Audrey Truschke, the controversial self-described historian who went to great lengths to whitewash the tyrannical Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, seems to have developed a new fascination of late: to downplay the savage Portuguese inquisition in Goa and atrocities committed against the indigenous population.
To this end, Truschke recently took to Twitter to share her version of Portuguese conquest of some of the cities along the India’s southwestern coast. “I’m writing today about the first Indian experience with European colonization — the Portuguese Estado da India, established in 1505 and limited to a handful of cities along India’s southwestern coast,” Trushcke tweeted on August 2.
What followed next was a series of tweets packed with Audrey’s convictions and beliefs to sweep under the rug the atrocities meted out by the Portuguese during the tenure of their oppressive reign in India. She tweeted that there were certain things “pretty critical” to add to the conventional understanding that Vasco de Gama successfully sailed around the Cape of Good Hope and arrived in Calicut in 1498.
Among those things was cooperation from experienced Indian traders in Africa, who, according to Trushchke, played a pivotal role in helping Vasco de Gama navigate the oceans to reach the Indian shore. While Audrey Trushcke summarily rejects Indian literature and evidence of persecution of Hindus and desecration of temples by the Mughal emperors, Aurangzeb in particular, she conveniently relies on unmentioned sources to claim a certain Gujarati from Kenya helped Vasco de Gama sail on to Calicut.
Truschke adds that once Vasco de Gama reached Calicut, he undertook negotiations with Samudri Raja, the Malayalam-speaking local rulers, apparently in Arabic that to the Aurangzeb fangirl’s interpretation was a “debacle full of wild misunderstandings”.
“Among other things, after three months in India, Vasco de Gama left thinking that all of the Hindus he encountered were Christians who inexplicably practiced caste. It’s a powerful example of how preconceptions are not always corrected by experience,” Truschke said in a subsequent tweet while cunningly covering up the vices that Christian proselytisation and imperial Christianity brought in its wake.
Christian missionaries often pressurised the natives to embrace Christianity, offering them irresistible inducements for relinquishing their ancestral faith and making appealing promises to get them to initiate into Christianity. But, since the initiation often took place against the converts’ free will, it only served to widen social fissures and create artificial problems that hitherto didn’t exist.
Vasco De Gama, Truschke says, returned to Portugal in 1499, and the Portuguese soon returned to India, hoping to turn it into one of its colonies, especially with the conquest of Goa from Bijapur in 1510. And aping her deceit in painting Mughal emperor Aurangzeb as a victim of contemporary perception, Truschke tried to portray the subjugation of Goa by the Portuguese as some sort of peaceful transition that did not involved bloodshed and atrocities meted out on the natives.
She characterises Portuguese rule over Goa as the longest Indian experience with European colonialism, one that was distinct in the sense that Portuguese men often intermarried with local men. While Truschke tries to pass it off as a “virtue” of the Portuguese men to accept and marry indigenous women, what she tries to gloss over is the conformity of the Portuguese conquerors to the Catholic mandate that called for using miscegenation as a tool for converting Hindus.
One of the popular methods used in medieval times to convert the native Indian population to Christianity and generate a sense of contempt toward their own culture was miscegenation. Christian men married multiple local native women to convert them into Christianity and bring them under their fold, thereby robbing them off their prestige and culture, which could form the basis of their rebellion against the colonial rule.
Another preposterous argument Truschke offers in her colossal exercise to whitewash atrocities committed by Portuguese rulers on the Indian natives is that at least they left most of India ‘untouched’. It is worth mentioning that Portuguese rulers did not try to expand their imperial borders in India as a part of a benevolent gesture toward the natives but because they were severely constrained in their resources to overtake the mighty British, which at that time commanded the seas and ruled most of India.
Certainly, their inability to dislodge the British and seize control of India could not be construed as an act of generosity on the part of Portuguese for “untouched” Indians. But for Truschke, it was profoundly generous of the Portuguese for not extending their rule beyond their existing borders.
Besides, with the Twitter thread, Truschke has also tried to pull a veil over the Portuguese Inquisition of Goa, an often forgotten and unspoken event by the ‘secular’ circles of Indian historians, despite various historical records exposing the gross exodus of not just Hindus, but also Jews that had escaped Medieval Europe to take refuge in India.
The Portuguese Inquisition of Goa: A living hell for native Hindus and Jewish refugees
The Portuguese inquisition of Goa started when Vasco Da Gama returned to Portugal after he discovered the route to India via Africa’s Cape of Good Hope. Upon his return to Portugal in 1510, Gama told the Portuguese royals about the undiscovered route to India, which gave the Portuguese an opportunity to colonise the Western coast of India, and particularly Goa.
Pope Nicholas V soon issued a diktat which gave the kingdom of Portugal a monopoly on forcing Christianity upon the locals of the newly discovered areas (and mainly India), along with the monopoly to trade on behalf of the Roman Catholic Empire in Asia. Soon after, the Portuguese sent its troops to capture a portion of Goa and set up a colony in the coastal city.
Aghast by the local traditions followed by Hindus, the Portuguese were angered by the locals following a religion other than Christianity and ordered all temples within the colony to be shut; this marked the beginning of the bloody Goan inquisition that comprised of gross human right violations and mass executions of the local Hindu, Jew and Muslim populations.
In 1541, idol worship was forbidden in the Portuguese colony of Goa and over 350 temples were destroyed by the Portuguese soldiers. It had been officially declared that being a believer of any religion other than Roman Catholicism was forbidden for residents of Goa.
The infamous Francis Xaviers and Martin Alfonso were sent to Goa by King John III of Portugal in 1542 to initiate the process of converting Goan residents to Roman Catholicism. On their arrival in Goa, they were enraged by the New Christians of Goa secretly practising their previous religions (either Judaism, Hinduism or Islam), while also upholding their Hindu values and traditions. A disturbed Francis Xavier wrote to King John III of Portugal on 16th May 1546 to impose inquisition on Goa in an attempt to ‘discipline’ the residents and make them follow Catholicism.
The inquisition banned apostasy of Roman Catholics to Hinduism, Judaism or Islam, and banned the sale of books in the Konkani, Marathi, Sanskrit and Arabic languages. The use of Konkani was forbidden in the colony of Goa.
The Inquisition particularly affected the New Christians of Europe from the Jewish community, who had fled to India during the Spanish Inquisition in an attempt to escape the imposition of Christianity and live amongst the Jewish community in India. They had come in search of a life of dignity where they could practise Judaism openly and not in hiding while pretending to be Christian. India was the only country in the world where Jews were given absolute freedom to practise their faith, especially under Hindu kingdoms.
Upon the imposition of the inquisition in Goa, life became comparable to hell for the local Hindu population, who were often on the receiving end of persecution and were targeted in particular by the sadistic Christian missionaries. The Christian missionaries called the Hindus ‘uncultured’ and ‘savages’, who worshipped black idols ‘resembling demons’; the Christians took it upon themselves to force Hindus into leaving their religion and succumbing to Christianity. An inquisition office was thereby set up which aimed to discriminate against Hindus on all matters possible.
Hindus were forbidden from holding any public office, inheriting their father’s property and testify as witnesses in courts. If a Hindu child was deemed to be an orphan by the colonialists, the child was ‘seized’ by the Society of Jesus (founded by the not-so-saintly Francis Xavier) and made to change his religion. Clear discrimination was seen in social life, where Hindus were forced to sign public documents only after Christians and couldn’t be clerks in village offices. In 1567, a law banning Christians from employing Hindus in the colony was introduced.
