R.B.

Tate Lecture (Nottingham, 3 March 2004)

The search for India:

Spanish and Portuguese exploration at the start of the
modern age
Between the middle of the fifteenth century and the late seventeenth, Europeans learned to
think of the world as a whole and of all seas as one.
These opening words of Brian Tate’s essay on Luís de Camões and Virgil, in a
volume published by Nottingham University to celebrate the bimillenium of
the Roman poet’s death (Tate 1986, 77), provide the theme for this talk about
the search for India at the start of the modern age.1
The quotation also encapsulates something of the range of Brian’s own
work, and gives a hint of why it is such an honour to have been invited to
render this homage to him. The imposing array of studies and editions which
earned him election as Corresponding Member of the Real Academia de la
Historia in 1974 and Fellow of the British Academy in 1980 range from med-
ieval crusades and chronicles to Renaissance and Baroque poetry, combining
the three fields of history, philology, and literature in Latin, Spanish, French,
Catalan, and Portuguese. But he is also known to speak with authority on the
modern architecture of Barcelona, Nottinghamshire volunteers in the Spanish
Civil War, or the mirabilia of the peaks and dales of Birchover; and his
languages might have included Urdu if the teacher had not insisted that Brian
learn to pound his own ink and cut quills from living bamboo before tackling
the Arabic script. Among his variegated publications are an introduction to
the Catalan translation of T.S. Eliot, studies of English pilgrims on the road
to Compostela (which, as a leading member of the Confraternity of St James,
he has done so much to conserve), and a singular item entitled “Who wrote
Don Quixote?” (Tate 1977). How typical of Brian to have spotted this
surprising problem about Spain’s best-known book! He never beats about the
bush, yet he keeps something of the bright, roving eye of the leprechaun.
One further reflexion on Brian’s career is prompted by the Nottingham
Virgil volume: namely, the striking circumstance of its being jointly edited by
Richard Cardwell, another member of the Department of Hispanic Studies. In
his tenure of the Chair of Spanish from 1958–1983, Brian Tate impressed
upon the subject something of his own catholicity of vision. In Nottingham’s
outstanding tradition of humanistic studies it was not extraordinary that a

1 Full references to works cited by author and date are given on pp. 18–19 below.

1
2 JEREMY LAWRANCE, THE SEARCH FOR INDIA

book on Virgil should be edited by a Hispanist. More exemplary is the fact

that Brian Tate’s department did not consider it a waste of anybody’s time
that a leading expert on medieval Spanish should contribute an article on
Renaissance Portuguese, and a leading expert on Juan Ramón Jiménez should
subscribe the introduction.
This progressive view of the future of Hispanism was in no way circum-
scribed by Brian’s own love for medieval Catalan —despite the fact that he is
rumoured to be the only man ever appointed to a lectureship in a bar in
Girona.2 Of all the bars in all the world, the 27-year old Brian pitched up in
that one because, fresh from a degree in French and Spanish that had been
interrupted by five years of war service, he was directed to Girona in 1948 by
his Belfast supervisor, Ignasi González Llubera. In the aftermath of war and
under one of the only surviving Fascist dictatorships in Europe, Catalonia was
no plum posting —others of Brian’s generation tell of seeing passengers drop
dead of starvation in Barcelona trams. Nevertheless, the temperament of the
Catalans and their dark, glutinous language struck chords in the Ulsterman’s
heart, sparking an affection that culminated last year in Brian’s noble donation
of his library to the university of Girona. Yet, as I have said, this early love
never closed his vision to the wide horizon. Brian was one of the founders of
the Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland; he welcomed to
Nottingham a McGuirk, whose doctoral work was on modern French poetry,
and a Millington, whose expertise in contemporary Latin America concerns
the only branch of Hispanism on which he himself has yet to pronounce. In
short, Brian Tate’s legacy is to have given the impulse which, under the wise
leadership of Richard Cardwell and his successors, has brought the
Nottingham department to its position in the forefront of British Hispanism.
Its present interests are incarnated in a brilliant quadrumvirate of professors
—or should I say sesquiquadrumvirate, since Richard has only half retired? In
those days, they were epitomized in a single Tate.
To think of all seas as one: it is fitting that a son of Belfast should have chosen
to characterize the intellectual quest of the Renaissance in a maritime image.
This, and a life whose adventures include wartime service in India as lieuten-
ant in the 10th Royal Ghurka Rifles and as Staff Captain in the 12th Army at
Rangoon, as well as a later trip to Macau on the track of Camões, emboldened
me to hope that, of the multifarious interests which could have been repres-
ented in the first R.B. Tate Lecture, Brian might find India a suitable topic.
* * *

2The perspicacious fellow-drinker was, I am glad to say, Professor J.W. Rees of the
University of Manchester, where Brian was to inaugurate his career in 1949–52.
 JEREMY LAWRANCE, THE SEARCH FOR INDIA 3

