SOURCE: “The Lusiads and the Asian Reader,” in English Studies in Canada, Vol. 23, No. 1, March 1997, pp. 1-19.

[In this essay, Rajan examines The Lusiads in the context of European exploitation of Asian economies and peoples.]

In March 1553 four ships set sail from Lisbon along the route that Vasco da Gama had pioneered for Western commerce. Three were lost on the way. The fourth ship, the Sao Bento, dropped anchor in Goa only to be lost on the way back. Among those disembarking from the Sao Bento was a common soldier, Luis Vaz de Camoens, the author-to-be of The Lusiads.

Goa had been seized by Albuquerque in 1510, an event foretold by Jupiter in The Lusiads, who assures the importunate Venus that Goa will in time be the queen of all the East. Camoens had not arrived to savour the truth of this prophecy, regarding a city that he described elsewhere as a modern Babylon, or to enjoy the fruits of that paradise that Vasco da Gama had hailed, or even to conduct preliminary research for The Lusiads. He came because he may have had no alternative. In a street brawl on Corpus Christi day in 1552 the quarrelsome Camoens had wounded a court official, Garcalo Borges. He was cast into prison for eight months. Borges did not press charges and in fact forgave the poet after receiving an apology. The king's pardon followed on 7 March 1553, presumably with a condition attached to it. A fortnight later Camoens embarked for Goa. “I set out,” he wrote dejectedly, “as one leaving this world for the next.”

He continued on his colourful course, taking part in an expedition against the king of Chembe on the Malabar coast within six weeks of his arrival and, perhaps, in an expedition to Ormuz in 1554. In February 1555 he “can be located with some precision in what used to be Italian Somaliland (Lusiads, intro. xix). In the following year he appears a third of the way across the world in Macao as Trustee for the Dead and Absent. Opinion differs as to whether this was a promotion or a further degree of exile. In Macao Camoens once again displayed his customary talent for not getting on with authority. Relieved of his post, he was in some danger of providing his successor with an additional dossier, by himself joining the ranks of the dead and absent. The hospitable Vietnamese rescued him from a shipwreck in the Mekong estuary. Clutched to his heart was the waterlogged manuscript of The Lusiads. It is a story that seems designed to belong to literature rather than fact. Camoens endows it with a double legitimacy by incorporating it into his epic poem (x, 124). He also anticipates Milton here and elsewhere in The Lusiads in his infiltration of the epic voice by the personal (Sims 374-84; Martz 45-59, esp. 58).

From Macao, Camoens returned to Goa and was in and out of prison, once for not paying his debts and once, it is conjectured, because of the enemies he had made at Macao. He decided to return to Portugal, but languished for two years at Mozambique, unable to pay his passage further. It was not until 1570 that he reached Lisbon. The Lusiads was published two years later. The king awarded Camoens a pension of 15,000 reis, which is described as not magnificent but not a pittance (intro., xxv). It compares well with the payment of ten pounds that Milton received for writing Paradise Lost.

A life that reads like a tale out of Conrad is reflected in a poem that is more robust than thoughtful. Innumerable and boastful accounts of Portuguese victories past and future remind one of that “tedious havoc” that Milton castigates (PL IX, 30), though only after indulging in a fair measure of it himself. Camoens courts comparison assiduously with Virgil through more than eighty allusions to the Aeneid and claims superiority over past epics in that his hero is actual rather than legendary. The machinery of the poem complete with Greek gods and Olympian squabbling is also lavishly emulative of the ancients. It becomes something of an embarrassment in a poem written under Christian auspices, so that at one point in it (X, 82) Tethys is obliged to warn Vasco da Gama that she and the mythological apparatus she represents are to be regarded as no more than figures of poetry. It is advice that the reader is expected to apply with discrimination. The future Portuguese empire that Tethys thereupon proceeds to display to da Gama is unfortunately not intended to be figural.

The view of The Lusiads offered here runs against the grain of current interpretation. It is put forward to suggest that current interpretations may rest upon reading habits that need to be further scrutinized. Commentary on The Lusiads is almost nostalgically Eurocentric. The negligible attention given to the representation of Asia in a poem that displays the heroic quest as the discovery of a new route to Asia's riches, is symptomatic of this nostalgia; but it ought to be slightly surprising in an era in which Western revisionism seems prepared to admit that it needs to listen to others as well as to learn from itself. Circumstances make it necessary to declare the relevance (if not the primacy) of an Asian viewpoint in the reading of the poem and to do so, perhaps, with an assertiveness that would not have been called for in a world of evaluation with more generous boundaries.

Historicizing The Lusiads restricts itself at present to considering the poem as an event in the epic genre, or as an event in the orchestration of a Portuguese-European identity. The first tactic enables us to separate epic dreams of heroic achievement and glory that are both upper-class and in the high style, from more prosaic commercial visions that are middle-class and also in the mean style. The inexorable collusion between commerce and empire is mystified by a disengagement that enables us to read The Lusiads as an impure poem, or as a poem forced out of the decorum of its genre by the glittering possibilities of a breaking open of commercial horizons to which it was unable to remain oblivious.

The second tactic of considering the poem as an event in a national-cum-European formation of identity, can attach considerable weight to the questionings of itself that The Lusiads occasionally places at its margin. These questions are treated as part of an internal debate through which Portugal proceeds to write out its meaning and destiny in a manner that can be read as emblematic of Europe; but they can also be treated as troubling the poem or even placing it in jeopardy to a sufficient extent to do away with some of the embarrassments of its imperial stridency in a post-colonial era.

