Portuguese India

The State of India (Portuguese: Estado da Índia), also referred as the Portuguese State of India (Estado Português da Índia, EPI) or simply Portuguese India (Índia Portuguesa), was a state of the Portuguese Empire founded six years after the discovery of a sea route to the Indian subcontinent by Vasco da Gama, a subject of the Kingdom of Portugal. The capital of Portuguese India served as the governing centre of a string of military forts and trading posts scattered all over the Indian Ocean.

Quotes

• Haters of idolatry, haters of all that was not the true faith, establishers in Goa of the Inquisition and the burning of heretics, levellers of Hindu temples, the Portuguese had created in Goa something of a New-World emptiness, like the Spaniards in Mexico. They had created in India something not of India, a simplicity, something where the Indian past had been abolished. And after 450 years all they had left behind in this emptiness and simplicity was their religion, their language (without a literature), their names, a Latin-like colonial population, and this cult, from their cathedral, of the Image of the Infant Jesus.
  • Naipaul, V.S. - India_ A Million Mutinies Now (Vintage, 2011)

• We give praise to God for our achievement (in reaching India) and for the information that there are in these countries Christian people. It will be our principal object to speak to you of these latter and to profit, whilst also maintaining the love and fraternity which ought to prevail among Christian kings. For we believe that God, Our Lord, did not permit this great achievement of our navy only to serve our temporal interests, but also to strive for the spiritual betterment of souls and their salvation. It pleased God to bequeath both to you and to us the same Christian faith by which the whole world was united for six hundred years after the birth of Christ, until at last by the sins of mankind, there came certain sects and creeds contrary to the primitive religion of Christ, which sects had to come for the justification of the good and on account of the deceit of the wicked. These merited condemnation and loss, because they did not desire to receive the truth to be saved. Wherefore God warned them of what they should know and understand. For doing wrong and acquiescing in falsehoods they were condemned. These sects occupied the greater part of the land between your country and ours – which impeded communication between us. This communication is now opened afresh by our navigation, and thereby God, to whom nothing is impossible, has cleared an obstacle. Wherefore knowing that the hand of God is manifest in all this and desiring to serve Him by carrying out His will, we are now sending you our captain, ships, and merchandise, besides a factor who, if it is your pleasure, will remain there to carry out his duties. We are also sending some religious versed in the teachings of Christ, and ecclesiastical ornaments for celebrating the divine office and administering the sacraments. These religious will enable you to know the doctrines of the Christian faith, instituted by Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and as imparted to the twelve apostles, His disciples. After His holy resurrection these apostles preached this faith everywhere and it was received by the whole world. Two of them, St. Thomas and St. Bartholomew, preached in your parts of India, working many and stupendous miracles and attracting the people away from unbelief and idolatry – in which ere this the whole world was steeped, and converted them to the truth of the holy Christian creed. One of these apostles, St. Peter, was ordered by Our Lord, Jesus Christ, to be His chief vicar. Preaching in the city of Rome, then the centre of idolatry, he suffered martyrdom for Him, and lies buried there. From that time onwards this city has been the seat of the head of the faith of Christ by His command through the successors of St. Peter, the Holy Fathers. The Lord God wished that just as in former times Rome was the mother of error and falsehood, she should now be and continue for ever more to be the mother of truth.
  • On the religious aspect of the Portuguese mission. A letter dated 1 March 1500, which Pedro Alvares Cabral, leader of the second expedition to India, carried from D. Manuel I to the Zamorin, under the impression that the latter was a Christian . Moraes, George, M. A History of Christianity In India. From early times to St. Francis Xavier: AD 52-1542, Manaktalas, 1964. quoted from Jain, M. (editor) (2011). The India they saw: Foreign accounts. New Delhi: Ocean Books. Volume III Chapter 14

• The reason for undertaking this voyage to your shores is (to make known to you) these things of such high import and profit as well as of service to the Almighty. We, therefore, request you with brotherly affection to conform to the Divine will for your own profit and that of your kingdom, both spiritual and temporal, and wish that it should please you to be friends with us, which conversation and friendship we offer you most peacefully for His holy service. Be pleased to accept this and deal with our captain and our people with the same spirit of love and truth with which we are sending them to you. For, besides the obvious reasons, the repeated and diverse demonstrations of His will ought to convince you that our coming to you is of His ordination. There is, therefore, all the more reason why you should be pleased with a people who come from such a long distance and with such affection, seeking your friendship and company, and bringing you so much profit as you cannot hope to receive from any other country as from ours.
  • On the religious aspect of the Portuguese mission. A letter dated 1 March 1500, which Pedro Alvares Cabral, leader of the second expedition to India, carried from D. Manuel I to the Zamorin, under the impression that the latter was a Christian . Moraes, George, M. A History of Christianity In India. From early times to St. Francis Xavier: AD 52-1542, Manaktalas, 1964. quoted from Jain, M. (editor) (2011). The India they saw: Foreign accounts. New Delhi: Ocean Books. Volume III Chapter 14

