Land of seven rivers: History of India's Geography (20 page)

Vasco knew that he had to get back to Lisbon as soon as possible to report his findings. The longer he stayed, the more likely that the Arabs would find a way to trap him or turn the local ruler against him. He presented himself to the Samudrin and tried to make the best possible impression with gifts and protestations of peace. Although the Arabs did instigate some Nair guards to briefly hold Da Gama captive, he was soon freed and was heading back to Europe. Not surprisingly, he was given a hero’s welcome in Lisbon. King Manuel lost no time in writing to the Spanish monarchs to inform them that the Portuguese half of the world contained India. He also assured them that India was full of Christians ‘although not yet strong in faith and possessed of a thorough knowledge of it’.
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The Portuguese lost no time in following up on their discovery. A fleet of thirteen ships and 1200 men was dispatched under the command of Pedro Alvares Cabral. They were heavily armed with cannons and guns, still unknown in the Indian Ocean. By now the Portuguese had worked out that winds and ocean currents made it more efficient to first sail south-west and then turn east rather than hug the coast of Africa. The fleet swung so far west that they landed on the Brazil coast and claimed it for Portugal. Note that only a small part of Brazil actually fell within the Portuguese sphere as per the Treaty of Tordesillas, but cartographic ambiguity would allow the Portuguese to grab more than their share. The Spanish would have their revenge by taking the Philippines
which was clearly in the Portuguese sphere. Soon, the papal division would completely break down as other Europeans joined the race.

On reaching Calicut, Cabral presented the Samudrin with many lavish gifts before putting forward the demand that he expel the Arabs and trade exclusively with the Portuguese. The Samudrin was understandably taken aback. While these negotiations were going on, a Meccan ship loaded with cargo prepared to leave for Aden. The Portuguese seized it and triggered riots in which a number of Portuguese men were killed. Cabral responded by lining up his ships and firing broadside after broadside into the city. The Samudrin was forced to flee from his palace. A number of merchant ships were seized and their sailors were burned alive in full view of the people onshore. Thus began the European domination of the Indian Ocean that would last till the middle of the twentieth century.

Within a few decades, the Portuguese used their cannons to establish a string of outposts in the Indian Ocean. Control over Socotra and Muscat allowed them to control the Red Sea and Persian Gulf respectively. In 1510, they conquered Goa. A year later, a fleet sent out from Goa took over Melaka and established control over the key shipping route to the Spice Islands. Soon, they had trading posts in Macau and Nagasaki. The Portuguese maintained control over the seas with an iron fist and, even by the standards of the time, gained a reputation for extreme cruelty and religious bigotry. They destroyed numerous Hindu temples, persecuted the Syrian Christians and harassed ships carrying Muslims for the Hajj, on occasion burning the ships mid-sea with the pilgrims still on board.
Perhaps no one suffered more from Portuguese repression than the Sri Lankans, both Tamils and Sinhalese. Much of the island was in a state of almost constant war for one and a half centuries. One can only be grateful that the Portuguese lacked the resources to attempt a full-scale conquest of the subcontinent.

Portuguese control over the Indian Ocean was based on a network of forts along the coast. The best preserved of these forts is in Diu, a small island just off the Gujarat coast. I recommend climbing the ramparts to see the beautiful views of the Arabian Sea and the impressive array of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century cannons. There are few places in the world where one can see and touch such a large number of early cannons, their solid wood wheels weathered by centuries of rain and sun. In 1538, the Portuguese were able to defend Diu against a combined attack by the Sultan of Gujarat and a large fleet sent by the Ottoman Turks. A huge Ottoman cannon, cast in 1531 in Egypt, is the only remnant of the failed Turkish expedition and can still be seen in Junagarh fort. The Portuguese would manage to hold on to Diu till as recently as 1961. The last of the outposts in Asia, Macau, was handed back to the Chinese in 1999. The Portuguese had been the first Europeans to come to this part of the world and they were the last to leave.

