Goa, the city and the territory around it, is a place that somehow tends to attract and accumulate clichés, and this was already the case in the sixteenth century. Goa Dourada, “Golden Goa,” was the phrase that was deployed by many contemporary travelers as well as later historians to evoke a place that, on account of its dense landscape of churches, was also glibly termed “the Rome of the East.” A verdant location at the place where two rivers — the Mandovi and the Zuari — entered the Arabian Sea, it was seen as an ideal situation for a port that would direct commercial maritime traffic to the advantage of the power that held it, even though it was not situated at one of those dramatic “choke-points” that made for the prosperity of Aden and Hormuz to the west, or Melaka farther east. Goa in 1510, when it was conquered, then lost, then rapidly conquered once again by the Portuguese under their ferocious governor, Afonso de Albuquerque (admiringly nicknamed “the Terrible” in sixteenth-century texts), competed with a series of other ports, Honawar and Bhatkal farther south along the coast of Karnataka, as well as Dabhol and Chaul farther north. On the other hand, Mumbai (known to the Portuguese as “Bombaím”) was still an ill-defined set of islands, creeks, and inlets, and could hardly be seen as the ideal location for the center of an extended enterprise such as the Portuguese Estado da Índia (or “State of the Indies”) was turning out to be.
The heart of the territory of Goa was an island some 166 square kilometers in extent known as Tiswadi (or “Tissuari” to the Portuguese, from tīs vādī, or “thirty settlements”), where the sixteenth-century city denominated Goa was located. If one included the adjoining islands of Chodan (“Chorão” to the Portuguese) and Divar, as well as some other smaller ones, the area was collectively designated as Ilhas. In the years from 1510 to 1530, the status of Goa in the overall scheme of the Estado was still somewhat uncertain. Melaka on the Malay Peninsula, the focal point of important trading routes to the Spice Islands of Southeast Asia as well as across the Bay of Bengal, was also seen as a center of prestige and a lucrative spot to preside over as captain. For sentimental and strategic reasons, many also preferred Kochi (or Cochin) in the further southwestern part of the Malabar coast, the port where the Portuguese had taken refuge in 1500 after being forced out of the great commercial entrepôt of Kozhikode (or Calicut) when they had attempted clumsily to impose themselves by force. Kochi by the 1520s was more than a simple place for many Portuguese in Asia; it was instead the symbol of a certain vision of things, an implicit blueprint for an Estado da Índia where the Portuguese Crown would wear its power lightly, and leave most significant initiatives to freebooters, corsairs, and aristocratic entrepreneurs. But the years immediately following the death of Viceroy Vasco da Gama (who breathed his last in Kochi on Christmas Eve 1524 only a few months after arriving there) did not prove kind to the protagonists of the primacy of Kochi. Rather, the regime of the powerful, enigmatic, and long-serving governor Nuno da Cunha (1529–38), who had been nominated by the court of Dom João III to settle affairs in Asia after a deeply turbulent period of internecine quarrels among highly placed fidalgos and their clients, asserted the primacy of royal power, and also considerably consolidated the Portuguese presence along the west coast of India. The new Portuguese territories were mostly located in the socalled “Northern Province” (Província do Norte), and were acquired at the expense of the sultanate of Gujarat, formerly a powerful and expansive state in coastal northwestern India. Gujarat in the early 1500s was perhaps the most powerful of the northern Indian states, seemingly poised to expand far inland into both central India and the heartland of the Indo-Gangetic plain. Instead, in the course of the early 1530s, it collapsed dramatically when faced with the challenge of the rising Mughal dynasty, which had irrupted into northern India in the mid-1520s. The ambitious and charismatic sultan Bahadur of Gujarat (r. 1526–37) was thus obliged not merely to curtail his expansionary ambitions but to cede territories to the Portuguese, who pressed on his maritime flank even as he turned to face the Mughal threat. These included coastal lands to the southern fringes of his sultanate (in the area of Mumbai), as well as the port of Diu, strategically located to control trade with the western Indian Ocean.
In this new set of circumstances, Goa emerged as the logical center of the Estado da Índia, a position it effectively held from the early 1530s. Contemporaries began to use terms like chave (key) or cabeça (head) as metaphors to speak of Goa. A characteristic evocation appears in an anonymous text from the early 1580s, describing the Portuguese Indies to the Habsburg ruler Philip II, who had recently assumed control of the Crown of Portugal.
The city of Goa, head and principal seat [cabeça e assento principal] of the State that the Crown of Portugal possesses in the parts of the Orient, is situated in an island of the same name, along the northern bank of a river called Pangim, two leagues to the interior from its mouth. This island shares borders with the lands of the Hidalcão, a very powerful king who is the lord of the greater part of the Kingdom of the Daquem [Deccan]. The separation from the mainland [terra firme] is effected by a very narrow divide that comes from two rivers which descend from a mountain range (which they call the Gáte), and which enter into the sea here creating two most excellent and large harbors, capable of receiving many ships, lying north and south respectively.
~~Three Ways to Be Alien: Travails & Encounters in the Early Modern World -by- Sanjay Subrahmanyam
No comments:
Post a Comment