None of the standard Indian dates apply here, because the colonial power was Portugal and it arrived in 1510. Opposition to it therefore has a two-hundred-year prehistory before anything comparable exists elsewhere in India, and it is not nationalism. The conspiracy of the Pintos in 1787 was a plot by Goan Catholic priests and army officers whose stated grievance was exclusion from senior appointments in the church and the administration. The Rane risings of the nineteenth century came out of a hill taluk that had been annexed only decades before and never governed easily. Organised nationalist politics arrived late, was legal and journalistic before it was anything else — a Goan press in Portuguese and Konkani from 1900, and a self-determination resolution moved in the Legislative Council in 1930 — and much of it was organised from Bombay rather than from inside the territory, because the territory did not permit it. It became a mass campaign only in 1946, when a meeting held in defiance of a ban on assembly at Margao on 18 June led to arrests that continued through the rest of the year. Portuguese rule in Goa continued past the independence of British India in 1947.
The conspiracy of the Pintos1787
A plot by Goan Catholic priests, army officers and members of the Pinto family of Candolim to overthrow Portuguese rule in Goa. The grievance recorded in the accounts is the exclusion of Goan clergy from senior church appointments and of Goans from the administration. The plan was disclosed to the authorities before it could be acted on.
Outcome: Forty-seven people were arrested, among them seventeen priests and seven army officers, and fifteen were executed at Panjim.
The Rane risings of Satarithrough the 19th century, the last in 1912
Repeated risings by the Rane chiefs of Satari, a hill taluk annexed with the New Conquests in the 1780s, against Portuguese authority in the taluk. Standard accounts count fourteen local revolts against Portuguese rule in Goa across this period.
Outcome: Each was ended by suppression or by a negotiated settlement, and the taluk was never brought under close administration.
The civil disobedience campaign of 194618 June – November 1946
Ram Manohar Lohia and Julião Menezes addressed a gathering of six or seven hundred people at the maidan in Margao in defiance of a Portuguese ban on public meetings. Both were arrested at the venue and the crowd was dispersed with a baton charge. Lohia was put on a train to Castle Rock and expelled from the territory; Menezes was released the next day.
Outcome: Further meetings were held at Margao on 20 and 30 June and satyagrahas followed in October and November. More than fifteen hundred people were arrested in the course of the year. Tristão de Bragança Cunha was arrested on 17 July 1946, court-martialled and sentenced to eight years in the fortress of Peniche in Portugal, the first civilian in Goa tried by a military tribunal.