Portuguese and Luso-Asian Legacies in Southeast Asia, 1511-2011, vol. 1: The Making of the Luso-Asian World: Intricacies of Engagement

5. Continuities in Bengal's Contact with the Portuguese and Its Legacy: A Community's Future Entangled with the Past

5 CONTINUITIES IN BENGAL’S CONTACT WITH THE PORTUGUESE AND ITS LEGACY: A COMMUNITY’S FUTURE ENTANGLED WITH THE PAST Ujjayan Bhattacharya Cross-cultural interactions were a significant feature of the sixteenth-century phase of Portuguese expansion. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, who has extensively examined this theme, suggests viewing this phenomenon as “a part of the history of the Portuguese presence in maritime Asia at a time when Portugal was itself under Habsburg rule”, that is, the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.1 One may recall the individual prototypes who exemplified such cross-cultural interactions, namely, Felipe de Brito e Nicote, governor of Syriam in the early seventeenth century, and Gabriel Quiroga de San Antonio in Cambodia at the end of the sixteenth century. This chapter will argue that, if cross-cultural interactions in Portuguese settlements were characteristic of this expansive phase, the inversion of it, implying inward-looking tendencies, was its trait in the phase of imperial decline and contraction. I contend that cross-cultural interactions were vibrant and vigorous so long as the Portuguese remained a dynamic power in colonization, maritime commerce, and political and diplomatic affairs. Once maritime links weakened or snapped, and the Portuguese developed an inclination to become more territorially based, interactions within cultures, rather than ones across 106 Continuities in Bengal’s Contact with the Portuguese and Its Legacy 107 cultures, found more intensity. Cross-cultural interactions abated or waned, and a process of narrowing down the ambit of the foreign culture set in, as the Portuguese identity absorbed local or native traits unto itself. Territorial or maritime extensions of Portuguese Asia were dependent on strategic and political factors, and the diversities that it could include were variables set by the degree of hegemony it could assert. Once that hegemony fell apart, the same niches of Portuguese existence could no longer be described as parts of “Portuguese Asia”, but rather as “Portuguese-speaking spaces”. Subrahmanyam’s argument, intended for a completely different purpose, has been taken here in its broadest implication to demonstrate processes within the shrinking spaces of Portuguese Asia. Subrahmanyam argues that there was a process in operation as of the sixteenth century that produced a “trans-cultural” synthesis.2 However, such a synthesis could only be possible while “Portuguese Asia” was expanding, not while it was struggling to survive and conceding physical space to its rivals. By the eighteenth century, the empire was militarily weakened and the white Eurasian population had failed to “reproduce itself in adequate numbers” all over Portuguese Asia.3 Thus a weakening of linkages and the collapse of the imperial structure produced Indo-Portuguese culture(s) within local settings. I would like to call this phenomenon the parochialization of an erstwhile imperial culture that produced identity tensions in a later period. THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE PORTUGUESE IN DECINE The historiography of the Portuguese maritime empire raises critical questions regarding its political and economic strength in the post-expansion period, such as whether the Estado da Índia could, in this period, affect or alter the position or status of its distant settlements; whether the “frontier milieu” character of distant settlements was equally applicable as an idea for all outposts; and how vivacious and continuous Portuguese maritime commerce was. To these, one may add questions: how strong was the contact of these settlements with Lisbon?; did the ecclesiastical domain became the focal point of these settlements instead of the politico-juridical one?; and what was the relation between the two? The last point has some significance in light of the statement by António Bocarro in the mid-seventeenth century that “now that trade is almost extinct, the only sense it [Portuguese Asia] has through this [is] Christianity”, implying that religion and congregations would be the central focus of the communities’ attention.4 108 Ujjayan Bhattacharya A number of factors contributed to narrowing down the Portuguese presence into small hubs of minuscule communities and to the formation of an Indo-Portuguese society with varied features. One would do well to remember that Portuguese India from the second half of the seventeenth century bore a frontier character and had a low demographic trend that had important consequences for the composition of the population. Bengal was almost literally a frontier for the Portuguese, and the dictum of C.R. Boxer is applicable here. According to Boxer, “this frontier milieu of continuous warfare, which lasted with few intermissions until the end...