Debunking Da Gama

The dazzling research of a master economic historian--ranging from forgotten 19th century operas to the diaries of visiting Venetian nobles at the Lisbon court, from 20th century Bengali novelists to anonymous chroniclers aboard the Sao Gabriel (Vasco da Gama's vessel)--shines through this almost racy biography. Subrahmanyam does not need the security of stereotypical explanatory frameworks. He oscillates skilfully between legend and fact to create a finely nuanced portrait of the 15th century 'Argonaut'. In doing so, he reaches several universal conclusions about why nations create heroes: not only to bolster international prestige but also to establish a greater 'national' truth that is able to harness to itself the energies of a powerful and quarrelsome ruling class. The cult of heroes also sanctifies the authority of he who aspires to be supreme ruler of the 'nation'--in this case, Dom Manuel of Portugal.

Subrahmanyam locates the life and achievements of Vasco da Gama--Portuguese commander of a fleet of three ships that opened the all-sea route between Europe and Asia in the late 15th century--in the context of Portuguese politics of the time as well as the prevailing balance of power in Europe and the Indian Ocean. The Portuguese maritime project and those royal agents who carried forth the ships of messianic ambition and commercial adventurism far into the unknown waters of the East sprang from several impulses. Dom Manuel's messianic zeal is established quite soundly by Subrahmanyam although most historians have tended to attribute this to his great grandson, Dom Sebastio. However, Subrahmanyam points out that the king's mission to found the Christian kingdoms of India and thus monopolise the glories of 'Respublica Christiana' was indistinguishable from his larger aim to encircle the Mamluk sultanate in Egypt by a possible military alliance with the kingdoms of the East.

Furthermore, within Portugal in the context of bitter court politics, Gama was a compromise candidate, not one of the king's handpicked nobles but someone from the opposing camp, so that the burden of failure of the mission could be passed on to the king's enemies. As it turned out, from the point of view of the national myth-making machinery, the mission was a great "success". But Subrahmanyam demystifies the man and the mission. Chroniclers like Luis Vaz de Camoes in his Os Lusiadas see Gama as a sort of medieval Christ landing with 12 disciples everywhere from Malindi to Calicut (Kozhikode). He is described as a stately personage assuring the Samudri Raja of Calicut that he had come to secure peaceful trade. Others have mythified the voyage of the Sao Gabriel even more, comparing it to the conquests of Alexander. Contrary to this majestic portrait, Subrahmanyam points to the organised violence of the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean, the ill humour and tantrums of Gama, the hostile equation and cultural incomprehension between the Portuguese and the Samudh Raja of Calicut and the fact that early trade was minimal and unfriendly.

Most revealing of all, he buries the orthodox view that Gama's pilot was the most celebrated Arab navigator of the time, Ibn Majid, who in a state of drunkenness is supposed to have pointed a finger across the Indian Ocean. Gama's pilot, in Subrahmanyam's view, was not Ibn Majid but probably a Gujarati, a freelance sailor floating around the African East coast who took the Portuguese from Mozambique to Calicut. Gama had a specific task in India, "namely to make contact with not a region, but a commercial city, that of Calicut", and needed someone to "unlock the mysteries of the monsoon "discovery" of a route, simply the use of local expertise to sail an already well-known sea.

AT Calicut, the Portuguese found a land of ugly women and greedy men and were quite thoroughly discomfited with the saddleless horses and general behaviour of the Samudri. But Calicut had been reached and trade, after a few skirmishes, was established. And even though on the return journey several sailors died of scurvy, Gama did not even sail grandly back into Lisbon but stopped off in the Azores to bury his brother who died on board (while one of the other ships went on into Lisbon harbour). The stuff of leg end was beginning to take shape.

"The legend of Vasco da Gama began in his own lifetime, yielded financial and fiscal returns for him and heightened the position of Dom Manuel in his own realm Portugal in Europe." The important was not the circumstances of the voyage, but the celebration of Portuguese nationhood that the expedition afforded, the creation of a "key national treasure to be trotted out on all occasions". After all, the professional mariner Bartolomeu Dias had already rounded the Cape of Good Hope before Gama, only a few ships went on Gama's expedition, Gama himself was a relatively unknown, petty nobleman, the voyage proceeded not by grand design but by local exigencies, and relations with Calicut were not a warm embrace between East and West but the suspicious regard of enemies.

Yet the genius of Subrahmanyam lies in demonstrating how badly Portugal needed a hero at that time and how succeeding generations of writers built up the glorious myth of the European heroes who "discovered" Asia, for their own reasons. It could be argued that in concentrating on developments the European "core", Subrahmanyam spends less time on the Asian "periphery". That is, he neglects to tell us how circumstances in India or in east Africa may have affected Lisbon's outward thrust, and sometimes does fall prey to the very Namier-ite analysis of elite factionalism as a cause of state action that he disavows.

But there can be no denying the formidable accomplishments of this book. From one of India's finest scholars here is some solid revisionist history, firmly grounded in primary sources, brave enough to "laugh when human actions are ridiculous, weep when they are tragic and detest them when they were detested by their victims". As always Subrahmanyam's work resists viewing the past in terms of monolithic entities. He leads us not only to question conventional wisdom but also to understand why it comes to be accepted as such.