Abstract
A study of the initial encounter of the West with India effectively demonstrates that all heterologies, all investigations of the Other, seek to distinguish between what is deemed “civilized” as opposed to “barbarian.” This chapter compares early Italian and Portuguese accounts of voyages to and from India1 to consider first of all how these narratives reflected or differed from the classical sources. Questions of race and racial construction featured centrally in these discussions. An insistence on distinguishing the civilized from the barbaric also characterized the Church’s contributions to these debates. The influence of this alternative hegemonic structure in the representation of the “Other” adds a significant component to the study of the rhetoric and politics of empire building in India.
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Notes
Ivan Hanneford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 88.
Augustine, De civitate Dei , “The deserts of souls are not to be estimated by the qualities of bodies,” The City of God , trans. Marcus Pods (New York: Random House, Inc., 1950), 11.23.
Lincoln Davis Hammond, ed., Travelers in Disguise: Narratives of Eastern Travel (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), 6.
Richard Henry Major, ed., India in the Fifteenth Century (London: Hakluyt, 1857), 13.
Tome Pires, The Suma Oriental. An Account of the East from the Red Sea to Japan , ed. Armendo Cortesao (Nendeln, Lichtenstein: Kraus, 1967), 48, 51, 57.
Damiao de Gbis, Fides, Religio, Moresque Aethiopium sub Imperio Preciosi Iounnis (Louvain: Rutgerus Rescius, 1540). This work barely scooped Alvares’s own account of the encounter published under the title, the “Verdadera informacam das terras do Preste Joam.”
Jeremy Lawrance, “The Middle Indies: Damião de Gois on Prester John and the Ethiopians,” Renaissance Studies 6.3–4 (1992): 320. His authorial stance, by the way, would cost him dearly when he later came under the surveillance of the Inquisition.
C. R. Boxer, Four Centuries of Portuguese Expansion 1415–1825: A Succinct Survey (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969) and C. R. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborn Empire: 1415–1825 (London: Hutchinson, 1969).
K. G. Jayne, Vasco da Gama and His Successors: 1460–1580 (London: Methuen, 1910), 286–87.
C. R. Boxer, Race Relations in the Portuguese Colonial Empire ( Oxford: Clarendon, 1963), 58.
Antonio da Silva Rego, ed., Documentacão para a história das missöes do Padroado portugues do Oriente. India , 12 vols. (Lisbon: Ageneia Geral do Ultramar, 1947–58), cited in ibid., 61.
Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History , trans. and intro. Tom Conley (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 227.
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Figueira, D. (2004). Civilization and the Problem of Race: Portuguese and Italian Travel Narratives to India. In: Rajan, B., Sauer, E. (eds) Imperialisms. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403980465_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403980465_5
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