Lacking in this historicizing is any sustained consideration of the poem as an event in imperial history, as an important and strong articulating voice in the coming to power of a discourse of dominance. This protocol of avoidance is not surprising. Placing a poem within a genre, or within a history of identity-formation, is an activity that can seek to remain descriptive; placing it within imperial history makes evaluation difficult to escape. It also means that the evaluation may put in doubt the status of any poem that contributes powerfully and with sufficient single-mindedness to discourses and practices now generally disowned. The protective barriers erected against this way of approaching The Lusiads are entirely understandable; they make it helpful (and perhaps essential) to import into the poem's Eurocentric containment a reading from a different space that is formed by a different experience. For the sake of clarity, it is proposed to pursue and to endeavour to shape this reading before putting it into engagement with other readings that have so far prevailed.

Camoens's insistent claim to be measured against Virgil only reminds us that Lisbon was not a second Rome and that The Lusiads is not a second Aeneid. There is no Dido to abandon, no Turnus to contend against, no devastated Troy to remember, no lost homeland to reinstate in the pursuit of an imperial destiny. If we add that the poem's freight of feeling carries within it none of Virgil's war weariness, his sense of a heroic and world-ordering imperative weighed down by the sacrifices that the imperative exacts, we are adding to thematic impoverishment a simplistic self-confidence that fully protects the poem's own voyage from any hint of an introspective hazard. That the golden opportunity for dismantling the poem that is proffered in the revelations of Tethys should not be taken up is entirely understandable. Her remarks are addressed to a suspicious Church rather than a subversive reader. More puzzling is the choice of Bacchus as the principal opponent to da Gama's expedition. As a companion to Lusus, Bacchus is part of Portugal's mythic ancestry. His likeness is painted on the banners of da Gama's ships (I, 30, 32; VIII, 4), which he had earlier done his best to sink. It would be reassuring if the founder of Portugal were opposed in principle to Portugal's imperial destiny. Bacchus's objections are, predictably, not of this order. He was the patron of Alexander's expedition to India, and Venus, in sponsoring da Gama's expedition to that country is interfering with Bacchus's territorial rights. Olympian deities are prone to petulant behaviour, and Bacchus is doing no more than setting his feet in Juno's footsteps. But his wounded ego is still more than slightly at odds with his responsibilities toward the nation that he founded.

In delaying the implementation of the Jupiterian world-will Bacchus is considerably less effective than Juno. One might conclude that his heart is not really in the unnatural role that the author of the Lusiads has assigned him. His manipulations reduce themselves to raising a typhoon as da Gama's fleet nears Calicut and causing the rulers of Mombasa and Mozambique to obstruct the Portuguese mission under pretence of assisting it. Scammell offers a different view of the latter incident: “at Mombasa gracious gifts were repaid with cheap beads” (1981 235). The ruler of Malindi was even more hospitable, offering technical assistance (in the form of a pilot who knew the passage to India) as well as gracious gifts. He was hopeful of Portuguese assistance against the neighbouring kingdom of Kilwa (Scammell 1981, 235).¹

It is typical of the poem's self-protectiveness that opportunities for even superficial self-examination are waved away before they can materialize. An old man rails against the expedition at the end of Canto IV, expressing the objections of the conservative opposition to the king's overseas policy as well as the potentially Satanic vanity of the quest for glory and fame. Having delivered his speech, he is never heard from again and his views, once aired, receive no further attention. In the same vein a mutiny that is said to have broken out as the fleet was sailing up the East Coast of Africa is deemed not to have taken place since such behaviour would have been un-Portuguese (V, 71-72).

The poem's impoverishments extend to its characterizations. Epic voyages provide opportunities to display the virtues of leadership, its courage, its resourcefulness, its heroic perseverance in the face of distractions and set-backs, its capacity to rekindle commitment among the doubtful or dejected. None of these qualities is affirmed under an adequate pressure of adversity in Camoen's presentation of da Gama. In fact, the depiction of da Gama is so minimal that he seems little more than a name for Portuguese self-confidence. As for his officers, they lack, with one or two exceptions, even the distinction of being named. It could be argued that this indifference to characterization shifts attention to the mission from its participants, so that the real hero of the epic becomes Portugal. But the procedure (or the negligence) also assists greatly in the construction of the poem as a surface devoid of depth.

Camoens's world presents itself to the Asian reader as a world not of meaning, but of riches. The mountain top from which da Gama is shown the Portuguese future is reached through an impenetrable thicket that reminds one of the approach to Milton's paradise (PL IV, 172-77). It is, characteristically, strewn with emeralds and rubies (X, 77). William Mickle's description of The Lusiads, in his preface to his 1776 translation, as “the epic poem of the birth of commerce, and, in a particular manner, the epic poem of whatever country has the control and possession of the commerce of India” (cxlvii),² has been strongly contested, but the reductionist characterization may reflect some of the poem's difficulties in claiming more for itself. In the exhortation that opens Canto VII, for instance, religious divisions are first deplored and unity is called for in contending against the infidel. It is then blatantly argued that those unmoved by religion should at least be moved by the prospect of vast riches (VII, 11). The exhortation takes place on the threshold of the discovery of India, making it once again clear that the wealth of Ind that Milton infernalizes is, in Camoens's poem, the fitting recompense for epic valour.

