Indo-Portuguese Diplomacy: During the 16th and 17th Centuries (1500-1663)

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up over a decade ago when I started teaching diplomatic history of Portugal and noticed that there was a great dearth of works not only on Portuguese diplomatic relations with various states of Europe but also with Asian empires, especially with the Indian, with which they had almost five hundred years of political, economical and social interactions. Strange enough to note that historians and social scientists of the whole world who have dedicated more than three decades in researching variable subjects, recently, but none directly focussed on Indo-Portuguese diplomacy. On the contrary, most of the historians have been quite seriously involved in some unproductive debates on which they have not, so far, reached or appears that they will ever reach to any possible conclusion. The reason of not working on the topic in question may not, possibly, be ever unearthed. But I can assure one thing that it was certainly not due to the lack of documentation.

The requirement of an elaborate work on Indo- Portuguese diplomacy has been awaited for long. Besides, it has been noticed that there has been some misinterpretations and wrong conclusion put forward by historians dealing with the Indo- European history, for over half a century, and especially, during the recent pasts, due to the lack of proper knowledge of the subject which has overshadowed the socio-political relations of India.

Prof. Afzal Ahmad was awarded a Ph.D. from the M.S. University, Baroda, for his study on Portuguese Trade on the Western Coast of India in the Seventeenth Century (1600-1663), in 1985, and, in 2006, Dr. Ahmad has been awarded another Ph.D. from the King's College, University of London, under the title Portuguese Diplomatic Relations with the South-West Indian States in the Seventeenth Century (1600-1663). While learning Portuguese language during 1976-79 for this work. he worked on several research projects of social sciences under the guidance of Prof. Imtiaz Ahmad. (Late) Prof. Moonis Raza and Dr. Usha Agrawal (Luther) all in J.N. University, New Delhi. He was also a research associate at Sri Ram Centre for Humanities and Research, in 1977.

The arrival of the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean has usually been seen as one of the great turning points of history - the beginning of the period when first Western Europe and then the United States imposed their economic and political dominance on the world by force of arms. The instrument of this supremacy was, first and foremost, the armed warship of which the Portuguese naus were the earliest and in some ways the most impressive examples. The story of the foundation of the first European empire in the East has been endlessly and repetitively repeated, the exploits of Vasco da Gama, Cabral, Almeida and Albuquerque being told and retold as the centenaries of the Discoveries and the Estado da India come and go. In contrast the way the Estado da India grew and evolved during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is much less widely known.

There are difficulties in giving a coherent account of the Estado da India since it was a state like none other in history - indeed there is no consensus among historians on what terminology can be used to describe it. The Estado da India was originally conceived as sovereignty over the sea. The sea was claimed to be the domain of the king of Portugal, giving him the right to levy customs dues on goods entering and leaving his dominions, to issue passports and permits to travel, and to enforce royal monopolies and embargos. Initially this 'state' had little or no territory and depended on treaties made with friendly or coerced rulers. At the same time the king of Portugal claimed jurisdiction over all Christians east of the Tordesillas line by virtue of the papal Bulls which granted ecclesiastical privileges to the Order of Christ of which he was governor. This royal patronage over the Church (the padroado real) enabled the king of Portugal to make church appointments, collect church taxes, authorise church Councils and exercise jurisdiction over matters which fell within the remit of the ecclesiastical courts. Such wide ranging claims, not rooted in any territorial sovereignty, opened the way for subsequent European claims that the power of the state was in some way attached to the body of the subject and could be exercised wherever the subject might be.