We are fortunate to possess, in the Relação or diary of a mariner on one of the

three caravels captained by Vasco da Gama, an eye-witness account of the
first European landing on the Malabar Coast of India since classical times.3
The Portuguese anchored near Kozhikode (Calicut) on 20 May 1498, and a
week later Gama accepted an invitation from the Samudrî Râjâ to come
ashore. Accompanied by six sailors and escorted on a palanquin by the raja’s
Kot-wāl or governor, Gama set out on the fourteen-mile journey to the
interview that was to become, through reproductions in art and literature (e.g.
Lusíadas V I I . 57-65), an icon of the glories or miseries of colonialism, depen-
ding on one’s point of view. On the way Gama’s party encountered the
following scene, as recounted in Relação, 28 May 1498 (17):
Here they took us to a great church [...], the size of a monastery, all built in
stonework and tiled with brick. At the main door it had a pillar of brass tall as a
mast with a bird on top which looks like a cock [...]. In the middle is a masonry
tower [...]with stone steps up to its door, which was of brass, and inside a small
statue which they said was Our Lady. [...] Here the Admiral prayed, and us with
him; we did not enter the chapel, because it is not their custom [...] The priests
wear threads slung over the left shoulder and under the right arm, just as
deacons wear the stole. They threw holy water over us. They give a white mud
which the Christians of this land put on their heads and chests and round the
neck and arms; they ceremoniously offered this mud to the Admiral, and he
took it and gave it to someone to look after, signalling that he would put it on
later. On the walls of the church were painted many, many other saints, all with
diadems; but their depiction was of a different kind, because their teeth stuck an
inch out of their mouths and each saint had four or five arms.4

3 Perhaps not quite the first; see Phillips 1988, 257. The Relação is in Porto, Biblioteca
Municipal MS 804, fols 1-40; quotations are from Lawrance 2004. All translations are mine.
4 “Aqui nos levaram a hũa grande igreja, [...] da grandura dum mosteiro, toda lavrada de

cantaria telhada de ladrilho. E tinha à porta prinçipal hum padram d’arame d’altura de hum
masto, e em çima deste padram está hũa ave que parece galo [...]. E em o meo do corpo da
igreja está hum coruchéo todo de canto, [...] e hũa escada de pedra por que subiam a esta
porta; a qual porta era d’arame, e dentro estava hũa imagem pequena a qual eles diziam que
era Nossa Senhora. [...] Aqui fez o Capitam-moor oraçam, e nós outros com ele. E nós nom
entrámos dentro em esta capela, porque seu costume é nom entrar [...] Estes quafés trazem
hũas linhas por cima do ombro lançadas, e o ombro é o esquerdo, e por debaixo do ombro
do braço direito, asy como trazem os créligos d’avangelhos a estola. Estes nos lançaram ágoa
benta. Dam hum barro branco que os christãos desta terra acostumam de põer em as testas
e nos peitos e derredor do pescoço e em os buchos dos braços. Toda esta çirimónia fezeram
ao Capitam e lhe davam aquele barro que posessem, e o Capitam o tomou e o deu a guardar,
dando a entender que depois o ponria. E outros muitos muitos santos estavam pintados
pelas paredes da igreja, os quaees tinham diademas; e a sua pintura era em diversa maneira,
porque os dentes eram tam grandes que saíam da boca hũa polegada, e cada santo tinha
quatro e cinco braços” (fols 20–20v).
4 JEREMY LAWRANCE, THE SEARCH FOR INDIA

It does not take great perspicacity to notice that something odd is going on
here. The accurate detail of the witness’s description is matched by the entire
wrong-headedness of his interpretation. The Keralans of Calicut were not
Christians, and this building was a Hindu, probably Vaishnava, temple. The
“bird like a cock” on the brass pillar or stanbha was Vishnu’s vehicle Garuda
or Gandara, half bird, half man; the statue of the Virgin Mary in the garbha
gŗha or sanctum, perhaps Vishnu’s consort Lakshmi or some other avatar of
the Goddess Devi. The deacon’s stoles were Brahmans’ cotton yajñopavitas or
sacrifice-cords; the white mud, ashes (Subrahmanyam 1997, 131–33).
Some of these misconstructions may be put down to Gama’s Arabic-
speaking interpreter, who, loth to admit he could not understand Malayalam,
invented the informants’ answers. It is touching, nevertheless, that Gama
knelt before the idols. A later source, obeying the imperial axiom that duplic-
ity is better than credulity, made the Admiral kneel from expediency,
mumbling under his breath that the images were devils; this pious fiction
cannot be squared with the Relação’s candid insistence that the images of
multi-coloured gods pullullating with arms, tusks, animal faces, lingams, bare
breasts, and lotus-flowers were saints of the Christian calendar.
What makes the error more interesting is that, according to standard
notions of the Revival of Learning, Renaissance Europeans ought to have had
the mental equipment to avoid such a confusion. The polytheistic icono-
graphy of Antiquity provided ample parallels to identify this temple as pagan;
Aristotle gave a methodology for identifying foreign cultures as barbarian; and
finally, descriptions of Hinduism in the works of Ptolemy and Pliny should
have enabled the Portuguese to identify the Brahman priests as Gymnosoph-
ists. Yet at no point does the Relação of Gama’s four-month sojourn in Calicut
display any hint that the Portuguese tumbled to the truth. They sailed home
to Portugal convinced that Kerala was as Christian as Ireland.
In his essay on Camões Brian Tate observed:
No one has been able to expound [...] how the two manifestations [of the
Renaissance], overseas expansion and classical revival, may be conceived as twin
aspects of the same Zeitgeist. (Tate 1986, 78)
Ruminating on this problem in the light of the case just quoted, one might
conclude that the connexion was mere happenstance. However, let us fast-
forward forty years to the account of this same scene in Decade I , Bk iv of
João de Barros’s humanist chronicle of Portuguese expansion in the East.5

5 Ásia: Dos Fectos que os Portugueses Fizeram no Descobrimento e Conquista dos Mares e Terras do
Oriente, 2 vols (Lisboa: G. Galharde, 1552–53), I .iv. The first decade was completed by 1539.
Quotations are from the edition in Barros 2004.
 JEREMY LAWRANCE, THE SEARCH FOR INDIA 5

