The Portuguese Ruckus in India
By Syed Osman Sher
Mississauga, Canada
The first European explorer to reach India by sea was Vasco da Gama of Portugal. His voyage, linking Europe and Asia, was destined to initiate a long era of European colonialism in India and Asia. Dispatched by the Portuguese monarch to explore trade and expand cultural relations, and backed by the Papal Bull styling him as ‘Lord of the Navigation, Conquest and Commerce of Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia and India’, Vasco da Gama arrived at the port of Calicut in May 1498 on a small flagship San Gabriel.
At that time, Calicut was a port thriving with the activities of Hindu, Arab, African, and Chinese merchants and seamen, who purchased pepper and ginger of Malabar and gave in return gold, ivory, silks, and jewels. On his arrival, Vasco da Gama at once acknowledged the sovereignty of Vijyanagar under whose tutelage the Zamorin (Chief) was ruling at Calicut. He informed the Zamorin that he had come to seek ‘Christian and spices’. By all counts, it was a very successful venture. It gave birth not only to the Portuguese empire in India, but also opportunities to the Portuguese to give enormous boost to their trade, to persecute the Muslims, the Hindus, and the Christians alike, and to spread their religion and culture in the area under their control. Vasco da Gama did find Christians in Malabar—the so-called Syrian community--- who were peacefully settled there for more than a thousand years. Surprisingly and to his dismay, he also found the Arabs. The Portuguese, who were fighting the Moors in North Africa, thus found themselves entering India with the same zeal and hostility towards the Muslims. Unconnected with the Muslim sultanates to the north, the Arabs were favoured by the Hindu Zamorin, who depended heavily upon their commercial activity. He also had links with the Sultan of Egypt, whose well-gunned vessels came to the aid of the Zamorin at the first sign of Portuguese aggressiveness. The expedition failed to take Calicut but it was successful in establishing its first small stronghold at nearby Cochin.
When Portugal resounded with the news of 3000 per cent profitability of da Gama's trade, an armada of ships was immediately assembled. It sailed under the command of Pedro Alvarez Cabral in March 1500. On reaching Calicut, he forced the Zamorin, in a show of strength, to sign a treaty of peace and friendship with Portugal. This friendly Indo-Portuguese collaboration resulted in a long period of bitter conflict and hatred. Soon after leaving Calicut, Cabral plundered a Muslim ship laden with spices. In retaliation, the Muslims attacked the Portuguese factory and killed all of them. Vasco da Gama returned with a fleet of fifteen heavily armed ships in 1502 and blasted the port until it was all but reduced to rubble. Then he captured several Muslim vessels and cut off the hands, ears, and noses of some eight hundred Moorish seamen, and sent the lot to the zamorin’s palace for “his highness’s curry”.
In 1509, Alfonso Albuquerque was deputed as the Captain General to work as the custodian of Portuguese interests in the East. He was to become the master architect of Portugal’s Indian empire. He was “a strategist of no mean vision and a religious fanatic whose hatred of Islam was almost as great as his knowledge of the Indian Ocean”. The first important act of his masterly command was to wrest control of the strategic Goa in 1510 from the sultan of Bijapur. He then forced the sultan of Gujerat to cede Diu to the Portuguese. In 1511, he took control of Malacca in the East Indies after a hard-fought battle, and then of Macao, an island off the Chinese coast. He then established a strategic base at Ormuz at the entrance of the Persian Gulf. He seized Socotra Island to control the traffic and trade from Red Sea. In a masterly move, he made Goa the capital of the Portuguese eastern empire from where the Portuguese supervised Malabar and all other strong points. Thus, he achieved full control of the spice trade at its source in the East Indies and on the traffic of the Arabian Sea, which now became subject to a Portuguese licensing system. Goa came to be known as the Golden Babylon of the East.
Goa’s population was mostly Hindu. Albuquerque cut their taxes in half “after doing no less to the bodies of every Muslim soldier and official or overlord he could find.” Viceroy Albuquerque wrote to his king, Dom Manoel, “I do not believe that in all Christendom there will be so rich a King as Your Highness, and therefore, do I urge you, Senhore, to strenuously support this affair of India with men and arms, and strengthen your hold in her, and securely establish your dealings and your factories; and wrest the wealth of India and business from the hands of the Moors.” Albuquerque’s hatred of Islam was so fierce that he dreamed of diverting the Nile in order to dry up Egypt and of stealing the remains of the Prophet from Mecca. In Albuquerque’s imperial regime no Muslim was permitted to hold any office, no matter how humble, though Hindu sipahis were readily employed. In the words of Stanley Wolpert, “Western Europeans learned long before the British arrived how best to exploit the communal conflicts and social divisions within India’s fragmented, pluralistic society”.
In the beginning, the Portuguese concentrated at gaining mastery over the sea, trade, and traffic. They showed no signs of territorial ambition to expand inside India. They maintained very good relations with the ruler of Vijayanagar, Krishnadeva Raya (1509-30), who himself needed a trade outlet from Goa as also a source of military supplies.Vijaynagar was in continuous state of conflict with the Muslim sultanates of the Deccan. The enemy of Muslim powers was a natural ally of Albuquerque; so he warmly solicited the friendship of Vijaynagar. It resulted, temporarily, in non-prosecution of Hindus. Initially, they satisfied their ambitions of infusing Christian culture and of making a permanent presence by inter-marrying and producing a hybrid community of Roman Catholic Portuguese Goans. This community, they thought, would be committed to the Portuguese settlements, and would provide a self-perpetuating garrison. However, their control of the sea irked the Mughal emperors at Delhi and other Muslim rulers, especially because of the tax the Portuguese levied on trade from the port of Surat and on the pilgrim traffic to Makkah. Often they spilled over from the Portuguese settlements and formed communities of their own, which tended towards disorder and piracy. Such incidents, one at Surat at the time of Jahangir in 1613, and the other at Hugli in Shah Jahan’s time in 1632, were suppressed. Percival Spear writes in A History of India, Vol. Two: "In seizing and retaining their strong points they acquired a reputation for cruelty and perfidy 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. In religion they were intolerant to the extent of allowing no Hindu temples in Goa and introducing the Inquisition (1560), both measures which can be regarded as sub-standard from the Indian standpoint, and they advertised this trait in their rough handling of the Syrian Christians of Malabar to secure their submission to Roman supremacy."
In those days, the Protestant and Catholic clergy and governments agreed with each other in holding the belief that it was the prerogative of the local government to dictate the religion of its subjects. Dissenters must migrate or else run the risk of being put to death—probably by being burnt alive. Thus, the number of converts, combined with the offspring of intermarriages (Luso-Indians), made the population of Goa so much Catholic dominated that the Inquisition was introduced there in 1560.
It had appeared that Portuguese trade and power was linked with the prosperity of Vijyanagar. In 1565, the Deccansultanates of Ahmadnagar, Bijapur, Bidar, and Golconda joined together to declare a war against Vijayanagr, which had employed in its army 2000 Turkish cavalrymen. Vijayanagar was reported to have armed nearly a million soldiers in its defense. Even then, it proved no match to the united Muslim force. After the fall of Vijaynagar, the Portuguese were left with the frightening prospect of being kicked out by the newly enriched and emboldened Muslim Sultans of the Deccan. But the Sultans did not drive the Portuguese out of India. After Independence in 1947, the Indian Government entered into talks with the Portuguese Government to relinquish charge of their Indian possessions of Goa, Daman and Diu, but to no avail. Ultimately, they were thrown out by the Independent India in December 1961.
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