Damodar Mauzo is one of the finest fiction writers of India today, a fact made doubly significant for the reason that he writes in one of our smallest languages, Konkani. He has been an ardent activist for the Konkani language and literature and indeed written a book-length history of it. He was a vigorous advocate of Goa being declared a full-fledged State when there was talk after its liberation of merging it with Maharashtra. He has also been a fearless champion of free speech. A collection of his essays is titled Ink of Dissent (2019), and when his name was found to be on a hit list of the organization that was charged with killing Gauri Lankesh, Mauzo was given round-the-clock police protection.
The novel with which he rose to prominence was Karmelin (1981),named after its young heroine who is obliged to migrate to a Gulf country to work as a housemaid and is sexually exploited there, a circumstance that Mauzo treated with just indignation as well as humane compassion. It won the Sahitya Akademi award the following year. As his short story collections demonstrate, most notably Teresa’sMan (Eng. tr. 2014; nominated for the Frank O’Connor International award) and The Wait (2022),