The purpose of da Gama's voyage was to open a passage to the Orient that would destroy both the Venetian monopoly of the spice trade and the Arab monopoly of the trade routes between the East and Europe. Lisbon would become Europe's richest city and the blow dealt to the Moslem infidel would felicitously serve both commerce and religion. “I hold it as very certain,” Albuquerque opined, “that, if we take this trade of Malacca away out of their hands, Cairo and Mecca will be entirely ruined, and to Venice will no spices be conveyed, except what her merchants go and buy in Portugal” (qtd. Mukherjee 100). For a brief period this strategy seemed triumphant. Although one-third to one-half of da Gama's men never saw Portugal again, the cargo he brought home sold in Lisbon for sixty times the price paid for it in India (Atkinson 148). By the early sixteenth century, Venetian trade with the East was sufficiently disrupted for Portugal to take over 75٪ of Europe's spice imports, reaping profits of 90٪ in the process (Scammell 1989, 97). “For a time,” Scammell comments, Portugal's “remarkable ambitions came near to success, an astonishing achievement for a tiny country short of ships and men, and with such forces as it possessed thinly scattered through dozens of forts and posts in East and West alike” (1989 14).

Portugal's moment of commercial glory was brief. Despite the capture of Goa (1510), Malacca (1511), and Ormuz (1515), Eastern traffic through the Arab world recovered and indeed began to surpass its previous dimensions. The failure to capture Aden resulted in the spice traffic being re-routed rather than cut off, and the porousness of Portugal's blockade was attested to by clandestine Portuguese participation in the very trade it was seeking to intercept. By 1600 only 20٪ of the pepper and less than 50٪ of the other spices reaching Europe were arriving in Portuguese ships. Indeed, as the sixteenth century wore on, the spice trade lost its pre-eminence for Portugal and cargoes were increasingly made up of cotton textiles. The Portuguese also developed a carrier trade conveying the produce of South and Southeast Asia to the markets of China and Japan. Japan had been fortuitously “discovered” by a Portuguese ship blown off-course by a typhoon and, for a time, trade between China and Japan was exclusively in Portuguese vessels. These secondary trade gains were scarcely compensation for the shrinking commerce of a waning empire. Seventy years after da Gama's voyage, Camoens was writing of a moment already past and prophesying a future that the present seemed insistent on undermining.³

The decline of Portugal's fortunes became catastrophically evident when, in June 1578, King Sebastiao, led an expedition to Alcacer-Kebir to verify Camoens's assurance that the Moslem everywhere would quail in terror before the weight of Portugal's armies and the fame of her exploits (I, 6-8). The king had reasons for confidence apart from Camoens's poetry. Fifty years earlier, a triumph by the Portuguese over the Moors had been celebrated by a lavishly caparisoned white elephant trained and ridden by a subservient Moor, curtseying thrice before the Pope and sprinkling the assembled spectators with water. On this occasion the outcome was to be different, even with an invading force consisting of 1500 horsemen and 15,000 foot soldiers, with 500 vessels needed to transport them. Large numbers of women were included among the 9000 camp followers who accompanied the expedition to celebrate the victory in the manner of Canto IX of The Lusiads. In four hours of battle under a searing African sun the flower of Portugal's manhood was destroyed—8000 were killed and a further 15,000 taken prisoner and sold into slavery. No more than a hundred found their way to safety. In the following year as the plague descended on Lisbon, Camoens entered his final illness, commenting that he was glad to die not merely in but also with his country.

It is not difficult to consider The Lusiads as a poem of bombast that history ironically falsifies. The grandiose conception of the state of India (which in the period's expansively vague geography included not only India but also Southeast Asia)⁴ can be mockingly set against Portugal's limited manpower and its increasingly straitened finances. Yet the defining Portuguese experience may be the extraordinarily swift expansion of nationhood into empire, an empire that, though precariously maintained, was also more far-flung than any in history. The intoxicating opening of horizons that sea power suddenly made possible accounts for many of the excesses in the Portuguese imperial vision, and the over-reaching becomes more endurable as we remember that all imperial visions are the children of excess.

The Portuguese effort has its instructive antecedents, not in Western but in Indian history. K. M. Panikkar is, of all Indian historians, the most impressive in depicting how South India's expansion into Further India was achieved by that very sea power that ten centuries later was to open India to colonization by the West:

[A]t the end of the fifth century the area of the Mekong valley, Malaya and the Indonesian islands were dotted with Hindu principalities some of which, like the kingdom of Funan, had attained considerable importance and prosperity. This was the formative period. Hindu culture and organization had been established on a firm basis, and the local population—at least the higher strata—assimilated with the Indian emigrants and colonists. The next five centuries witness a great flowering of Indian culture in these areas which properly belong to Indian history, because at least till the twelfth century, these people considered themselves as integrally belonging to the Indian world.

(116)

Further India was a cultural as well as a territorial concept, the former persisting while the latter dissolved. In the noblest of his many books, Zimmer writes as follows of the Indian cultural world:

Each of the colonial cultures and art styles of Ceylon, Indonesia, and Further India, as well as that of Tibet, China, Korea, and Japan, took over in a worthy way the Indian heritage, giving to it an original and happy local application. Out of various ethnological and biological requirements self-contained styles were formed that were the peers in originality, nobility and delicacy of the Indian.

(363)

India remains “the creating hearth”:

Indeed, whenever the incredible brightness of the spiritual, the balanced repose of the dynamic, or the brilliant power of the triumphantly omnipotent are made effectively manifest in Oriental art, an Indian model is not far to seek.

