Goan Literature ROBBER BARON OR HERO ? Review of Vasco da Gama book The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama REVIEWED BY Madhavan K Palat There could be three ways of looking at Vasco da Gama's advent to India. One is Indo-centric, on the assumption of an India, so dear to us, that existed in the 16th century as well, or for that matter, for all the successive five millennia. To the periphery of this India came outsiders on sundry missions; some of them, to our considerable chagrin, penetrated to our hearts (and regrettably, even our minds). The most important of these in recent times came from the West, that is Europe. In such a story Vasco da Gama should by rights be the villainous harbinger of colonialism. Another approach can be called Euro-centric. This is the sage of Westner expansion that every European schoolchild is reared on. An energy seems to radiate from a European centre and reorders the rest of the world around it. In such an account, Vasco da Gama is resplendent hero, far-sighted statesman, doughty warrior, pious Christian, shrewd businessman and bearer of modernity to the stagnant non-European world. He has been apotheosized in many texts, beginning with Luis Vaz de Camoes who composed the *Lusiades* to show how da Gama overcame the forces of nature and much else to conquer the world. Another example is Diogo do Couto's *Treatise of Gama* produced to the order of Francisco da Gama, one of the viceroys of Goa, to celebrate the dynasty and to compete with a similar feat by Alfonso de Albuquerque's son. Yet another approach can be labelled, for want of a more elegant term, Indian Ocean-centric. It is focussed on the universe of the Indian Ocean and its littoral, from the East African coast, the Persian Gulf, down and up the Indian coasts, and into the South China Sea, beyond which lies the Pacific. Normally, we treat a landmass as a unit and the ocean as a medium of transit. But the cultures on the littoral as constituted by the ocean may well be conceived as a unit by itself. Fernand Braudel demonstrated the fertile possibilities of this idea in his masterpiece on the Mediterranean, and inspired Kirit Chaudhury to produce similar work on the Indian Ocean. In fiction, Amitav Ghosh experimented with it in his *In An Antique Land*. Within this genre, Vasco da Gama would be just another denizen, trader or pirate; but, as in the Indo-centric account, his advent would in fact be an irruption that violated the stable rules of intercourse over this expanse by subordinating its sovereignty to a European colonialism. The ocean-centric story, like the Indo-centric one, does not quite make the grade since 'the centre' is relocated to the periphery. For this reason perhaps, or independently for more pragmatic purposes, Sanjay Subrahmanyam has chosen the Euro-centric approach. It is especially interesting to find an Indian who is not an emigre (despite long research spells abroad) writing a Euro-centric history of Europe. Nor is it simply another Euro-centric account of India. To set himself apart, the author has provided a vignette of the Government of India's version of national history from a textbook produced by the National Council of Educational Research and Training. Owing to the poverty -- or rather the colonial mindset of our educational system -- the official textbook ends up endorsing in its entirety the European myth-making industry around Vasco da Gama. Sanjay Subrahmanyam has effortlessly avoided falling into this trap. Like Indian creative writing in English, this is an Indian's perspective of the history of Europe. If it is Euro-centric, it is not because of any colonial inadequacy, but perhaps because that is the only way European history beyond the regions of Arab and Ottoman conquest can possibly be written. Other perspectives may indeed be possible, and an Indo-centric history of Europe might well be written; but neither has one been attempted nor yet brought to fruition. Ironically, one of the few Indians who had mastered a branch of European history has chosen to adopt a Euro-centric position. It is worth bearing this in mind in the 50th year of our Independence, 500 years after Vasco da Gama's landing on 'our' shores. (Although the Samudiri Raja of Calicut might have bristled at the thought of anybody outside his domain claiming this land as 'theirs'.) This is then a biography set against two backgrounds -- the ceaseless intrigue in Portuguese court politics, and the strategies of domination of the Indian Ocean from an Indian base. Strange as it might appear, in this account India is strictly marginal, noticed marginally more than Hormuz, Aden, Safavid Iran, Mamluk Egypt, and the Ottoman Empire. What did Manuel, the king of Portugal, imagine he was up to when he ordered this expedition in 1497? He was a megalomaniac with a messianic dream. He wished to complete the European Crusades and the Iberian *Reconquista* (driving out Arab power from the peninsular) with a final victory over Islam at Jerusalem and Mecca. He hoped to establish a great Christian empire to accomplish this task, expecting the assistance of Christians eastward of the Muslim countries. (An old European Christian superstition, derived from scattered information about Nestorian Christians in Central Asia, held that there were Christians beyond the Muslims who might join hands with their western bretheren to batter the Muslims in between.) This was the basis of the legend of Prester John, the Christian potentate somewhere in the East. To Portuguese kings, a Prester John in Central Asia was useless; but quick-witted scribes and travellers had summarily transferred him to Ethiopia, which was after all Christian and made