A HISTORICAL NOVEL LOOKING AT WHAT HAPPENED AFTER 1510 (AND MORE):
LOVE AND SAMSARA
LOVE AND SAMSARA
By Eusebio L. Rodrigues
New Academia Publishing, USA 2007
611 pp. Price not listed
Love and Samsara is a historical novel set in the
sixteenth century. It explores the consequences of
the discovery by Vasco da Gama of the sea route
from Europe to India.
The importance of this discovery is a subject of revision
since the fifties; the quinquennial celebrations of his
landing in Calicut were politically incorrect and had to be
abandoned. The discovery did initiate the era of imperialism;
its end and the decline of Eurocentrism, have prompted
studies for a balanced and nuanced assessment.
These take into account the socio-economic and cultural
implications of the encounters between West and East and the
changes that affected the lives of the Indian subcontinent
and of the communities on the periphery of the Indian Ocean.
The scholar and historian, Ashin Das Gupta (1922-1998) in
follow up of Fernand Braudel's studies of the Mediterranean,
has revealed the distinctive society of trading families and
interactions of merchants in the Indian Ocean from Malabar to
Surat that transcended the political boundaries of the
hinterland states.
Another important consequence that changed the life
of the region was the establishment of the
sea-borne Portuguese empire, a unique exercise of
sovereign power from control points around the
seas.
In the first half of the sixteenth century, Portuguese India
-- the Estado da India of Goa, Daman, and Diu -- with Goa as
capital, radiated from seaports in Asia and Africa. Though
geographically inchoate in terms of land mass, yet it
controlled the vast expanse of the Indian Ocean. Sanjay
Subramanian and Luis Filipe Thomas refer to its operations
from "a complex of territories, establishments, goods,
persons, and administrative interests in Asia and East Africa".
There were cultural implications. Prior to the invasive
nature of culture and religion by the Portuguese in the wake
of the discovery, there prevailed in the region of the Indian
Ocean a harmonization of Buddhist and Jain influences
transmitted in cultural and trade exchanges in the Arab
controlled routes through Asia and Africa into Europe.
An exemplar is the Arabian Nights a collection of stories,
whose tales of Sindbad the Sailor, Aladdin, and Ali Baba, a
part of Western folklore. are set in a timeless universe.
Did Vasco da Gama herald a culture of violence,
proselytisation, and power that vitiated the
cultural homogeneity and delicate balance of
Indo-Islamic civilization? Did the Judeo-Christian
concept of time and history introduce reality into
the ocean of illusion? These issues are debated and
discussed in 'Love and Samsara', the author Eusebio
Rodrigues holding forth in an array of historical
characters and personalities, that are given body
and voice in events that were turning points in the
lives of communities and countries that fringed the
Indian Ocean.
The personal story of the protagonist,Ahmad ibn Majid, the
Arab master navigator who showed Vasco da Gama the sea route
to India is set within this frame. Was he a traitor, an Arab
Muslim paving the way to the destruction of Islamic
civilization in the East?
Guilt ridden, he consoles himself with the reflection that he
was merely performing his duty, a professional service paid
for strictly by the scheduled rates. But it is his world that
is on the brink of destruction. "The circle of my universe,"
says Ahmad "began at Sofala in East Africa, and went on to
Mogadishu, to Aden, to Hormuz, around to Diu, to Chaul and to
Calicut in India, and then to the region that stretches below
the wind, the worlds of cinnamon and cloves that lies beyond
Cape Comorin, and ends at Melaka".
Camões in his epic poem of that time, The Lusiads,
does not specify the nationality of the navigator
that showed da Gama the sea route to India, but
places him in Malinda near Mombasa in East Africa,
referring to an act of friendship by the Sultan who
is. grateful for the help of the Portuguese in
battling the neighboring principalities, in
offering his master navigator to Vasco da Gama.
Some historians make the navigator a Gujerati Hindu
who knew the monsoon routes, an interpretation
consistent with Hindu resistance seeking allies
against Muslim invaders. Rodrigues however uses the
historic figure to give significance to the
narrative and the plot.
Historically the objective of the sea route to India was to
destroy Islamic power. The Portuguese did come to India, in
the words of Vasco da Gama, for spices and souls; both
economics and religion determined that the principal enemy
was Islam.