(363)⁵

There is a lesson to be learned here and some of it is learned in Macaulay's vision of an “imperishable empire” in which the integrating force was to be cultural cohesion rather than imperial dominance.

Sea power established and sustained the Portuguese empire, but long lines of communication and restraints on manpower made that empire (unlike the cultural world of Further India) an essentially coastal affair. The brief and solitary reference to the Mughals in The Lusiads (X, 64) is not necessarily a reflection of this skin-deep character. Though the Hispanic Society's editor, Leonard Bacon, finds the lack of attention to the Mughals surprising (395n), the fact is that the dynasty had not come into existence when da Gama dropped anchor in Calicut. A reference to the Mughals is only possible in the accounts of the Portuguese imperial future that occupy the last books of the poem. Camoens does make such a reference, but the occasion he chooses is the support given by the Portuguese to the king of Gujarat in his campaign against Akbar's father, Humayun. The Portuguese reward consisted of permission to build a fortress in Diu. Since Akbar himself was on the throne at the time The Lusiads was published, the singling out of the event was much less than tactful. It also showed the Portuguese wrong-headedness (predictable in a coastal empire) in assessing the balance of forces on the Indian sub-continent. In the year following the publication of The Lusiads, Akbar opened his campaign against Gujarat, and, realizing like all successful generals that speed was of the essence, surprised his adversary with a forced march that covered the six hundred miles to Ahmedabad in eleven days. Surat had been taken six months earlier and all of Gujarat was now subdued. The great Mogul, who fortunately had not read The Lusiads, exacted no price for Portuguese participation in the alliance against his father. Later in the decade Abkar was to begin his pursuit of a universal religion and was to summon Portuguese Jesuits to his “House of Worship” in Fatehpur-Sikri to articulate the insights of Christianity. Tennyson takes note of the event in that carefully researched poem, “Akbar's Dream” (Poems 1441-49).⁶ In another five years Camoens's perception of the Great Mogul might have changed, but the period in which he sets his poem remains one in which the Delhi Sultanate was collapsing and in which power relationships all over Northern India were turbulent and unpredictable.

In Southern India the situation was quite different. The Hindu kingdom of Vijayanagar had been growing in power and influence for more than a century. Nicolo Conti, the Italian traveller, had visited the capital in 1420, and left a glowing description of its splendours. The Portuguese traveller, Paes, was to visit it soon after da Gama's arrival and was to describe the kingdom's capital as “the best provided city in the world” (qtd. Sewell 257).⁷ Vijayanagar's suzerainty extended to all of South India, and Portugal respected that suzerainty sufficiently to seek Vijayanagar's permission to build a fortress at Bhatkal. Permission was granted but only after Portugal had demonstrated its prowess by Albuquerque's capture of Goa, though with the assistance of 2000 Indian troops (Scammell 1989, 81). Portuguese relations with Vijayanagar were extensive, and, indeed, much of our information about the kingdom comes from Portuguese sources such as Domingo Paes, Duarte Barbosa (on whom Camoens draws heavily in his account of the matrilineal society of the Nairs), and Fernao Nuniz. Panikkar describes these relationships as “most cordial” (176), but perhaps they are better characterized as opportunism overlaid by a diplomatic veneer as is too often the case in relationships between nations. When Vijayanagar reached its apogee under the rule of Krishnadeva Raya, the veneer of cordiality was sufficient for Portugal to assist Vijayanagar substantially in recapturing Raichur. Nuniz treats that event as decisive in Vijayanagar's attainment of supremacy in South India. As the kingdom became less stable, Portuguese relationships with it became predictably more disruptive. It may not have been altogether helpful to Vijayanagar that “the external trade of the great Hindu kingdom was practically in the hands of the Portuguese” (Panikkar 226). That trade, which as Barbosa noted extended from China to Alexandria, included a considerable number of Persian horses. Nuniz, who earned his living as a horse dealer, estimates that as many as 13,000 horses were imported annually into Vijayanagar.⁸

The ruler of Vijayanagar at the time of da Gama's arrival in Calicut was Narsimha Saluva, to whom Camoens is almost certainly referring when he speaks of the kingdom of Narsingha (Sewell 128). Camoens's response to Vijayanagar bypasses the substantial connections between Portugal and the Hindu kingdom. It is restricted to observing that Vijayanagar is more noted for its gold and precious stones than for the valour of its people⁹ and that it is the territory in which St. Thomas was treacherously put to death (VII, 21; X, 108-19). To arouse cupidity and religious hatred and to make the latter a pretext for the former are tactics pervasive in The Lusiads. None of Vijayanagar's accomplishments are recognized in a poem that takes it for granted that Oriental nations are incapable of sustaining the forms of civilization and that the best they can do is to provide opportunities for commerce. Others, who claim no literary eminence, have been able to perceive more in Vijayanagar's history.

The Vijayanagar style, a Hindu anticipation of the baroque, has aroused disparate reactions and can be accused of florid excess. On the other hand, the political statement that the style had to make could be expected to call upon the aesthetics of lavishness, using the controlled profusion of Hindu art as a metaphor for the kingdom's ordered plentitude. That statement was soon to come to an end.