When Vasco da Gama landed in India, it had a population of around 110 million. At that time, China had an estimated population of 103 million, the United Kingdom 3.9 million
and Portugal just 1 million.
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India was still a major economic power with a share of 24.5 per cent of world GDP. Nonetheless, this was smaller than the one-third share of world GDP that it had enjoyed in the first millennium
AD
. Around 1500, the Chinese economy bypassed the Indian economy in terms of size for the first time. Moreover, per capita income in India fell below the global average. After having lagged behind India for centuries, most European countries enjoyed higher per capita incomes by 1500. The richest country in Europe, Italy, had a per capita income that was twice the Indian level. The individual brilliance of rulers like Akbar and Krishnadeva Raya may have created periods of prosperity, but it did not reverse the trend. In short, the glittering Mughal court of the sixteenth and seventeenth century hid the fact that India was already in relative decline.

As argued in my previous book,
The Indian Renaissance
, the problem was a growing technological gap between the Europeans and everyone else. The most cutting-edge technology of that time was cartography—the technique of making maps—and the Europeans were simply miles ahead by the beginning of the sixteenth century. The discoveries of the Portuguese were put down on hand-drawn maps and these charts were considered top secret. Before each voyage, the captain was allowed to make a copy from the royal library and was expected to return it with new discoveries marked out when he got back.
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Not surprisingly, the maps were the focus of international espionage. In 1502, Alberto Cantino, an agent of the Duke of Ferrera, stole a chart from Lisbon and took it to Italy. It is preserved in the Biblioteca Estense of Modena and shows that the Portuguese had quickly worked
out that India was a peninsula although many elements of Ptolemaic geography were still retained.

The first map showing the Indian peninsula to be published publicly was by Johan Ruysch in Rome in 1508. It shows India as a peninsula and marks a few of the ports on the coast but shows little knowledge of the country’s interiors. The Indus and the Ganga are the only two Indian rivers marked but their courses are essentially arbitrary. It also shows the Malay peninsula and marks Melaka (spelled
Malacha
on the map). A well-known map by Waldseemüller in 1513 has a broadly similar layout. Over the next century, more maps were published and the level of knowledge improved, albeit not always linearly. Mistakes were common and often perpetuated by cartographers copying information from each other. Empty spaces were decorated with drawings, often echoing the fantastical creatures of Mandeville. Nonetheless, geographical knowledge went through a major shift in the sixteenth century. At the centre of the cartographic revolution were two individuals, Gerardus Mercator and Abraham Ortilius, contemporaries from the Low Countries.

Mercator was born in 1512 near Antwerp and was an accomplished engraver of maps and charts by the time he was twenty-four. Although he does not seem to have ever travelled to the faraway lands that were being newly discovered, he was able to systematically assimilate all the information available about them. In 1538, he published his first world map that is one of the earliest to bear the names North and South America. He also showed Asia and America to be separate continents long before the discovery of the Bering Strait proved it to be a fact.

Mercator lived in a time of great religious and political ferment. An innovator who asked too many questions was always suspect and, in 1544, he was arrested as a heretic. If he had not been rescued by influential friends a few months later, it is likely that he would have been beheaded or burned at the stake by the Inquisition. A few years later, Mercator would shift east to Duisburg where he would produce his most famous work. In 1569, he produced his world map with the legend ‘New and Improved Description of the Lands of the World, amended and intended for the use of Navigators’
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. The map did not just have richer information than earlier maps; it used a novel system of projecting the curved surface of the world on a flat surface. This was a major innovation in cartography. The ‘Mercator Projection’ is still the most commonly used format for a world map even though it is based on a distortion that squeezes the countries near the equator and stretches those near the poles. This is why countries like Norway and Sweden look much larger than they are in reality while India and Indonesia look much smaller.

It was with Mercator’s encouragement that Ortilius produced the first atlas in 1570 in Antwerp. The first edition of the atlas had seventy sheets and was called the
Theatrum Orbis Terrarum
(Theatre of the World). It proved such a success that forty editions would eventually be published. It is interesting to see how the rediscovery of classical Greek and Roman works had a profound impact on the European mind of that time. Ortelius took pains to include a map that tried to reconcile the new findings about India with the
Periplus
and with Arrian’s account of Alexander’s expedition. The map identifies the location of cities like Pataliputra and Muzaris
with surprising accuracy given the passage of time. In a sense, it was the first attempt to recreate the history of India’s geography and is consequently a direct ancestor of this book.

