ABSTRACT
The novel Os Maharatas, published in 1894 in Goa and written in Portuguese, is the unfolding of a tale narrated by an old man embittered by the times in which he finds himself. Os Maharatas quite explicitly depicts the commoditization of agricultural land as a degraded contemporary offshoot or a corruption that developed out of the assumed antiquity of the comunidade system, in which land was assumed to be inalienable from the time it was settled by its original dwellers. The origin story mutually sacralized the rights and relationship of the temple and the members of the village over village land. Os Maharatas naturalized the truism about the timelessness of the comunidade by merging it with its corollary, the idea of an original settler community and their rights over land, a notion that was invested in settled agriculture as a sign of the beginning of civilization.