A coalition of Muslim and Deccan Sultanates disastrously defeated the Hindu kingdom's army in the battle of Talikota on 23 January 1565. They were aided in this crushing victory by two crucial defections from the Vijayanagar forces. The sacking of the capital followed, and in five methodical months of further destruction Vijayanagar was razed to the ground. “Never perhaps in the history of the world,” one scholar writes, “has such havoc been wrought and wrought so suddenly, on so splendid a city” (Sewell 208). The havoc may have been sudden, since the people of Vijayanagar were confident in the victory of their enormous army; but it was also systematic and hideously prolonged. War lust does not explain the one hundred and fifty days of the capital's ordeal when a conclusive victory had been achieved in the field. It was not sufficient for the city to be plundered. The statement it made had to be erased from cultural memory. Western imperialism possesses no monopoly in the exercise of vindictiveness toward otherness.

Camoens was in Goa at the time of the battle of Talikota, and, when he makes his reference to the kingdom of Narsingha as more notable for its gold and precious stones than for the valour of its peole, he may have been making his comment on that battle. Despite its more abrasive implications, the comment is indeed necessary to reassure investors in empires such as the Portuguese crown corporation and the consortiums brought into being by the English, the French, the Dutch, and even the Danes. If venture capital is to be called out in sufficient quantities, the territory must be rich in resources and its population easy to intimidate.

A third and more subtle desideratum comes to be added to the imperialist prospectus: the territory must not only accept submission but also acknowledge it as proceeding from its identity. When da Gama is conducted to the Zamorin's palace, he first enters a temple filled with abominable representations of the Deity in the manner of the catalogue of pagan gods in the first book of Paradise Lost. Camoens's condemnatory description rectifies an incident in which da Gama is said to have endeared himself (briefly) to the local populace by kneeling in a Hindu temple, thinking it to be an eccentric version of a Christian church. Southey, who considered da Gama to be worse than Pizarro, seized on the incident as confirming da Gama's stupidity (Letters, I, 37).

After Hindu idolization of the unnatural has been underlined, da Gama can proceed to the enclosed garden of the Zamorin's palace, a country retreat in the centre of the city. A Marvellian disengagement of art from life is suggested, with art reaffirming those principles of the real world that are sufficiently powerful to maintain themselves even in the segregation of the artistic enclosure. The gateway set in the surrounding walls is adorned (with a craftsmanship said to be worthy of Daedalus) by scenes depicting previous conquerors of India. These conquerors are specified as Bacchus, Semiramis, and Alexander. The representations are as the shadow to the substance, and the substance consists not merely of the three conquerors represented but attains its full realization in a final conquest by the Portuguese, of which the previous conquerors are shadowy types.

Of the three conquests the first is mythical. The fictitious campaign of the second against India was a military disaster, according to Strabo and Arrius. The third conqueror, Alexander, in his brief foray into India, never penetrated to within a thousand miles of Calicut. Camoens is praised for his capacity for direct observation, for writing whereof he knows, unlike Milton, who is compelled to pore over travel books and atlases. The claim is not without substance but might be more persuasive if The Lusiads made less extensive and more critical use of classical historians and geographers. Here, however, Camoens is not recording his observations but providing art work for the imperialist folder. Achilles's shield is the distant ancestor of this art work, but the depictions on the gateway commemorate submission, not victory, and are carved on a gateway, not a shield. This crucial change, on which Lusiadic commentary is so conspicuously silent, carves out the difference between Occident and Orient, between a masculine, imperial Europe and a feminine, colonial Asia. Were it not for Semiramis one could argue that domination over the Orient is a Western entitlement so deeply taken for granted that it can even be found incised into the art of subject peoples. Semiramis, an Asian, may seem to represent a problem, but her figure in the gateway may well be an allusion to the matrilineal habits of the Nairs—habits that Camoens, drawing upon Barbosa's account, has already described in unusual detail. Moreover, since The Lusiads draws some attention to Semiramis's lurid sexual practices (which Raleigh regards as invented by “envious and Iying Grecians” [173]), her imaginary conquest of India can be seen as implanting those practices in the fertile soil of Oriental decadence. India's talent for the unnatural has been emphasized already in the previous stanzas. Conquest by a woman to whom the unnatural comes easily, compounds the effeminacy and degeneracy of the conquered. A civilization that celebrates its defeats in this manner has earned the ennoblement of a Portuguese conquest.

Edward Said finds imperialism “supported and perhaps even impelled” by ideological formations that include the notion “that certain territories and people require and beseech domination” (9).¹⁰ The gateway to the Zamorin's palace is sculptured as if to demonstrate this proposition, treating it as inlaid into India's understanding of herself. It is a gateway not only to India but also to a way of viewing the colonial world.

The feminization of the Orient is a perception deeply embedded in imperialist discourse, but, as the perception accumulates its history, the nuances (or crudities) of that feminization become more instructive to identify. We are not yet at that more sophisticated stage where an Oriental-feminine other comes into being as an object of desire and guilt that a censored self has fashioned from its purged elements. The self's previous collusiveness with what it must hereafter reject and its will to eradicate all traces of that collusiveness can then be reflected in the sternness with which the other is treated. The purged identity is heroically maintained. Exploitativeness can be masked by a defensive anger that then becomes the evidence that the self's illicit relationships with its alternative are being severed and that their tentacular tenacity is being dealt with root and branch. This root and branch ferocity is chillingly apparent in Stephen Greenblatt's memorable juxtaposition of genocide in Hispaniola with Guyon's destruction of the Bower of Bliss (172-92).

