Goa Trance And The Afterlife Of Empire: A Post-Colonial History

Being from Mumbai, Goa has been the setting of many of my firsts. My first holiday with friends where the sea washed away graduation anxieties. The first time I stayed up through the night, dizzy from laughter. The first time I found myself in the middle of a crowd moving as one — bodies swaying to music that felt hypnotic. And later, the first time I understood how easily pleasure could blur into escape. Goa has always held that duality: liberation and illusion, utopia and excess.

But long before it became India’s party capital, Goa was a Portuguese colony for over four centuries. Its layered history shaped the emergence of a global countercultural sound. Psychedelic trance, or psytrance, absorbed the state’s colonial past, its Catholic-Hindu hybridity, and its entanglement with Western fantasies of the “Orient.”

By the late 1960s, Goa found itself at the tail end of what was called the “hippy trail” — a route stretching from Europe through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, and India, ending where the Arabian Sea meets the red laterite cliffs of Anjuna. Travellers came in search of spiritual freedom, cheap living, and a climate permissive of their indulgences. For many Westerners disillusioned by Vietnam and consumer capitalism, Goa was a blank slate: a place “outside history,” where you could reinvent yourself.

Among them was Eight Finger Eddie, an Armenian-American drifter often credited with 'discovering' Anjuna. He hosted gatherings that were part barter market, part beach jam, and part communal experiment. Acoustic guitars, hand drums, and incense smoke filled the air. The first full moon parties were born as improvised rituals of dislocation — an attempt to build a new kind of community far from the West’s moral economies.

Yet even at this early stage, Goa’s 'freedom' existed within structural asymmetry. The 'freaks', as they called themselves, were mostly white and affluent enough to travel. Locals sold chai, fruit, or food at the fringes of these parties, watching as Westerners danced naked under the moon to music they neither played nor owned. The image of Goa as a spiritual refuge for outsiders began as a mirror of colonial fantasy; a projection of permissiveness onto Indian soil.

By the 1970s, the soundscape of these gatherings shifted. American expatriate Gilbert Levey — better known as Goa Gil — arrived from San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury scene, disillusioned with the drug-fuelled decline of the counterculture. He travelled through Indian holy sites, became a disciple to a Hindu guru, and adopted the ascetic persona of a sadhu. When he began spinning music at Anjuna’s beach gatherings, he fused this newfound spiritualism with the electric pulse of Western experimental music.

Early Goa parties used rock, funk, and psychedelic tracks from the likes of The Grateful Dead, Pink Floyd, and Kraftwerk. But as technology advanced, European DJs arrived with cassette recorders and DAT tapes, bringing electronic body music, acid house, and early techno. These were remixed, stripped of vocals, and elongated into endless rhythmic loops — the skeleton of what would become Goa trance. The technical shift from guitars to synthesisers paralleled a cultural one: from organic communion to mechanised transcendence.

Music was now designed for collective trance. It had a continuous beat of around 140–155 BPM, layered with arpeggiated melodies, sampled mantras, and 'oriental' scales like the Phrygian mode. The sonic vocabulary drew directly from Hindu devotional aesthetics, yet it was produced and circulated largely by European men. The fusion of spiritual motifs with electronic machinery reflected both the utopian ambition of the scene and its orientalist contradictions: the East as a muse, but never as an author.

The Goa of the 1980s and 1990s was an enclave of global counterculture. Posters of Shiva and Om symbols adorned makeshift DJ booths; fluorescent mandalas glowed under blacklight. The parties were "resistance against capitalism and war." To many, dancing for twelve hours straight in a jungle felt like meditation. It was a return to primal unity.

Yet, as cultural geographer Arun Saldanha observes in Psychedelic White, this utopia was profoundly racialised. Goa’s beaches became what he calls a “viscous” racial landscape. They were spaces where white bodies were free to experiment while local brown bodies were confined to labour or spectacle. Western travellers described Goans as “tolerant” and “less Indian,” their Catholic past seen as a sign of approachability. But this tolerance was often imposed rather than reciprocated; parties took place near conservative villages whose residents had little say in how their land or culture was consumed.

By the 1990s, the underground scene had exploded. Record labels in London, Tel Aviv, and Berlin began releasing compilations with names like Project II Trance and Tantrance. Goa’s beaches, once secretive sanctuaries, became international destinations. The music was exported to Europe and re-imported as a commercial sound. Psytrance festivals like Boom (Portugal), VuuV (Germany), and later Sunburn (Goa) institutionalised what had once been anti-institutional.

As the genre globalised, its Indian roots were increasingly aesthetic rather than participatory. Sanskrit chants, sitar samples, and mandalas appeared on album covers, but what had begun as an exchange of ideas had turned into cultural appropriation on an industrial scale.

Still, psytrance retained a peculiar resilience. Its repetitive structure mirrored the cyclicality of Hindu cosmology — birth, death, and rebirth through sound. For many ravers, dancing all night under the stars felt like a pilgrimage, a ritual without a god. The problem was not the trance itself, but the historical amnesia that accompanied it. There was a refusal to see how this “freedom” relied on other people’s silence.

The story of Goa trance is about the ongoing afterlife of empire in culture. The hippies’ desire for authenticity echoed the colonial anthropologist’s search for the 'primitive'. Their spiritual quests often displaced local spiritualities, substituting imported mysticism for lived religion. The “Goa state of mind” — marketed today as carefree hedonism — was built on centuries of dispossession.

Yet, it would be reductive to dismiss the entire culture as exploitation. For some Indian artists, psytrance became a medium of self-expression and reclamation. Contemporary producers from Pune, Bangalore, and Goa remix the genre’s global lineage, infusing it with Indian classical instrumentation and environmental themes. In this new iteration, psytrance becomes about re-rooting.

When I return to Goa now, the parties feel both familiar and unrecognisable. The beaches are lined with resorts; what was once an act of resistance has become a brand. Yet there remains a trace of that original longing — the urge to transcend.

Perhaps that is why Goa continues to draw people from around the world. It exposes how conditional our freedoms are. In its post-colonial afterlife, psytrance shows us that utopias are built atop other people’s worlds.

As the bassline loops and the sun rises over Anjuna, it’s easy to forget that every beat carries an echo of Western fantasies. To dance in Goa is to move within that history. Does trance still liberate? Why did it ever liberate to begin with?

If you'd like to learn more about the Goa trance movement, check out Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race by Arun Saldanha.

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