The direct route between Europe and India was blocked by the
Arab conquest of Egypt and Persia in the seventh century, all
Indian wares had to pass through Muslim hands, until these
reached Venice, the entrepot for Europe. The source of the
spices in India was the South; which the Portuguese
commandeered by stages from Calicut, to Cochin, and
Cannanore. With the control of the seas of the western part
of the Indian Ocean, the trade from India was in their hands.
The Portuguese used their superior gunnery and ships to
good effect, aided by diplomatic and strategic skills in
playing off one potentate against the other, and overall
taking advantage of the interstate wars in India between the
Bahamani and Vijayanagar kingdoms in the South, the breakup
of the Moghul Empire in the North, and beyond India, the
defeat of the Mamelukes of Egypt by the Turks.
Against the disintegrating Moghul Empire, Gujerat
in the strong hands of Mahmud Bigara remained as a
bastion of Islamic power against the marauding
Portuguese. Gujerat formed a strong alliance with
the Sultan of Egypt and the Zamorin of Calicut.
An Egyptian fleet built at Suez reached India in 1507, where
it was joined by Indian ships lead by Malik Ayaz.The combined
force defeated the Portuguese at Chaul. The son of the
Portuguese Viceroy was killed. It is at this point that the
novel begins with the doom-laden premonition of the return of
the Portuguese with a stronger fleet and artillery that two
years later was to annihilate the Muslim alliance at Diu in
1509.
>From Diu the narrative in Love and Samsara moves into four
sequences in time and space backwards and forwards: The
arrival of the Portuguese, via the sea route, at Calicut in
May 1498 leading to the subjugation of the centres of the
spice trade in South India; the Portuguese playing off the
Hindu rajas one against the other; the usurpation of Arab
control of trade from India to the West with control of the
entrepots on the shores of West Africa, the Red Sea, and the
Persian Gulf, and finally Diu in Gujerat in 1509; the
transformation in 1510 by Alfonso de Albuquerque of trading
posts around the Indian Ocean into the unique sea-borne
empire with its capital Goa which was wrested from Adil Shah
of the Bahamani dynasty; dreams of Afonso de Albuquerque for
access to China and Japan by the acquisition of the Moluccas
in the Malay Peninsula, that were realized after his death in
1515.
Interwoven in the historical narrative is the personal story
of Ahmad's fateful relationships with Vasco da Gama and
Afonso de Albuquerque of his two infidelities in betraying
Islam, one in his showing the monsoonal secrets that will
take the Portuguese to Calicut, and the second when he heals
the wounded Afonso de Albuquerque with the arcane medicines
of the Unani school and discloses to him the strategic routes
to the capture of Goa.
His story has an elegiac refrain in his
recollections of his tragic love for Usha, of a
Jain family in Diu which ends with her murder on
the beach of Anjuna in Goa, in retribution for a
violation of the code that prohibits inter communal
marriage. The novel ends with Ahmad alone and
desolate estranged from his son who is left to the
care of Layla the maid.
The interweaving provides for a parade of characters partly
historical and partly fictional. They have their moments of
relevance and add zest to the narrative and tragic comic
confusion of values and purposes. Though the unification of
opposites does sometimes strain the bounds of credulity.
Jan Mirza a Portuguese adventurer, dissolute, and in every
sense a degrado, was a good Catholic, aspiring to be a
theologian in the University of Paris, a disciple of the
humanist Erasmus, but who gives up the faith on being
disillusioned with the senseless wars of Christendom between
the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. He becomes a Muslim
attracted by the life it offers of wine and women.
Nevertheless he is a good friend, loyal to Ahmad, an
unquestioning handmaid to his enterprises that ends one world
and brings into being another.
There is the Bania of Surat whose sole purpose in life is
the making of money; who believes that loyalties are
ephemeral and are to be subordinated to good business.
Then there are Catholic priests who preach the message of
love and charity but can not rid themselves of a kind of
fundamentalism which is to convert, though in a land where
all faiths and beliefs are acceptable, conversion is
meaningless. These priests profess celibacy and austerity,
succumb to drink and temptation to lascivious women.