Such a specification of the other is best nourished by a religio-ethical mentality that projects the internal structure of order within the self on to the external relationship between ruler and ruled and that reconceives the nature of subject peoples so as to fit the images of that projection. The Protestant ethic of temperance and thrift is ingenious in meeting these requirements. Though conducive to capital formation, it is also in potential conflict with the consumerism that is the basis of empire. It is therefore driven to set in subliminal motion an argument for empire that would pre-empt this conflict. An ambivalent construction of the Orient becomes necessary in which Western morality can denounce what Western cupidity continues to desire. Conquest that allows both condemnation and possession and finally even redemption of the object is the lucrative way out of this self-inflicted paradox. Oriental opulence has been a persisting stereotype, as third world poverty is today. When the opulence is infernalized, as in Milton, the way is open to self-rebuke conveniently displaced into disciplining of the other and to self-indulgence from the profits of that disciplining. Said's work is indeed supportive of a syndrome in which responsibility follows rape and a hostile relationship with otherness violated graduates into a hierarchical relationship with otherness redeemed.

The Lusiads seems not to be troubled by these entanglements of psychic politics. It invites reading as a work of imperialist innocence if we take innocence to lie in proximity to thoughtlessness. Homeric rather than Virgilian, it is only marginally given to that self-examination which in Virgil undercuts victory with some of the sadness of things. It needs no fictions of self-justification. The economics of plunder and the heroic satisfactions of annihilating the enemy are not emasculated by matters of morality. Wealth and women are the rewards of war. The women are provided in Canto IX and the prospective wealth displayed in the next Canto as if the human and cultural resources of the many-splendoured earth were matters of absolutely no consequence. Milton looks down from a mountain top to ponder the terrible dubiousness of history, hanging suspended in the mixed nature of humanity. Camoens looks down as Milton's Comus might have done to see the full and unwithdrawing hand of nature pouring forth its bounties with no other aim than to “sate the curious taste” of an emerging consumerism that has smelt the savour of affluence (Ludlow Masque, 709-23; PL V, 84-86).

One can equate the world that da Gama is invited to view with the banquet Christ refuses in Paradise Regained (II, 337-91). There is a higher hunger in which Camoens shows no interest. When the layers of the Ptolemaic universe are unwrapped to display the Portuguese future as its kernel, the poem also unwraps its identity as scarcely more than a guidebook to the spice trade. India grows rich on gold, precious stones, perfumes, and spices, and Malabar fattens on trade from China to the Nile (VII, 31, 41). Bengal outranks all other countries in fertility (VII, 20). The abundance of Chittagong, the looms of Orissa, and “treasure-strewn” Cambay await exploitation by those who control the routes of maritime commerce (X, 106, 120, 121). Jedda owes its prosperity to the spice trade (IX, 3). Banda can offer pepper and mace, the Moluccas nutmeg and cloves, and cinnamon presents itself as the fame, wealth, and beauty of Sri Lanka (IV, 14). Borneo's gift to the Portuguese is camphor. The cloves of Ternate and Tidore are all the more precious because they will be purchased with Portuguese blood. Sumatra offers silk and gold and trees weeping fragrant gums and balms in the manner of the trees in Milton's paradise. The Maldives provide coco-palms, Socotra, bitter aloes, and the islands of Africa, ambergris (X, 132-37).

The limitations of this inventory are persistent and obvious. One might expect more from a work of literature, and Camoens does indeed advise us that gold is the root of all evil and that contempt for riches is a part of human dignity (VI, 98; VII, 98-99). Like the old man's harangue in Canto IV, these statements are made in order not to be heard again. All three appear at the end of their respective Cantos, marking not the Canto's climax but its margin, the sporadic and residual appearance of another poem that no longer matters. We can hear in these distant disturbances the voices of what Quint calls a countervailing epic continuing to be audible at the poem's boundary. Their remote location can be read as acknowledging a text, marginalized as archaic and revitalized as subversive, which has been written over but cannot be erased. On the other hand, the very effort at erasure can be read as pointing to the inexorably diminishing future of these voices in a world now to be constituted by economics, not sententiae.

The reading of The Lusiads offered here confirms Mickle's characterization, though the exploitativeness that I discern in the poem does not seem to have counted for much with Mickle even in 1776, at a time when the English Nabobs were growing rich on the plunder of Bengal and when their misdeeds were a topic of popular literature in their country. My reading differs from critics such as Richard Helgerson who would prefer to locate their readings of The Lusiads around the poem's heroic-aristocratic core and to regard its commercial content as peripheral (155-76, 189-90). It also differs from those who read The Lusiads as a poem divided against itself and who would prefer to centralize rather than to historicize the poem written on the epic poem's margin.

Opportunities for such finessing are not lacking in Lusiadic commentary. C.M. Bowra sees Camoens as “a Humanist even with his contradictions” and finds among those contradictions “conflicting feelings about war and empire” (138). Thomas Greene suggests that “Os Lusiadas is a poem which turns back on itself” (231). Gerald Moser observes that “Every intellectual who has reflected on the episode of the Old Man has seen it in the light of his own times and circumstances.” The Old Man, according to him, speaks today to “worries about man's survival among technological advances” (149).¹¹ Alexander Parker argues that the voyages of Columbus and Vasco da Gama were regarded by enlightened thinkers of the time (such as Camoens) as opening the way to an “international community” and to “collaboration between different peoples on a scale never envisaged before” (11). Kenneth Jackson, in his study of the dialogics of The Lusiads, even suggests that “there is some evidence that the re-contact with India is upheld as a Utopian fusion of the Occident-Orient split.” The split is apparently to be healed by “love as transformed conquest” (203).