In his description of the temple Barros follows the eye-witness Relação, but
with two notable divergences. First, he was aware that the temple was Hindu,
so he calls it not “a great church”, but “a great temple of the local gentiles”,
excising all mention of monasteries, deacons, chapels, saints, and the Virgin
Mary. There remained the problem of how his hero Gama could have made
the egregious mistake of praying there. Barros’s answer is to excise all men-
tion of Brahmans and white mud. The statue of “a bird like a cock” becomes,
pointedly, just “a cock”, and the painted pantheon of gods with their multiple
arms and huge teeth just “certain images of their adoration”. Barros adds:
A few of our men, believing those people to be among those converted by the
apostle St Thomas, as rumour had it in the West and as they had been informed
by the Moors, knelt down to pray to those images [...]. This act much pleased
the local gentiles, who supposed we too were given to the cult of worshipping
images, which they had never seen Moors do. (Ásia I .iv, Capítulo 8)6
Barros’s decision to tamper with the Relação in this way, and to invent con-
venient motives from the well-springs of his own fancy, may shock us, but it
obeys the precepts of classical and Renaissance historiography. His Ásia is
replete with the fictional speeches, the conjectural recreation of motives in
oratio obliqua, the oratorical sentences and sententious perorations sanctioned
by Livy and Sallust. They made history a form of overt moral rhetoric.
Cervantes, quoting Cicero, called history the “mother” of Truth (Don Quijote
I .ix). As Borges remarked, the Baroque conceit contains the “staggering idea”
of history “not as an investigation of reality, but as its origin. Historical truth,
for him, is not what happened; it is what we judge happened.”7
So brazenly a pragmatic notion of the historian’s task was one of the things
the Renaissance gave to European culture in the Age of Discovery. Another
was an awareness of Hinduism. Earlier, Barros —who had never set foot in
India— noted the “superstitious gentiles’ taboo against touching people not

6 “Chegaram a um grande templo de gentio da terra, mui bem lavrado de cantaria, com
um coruchéu coberto de tijolo, à porta do qual estava um padrão grande de latão e encima,
por remate, um galo. E dentro no corpo do templo estava um portal cujas portas eram de
metal, per que entravam a uma escada que subia ao coruchéu, ao pé do qual, onde ficava o
redondo dele em modo de charola, estavam algumas imagens da sua adoração. Os nossos,
como iam crentes ser aquela gente dos convertidos pelo apóstolo São Tomé segundo a fama
que cá nestas partes havia e eles achavam per dito dos Mouros, alguns se assentaram em
giolhos a fazer oração àquelas imagens, cuidando serem dignas de adoração. Do qual auto o
gentio da terra houve muito prazer, parecendo-lhe sermos dados ao culto de adorar imagens,
o que eles não viam fazer aos Mouros” (Barros 2004, 22).
7 Borges 1997, 56: “La historia, madre de la verdad; la idea es asombrosa. [...] No define

la historia como una indagación de la realidad sino como su origen. La verdad histórica, para
él, no es lo que sucedió; es lo que juzgamos que sucedió.” Cf. Cervantes 1978, I , 145.
6 JEREMY LAWRANCE, THE SEARCH FOR INDIA

of their blood” (Ásia I .iv.7).8 This reference to the Hindu caste-system came
to him via the Roman geographer Pliny the Elder (A . D . 24–79), who stated
that “life for the more civilized peoples of India is partitioned into many
divisions” (multipertita), and went on to give a tolerably accurate account of
(respectively) Sudras, Kshatriyas, Vaisyas, Brahmans, Sadhus or yogis, and
Harijans (untouchables) or pariahs:
Some are farm-workers, others soldiers, others import and export merchandise,
the best and richest rule the commonwealth [...] A fifth race is devoted to their
famous wisdom, which verges on a religion, so they always choose suicide on a
funeral pyre lit by their own hand. There is one further race, half-wild and busy
with unending work —from which the previously mentioned races are kept
apart— hunting and taming elephants.9
On Gama’s first encounter with Indians in the East African port of Malindi,
Barros likewise noted: “these gentiles [...] follow the sect of Pythagoras so
religiously that they do not even kill the filth that grows on their own bodies
or eat any living thing” (Ásia I .iv.6).10 Here Hindu dietary taboos are linked to
beliefs about samsāra or reincarnation through a comparison with Pytha-
gorean vegetarianism and metempsychosis or transmigration of souls, though the
parallel is deconstructed by the word imundícia, “filth”, because, as Aristotle
showed and Lévi-Strauss reminds us, nothing so defines the ethnocentric
boundaries between the civilized and the barbarous as what people eat.
Barros’s learnèd reference to Pythagoras rested on a single passing mention
of sacred cows and diet in the Relação. This occurs in the account of the
selfsame encounter in Malindi, amid other matter which Barros prudently
chose to discard (19 Apr 1498, 14):
Here we found four ships of Indian Christians. When they came aboard Paulo
da Gama’s ship [...], they showed them an altar-piece of Our Lady with Jesus
Christ in her arms, at the foot of the cross with the Apostles. When they saw it
the Indians threw themselves on the ground [...]. These Indians are dark-