better strategic sense. So Vasco da Gama went in search of Christians, not merely pepper; assuming that every non-Muslim in India must have once been Christian -- this despite the very non-Christian comportment of the Samudiri Raja and the pagan architecture and rituals of temples in Kerala. How was Vasco da Gama chosen? Hwere we are plunged into the dense web of Portuguese intrigue and factional politics which the author seems to revel in considering the astonishing detail with which he treats it. Joao II, Manuel's predecessor and brother-in-law, was the first 'absolutist' monarch of Portugal -- the kind that mushroomed in 15th century Europe, be it Louis XI in France, Henry VII in England, the Catholic Monarchs in Spain or the princely despots in Germany who were shortly to take advantage of the Lutheran Reformation to this end. But Joao II had no idea that he was founding the modern state: he only knew for certain that he was grabbing power for himself. Like all dynasts, he then sought to manipulate the succession, this time in favour of his illegitimate son Jorge; but the Pope rejected his appeal for legitimization. Therefore Manuel had to succeed him, no matter how much Joao deplored it. He consoled himself then by making Jorge Master of the Orders of Santiago and of Avis, leaving instructions in his will that he be made Master of the Order of Christ and Duke of Coimbra. He was ensuring such vast powers to Jorge as to amount to a feudal challenge to the absolutism of the Crown and therewith undoing his own 'foundation of the modern state'. Jorge enjoyed also the support of the powerful Almeida clan. Manuel had to acquiesce to most of Joao's arrangements but he managed to subvert the appointment of Jorge to the mastership of the Order of Christ and delay for well over a decade the dukedom of Coimbra. Vasco da Gama's family sprang from the lesser nobility and lived off the Order of Santiago. Thus, although our hero and the new king belonged to opposing factions, he was the one chosen to head the expedition. Manuel's Council was wary of his delusions of grandeur. The majority of them preferred the humdrum plunder and piracy along the northern and western coast of Africa. Manuel was in a minority and he was king in an as yet late feudal state with military orders and powerful nobles asserting exclusive jurisdictions independent of the Crown. He could do nothing but compromise. Hence the offer to a member of the other faction -- Vasco da Gama. Vasco da Gama, just 28 years old in 1497, had already distinguished himself in skirmishes and warfare, although evidence about this is scanty. But Manuel took care to be niggardly by assigning him a mere three ships for such a long voyage into uncharted seas. Thus, it was a typical compromise solution for something in it for everyone. What then was the ideological context of the move? Twenty years ago, the author would have been attacked for not presenting it as another event in the eternal transition from feudalism to capitalism. But now he may securely pass it off as a moment in the final contest between feudal oligarchs and the centralizing absolutism of the modern state. Manuel, like Joao II and Joao III before and after him, was a centralizing monarch, but powerful feudal autonomies remained as yet in the form of the military orders. The Crown had already asserted control over them by 1420 to the extent of appointing masters from the princes of the blood; but such princes could, and did, challenge the Crown. It was only Joao III, Manuel's successor, who secured a Papal sanction for vesting the masterships in the crown in perpetuity, which completed the centralization by the middle of the 16th century. Vasco da Gama's ideological position, as the author puts it, was that of an 'uneasy bearer of the heritage of Santiago,' or that of late feudalism! At this point, we enter the Indian Ocean. At times the narrative reads like an old-fashioned colonial adventure story of Europeans passing along the coasts of sundry native peoples, periodically bludgeoning them into submission. But as Vasco crosses the Arabian Sea towards Calicut, the author reflects on the world of the Indian Ocean. He must knock many facile theories on their head -- the dogmas of Arab dominance, monolithic Muslim control and peaceful trade in the Indian Ocean before the European irruption. While the Arabs did not dominate, the Mamluks o fEgypt were the exemplars for their capacity to combine sea power with economic interest. There was no such thing as Muslim domination. Gujaratis, Tamil and Telugu Chettis, Syrian Christians, Chinese from Fukien, and Jews were all engaged in this trade. And, just as today, Muslims then did not act as a single bloc. Nor were all trading ports and princes alike. The princes at Hormuz and Calicut taxed trade to good profit; but those at Aden and Melaka preferred to trade themselves. The Arabian Sea was no world of primitive tranquillity -- it was one of unarmed trade. The Portuguese altered the rules to impose armed trading, and with it the Indian Ocean was subordinated to various European centres, beginning with the Portuguese in the late 16th century. Pedro Alvares Cabral's bombardment of Calicut for two days in 1500 was a sensational inauguration of the century. But he was followed by Alfonso de Albuquerque, a true empire builder, who seized Hormuz and Malacca but was beaten off before Aden in 1513. From 1500 to 1515 the Portuguese invaded the principal strategic ports of East Africa, the Persian Gulf, the Konkan and Malabar coasts, and the Malacca strait. Between 1515-1560, they imposed a near monopoly on the pepper and spice trade, enforcing customs duties and taxes on passage from