At a time when discourses around land in nineteenth century Goa were still incommensurate with each other, delaying the moment when agricultural land would circulate as a commodity, the world in the novel too, was not a homogenized or transitive social space. Os Maharatas, written in Portuguese by Leopoldo Dias, and published in 1894, complicates the relationship of the novel to the history of capital not only because land was not fully incorporated into an economy of exchange, but because capital had differentially historicized some forms of property and social organization as a remnant of another time. The essay suggests that the early novel in India be read alongside the fluctuating dominance of discourses of knowledge production, particularly Os Maharatas, which is embedded in a moment in which economic history, myths of origin, and narratives of castemigration had overlapped though carrying different values as history and ritual entitlement.

       Rochelle Pinto is Research Fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi. Her area of research is 'Land and narrative – the culture of economy in colonial Goa'. She has taught in the Department ofEnglish of the University of Delhi and at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (Bangalore), after completing her PhD from School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS, London) in 2003. Her writings include the book *Between Empires: Print and politics in Goa* (Oxford University Press, 2007) and many articles in journals and edited volumes.