8 Barros 2004, 20 “o gentio dela mui supersticioso em se tocar com gente fora de seu
sangue, principalmente os que se chamavam brâmanes e naires”.
9 C. Plinius Secundus, Naturalis Historia V I .xxii.66, in Pliny 1938–52, I I , 386–88 “vita

mitioribus populis Indorum multipertita degitur: tellurem exercent, militiam alii capessunt,
merces alii suas evehunt externasque invehunt, res publicas optumi ditissimique temperant
[...] Quintum genus celebratae illi et prope in religionem versae sapientiae deditum voluntaria
semper morte vitam accenso prius rogo finit. Unum super haec est semiferum ac plenum
laboris inmensi, a quo supradicta continentur, venandi elephantos domandique.”
10 Barros 2004, 17 & n50 “vieram certos homens a que chamam baneanes [ì.e. Gujarati

Banyans], do mesmo gentio do reino de Cambaia [Khambat], gente tam religiosa na seita de
Pitágoras que até a imundícia que criam em si não matam, nem comem cousa viva.”
 JEREMY LAWRANCE, THE SEARCH FOR INDIA 7

skinned; they wear few clothes, have great beards and long hair in braids, and
according to their own account eat no beef.11
The Victorian Orientalist Sir Richard Burton suggested, with characteristic
malevolence, that what happened in front of the altar-piece was that the Por-
tuguese thought the prostrate Hindus were saying Christe, Christe, when they
were really chanting Krishna, Krishna (1880–84, I V , 420).12 Some such misun-
derstanding may also have lain behind the passage in the Relação that was the
source for Barros’s note on Hindu castes (21 May 1498, 16):
This Calicut is a city of Christians. They are dark-skinned; some go about with
great beards and long hair, others shaven-headed, but they wear a topknot on
their head or moustachios over their beards as a sign that they are Christians.13
Shaven versus shaggy, moustachio versus topknot: for Barros evidence of the
caste system, for the Relação —perplexingly— emblems of Christianity.
Fast-forwarding another forty years, we come to the account of Gama’s
visit to the temple in Luís de Camões’s heroic poem Os Lusíadas, the Renais-
sance’s most imaginative representation of India.14 Camões followed the
earlier sources in his account of the “sumptuous temple”, but only one detail
caught his interest —the one hurried over by Barros (Lus. V I I .47–49):
47 There stand the images of the gods:
carved wood, cold stone.
Riot of faces, colours in riot,
lying as the Devil lies;
abominable totems,
limbs writhing as a chimera writhes.
Christian eyes, used to gazing on God
In human shape, gape with wonder.

11 “Aqui achamos quatro nãoos de christãoos da Índia, os quaees, a primeira vez que vie-

ram ao navio de Paulo da Gama onde o Capitam-moor estava, ali lhe mostraram hum
retávolo em que estava Nossa Senhora com Jesu Christo nos braços ao pée da cruz, e os
Apóstolos. E os índios, quando viram este retávolo, lançavam-se no cham. [...] Estes índios
sam homens baços e trazem poucas roupas, e trazem grandes barbas e os cabelos da cabeça
muito longos e trazem-os trançados, e nom comem carne de boi, segundo eles diziam” (Relação,
fols 17–17v, my italics).
12 Barros suggested the Indians were Muslims, a conjecture accepted by some editors;

Burton was of course right to identify the taboo against beef as Hindu.
13 “Esta cidade de Calecut é de cristãoos, os quaees sam homens baços e andam deles com

barbas grandes e os cabelos da cabeça compridos, e outros trazem as cabeças rapadas e

outros trosquiadas; e trazem em a moleira huns topetes por signal que sam christãos, e nas
barbas bigodes” (fol. 19, my italics).
14 Os Lusiadas de Luis de Camões (Lisboa: Antonio Gonçalves, 1572). Quotations are from

the edition in Camões 1973.

8 JEREMY LAWRANCE, THE SEARCH FOR INDIA

48 Here is one, horns on head

Like Libyan Jupiter-Amun;
Or this, trunk sprouting fused heads
Like some painted antique Janus;
Another, octopus arms afloat,
apes the giant Briaréus;
Another, with jutting jackal-snout,
some dog-faced Memphitic Anubis.
49 Here they performed
The barbarous gentiles’ superstitious adoration,
Then wend straight
Toward the monarch of that deluded nation.15
It is usual to say that Camões’s purpose was to turn the imperial adventure
of Portugal into epic. That task had already been accomplished by Barros;
Camões aimed at the profounder feat of turning it into myth. Whereas Barros
suppressed or invented in order to glorify Gama, Camões’s tour-de-force of clas-
sical allusions, comparing Hindu gods to the pagan pantheon of Egypt and
the monsters of classical mythology, formed part of a grand plan to subsume
the founding moment of empire within a scheme stretching back to Antiquity.
Os Lusíadas take 55,200 words to tell a story told in under 22,000 in the Relação
and just over 23,000 in Barros’s Ásia. The doubling of length is due not only
to a tapestry of biblical and classical allusions, but also to strategies of proph-
ecy and flash-back that incorporate into the narrative the previous history of

15 “Ali estão das deidades as figuras,

esculpidas em pau e em pedra fria,
vários de gestos, vários de pinturas,
a segundo o Demónio lhe fingia;
vêem-se as abomináveis esculturas
qual a Quimera em membros se varia;
os cristãos olhos, a ver Deus usados
em forma humana, estão maravilhados.
Um, na cabeça cornos esculpidos,
qual Júpiter Amon em Líbia estava;
outro, num corpo rostos tinha unidos
bem como o antigo Jano se pintava;
outro, com muitos braços divididos,
a Briareu parece que imitava;
outro fronte canina tem de fora,
qual Anúbis Menfítico se adora.
Aqui feita do bárbaro gentio
a supersticiosa adoração,
direitos vão, sem outro algum desvio,
pera onde estava o Rei do povo vão.”
 JEREMY LAWRANCE, THE SEARCH FOR INDIA 9