• [The English traveller John Fryer, referring to conditions in Goa in 1675, writes as follows:] The Mass of the People are Canorein though Portuguezed in Speech and Manners; paying great Observance to a White Man, whom when they meet they must give him the Way with a Cringe and Civil Salute, for fear of a stochado.
  • John Fryer, . New Account of East-India and Persia, London 1698, p. 156. in :Priolkar Anant Kakba and Gabriel Dellon. 2008. The Goa Inquisition : Being a Quatercentenary Commemoration Study of the Inquisition in India.

• He (K.M. Panikkar) begins by showing how it was possible for the Portuguese to accomplish what they managed to do, as, when Vasco da Gama reached the Malabar Coast the country was split up into petty principalities over whom no one had any real authority — not even the Zamorin of Calicut. So it did not require any particular political insight to play off the princelings along the coast against each other and establish foreign authority over small isolated Coastwise areas. Mr. Panikkar has no high opinion of Vasco da Gama and does not class him with the great European explorers. Perhaps he is somewhat hard on him; but, no doubt, Vasco da Gama was not a “great” man in the sense that others of his time and later on were. Mr. Panikkar has indeed but little opinion of any of the Portuguese leaders excepting Albuquerque, Duarte Pacheco as a military luminary, and Affonso Mexia as a financier; and, indeed, these men did some wonderful things, considering the difficulties that surrounded them. He is right also in stating clearly that the Portuguese never had any power or Empire in India, that they never got beyond acquiring a little local authority, strictly confined to small areas around the forts they built along the coast line. Yet, with the fortuitous assistance of general politics in the Near East, and not of their own superior skill, they achieved for a long period their chief object— the destruction of the Egyptian and Venetian trade with the East, and the concentration of it in their own hands on tht sea. Some of their Governors saw that it was in sea power only that their chances of success and greatness lay.
  • Sir Richard Temple, in his foreword to Panikkar K. M. (1929.) Malabar and the Portuguese. New Delhi: Voice of India. (1997)

• In judging of the Portuguese and their actions in India, one has to recollect that they were a century nearer feudal Europe than were any of the other nations that invaded the country—a century further back in civilisation and political organisation. In fact, they had very little of the latter, as practically every Factor had a right to address the Portuguese Crown direct and write home what he thought fit—truth or untruth, praise or slander_of the Viceroy, Governor or other superior authority. Authoritative government is impossible under such conditions, and so the Portuguese officials made it. They destroyed even Albuquerque in the end. One wonders indeed that anything at all was accomplished; and the undoubted fact that trade and civilisation did flourish under them for a time supplies yet another instance, of many in history, of the truth of the dictum that human beings act better than they organise.
  • Sir Richard Temple, in his foreword to Panikkar K. M. (1929.) Malabar and the Portuguese. New Delhi: Voice of India. (1997)

• But in the time of Joao III, evangelisation was taken up as a main object of policy. A Bishopric at Goa was created in 1538 and Frei Joao d’Albuquerque, a cousin of the great Governor, was sent out as Bishop. Cochin was soon raised to a Bishopric, and the Malabar coast was placed under it. The King was particularly anxious about the spread of Christianity and wrote to the Viceroy Joao de Castro demanding that all the power of the Portuguese should be directed to this purpose. “The great concernment which lies upon Christian princes to look to matters of faith and to employ their forces for its preservation makes me advise you how sensible I am that not only in many parts of India under our subjection but in our city of Goa, idols are worshipped, places in which our Faith may be more reasonably expected to flourish ; and being well informed with how much liberty they celebrated heathenish festivals. We command you to discover by diligent officers all the idols and to demolish and break them up in pieces where they are found, proclaiming severe punishments against any one who shall dare to work, cast, make in sculpture, engrave, paint or bring to light any figure of an idol in metal, brass, woo.d, plaster or any other matter, or bring them from other places; and against who publicly or privately celebrate any of their sports, keep by them any heathenish frankincense or assist and hide the Brahmins, the sworn enemies of the Christian profession ... It is our pleasure that you punish them with that severity of the law without admitting any appeal or dispensation in the least.”
  • Letter by King of Portugal to Viceroy Joao de Castro, in Jacinto Frere Andrade. ‘'Life of Dom Joao Casho,’ Translated into English by Sir Peter Wyche 166*. p. 45. quoted from Panikkar K. M. (1929, republished 1997) Malabar and the Portuguese.