Journey
Portuguese India — 1498 to 1961
Four hundred and sixty-three years, from Vasco da Gama's landfall near Calicut in May 1498 to the Indian army's entry into Goa in December 1961. The Estado da Índia was a chain of forts and customs houses rather than a territory, and the first European empire here outlasted every other.
Stops (23)
- Kappad beach, Kozhikode · 20 May 1498
Da Gama anchored off this beach after twenty-three days out of Malindi, guided across by a pilot who already knew the passage. The sea route from Europe to India opens here, and with it four and a half centuries in which European powers arrive by water rather than through the north-western passes.
- Kozhikode / Calicut · 1498–1525 · the Zamorin's port
The Zamorin received da Gama civilly, declined the exclusive pepper contract Portugal wanted, and kept his Muslim shipowners. Portugal's answer was force: Cabral bombarded the town in 1500, and Calicut then spent a century fighting a war it had not sought, at the port that had first welcomed the ships.
- St Francis Church, Kochi · first capital, 1503–1530
Cochin's raja, at odds with Calicut, granted the fort and factory that made the Estado possible, and the first Portuguese capital in Asia stood here rather than at Goa. Da Gama died in the town in 1524 and lay in this church for fourteen years before his bones were shipped home to Lisbon.
- Kuñjāli Marakkār IV · the Marakkar wars, to 1600
The Zamorin's admirals were Muslim shipowners whose trade the Portuguese licence system had ruined, and they fought the carracks for a century with fleets of small fast craft out of the Malabar creeks. The fourth Marakkar was besieged at Kottakkal, surrendered in 1600 and was executed at Goa. He is the resistance the Estado never recorded as a war.
- Afonso de Albuquerque · governor, 1509–1515
Albuquerque decided Portugal could not hold the ocean by trade and took the harbours that controlled it instead — Goa, Malacca, Hormuz — then licensed all other shipping through his own customs houses. The fortified port and the cartaz pass are his, and every later European company copied the method.
- Old Goa · taken 1510 · capital from 1530
Albuquerque stormed the island city in November 1510, at his second attempt, from the Adil Shahi governor of Bijapur. Within twenty years it displaced Cochin as the capital of everything Portugal held from East Africa to Nagasaki, and by 1600 it was larger than Lisbon and called the Rome of the East.
- Se Cathedral, Old Goa · 1562–1652
The primatial cathedral of the East, ninety years in building and the largest church in Asia when it was finished. Its scale is the point: a metropolitan see for a seaborne empire, with suffragan bishops at Cochin, Malacca, Macau and Nagasaki all answering to the archbishop who sat here. Ninety years in building, and the largest church in Asia when it was finished.
- Basilica of Bom Jesus, Old Goa · 1594–1605
Built to hold the body of Francis Xavier, who died off the China coast in 1552 and was brought back here. The plain laterite exterior and the gilded Baroque altar inside became the export model for Catholic building from Daman to Macau and Manila, which is why so many Asian churches rhyme with this one.
- The Goa Inquisition · 1560–1812
The Holy Office sat in the confiscated palace of the Adil Shahi governor for two hundred and fifty years, with jurisdiction over the whole Estado. It prosecuted converts suspected of keeping Hindu or Muslim practice, and its own archive was burnt when the tribunal was abolished, which is why the record is thin.
- Ponda · the temples that moved
Ponda lay just outside Portuguese territory until 1763, which is why it holds the deities of Salcete and Bardez. When the temples in the Old Conquests were demolished, congregations carried their images across the border and rebuilt here — Shanta Durga, Mangueshi, Mahalasa — and the shrines are still there.
- Chandor, Goa · the Goan house
A village of great Catholic landowners' houses, the Braganza house running the length of one side of the square, built by families who kept Hindu Saraswat descent and Portuguese surnames at once. Chandor was also Chandrapura, a pre-Portuguese capital of the Kadambas, dug out from under the paddy. Chandor was also Chandrapura, a pre-Portuguese Kadamba capital, dug out from under the paddy.
