Goa’s new heritage craft

The Women@Work group who proudly display their newly acquired skill of recreating small models of Goa’s iconic shell windows.

The array of colourful model windows reflecting the styles of Goa evolved as a creative urge of Sharda Kelkar, who is the daughter of Dr Subhodh Kerkar, the founder of the Museum of Goa.

The resin window souvenirs are exact replicas of the original ones. The form an excellent decorative collection for an interior wall.

The windows are made in two sizes using a fairly eclectic palette.

The handcrafted windows recall the real windows still visible in Goa’s old architecture.

The window with overhanging balconies on upper floors of a home, become favourite places from which elderly ladies watched the world go by. The windows are thus realistic and yet fantastical.

These colours can be reimagined to cause a sensation if made in actual window sizes and attached to an art deco home.

Small and larger sizes offer a price difference for visitors at the Museum of Goa store.

Each little moulded window is painted very similar to but unlike any existing window in an actual home, making them quirky and fun.

These small souvenirs draw tourists’ attention away from Goa’s beaches and offer them a nudge towards Goa’s heritage architecture.

The creative windows kindle a sense of having seen them somewhere before.

Minimal in the use of colour, the sober elegance of the colour palette of this window expresses the mood of the woman who painted it.

The colours used for this window model recollects the vibrant mood of Goa’s popular street festivals.

Terracotta is a common colour on surfaces of buildings, but here the artist brightens her work with a fluorescent green in the space for glass or shells.

Wooden lattice work on window frames required skilled craftsmanship and carpenters of an earlier era.

The depiction of a balcony below the window indicates the window is imagined on an upper floor of a home

To match the originals, the windows are painted in bright and vivid colours, recreating a sense of Indo Portuguese influence.

If a vanished architectural style of Goa can give rise to small mementos, it is being imagined possible to go full circle and reconstruct those old Goan windows, painted in new creative ways, to make history yet again.

On the reverse side of the crafts map of Goa the Dastkari Haat Samiti used a series of clay tiles made in a small shop and tile making establishment found in 2004 in the Fountainhaas locality in Panaji.

Read more about Goa's window modeling here:
- Goa’s Windows: A heritage of shell work
- Museum of Goa: Goa’s history as Art and Inspiration