What happened to
India when the Portuguese arrived?
European interest in India has persisted since classical times and for
very cogent reasons. Europe had much to steal from India such as spices,
textiles and other oriental products. The best classical accounts are in
fact the commercial ones. When direct contact was lost with the fall of
Rome and the rise of the Muslims, the trade was carried on through
middlemen. In the late Middle Ages it increased with the increasing
prosperity of Europe. It should be remembered that the spice trade was
not solely a luxury trade at that time. Spices were needed to preserve
meat through the winter (cattle had to be slaughtered in late autumn
through lack of winter fodder) and to combat the taste of decay. Wine,
in the absence of ancient or modern methods of maturing, had to be
'mulled' with spices. This trade suffered two threats in the later
Middle Ages. There was the threat of Mongol and Turkish invasion which
interfered with the land routes and threatened to engulf the sea route
through Egypt, and there was the threat of monopoly shared between the
Venetians and Egyptians.
In 1510 Affonso de
Albuquerque captured the island of Goa on the west coast of India from
the Sultan of Bijapur and made it the capital of the Portuguese eastern
empire. Its strong points besides Goa were Socotra off the Red Sea (he
could not take Aden), Ormuz in the Persian Gulf, Diu in Gujrat, Malacca,
the entrepot for the Far East and the spice trade in the East Indies,
and Macao in China. The function of Goa was to supervise Malabar, to
control the pilgrim traffic to Mecca as well as the general trade to
Egypt, Iraq and Persia, and of Malacca to control the East Indian spices
at their source.
However, the Portuguese
irked some of the Mughal and preceding rulers because of the toll they
took of the trade from the port of Surat and the pilgrim traffic. In
seizing and retaining their strong points they acquired a reputation for
cruelty and peridy because their practice on both these points was below
the current Indian standard. They were deeply impregnated with the idea
that no faith need be kept with an infidel. It was from this period that
the word feringi (lit.farangi, frank) acquired the opprobrium of which
echoes may still be heard today. However, the Mughal Emperor, Jahangir
admired their pictures and had them copied. Emperor Akbar listened with
interest to Jesuit Father's discourses. The New Testament was translated
into Persian.
However, during the whole
of the 16th century the Portuguese disputed with the Muslims the
supremacy of the Indian seas, and the antagonism between Christianity
and Islam became gradually more intense. In 1519, Ferdinand Magellan, a
Portuguese navigator commanded the first expedition to sail around the
world. In the Collins Encyclopaedia it is written that Magellan set sail
to check the power of Muslim navy and fleet that was dominant. In 1560,
the Portuguese being intolerant in religion, introduced the Inquisition
with all its horrors. This was regarded as sub-standard from the Indian
standpoint, advertising this trait in their rough handling of Syrian
Christians of Malabar to secure their submission to the Catholic faith.
Socially the policy of
Albuquerque in encouraging mixed marriages had important results. His
object was to rear a population possessing Portuguese blood and imbued
with Portuguese Catholic culture who would be committed by race and
taste to the Portuguese settlements and so form a permanent
self-perpetuating garrison. The result was the race long known as Luso-Indians
and now as Goansese or Goans. They are mainly Indian in blood, Catholic
in religion, and partially western in outlook. In recent times, they
have spread all over India as traders and professionals, a less
successful version of the Parsis. (Of all the Asians in Britain, a
majority of whom are Muslim, the first Asian MP had to be a Roman
Catholic of Goanese descent, Keith Vaz).
Some Portuguese words
have even crept into the Urdu language such as the names of items for
furniture (mayze for desk, almaari for cupboard/wardrobe). Also vindaloo
(curry) is part Portuguese and part Urdu: vian is Portuguese for meat
and aloo is the Urdu for potato - thus we have meat and potato curry.
The Portuguese were soon
followed by European rivals like the French, Dutch and British. Rivalry
between the Dutch and English resulted in the Dutch East India Company
"winning" Southeast Asia and Indonesia (known to Europeans as the East
Indies); and the British East India Company having to settle for
"second-best", that is India. |
Europeans, the Portuguese were the first to establish themselves
in India and the last of the Europeans to leave. They arrived as early as
1498 via the ocean route discovered by Vasco-da-Gama.
