Shivranjana Rathore and Tino De Sa’s edited ‘Appetite’ is the Goan Anthology That Refuses to Sell You a Postcard

There is a particular kind of silence that descends over a place when it starts being talked about more than it is lived in. Goa has been in that silence for some time, buried under resort brochures, Instagram reels, and the confident opinions of people who arrived last season and already know what the place means. Launched recently at the Goa Arts and Literature Festival, Appetite: New Writing from Goa, assembled by the Goa Writers collective and edited by Shivranjana Rathore and Tino De Sa, breaks that silence not by arguing back, but by doing something more subversive: getting very, very close.

The anthology gathers poems, stories, and essays from writers who live in or have lived in Goa, all members of Goa Writers, founded in 2006 with the stated purpose of encouraging "more and better writing from and about Goa." Its organising frame is hunger: literal, political, erotic, ancestral, spiritual. It is a capacious metaphor, but in the hands of the stronger contributors, it holds.

The Body as the Argument

Rathore, who is also a visual artist whose practice examines constructed versus embodied places, came to this anthology with a precise intellectual investment. She is not interested in hunger as mere metaphor. When we asked her how she thought about hunger as a sensory and political experience in Goa, she told us, "Hunger is desire; it can be grounded and organic, as well as ravenous and greedy. There's hunger that comes from lack, and hunger that exists despite, or due to, excess. For me, the focus is often on what happens when desire operates without accountability."

In the Goan context, she explained, that accountability gap is most visible in land, "Land has long been a vessel of structural power, and within the myth of the construct, it increasingly becomes a commodity. Speculation, accumulation, and greed fuel a hunger that drives displacement, loss, and a place-making that excludes."

The anthology's instinct, then, is to counter this grand abstraction with the specific weight of bodily experience. Rachana Patni's essay on being a vegetarian Jain finding her footing in a fish-and-pork state is one of the collection's quiet revelations. What opens as a near-comedy. "I was delighted. This was surely a sign that God loved me," she writes upon finding vegetarian food in a Panaji park, expands into something genuinely searching. On appetite and Goa itself, she writes, “Appetite can be divine, and it can be inhuman. It can sometimes be an insatiable urge to consume. For example, the appetite for Goa itself, for its lands and rivers and the views it offers... let's contain our appetite for Goa so her may make stone soups of its red earth till eternity."

It is a passage that earns its ambition, moving from the personal to the planetary without losing either.

Messiness as Method

Tino De Sa, a writer shortlisted for major international literary prizes, is characteristically direct about what the anthology is doing and why its refusal to simplify is the point. When we asked him how collections like Appetite challenge how Indian writing in English is curated abroad, he was unambiguous, "An anthology like Appetite moves away from stereotypical ideas about Goa, both idealised and negative. It pricks the myth of an exoticised, one-dimensional Goa, that is the product of either tourist brochures on the one hand, or Bollywood films on the other. The real Goa is somewhat different; beautiful and precious, but also alive and human, and Appetite presents it honestly, warts and all."

The anthology earns this description, mostly. Salil Chaturvedi's poem, illustrated by Rathore, plays the erotic and the culinary off each other with a teasing lightness that the book accommodates without flinching. Vivek Menezes's introductory essay on the history of Goa Writers is erudite and generously proportioned, tracing the group's two-decade arc from a catalysing 2006 workshop to the Goa Arts and Literature Festival, which it has co-hosted for fifteen years.

The collection's honesty extends to the conditions under which it was made. When we asked Rathore about the ethics of documenting everyday Goan life from within, she was candid about the hierarchies at work, "Access itself is layered, linguistic, caste-based, class-based, digital, and religious." The anthology remains predominantly anglophone, and while this tension is acknowledged, it is not fully resolved. A Goa that speaks largely in English risks quietly reproducing the hierarchies it sets out to examine, a limitation worth naming precisely because the editors name it themselves.

What Literature Can and Cannot Do

In the weeks before this piece was written, Goans from across the state adopted a People's Charter in Panaji, demanding stronger protections for hills, lakes, and cultural identity against mounting development pressure. We asked both editors how they see the anthology speaking to those debates. Their answer was carefully, honestly bound, "Literature is not only a mirror of society, it is also a window into what might be possible. In Appetite, many essays and stories reflect the tensions around development, environment, and cultural identity, but they do so without prescribing a single solution and that is what makes the collection both engaging and socially relevant."

Rathore went further on the question of what anthologies like this one are ultimately for, "In a 'reels era,' literature still creates archives, holding memory, knowledge, and affect. Appetite invites readers to listen, remember, and resist flattening Goa into a postcard image or object. Sometimes, that is where resistance begins."

That is not a small claim. But Appetite, at its best, makes it feel earned, not through argument, but through the accumulated weight of people eating, longing, remembering, resenting, adapting, and occasionally just laughing. That is what a place actually is. And it is what this book, despite its unevenness, manages to hold.