- Fontainhas, Panaji · the eighteenth-century town
The Latin quarter of Panaji, laid out when the capital moved downriver from malarial Old Goa in the 1840s. Narrow lanes, oyster-shell windows, balcaos and ochre or indigo lime-wash repainted after every monsoon: the one place where the domestic architecture of Portuguese India survives as a whole streetscape. It is the one place where the domestic architecture of Portuguese India survives as a whole streetscape.
- Vasco da Gama, Goa · Mormugao harbour
The deep-water harbour at the mouth of the Zuari, which took over from the silted Mandovi and was given a railway to the Deccan in 1888 so that Goa could ship British Indian goods. The town carries the name of the man who landed at Kappad; the ore terminals came much later.
- Vasai (Bassein) Fort · 1534–1739
Ceded by Bahadur Shah of Gujarat in 1534 and built up as the walled Court of the North, a city of churches, convents and fidalgo houses. The Marathas under Chimaji Appa took it in 1739 after a three-year siege, and it has been a ruin under creepers ever since — the Estado's largest single loss.
- Gonçalo Garcia · 1556–1597
Born at Vasai to a Portuguese father and an Indian mother, he went east as a merchant and lay Franciscan and was crucified with twenty-five others at Nagasaki in 1597. Canonised in 1862, he is the first person born in India to be made a saint — the Estado's religious network running the other way.
- Moti Daman · 1559–1961
The walled town on the south bank of the Daman Ganga, taken from the Gujarat sultanate and kept for four centuries. Bastioned ramparts, a governor's house, two churches and a street grid inside them: a complete small Portuguese colonial town, because nothing later was ever built over it. A complete small Portuguese colonial town, because nothing later was ever built over it.
- Nani Daman · the north bank
The smaller settlement across the river, where the Portuguese put the shipyards and most of the Catholic Daneses lived. Daman's wooden shipbuilding served the Gulf and East African trade into the twentieth century, and the two banks together are why the enclave had a working economy at all. Daman's wooden shipbuilding served the Gulf and East African trade into the twentieth century.
- Fort of St Jerome, Daman · 1614–1672
The northern fort of Daman, built against Mughal rather than Indian Ocean attack, with a gateway carrying a carved figure of St Jerome above it. It guarded the crossing and the shipyards on the Nani Daman side, and its enclosure now holds a church, a school and a cemetery. Its enclosure now holds a church, a school and a cemetery rather than a garrison.
- Diu Fort · 1535–1961
The great fort on the island, obtained from Bahadur Shah of Gujarat in 1535 as the price of Portuguese help against the Mughals. It held out against a Gujarati siege in 1538 and an Ottoman-supported one in 1546, and those two failures are why no rival fleet displaced Portugal for a century.
- St Paul's Church, Diu · 1601–1610
The Baroque church in Diu town, its scrolled white facade cut in local limestone that hardens in air. Diu was a Gujarati port with a Jain and Vaniya merchant population before 1535 and remained one under Portuguese customs, which is why the town has a church of this scale in a Hindu commercial quarter.
- Silvassa · 1783–1954
Nagar Haveli's seventy-two villages came to Portugal in 1783 from the Maratha Peshwa, as compensation for a frigate the Marathas had seized — an inland forest tract acquired by way of a shipping claim. Silvassa was its administrative town, and the enclave was taken by Indian volunteers in 1954. Silvassa was its administrative town, and the enclave was taken by Indian volunteers in 1954.
- Dadra · liberated July 1954
Dadra, a few square kilometres surrounded by Indian territory, was entered by volunteers of the United Front of Goans on 22 July 1954, three weeks before Nagar Haveli. India declined to let Portuguese police cross its roads to reach the enclaves, and the International Court of Justice upheld that in 1960.
- Vasona · the forest tract
A village in the eastern part of the enclave, among the Warli and Dhodia communities whose land the seventy-two villages were. The transfer of 1783 changed the flag over a forest economy of teak, grazing and shifting cultivation without changing much else, and that is most of Nagar Haveli's history.