The Portuguese first on the Coromandel

– Pius Malekandathil Professor, Centre for Historic Studies, JNU, New Delhi

The waters of the Indian Ocean, which facilitated free movement of people, commodities and ideas for long, became the major theatre for confrontations between various commercially motivated European powers from the 16th Century onwards. The Portuguese were the first to claim supremacy over the Indian Ocean.

Afonso de Albuquerque realised that Portuguese interests in India could be well protected only by maintaining a centralised system of control in the Indian Ocean and also by keeping Malacca, Hormuz and the mouth of the Red Sea as part of their power-pillars.

From the second decade of the 16th Century, there evolved bi-partite divisions of the Indian Ocean, which again got modified by the 1550s so as to have a tripartite division. The centralised control of the Portuguese over the Indian Ocean, which included a tentative power centre in Goa, and supporting bases in Malacca and Hormuz, and a patrolling mechanism at the mouth of the Red Sea, started crumbling immediately after the death of Albuquerque. It happened mainly because of the pressure from the married Portuguese private traders.

During this period, these traders organised themselves as pressure groups, particularly in Cochin, and they wanted less state control in trade and a more liberal atmosphere to expand their commercial activities. As they found the State to be a stumbling block for their private commercial activities, they put pressure on the Portuguese authorities to earmark space for them, to conduct private trade. The lobbying group of private traders ultimately got the upper hand with the nomination of Lopo Soares de Albergia as the new Governor in 1515.

The eastern space of the Indian Ocean was then earmarked as an exclusive space for the private trade of the married Portuguese traders, known as casado traders, while the western space of the Indian Ocean was earmarked as the space for Crown commerce. The Crown instituted mechanisms of power like estalishing cartaz (fortress) and a patrolling armada in the western Indian Ocean to protect their monopoly trade, while the Portuguese private traders, who were married to Muslim women, began to move more and more towards the Coromandel and other places in the eastern Indian Ocean – in the company of their Muslim relatives. By the 1520s, their number rose to 300 and they had established a long chain of Portuguese enclaves from Punnaikayal and Vedalai on the Pearl Fishery coast to Nagapattinam at the mouth of Kaveri, Devanampattinam near Pondicherry, Mylapore near Madras and Pulicat. The expansion of the Portuguese in the western Indian Ocean was a crown-sponsored project, while the Portuguese expansion in the eastern was a result of mercantile expansion of the Portuguese private traders. In order to keep the eastern Indian Ocean as a commercial space, the Portuguese Crown slowly withdrew from the monopoly trade in spices in Southeast Asia (from Malacca in 1533, and Moluccas in 1537), and refrained from the use of control devices like fortresses and patrolling fleets on the Coromandel coast.

Eventually some of these Portuguese private traders, joining hands with the Muslim traders, even began to attack the vessels of the Portuguese Crown, as happened in 1537, when they found the Portuguese State to be their common enemy and the Portuguese vessels to be their common target of attacks. The Portuguese casados built ships for the Muslim corsairs and helped them to enlarge their fleet.

In 1537, Diogo Fenandes wrote to King John III that the Portuguese, who were married to native Muslim women, were giving protection and support to the Muslim corsairs. Seeing the eastern Portuguese settlements as a threat to the Crown’s projects, Portuguese officialdom twice ordered – in 1547 and 1568 – military preparations to destroy these private settlements on the east coast of India and to bring the Portuguese settlers in these places to the official Portuguese enclaves on the west coast of India.

Eventually, after the 1540s, the Portuguese identified certain regions as fringe areas in the Indian Ocean where the Portuguese power centre had no control. Portuguese private traders, adventurers and renegades began to move in considerable numbers, to such peripheral areas like Bengal, Pegu, Tenasserim, Moluccas, Timor, and, later, Japan, in order to escape from the rigorous control of the power centre at Goa. Though these peripheral areas remained outside the zones of direct control of the Portuguese authorities of Goa, attempts were often made by the Lusitanians to tame them and integrate them with the power centre at Goa, with the help of multiple sets of missionaries who made frequent visits. (Courtesy: Journal of Indian Ocean Studies.)

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