Goan tiatr was born in Bombay, with the first tiatr, ‘Italian Bhurgo’ by Lucasinho Ribeiro, staged on
April 17, 1892 at Alfred Theatre, Bombay. However, Joao Agostinho Fernandes was
the first to write original scripts for tiatrs on themes highlighting
injustices in Goan society. These gems that make up the history of tiatr would
have been long forgotten had they not been written about in newspapers and
magazines of the late 1800s. As the demand for Konkani among students is increasing,
there is also an interest in the history of tiatr, which led the Goa State
Central Library to publish a book for research on tiatr, titled, ‘Tiatr Machi’
– an anthology of articles on Tiatr’. The first edition of the book was
released last June and the second edition will be published in the coming
months. Goa State Central Library is working on five volumes of ‘Tiatr Machi’.
The first edition of ‘Tiatr Machi’
comprised 225 articles in English and Portuguese, while the second edition will
have 225 articles in English, Portuguese, Devanagari Konkani and Marathi and
Romi Konkani. The team behind this book is Curator of the library, Carlos
Fernandes, Prashant Phadte and Vrinda Gadekar. Carlos was the Member Secretary
of the 125th Anniversary of Tiatr Celebration Committee and realised the need
for a research on tiatr articles.
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“The second edition is 90 per cent ready
and we worked on the book focusing on researchers and students who are pursuing
PhD in Tiatr. A hundred and twenty-five years is a long period of time and it
was a tedious task to research and get the articles dating back to that era.
Since I was the Member Secretary of the 125th Anniversary of Tiatr Celebration
Committee, I found it very interesting to know about this history and it was a
necessity for the students who wanted to do research. There has been an
increase in the number of students pursuing this subject and it decreases their
time going through all the papers and magazines,” says Carlos.
“We constantly get requests for the sale
of the book but since it is an in-house publication, those interested in the
information can request for a scanned copy either on a CD or an email,” adds
Carlos.
Prashant Phadte works in the Circulation Department at the
library, heading 12 staff members. “The articles are from publications like
West Coast Times and the Portuguese edition of oHeraldo. The process included
converting images to text, comparing it character to character. The images had
to be cleaned up to be readable. For the second edition, we have categorised
the articles with author, title, publication and year, making it easier for
reference. It took us nearly a year to complete the book. The articles include
tiatrist profiles, interviews, biographies, tiatr releases and award functions,”
says Prashant.
Since
2010, Goa State Central Library has published 19 in-house publications on
various subjects including, ‘Bye-Laws of Devasthan/Temples in Goa’ available in
Official Gazette, Indo-Portuguese Review, ‘Yaditale Goem’ (Index of Photographs
available in Rare Books), ‘Villages of North and South Goa’, ‘Germans in
India’, ‘Portuguese Civil Procedure Code’, ‘British Cemetery’ and ‘British
Occupation in Goa’ and Bibliography of articles published on various
publications and dailies.
