Designing the cover of The Last Prabhu

Designing the cover of The Last Prabhu

How did the cover of The Last Prabhu come to be?

There are several elements that I wanted the cover to reflect:
   1. Migration: This is represented by the image of the pilgrim that takes up a big amount of space on the cover. The book is a story of the migration of my ancestors and I wanted this to be clearly represented. The image in my mind is that of a group of pilgrims who migrated all the way from the North of India to Goa, bringing with them their language, culture, religion, beliefs, deities, food habits.
   2. DNA: The primary instrument to research the migration of my ancestors was a deep and thorough analysis of my DNA with state of the art tests. This is reflected by the DNA double helix. In fact, there are 3 of these images to reflect the fact that they mutate and thus enable us to discover the migration patterns.
   3. Ancient documents: These are represented by an image of a page from the minutes of a meeting of Aldona’s comunidade written in the Goykannada script that can be seen in the background.
   4. Goa: At the left hand corner, I have placed a photo of a typical Goan window with a view of the river made in the ancestral home of my wife in Badem, Salvador do Mundo. Another element that represents Goa is the color of the cover, that reminds the reader of Goa’s red laterite soil that my ancestors first treaded when they arrived in Goa.

   The cover was designed by collating these 4 images using the photoshop programme Affinity Photo.