Portugal and the subsequent history of Portuguese India. Camões contrives to

portray the confrontation of Gama and the Samudri—quite unhistorically—
as the culmination of an encounter between Western civilization and the
pagan Orient. The symbolism is further developed by means of a concurrent
plot acted out by the Greco-Roman deities under the all-watchful eye of
Olympian Jupiter —a plot that ranges the Apollinian West’s Venus and Mer-
cury against the Dionysiac East’s Bacchus and Neptune, ending with the
glittering fantasy of the Isle of Venus, where human and divine intertwine in a
cosmic sacred marriage (I X .16–X ). Mythology represents Gama’s destiny “at
the intersection of time and timelessness” (Tate 1986, 83).
Despite these complex allegories, Camões sticks closer to the eye-witness
Relação than Barros. Having spent years as a soldier of fortune in the East, he
knew better than either what he was talking about. Of our three glimpses of
the temple, his is at once the most vividly authentic and the most full of arti-
fice —a balancing-act that embodies the fundamental principle of Baroque
aesthetics, that allegory captures truth (ser, essence) more profoundly than
mere verisimilitude (parecer, appearance). In Os Lusíadas, as Brian Tate
remarks, “the hard edge of history is never absent, but the edge is honed by
the poetry into matter for reflection” (1986, 82). Camões’s references to
Virgilian myth serve to vindicate the link between Rome and Christian
empire, proving the Portuguese had outstripped the ancients; yet, from the
vantage point of Renaissance modernity, the pagan classical world also
provided patterns of decline, disillusion, and darkness. Hence such
memorable episodes as the murder of Inês de Castro (I I I .118–35), the curse
of the Old Man of Restelo (I V .94–104), the vision of the storm-monster
Adamastor at the gateway to the Indian Ocean and the ghoulish terrors of the
scurvy that killed two thirds of Gama’s crew (V .37–61, 80–83), and the poet’s
set-piece diatribes on human frailty, lust, injustice, and greed (e.g. I .105–06,
I I I .136–43, V I I .78–87, V I I I .96–99).

* * *
Our three versions of the visit to the temple trace a small trajectory of the
impact of India on European consciousness in the Renaissance. But why harp
on this minute, meaningless scene? Does the narrative of Gama’s voyage and
of the preceding century of Portuguese exploration across two oceans and
round the coast of Subsaharan Africa deserve no more than nit-picking at the
fag-ends of long-dead chronicles?
If our subject is “discovery”, I submit that the history of the voyages is
irrelevant, whereas our tale of a temple is fundamental. It presents a paradox
that forces us to contemplate the heart of the matter, a paradox that hinges on
10 JEREMY LAWRANCE, THE SEARCH FOR INDIA

the contrast of vision versus language, or of discovery versus invention, which

is the Latin word for “discovery”.
The paradox runs like this: the eye-witness author of the Relação, the man
who made the discovery, saw but could not explain; the classical scholar
Barros did not see, but took the words of the witness and, by a mental
process which involved closing his eyes, wrested them into an explanation —
he rediscovered or reinvented the scene. Camões reinvented it again ... but
discovered what? Recall his words: “devilish lies”, “abominable totems”,
“barbarous gentiles”, “superstitious adoration”, “deluded nation”. The key to
his reinvention turns out to be not its evocation of Hindu idols, but the
parenthesis: “Christian eyes [...] gaped with wonder” (V I I .46). This cunning
insertion of a Western viewpoint is no longer innocent, as the eye-witness
Relação’s belief that the paintings were Christian was innocent. It records the
moment at which it was no longer possible for a Westerner to recognize an
Indian as himself.
Barros, with his conviction that Hindus were really Pythagoreans, stood
mid-way between these extremes. He made Gama declare, in his last interview
with the Raja, that of “the gentiles he had discovered”, Hindus were
friends of the Christians by nature, because they all came from one race (geração)
and were very alike in various customs and in the way of their temples, as he
had seen in this kingdom of Calicut of his —their Brahmans even agreed with
them (albeit it in another, very different way) in their religious belief about the
Trinity of three persons in one God, which among Christians was the foun-
dation of their whole faith. (Ásia, I .iv.9)16
In truth, Gama would never have said the Hindus were “like” Christians, be-
cause he thought they were Christian. This is another of Barros’s conjectural
improvements of history. Yet it is revealing. The notion that the Hindu Tri-
murti or Triad of Brahma, Shiva, and Vishnu (depicted in art as a three-headed
man) was a deformed imitation of the Christian Trinity seems like an attempt
to think of “all seas as one”, but it is also an act of cultural appropriation, a
move to subsume the alien into a Eurocentric pattern of thought.
Thus, while on the one hand the movement from the Relação’s innocent
vision of a church to Camões’s symbolic vision of a temple represents a “dis-
covery” based on accumulating experience and knowledge, on the other it is