One of the most prominent features of early European maps of India is the kingdom of ‘Narsinga’ that covers much of the southern peninsula. Most modern Indians will have difficulty identifying this name because it refers to what is now remembered as the Vijayanagar empire, named after its capital city. It was ruled by Narasingha Raya when the Portuguese first arrived in India. He was not an especially important monarch in the history of Vijayanagar, but his name stuck and Europeans continued to mark it on their maps long after he and his empire were gone.

The city of Vijayanagar was established just after the devastating raids of Alauddin Khilji’s general Malik Kafur had broken down the old power structures of southern India. Around 1336, two brothers, Hukka and Bukka, appear to have rallied various defeated groups under their banner and built a fortified new city called Vijayanagar or City of Victory. At its height in the early sixteenth century it was probably the largest city in the world.

The city was built across the river from Kishkindha, site of the monkey-kingdom described in the Ramayana. It is a dramatic landscape of rock outcrops and gigantic boulders. The choice of location, therefore, was no coincidence as the rocky terrain partly neutralized the military advantages of Turkic cavalry. An additional advantage was that the place
had easy access to iron-ore from the nearby mines of Bellary, still in active use today.

A number of visitors have left us lucid accounts of Vijayanagar, including Abdul Razzaq, envoy from the Persian court, and several Europeans such as Domingo Paes and Fernão Nunes. They tell us that the city was encircled by a series of concentric walls, perhaps as many as seven of them, that enclosed a massive area. The large gap between the first and second wall was used mostly for gardens and farming. The inner walls enclosed bazaars, homes, mansions and temples. At the core of the city was a magnificent palace-complex surrounded by strong fortifications. Despite thinking of itself consciously as a bastion of classical Hinduism, the city was very cosmopolitan with sizeable populations of Muslims, Christians and even Jews. Paes tells us that ‘the people of this city are countless in number, so much so that I do not wish to put it down for fear that it should be thought fabulous’. He goes on to say ‘This is the best provided city in the world … the streets and markets are full of laden oxen so much so that you cannot get along for them’.
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The remains of the city can be visited at Hampi in Karnataka, and can only be described as spectacular. In my many travels across the world, I have found only the ruins of Angkor in Cambodia to be comparable to those of Hampi in terms of sheer scale. It is too large to be explored solely on foot and the visitor will need both a car and a good guide. As described by the medieval travellers, there is still a fair amount of farming that continues within the UNESCO World Heritage site, in many cases using the old canals. We even have remnants of a system of stone aqueducts that brought water into the city.
The remains of temples, palaces and bazaars make it clear that the reports about the city’s size were not exaggerations. Indeed, after decades of excavations, much of the site has still not been uncovered. One of the more remarkable remains is that of Ugra Narasingha—a gigantic sculpture of Lord Vishnu as half-lion and half-man (unlike the Egyptian sphinx, it has the head of a lion and the body of a man). Given that the Vijayanagar empire was known as Narsinga by the early Europeans, this sculpture is particularly appropriate.

As already mentioned, the ruins of Vijayanagar are located right across the Tungabhadra from Kishkindha and it is worthwhile crossing the river to visit it. Although a modern bridge was almost complete at the time of writing,
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when I visited the site in 2007 and 2008, one still has to cross the Tungabhadra in a round coracle boat piled with people, goats, motor-cycles and sacks of rice. Almost five hundred years earlier, Domingo Paes made the same crossing and wrote, ‘People cross to this place in boats which are round like baskets; inside, they are made of cane and outside, are covered with leather; they are able to carry fifteen or twenty people and even horses and oxen can use them if necessary but for the most part these animals swim across. Men row them with a sort of paddle, and the boats are always turning around.’
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I know exactly what he meant.