The Better India · 16 hours ago

How Libia Lobo Sardesai Used Radio in Goa’s Fight Against Portuguese Rule

At 102, Libia Lobo Sardesai remembers with perfect clarity the day she and her future husband Vaman flew over a newly liberated Goa, raining down leaflets that read, "Rejoice! Rejoice! Brothers and sisters. Goa is free after 450 years." For six years prior, the two had lived hidden in jungle highlands at 2,000 meters, broadcasting resistance through a clandestine radio station while leeches drew their blood and the threat of capture never lifted - "we shed so much blood," she recalls, "though we were never shot by a gun." The Portuguese military would later document that their Voice of Freedom "carries a sharp stiletto" and was "the only voice which was hurting us at close range." What makes Libia's story quietly astonishing is not the scale of her courage but its source - a 12-year-old girl watching patriots fall beneath police horses in Bombay, not yet knowing the word "colonialism," but understanding, with the clarity only injustice can produce, that something was wrong and that she would spend her life saying so. Decades later, surrounded by medals she has lost count of, she tells the whole story unprompted - the chronology intact, every page a turner - as if history itself has been waiting for someone to simply ask.