Barros 2004, 27 “per quantas terras de gentios tinha descoberto […] estes naturalmente
16

eram amigos do povo cristão, por todos virem de uma geração e serem mui conformes em
alguns costumes e no modo dos seus templos, segundo tinha visto naquele seu reino de
Calecute —até os seus brâmanes, na religião que tinham da Trindade de três pessoas e um só
Deus, que acerca dos cristãos era o fundamento de toda sua fé, se conformavam com eles
(peró que per outro modo mui diferente).”
 JEREMY LAWRANCE, THE SEARCH FOR INDIA 11

clear that the trajectory from the Relação’s naïve credulity to Camões’s heavy-
lidded superiority marks an inverse movement, an “invention” that progresses
from a kind of empathy towards a kind of insularity. In this light, the state-
ment that Europeans had “learned to think of the world as a whole and of all
seas as one” requires to be understood in a particular way. The Portuguese
opening of the sea-route to India paved the way to a new world order, to the
global economy, and hence to modernity. But, as Camões’s parenthesis about
“Christian eyes” shows, what Portuguese exploration had “discovered” was
not so much India as Europe —Europe, that is, considered as a civilization
defined by contradistinction to an alien Orient (Said 1995; Lawrance 2001).
* * *
Shall we dismiss all this as nothing more than the old truism that men see
what they want to see? In the context of the Age of Discovery, even this
solution is paradoxical, for it presupposes that there was something that
Gama and his predecessors wanted to see, that they already knew what were
looking for. And this was in fact the case. As my quotation from Pliny
indicated, India was a Roman word, and ancient cosmographers had written at
length about it. No exploration was undertaken by navigators in the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries without this foreknowledge of what they would find.
We come back, then, to Brian Tate’s problem of how overseas expansion
and the Renaissance “may be conceived as twin aspects of the same Zeitgeist”.
Barros noted that Gama’s conviction that the Hindus of Kerala were Chris-
tians was due to the fact that he and his men “believed these people to be
among those converted by the apostle St Thomas”. Renaissance humanists
like Barros knew this legend was a fiction (“as rumour had it in the West”).17
The same was true of that other legendary Christian whose name occurs in
connexion with the search for India, the emperor Prester John (e.g. Relação 2
March 1498, 30 August, fols 10 & 33–33v; Barros, Ásia I .iv.1, I .iv.4).18 St

17 The third-century Acts of St Thomas tell how the “doubting Thomas” of John 20:24–
29 was sent by Christ to convert the Indian king Gundaphorus, and after adventures with
dragons, maidens, and wild asses came to the city of King Mazdai, where he was martyred
for persuading the queen to bar her husband from her bed. Modern scholarship agrees that
the story is apocryphal, despite finds of coinage demonstrating the existence of a King
Guduphara in northern India ca A . D. 20–46. By coincidence, unbeknown to Gama, there
was a Nestorian Christian sect on the Malabar Coast (probably converted by Syrian mission-
aries ca 745), but the place of Thomas’s martyrdom was located by the Portuguese in 1522
not in Malabar but, following Mandeville (1985, 124) and Marco Polo (1958, 274), in
Mylapore, a suburb of Chennai/Madras on the distant Coromandel Coast of Tamil Nadu.
18 On Prester John and his eventual —fanciful— location by the Portuguese in Ethiopia

in 1520–26 see Lawrance 1992.

12 JEREMY LAWRANCE, THE SEARCH FOR INDIA

Thomas, Prester John, and other stories about India figured in Mandeville,
Marco Polo, and on medieval mappae mundi, but medieval geographers lacked
the scientific methods to determine the whereabouts of the numerous Indias
of legend, Lower, Middle, Upper, Extra- and Intra-Gangetic.19 Fragments of
the mysterious subcontinent wandered the impenetrable fringes of the
southern hemisphere, lurking sometimes in Africa, sometimes in Asia, always
populated by marvels and monstrous races.
Hereford Mappa Mundi
(Ricardus de Bello of
Haldingham, ca 1290,
64 × 54 inches,
Hereford Cathedral )
India stretches along the
top of the map, left of
the Red Sea and Persian
Gulf (in red). The circul-
ar isle below the throne
of Christ is Earthly Para-
dise; Ganges with its tri-
angular delta flows into
Ocean to its left; below,
the Jhelum and Indus
flow horizontally, joining
Ocean at its junction
with the Red Sea, next to
an elephant; Taprobane
or Sri Lanka is the island
at the mouth of the Red
Sea. Asia is divided from
Africa by the Nile, the
two-headed river right of
the Red Sea which flows
into the Mediterranean.
On the fringes of both
continents are drawn
monstrous races.

It was not until Renaissance humanists rediscovered the 2nd-century Alexan-

drian astronomer Ptolemy’s Geographia in the 1470s, and in particular the first
printed Latin translation featuring woodcuts of Regiomontanus’s reconstruc-
tion of Ptolemy’s conical projection of a world-map by solar coordinates

19The account of the Greater and Lesser Indias in Mandeville (1985, 120–26 & 165–85)
is a classic medley of garbled classical lore and fable; Marco Polo is by comparison level-
headed, though still fanciful (1958, 260–294). For fifteenth-century travellers before Gama
such as Niccoló de’ Conti see Phillips 1988, Index, s.v. India.
 JEREMY LAWRANCE, THE SEARCH FOR INDIA 13

(1477), that the possibility of a scientific solution to the conundrum of India’s

location arose to fuel the project of discovery.20

Henricus Martellus, World Map, 1489

Based on the rediscovered text of Ptolemy’s Geographia, Martellus incorporates Bartolomeu
Dias’s circumnavigation of the Cape of Good Hope in 1488 (Ptolemy portrayed the Indian
Ocean as landlocked). The squashed appearance of India, above Sri Lanka at the centre of
the Indian Ocean, was caused by foreshortening due to errors in Ptolemy’s solar coordinates
for Cape Comorin/Kanniyakumari at the southern tip of the subcontinent.
A glance at humanist maps such as that of Martellus shows that Gama’s
voyage did almost nothing to extend European geographical knowledge of
the Indian Ocean; and as we have seen, his landfall in Calicut did less than
nothing to extend European ethnographical knowledge of Hindus and Hin-
duism. It is a misconception, therefore, to suppose that the voyages of discov-
ery fuelled the Renaissance revival of learning; in truth, it was the other way
about. It was not navigators who were responsible for discovery, but the
scholars who set their agenda and slotted their reports into the imaginary
chart of a newly-ordered episteme. Map-makers, not sailors, remade the map.
This is not to say, of course, that exploration produced no revelations, or
that the New Learning remained impervious to the new. The search for India

