Ribandar, the church square, and the Fontainhas quarter, settled by a returning expatriate and laid out in narrow lots that now form the Latin Quarter.

Indian forces took Goa, Daman and Diu in 1961, ending 451 years of Portuguese rule. Goa was governed as a union territory, with Panaji as its capital, and in 1987 became India's twenty-fifth state; the same year Konkani was recognised as its official language, after a long campaign and a 1967 referendum that rejected merger with Maharashtra. Since statehood the city has gained a state assembly complex across the river at Porvorim, the Konkani theatre and arts complex at Campal, offshore casino boats on the Mandovi and, since 2004, the annual home of India's international film festival.

Panaji is a Konkani city with a Portuguese inheritance that shows in its buildings, surnames, church calendar and music. Catholic and Hindu communities live side by side, and the year runs through both: Carnival and Lent, Easter and the December feast of St Francis Xavier at Old Goa on one side; Ganesh Chaturthi, Diwali and the spring Shigmo processions on the other. Village brass bands, choirs and the Goan tradition of church music are strong, and mando, a slow sung dance form in Konkani that grew among Goan Catholic families in the 19th century, is performed at competitions and weddings.

The state's musical reach is wider than its size. Goan musicians trained in Western classical and dance-band traditions supplied Bombay's film studios for decades, and small live venues in and around the capital still work in jazz, fado-influenced song and Konkani pop. Tiatr, Konkani-language musical theatre with songs and topical comedy, plays to full houses at the city's auditoriums and is followed closely by Goans at home and abroad.

Daily manners are unhurried by Indian urban standards, and the long Goan lunch break is real. Susegad, from the Portuguese sossegado, is the word Goans use, half proudly and half ironically, for a contented, unhurried temperament. Visitors are expected to dress modestly away from the beaches and to keep quiet in churches, and the city's conservation lobby is vocal about protecting the old quarters from redevelopment.

Panaji is small: about 114,000 people in the city and its immediate suburbs at the 2011 census, with the wider conurbation reaching across the river to Porvorim and along the coast. It is the seat of the state government, and administration is the biggest employer, alongside tourism, education, shipping and services. The state assembly sits at Porvorim, and the courts, secretariat offices and the university a little way out at Taleigão shape the working population.

The rhythm of the day is coastal and unhurried. Markets and bakeries open early, the poder delivers bread by bicycle twice a day, offices break for a long lunch, and the riverfront and Miramar fill in the cooler evening. School and office traffic makes the bridges busy, but the old quarter stays quiet, and much of the housing in Fontainhas and Altinho is still in the hands of long-standing families.

Current issues are those of a small capital under pressure: the volume of tourism and its effect on prices and water supply, mining and its legacy in the interior, the casino boats moored on the Mandovi and their place in public life, the conversion of old houses into shops and guesthouses, and the drift of young Goans abroad — many hold Portuguese passports through descent and work in Britain or the European Union, sending money home.

Goan cooking is coastal, sour and coconut-rich, and the capital eats it in two traditions. The everyday meal is xit kodi, rice with fish curry, made with coconut, chillies, tamarind or kokum, and served with a fried mackerel, kingfish or pomfret steak, pickled vegetables and papad. Prawn balchão, hot and vinegary, and ambot tik, a sour and spicy fish curry, belong to the same table, as does xacuti, chicken or mutton in a dark sauce of roasted coconut and spices.

The Catholic kitchen adds the Portuguese inheritance: pork vindaloo, sharpened with palm vinegar and garlic, sorpotel of pork and liver that improves for days, chouriço sausages stuffed with vinegar and chilli, and cafreal, green chicken with coriander and green chilli. Bread is a Goan distinction in a rice-eating country — poee, pao and kankonn are baked in wood ovens and delivered by the poder on a bicycle horn round.

Sweets are elaborate: bebinca, a layered coconut and egg pudding baked one layer at a time, dodol of jaggery and coconut, bolinhas biscuits and the Christmas tray of kuswar. To drink, there is feni, distilled from cashew fruit in the spring or from coconut sap, drunk with lime and soda, and urrak, the young first distillation, sold only in the cashew season. Ros omelette, an omelette in chicken-coconut gravy with pao, is the standard late-night street food.