These recuperative efforts bear witness to some uneasiness with the more than occasional stridency of The Lusiads, but the poem also needs to be shown as complicating itself by those who find Mickle swaggeringly reductionist. The alternative (as Helgerson clearly sees) is to argue that the true site of the poem is not where Mickle found it. Such restorative readings remain precarious because of their excessive attention to possibilities that the poem sites on its margin, or which it raises and then declines to pursue. In fact, the most effective turn against The Lusiads takes place not at the poem's margin but in another poem by Camoens, the justly admired “By the Rivers of Babylon” (tr. Bacon 411-23). Something important is said about Camoens's epic when uneasiness with its ideology is placed so explicitly outside its borders. The poem surrenders to the imperial future and, though the surrender may not be without misgivings, the claim of the future is so powerful that the misgivings can only be voices from the past.

A potential counter-force in the poem to which imaginative energy is heavily and by no means marginally committed can be found in the Adamastor episode. Placed with high prominence both at the mid-point of da Gama's journey and at the mid-point of the poem itself, the myth of Adamastor is found by David Quint to be “a figure for an Africa that cannot definitively be subdued by European arms” (117). Adamastor's menacing warning to da Gama against proceeding further on his quest picks up elements from the Old Man's speech and is in the tradition of the epic curse—a promise of resistance to the imperial narrative and of the assiduous undoing of the drive to closure on which the authority of that narrative depends.

In weighing Quint's reading of Adamastor we must remember that the epic prize sustaining da Gama's quest is Asia and not Africa. The stormy cape (which nearly disposed of the author of The Lusiads) is a formidable obstacle, but no more than an obstacle, in a drive to finality that leaves the impediment behind both in geo-political space and as a continuing threat to epic-imperial closure (Quint 120).¹² Significantly, Asia, the consummation of the quest, is not allowed either a site or an image of resistance. Thus the epic topos is crucially limited, and, as Quint's study makes plain, it is deformed even within those limits, with Adamastor reduced from a human counter-force to a “blind fury of nature” (118), able only to recycle its own wrath. In so far as resistance is repetitive and even random, it can only struggle ineffectively against the teleological thrust of the imperial narrative, an impetus so powerful that, like that divine providence for which the imperial will habitually makes itself a metaphor, it can even turn resistance to its ends. Thus, the storms that assail da Gama actually blow him closer to the shores of India. This is Bacchus's frustration and not Adamastor's. Adamastor's frustration is to remain perpetually taunted by Thetis (who is not to be confused with Tethys), locked forever into the African landscape, while Tethys displays to da Gama the many kingdoms that are to be jewels in the Portuguese crown. Thus even this much-praised episode only suggests “that epic's representation of its losers, its attempt to adopt their perspective, may not be able to escape appropriation by the victor's ideology” (Quint 124).

Historicizing The Lusiads can offer more than one possibility of placement. It allows us to map the poem so that its margin becomes its past and thus to read its poetics as anticipating a dismissive move that imperial discourse was to make routine. It also allows us to locate ourselves at different points along what Helgerson, in endeavouring to account for the difference between his and Mickle's reading, calls the hermeneutic spiral (190).¹³ Readings made in the Elizabethan world of English national consciousness, in an imperial world poised on the threshold of possessing India, and in a post-colonial world that must take into account not only heroic identities but also their exploitative consequences, will naturally differ in the way they perceive the poem. The spiral form reminds us not only of these differences but also of the interplay of understandings that ought to take place across them.

Helgerson's reading is located in an Elizabethan world that in writing itself is articulating a nationhood that will persist and prevail in future constructions of England. The Lusiads, not merely honoured but cherished in Portugal as a deep and singular statement of the Portuguese national self, is placed within and read as speaking to this English world. It is the poem of an aristocratic-heroic ethos, set in contrast by Helgerson with Hakluyt's voyages, which speak for a commercial ethos, potentially indifferent to the imperial.

One must question a separation influential in the decorum of its day, but one which subsequent events seem to blur. Mickle resoundingly associates commerce with possession, and that association persisted even though nineteenth-century free traders questioned the empire not on moral grounds, but on the grounds of its viability as a business concern. They could have been mistaken, and it was more prudent to be safe. As a place for character building and for exhibiting the British heroic identity, the empire had possibilities that could be said to appeal to an aristocratic code; but it would be rash to conclude that these theatrical opportunities were more important than the protection of trade routes.

To these cautions one should add that the separation for which Helgerson argues was not clear-cut even in Elizabethan England.¹⁴ If “honour, dominion, glory and renown” were assigned to a heroic realm and profit to a practical world free of heroic distractions, that may have been largely to distinguish British matter-of-factness from a confusion of genres that marred the Spanish performance. When Milton displaces the heroic claim into the Satanic manifesto, he does not simply devalue the heroic—he also points in similes, freighted with evocations of the spice trade, to the inexorable link between the heroic and the commercial. Donne's nineteenth elegy (ed. Patrides 184), a poem admittedly written in the middle style but one that strains instructively against its boundaries, places material riches and imperial possession (figuratively realized as sexual possession) in an intimate relationship within the much-used trope of the New World perceived as the female body. Bonds, seals, and licences attest to the mercantile strain that pervades the imagery, and, since title to possession is conveniently granted by the person possessed, the images can apply the binding forces of both legal contracts and passionate undertakings to the relationship between imperial power and colonial yielding. We pass through the now familiar gateway of The Lusiads to the surrendered wealth of a territory beseeching dominance.¹⁵

Today's postcolonial reader is concerned not with how England wrote itself even in Donne's exuberant complexities, but with how Asia is to write itself in a manner that emancipates it from previous writings by Europe. For such a reader, the heavy commercial freight that the poem carries and the characterizing of every Asian country exclusively in terms of its wealth and vulnerability are too dominantly foregrounded for The Lusiads to be approached as a heroic poem that swerves into the commercial. The reverse reading of Camoens's poem as a commercial poem that swerves into the heroic remains possible; but the magnitude of the swerve cannot be made significant to those aware of the exploitative realities, the destructive cooperation of commerce with possession that history wrote as a postscript to the poem's final cantos.