20Dilke 1998, 72–86, 154–66. For a fine set of reproductions illustrating the progress
from medieval to Renaissance cartography see www.henry-davis.com/MAPS/.
14 JEREMY LAWRANCE, THE SEARCH FOR INDIA

sprung one earth-shattering surprise, one truly new world, but it did so by
mistake. The Genoese mariner Christopher Columbus prefaced the log-book
of his first Atlantic exploration in 1492 with the following statement:
Through the information I had given your royal Highnesses concerning the
lands of India and a prince who is called Great Khan, […] your Highnesses […]
decided to send me, Christopher Columbus, to the said regions of India to see
the said princes and peoples and lands, and their state in everything, and the
means that may be had for their conversion to our holy faith.21
Columbus’s search for the land that Gama also sought, “not eastward by land,
which is the usual way, but by the western route, which until today no one we
know for certain has ever followed”, went spectacularly astray.22 Yet he was
following the same sources as Gama; he carried the same preconceptions, and
this mental baggage distorted what he saw in much the same way. Columbus’s
writing gives the illusion of being more personal, more modern; torn between
invention and discovery, he often presents a volatile fusion of both. But this
was due to the fact that he was driven by the demons of failure. The story of
his four voyages testifies to an increasingly desperate struggle to superimpose
his conviction that he was in India upon the mounting evidence to the
contrary. On first arriving in the Bahamas he interpreted the Tainos’ ritual
body-scars as wounds inflicted by the Great Khan’s raiding parties, and
conjectured that he must be less than ten days’ journey from the Asian
mainland, somewhere in the China Sea south of Chipangu or Japan (Diario del
Primer Viaje 11 October 1492, 111 & n33; 13 October, 112). A week later the
Taino told him he was near Colba, or Cuba; this sounded to the infatuated
Columbus just like Chipangu, and he wrote in his log that he would now sail
for “the mainland and the city of Qinsai to deliver your Highnesses’ letters to
the Great Khan”.23 But the elusive landfall was endlessly deferred over the

21Diario del Primer Viaje, in Colón 1992, §I I , 95– 218 (prologue, 95–96) “por la informa-
çión que yo avía dado a Vuestras Altezas de las tierras de India y de un prínçipe que es lla-
mado Gran Can […], pensaron de enbiarme a mí, Cristóval Colón, a las dichas partidas de
India para ver los dichos prínçipes y los pueblos y las tierras y la disposiçión dellas y de todo,
y la manera que pudiera tener para la conversión dellas a nuestra sancta fe.”
22 Diario del Primer Viaje, prologue, 96 “no […] por tierra al Oriente, por donde se

costumbra de andar, salvo por el camino de Occidente, por donde hasta oy no sabemos por
cierta fe que aya passado nadie”.
23 Diario del Primer Viaje, 21 October, 122 “me partiré […] para otra isla grande mucho

que creo deve ser Çipango, según las señas que me dan estos indios que yo traigo, a la cual
ellos llaman Colba, en la cual dizen que hay naos y mareantes muchos y muy grandes. […]
Mas todavía tengo determinado de ir a la Tierra Firme y a la ciudad de Quisay [i.e. Kinsay,
the Mongol name for Hangzhou, as reported by Marco Polo] y dar las cartas de Vuestras
Altezas al Gran Can y pedir respuesta y venir con ella.”
 JEREMY LAWRANCE, THE SEARCH FOR INDIA 15

next hill or to the next island, and Columbus began to be increasingly

perplexed by the fact that, as he later put it in his printed official report,
in these islands up to now I have found no monstrous races, as many expected,
but on the contrary they are all people of very pretty countenance; nor are they
black as in Guinea, being on the contrary straight-haired.24
Searching for exotic mirabilia to corroborate his Indian hypothesis, Columbus
eagerly lapped up reports of what he thought were Anthropophagi and
Amazons.25 His logbooks are full of hare-brained identifications of Cathayan
and Indian locations, culminating in his conviction that the Orinoco in Vene-
zuela rose in Earthly Paradise, the highest and most easterly mountain on
earth, and that the river must therefore be a tributary of the Ganges,
Euphrates, or Tigris.26
Before Columbus set out, a committee of scholars at Salamanca University
correctly informed Queen Isabel that his project was nonsense: the Atlantic
route to Asia was not 2,300 miles, as he claimed, but 8,000, as Ptolemy
showed. Within a short time geographers realized that he had discovered a
new world; after Gama’s voyage in 1498, Columbus’s steadfast refusal to
admit this truth became no more than the ranting of a madman. Nonetheless,
the name “Indies” stuck in popular parlance and became the Spanish Crown’s
official name for its American colonies; and a scholastic theologian, anxious
to deny that God forgot to evangelize an entire continent, suggested that the
Indians converted by St Thomas were in fact Americans. So Barros still found
it worthwhile to begin the seventh chapter of his account of Gama’s voyage,
on the geography of India, with the following statement:

