The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [121]
There have been many studies of the Portuguese all over the Indian Ocean area 'going native', assimilating to the intricate long-standing networks of trade, especially in the Bay of Bengal area and many parts of southeast Asia. These people operated outside official Portuguese channels, spoke various Asian languages, and indeed very seldom had the opportunity to be counselled by a priest. They were in a position no different from, say, Armenians, Jews, Shirazis, Turks, and the host of other people trading and living and marrying in this polyglot and heterogeneous maritime world.
Most Portuguese outside the official structure were men who had served in the forts, and then by getting married had become casados ('householders'). Many of these people found better trading opportunities outside the forts and strips of the coast controlled by the state. They went to other areas and traded alongside all the others found there, whether Swahili, other Muslims, or Indian Hindus. Many of these people can be seen as transfrontierfolk, the appropriate term for people who do not straddle a frontier, but rather move right over to the other side and acculturate more or less fully. These men were to be found all over littoral Asia, up and down the Swahili coast, in Cambay, all around the Bay of Bengal.
The same interaction can be seen in the 'search for the similar' which the early Portuguese did both in East Africa and in India.70 In both cases they tried desperately to come to terms with, even appropriate, unknown people and religions, and understand them in terms familiar to themselves. In both cases what happened was that they met Hindus, followers of a religion at that time unknown to nearly all Europeans, and thought their religion was a form of Christianity. They were also predisposed to find Christians because they hoped to find Prester John, the Christian emperor who would ally with them and smite the Muslims from the south.
In a more social area, it is clear that many Portuguese in India acculturated and fitted in to the Indian Ocean littoral environment. Portuguese doctors, including even Garcia da Orta, recognised that often Indian remedies were better than European ones. Some aspects of pollution were picked up from Hindu practice. There was copious sexual interaction, and hence reproduction, between Portuguese men and Asian and African women. The result was the creation of a very large mestiço population. Even in their capital city of Goa the Portuguese were far outnumbered by Indians: the total population in 1600 was about 75,000, of whom 1,500 were Portuguese or mestiços, 20,000 Hindus and the rest local Christians.
The medical intermingling can stand as a type for this whole topic.71 Until the sixteenth century medical knowledge and practice in Europe, in the Muslim world and in India seems to have been relatively evenly spread. No area had any decisive advantage, although in different specialities different areas were ahead. There was a considerable degree of interaction between the traditional systems of these three areas. Yet there also was a recognition that some illnesses were geographically specific; some Indian illnesses, for example, were seen by foreigners as 'different', and best treated by indigenous methods. This was especially to be seen in the first European city in Asia, the Portuguese capital of Goa.
One example of both difference and interaction was bleeding. Bleeding was almost a universal cure, prophylactic and restorative in European medicine. They continued to rely on this when they got to India. In January 1542 Francis Xavier, later to be a saint, was ill. He ended a letter by writing, 'I would very much like to write at greater length, but sickness does not now permit it. I have been bled seven times today, and I am only passing well.'72 In the 1670s the Abbé Carré fell ill with a fever, and insisted on being bled. Great quantities were hacked out of him by enthusiastic amateur bleeders, and
This made me so feeble that I cannot bear to speak of it. Yet, though I felt very weak, I was not