The relativities of reading must always be borne in mind as we read. The argument being pursued here is that the turn of the spiral into our era has opened the way into a new order of reading that calls for a place among the concerns of this essay. It is not suggested that the new reading is the only reading that our historical situatedness can authorize. It is suggested that inter-cultural understanding cannot proceed until the new reading is more than that voice in the margin that the old man's harangue continues to be in The Lusiads. The look of a canon, largely imperial, must change as readers from territories, till recently subjected, take their proper place in future reading communities.

Notes

1. The pilot was Ibn Majid, whom Scammell describes as “the most distinguished Asian navigator of the time” (1981 235).

2. Mickle was by no means a responsible translator. For an account of his inventions and omissions see West 184-95, esp. 187.

3. This paragraph draws upon Scammell 1989, 12-17, 67-104; Scammell 1981, 225-30; Braudel 383-406; Boxer 39-64. John Dos Passos's The Portugal Story is rich in evidence but suffers from heroic idealization.

4. In 1647, Fletchers's The Island Princess describes itself as set in India, when its setting is the spice islands of Ternate and Tidore. The habit persists into the nineteenth century. India proper is referred to as West India and the East Indies as the other India. See, e.g., Hahn 89, 163, 202.

5. For a more problematized account see Chaudhuri 58-61.

6. Ricks's headnote (1441) indicates the extent of Tennyson's research. His poem makes British rule over India a fulfilment of Akbar's vision that Aurangzeb all but destroyed. British rule is thus domesticated by being placed in succession to enlightened Mughal intentions. The canonical contrast between Akbar and Aurangzeb can then be presented as a regression that British power is fortunately able not only to reverse but to consummate in the triumph of Christianity, as the religion into which other religions must flow. On the Portuguese mission to Akbar's court see Gascoigne 110-15; on Akbar's “religion,” see 115-19.

7. Paes's narrative is reprinted in Sewell 236-90.

8. Stein's Vijayanagar is the most up-to-date and scholarly account available of the kingdom. The following have also been drawn on for this paragraph: Sewell; Majumdar, Raychaudhari, and Datta 359-74; Thapar 324-36; Nilakanta Sastri 264-312.

9. One should contrast this with Paes's observation that Vijayanagar's standing army (which he estimated at one million) consisted of “the finest young men possible to be seen or that ever could be seen, for in all this army I did not see a man that would act the coward” (qtd. in Sewell 279, 281).

10. The soliciting of Western domination is carried extraordinarily far back into Indian history by Jonathan Fast in his novel Golden Fire. Here we meet a princess with a skin “white as rice flower,” hair “like burnished gold,” and eyes “blue as the sky” (15), a Goth from the “Land of Ice” (17) whose father was a general in the Roman army and who is now one of the wives of the Emperor, Samudra Gupta. She gives birth to a son, conspicuously blond-haired, who defeats Rama, the villainous and perverted claimant to the throne, marries the beauteous Dhruyadevi, and brings India an era of prosperity.

11. The Old Man's harangue is also considered by Tomlins, who argues that two playlets written by Gil Vicente in 1509 and 1520 are echoed in the episode. Tomlins concludes that the opening dedication, the Old Man's rebuke, and the disillusioned envoi of the epic were all composed after the poet's return from India. The poem “flies apart at three junctures,” thus undoing “the very business of the epic.” Before The Lusiads was published Camoens “saw the Oriental conquest—with India the brightest diamond in the crown—as mere vanity and total ruin” (170-76). Tomlins, in effect, confirms my view of the marginal location of the poem's misgivings about itself. His argument is that these recantations came too late to enter a central space already occupied by a previous poem. The recuperation via chronology can only be conjectural and is not supported by any evidence except the desirability of the recuperative arrangement; but that desirability makes a statement that will be becoming familiar.

12. In genre terms, Epic could be deflected into Romance by the Adamastor episode but maintains its status as Epic by fully containing that episode.

13. Helgerson describes Mickle's reading as a “bizarre twist” in this spiral. Commerce and its relation to national identity are “central to The Lusiads,” but Camoens worked to suppress what Mickle strove to exalt.

14. The integral relationship between commerce and empire is underlined in Knorr 19-22.

15. The highly male sexual imperialism of this passage is crossed by the uneasiness of submission to a female monarch who lays down the terms of the licence, receives the bond for its execution, and imprints both with the royal seal of approval. The appropriately distant site for this uneasiness is Amazonia, which, as Montrose observes, cries out to be invented (202). The remoteness of Amazonia makes possible lessons on the perils of role reversal that it would be less than tactful to intone in England.

    Reducing the monarch's body to colonial status (albeit with her approval) is among the passage's subversive satisfactions. In the process, the seal that was the monarch's property becomes the property of her subject in a restoration of sexual-political normalcy sufficiently peripheral to be discounted even while it continues to be imagined.

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