24 Carta a Luis de Santángel (1493), in Colón 1992, §V, 219–26 (224) “En estas islas fasta
aquí no he hallado ombres mostrudos, como muchos pensavan, mas antes es toda gente de
muy lindo acatamiento, ni son negros como en Guinea, salvo con sus cabellos corredíos.”
25 Anthropophagi: Diario del Primer Viaje, 4 November, 131 “Entendió también que lexos

de allí avía hombres de un ojo, y otros con hoçicos de perros que comían los hombres, y que
en tomando uno lo degollavan y le bevían la sangre y le cortavan su natura” (“he understood
them to say that, far away, there were men with one eye and others with dogs’ snouts who
ate men, and that when they captured a person they cut his throat and drank his blood and
cut off his genitals”). They are first called caníbales —a mishearing of Cariba— on 23
November (142). Amazons: Diario del Primer Viaje, 6 & 13 January, 189, 195 “una isla adonde
no avía sino solas mujeres”. Both are mentioned in Carta a Luis de Santángel, 224–25.
26 Relación del Tercer Viaje (1498), in Colón 1992, §X X X , 366–406 (376–82), with a barrage

of authorities from Aristotle, Ptolemy, Pliny, and the Bible to Isidore, Bede, Ambrose, Ibn
Rushd, and Pierre d’Ailly. Columbus talks of Ganges on 379 (biblical commentators identif-
ied it as the Phison of Gen. 2:11–12, and India as Havilah, the land of gold); he doubts the
identification later in this text (402), but in Relación del Cuarto Viaje (1503) he again thought
he had found the river (Colón 1992, §L X X I V, 485–503, at 488).
16 JEREMY LAWRANCE, THE SEARCH FOR INDIA

The region which geographers properly call India is the land which lies between
the two illustrious and celebrated rivers Indus and Ganges, from the former of
which it takes its name; and the peoples of the most ancient kingdom of Delhi,
chief in position and power of all that region, as well as the neighbouring Farsis,
still call it by its proper name of Hindustan. (Ásia I .iv.7)27
A região a que os geógrafos propriamente chamam Índia: “properly”, that is, by
contrast with Columbus’s improper use of las Indias to designate America.
Barros might curl his Portuguese lip at this pitiable Spanish delusion, but for
his description of Portuguese discoveries about the subcontinent he still relied
in part on “the delineation on the map Ptolemy makes of it”.28
* * *
The decades spanned by our texts thus witnessed several kinds of “discov-
ery”. The India for which the explorers were searching was not exactly a
dream; the India which they found was not exactly a reality. My proposal to
name this process “invention” was anticipated many years ago by the Irish-
Mexican historian Edmundo O’Gorman, who coined the term “invention of
America” to argue that the Spanish conquest erased the India that Columbus
had found, thereby inventing the New World:
Let us not make the mistake [...] of assuming, as is commonly done, that
although he was not aware of it, Columbus “really” crossed the Atlantic in quest
of America and that the shores at which he arrived were “really” those of the
American continent. The voyages which Columbus undertook were not, nor
could they have been, voyages to America, since the interpretation of the past is
not retroactive. [...]
This is the historical fact, which is not to be considered an “error” only
because, at a later period, these lands were invested with a different being. This
fact must be our point of departure in tracing the process by which, eventually,
these lands were endowed with a different being —the process that we have
called the invention of America. (1961, 73 & 81)
O’Gorman’s argument is cogent, but its relevance to the European invention
of the Asian India is indirect. The Portuguese did not erase the India which
they discovered; my point has been that they did not need to erase India in
order to reimagine it. The invention went on in the confines of their own
heads, and owed more to men reading and writing in studies —often without

27Barros 2004, 18 “A região a que os geógrafos propriamente chamam Índia é a terra

que jaz entre os dous ilustres e celebrados rios Indo e Gange, do qual Indo ela tomou o
nome; e os povos do antiquíssimo reino de Eli, cabeça per sítio e poder de toda esta região, e
assi a gente pársea a ela vezinha, ao presente per nome próprio lhe chamam Indostão.”
28 Ibid. “segundo a diliniação da távoa que Ptolomeu faz dela, e mais verdadeiramente

pela notícia que ora com o nosso descobrimento temos”.

 JEREMY LAWRANCE, THE SEARCH FOR INDIA 17

ever setting a foot outside— than to sailors or soldiers. Edward Said’s thesis
on Orientalism rests on the premise that Western representations of the East
are always shaped by a relationship of hegemony. The early Portuguese annals
of India suggest that this premise is neither necessary nor sufficient. 29
It remains to bring this talk to a close with a reminder of its purpose. There
is an old English formula of greeting used to welcome new fellows at
Magdalen College, Oxford, which is described with special affection in an
essay by C.S. Lewis (a writer with whom, through Beth, Brian Tate has a very
special affinity). It expresses what I think is in the heart of every one here. To
Brian, Beth, and family: We wish you joy.

Jeremy Lawrance
University of Manchester

29 At the Primeira Exposição Colonial in Oporto in 1934 the Goa committee voted to
send Devadasis (classical dancers who formerly officiated as temple prostitutes); the Gover-
nador-Geral da Índia ordered them to “eliminate these messengers, who do not dignify the
civilizing work of the Portuguese […] To send devadasis —a social sore which the proclaimed
civilizing mission did not eliminate— is an insult” (see Alfredo Froilano Bachmann de
Mello, Memoirs of Goa, 2003, at www.colaco.net/1/AdmCarlosCaculoFirstGoaFlight.htm; cf.
Galvão 1934). By that date the “civilizing mission” had been in operation —or failing to
operate— for 400 years.
18 JEREMY LAWRANCE, THE SEARCH FOR INDIA

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