their headquarters at Goa. In this dramatic half century, the world had chaned as Portuguese floating fortresses set out annually to impose their will on the Ocean, set up a string of fortified bases on the coasts, and to divert trade across from the Levant, or at least to tax it profitably. Great captains of this age were Alvares Cabral, Francisco de Almeida, Afonso de Albuquerque, Lopo Soares de Albergaria, Diogo Lopes de Sequeira, and Duarte de Meneses. Vasco da Gama came first and, as it happened, at the end of this series. Since Vasco da Gama belonged to an Manueline faction at court, he languished for nearly two decades after his great achievement in 1497-1499. Meanwhile Manuel prospered and carried out a great wave of centralization from 1505 to 1514. He then came under attack from his Council for over-extension with charges of corruption against Albuquerque, a disastrouc campaign in North America, and an exorbitantly expensive embassy to the Pope complete with the spiritual and temporal potentates exchanging an elephant and a rhinoceros, both gifts or prizes from India. (The Pope got to keep his elephant, but Manuel lost the rhinoceros in a shipwrect off Genoa.) Vasco da Gama then threatened to offer his services to the Hapsburg Charles V of Spain just as Fernao de Magalhaes, known as Ferdinand Magellan in English, had already done. Manuel relented. Vasco da Gama was permitted to purchase the title of Count of Vidigueira in 1519 along with the estates appropriate to such a grand title. In 1521 Manuel died, but Vasco da Gama had to wait until 1524 for the fulfilment of his career. He was fitted out with a flotilla of 15 ships, supplied 300 men, granted the title of Viceroy, and permitted to carry his whole clan with him and appoint them to lucrative posts under his patronage. Nobody, it seems, was then squeamish about founding dynasties. Vasco weighed anchor in April 1524, touched the Konkan coast at Chaul in September, only to die on Christmas eve at Cochin. The triumph was brief but presumably satisfying, especially since the whole family had been taken care of. This is a biography, but the author is obviously pressed hard because there is clearly not enough biographical material. There are detailed accounts in the three voyages of the hero to India; these were necessarily well documented for reasons of state and most of the biography derives from these episodes. But we know almost nothing of da Gama's childhood and adolescence, and surprisingly little even of his years of waiting, 1505-1524. Instead, we are given an overly detailed story of factional politics, intrigue, and legend. The excess of factional politics here seems a substitute for proper biography, which is impossible, and for history, which is perhaps unnecessary. However, some of the most readable and profitable portions of the book are the numerous examinations of legend and myth encrusting this figure. Myth-making has been part of the Portuguese 'national' enterprise ever since Vasco da Gama set out to bring glory to the crown of Portugal. But behind it lay strong personal, career-enhancing, reasons. Vasco da Gama's voyage was an investment to be cashed by him in his years of eclipse. Thereafter it was a dynastic business as his heirs sought to derive the maximum advantage from the great name and to compete with others in the field like the Albuquerques. Eventually, it merged with a pan-European myth-making about the great 'discoveries', as they are still called. The content of the myth, if any, in Portuguese India would have been arresting; unfortunately the book does not deal with the Indian side of the experience. The story of the itinerant corpse of Vasco da Gama gives us some idea of its cultic potential. He was buried in Cochin in 1524, later his son Pedro da Silva Gama carried off the body to Vidigueira in 1538. But this location was considered insecure after social unrest in 1840; accordingly it was reinterred at the Jeronimite monastry at Belem in 1880 amidst much pomp with the King and Queen of Portugal themselves receiving the cortege. Then in 1884, Teixeira de Aragao claimed that the wrong body -- that of Francisco da Gama, also Viceroy of India -- had been exhumed. The government, like any bureaucracy, refused to admit an error until 1898 when the fourth centenary of the first voyage provided an occasion for anay rectification, but this time without the elaborate ceremonial of 1880. A true legend is sustained by mystery; so members of the family claim to this day that the real bones were hidden on the estate and that a spurious set had been palmed off for official veneration. Where they are located is still a secret that is handed down from owner to owner, none of whom will reveal the truth! One of the most interesting offerings in the book are the portraits of the subject. As befits a hero, they are stylized and with the insignia of office; one of them shows an elderly gentleman calmly looking out of the canvas; another, now in the possession of the Geographical Society at Lisbon, shows Vasco da Gama as a young man. It reveals what he must have been in his 20s -- a thug and a villian who would have been instantly-chosen for a formula movie in Bombay. If an Indo-centric version of the story were attempted, this portrait would provide all the answers. The effortless style, the brisk narrative, the fascinating encrustations of legend, the illustrations, and the splendidly high quality of research -- all make the time spent on this book a worthwhile investment, and one which comes, appropriately enough, on the eve of the fifth century of Vasco da Gama's arrival on Indian shores. Forwarded by Frederick Noronha Email:fred@goa1.dot.net.in |