A main character, Father Luis, a presiding spirit throughout
the book, is given his own medicine when he is about to be
forcibly converted to Islam. He is rescued from this fate by
the Gujerat Sultan whom he has saved from an assassination
attempt by Islamic fundamentalists. His sermons on love and
charity fall on deaf ears that are more attuned to the Bhakti
and Sufi cults that were gaining popularity at that time.
The cameos of the historical characters of Vasco da Gama, of
Sultan Mahmud of Gujerat, and Krishna Deva Raya of
Vijayanagar, and of Afonso de Albuquerque are expertly and
deftly drawn.
So also the lesser characters who play a crucial
role in history: Timoja the Admiral of the
Vijayanagar fleet who persuades Albuquerque to
drive the Muslims out of Goa and then restore the
Hindu dynasty in the South, is a counterpoint to
Majid the traitor. The difference is Timoja keeps
to his faith by his act of infidelity in inviting a
foreign power to invade Goa and thereby save
Hinduism.
As behooves a Professor of Eng.Lit. of several years in the
Bombay University and later for many more years at the
University of Georgetown, Rodrigues keeps firmly to the
classic unities of plot, space, and time, with touches of
hubris and guilt, and Proust-like evocations of lost time and
lost love, in a narrative of chiseled prose recorded like a
palimpsest chronicle interspersed with inter-textual
interventions from subsidiary characters. There are no
quotation marks for speech but the cadences of the spoken
word resonate throughout.
The philosophical arguments and debate on Christianity,
Hinduism, and Islam do sound ineffectual and sterile and one
is not quite sure as to whether they are meant to be a part
of Samsara, the grand ocean of nothingness. But there is no
denying the literary flavour of the book which is replete
with significant colourful detail of cuisine, customs, dance,
music,and literature of both East and West.
References abound to Western theologians and to Islamic and
Hindu philosophers; the net is stretched far and wide to
catch Duns Scotus, the Vaishnavite Madhava, and the
philosopher singer, Purandaradasa of the Vijayanagar Court.
There are graphic descriptions of festivals and drama
recitals, with insertions of play within a play in the
narrative, and the sprinkling of words in the original
languages which are explained by the further reading of the
text.
Some devices serve to good effect for the unity of
opposites: the Portuguese who for centuries were under
Moorish occupation use the Moorish imperatives of jihad to
extirpate them; they themselves wreak vengeance with
unparalleled cruelty killing women and children in the ships
that take them for the Haj pilgrimage; their fundamentalism
and zeal to convert has an Islamic character without its
compassion and brotherhood.
Some of the tragic comic confusion is described
with some relevance as for instance the play for
the entertainment of the Sultan of Gujerat where
the Portuguese in the early part of their
explorations are symbolized in the character of a
stunted dwarf, the object of ridicule and laughter
from those who are soon to be destroyed by the
triumphant Portuguese; the confounding by Vasco da
Gama and his crew of a deity in the temple in
Calicut with the Virgin Mary of the Christian
church; the Portuguese search for the mythical
Christian king, Prester John, in Kerala but finding
to their dismay the more real and enduring Thomas
Christians instead, and the unresolved mystery as
to who killed whom when the Sultan of Gujerat was
invited by the Portuguese governor of Diu to a
friendly meeting but both losing their lives in a
skirmish shrouded in mystery.
Samsara and Love is a vade mecum and literary tour de force
that explores in picturesque and poignant detail the events
that shaped the lives and fortunes of communities of the
Indian Ocean at a turning point in history when their ethos
was shattered by the technology and and power of the West.
The invasive influence was aided by native intermediaries and
agents who shared in the power and greed of the imperialists.
The gory details of the terror, the bloodshed, the massacres,
are dissolved in the great ocean of illusion. The enduring
frame of reference is the Arabian Nights, the Arabic Alf
Layla va Layla (a thousand nights and one night).
In Love and Samsara, Layla is the custodian of Ahmad's son;
she is spared from the fate that killed Usha so that she can
carry on with the serial of the life giving narrative. Ahmad
is the archetype Sindbad who makes an appearance in the
novel. He is like Ahmed a master navigator, a poet,and a
spinner of tales.
The novel concludes with a promise of another story
which must be narrated as Scherazade did to atone
for human infidelity and to ward off execution and
death. When will the endless narrative of sequels
between Diu and Anjuna, the ancestral village of
Rodrigues in Goa, reach the denouement publicized
in tourist guides of Samsara in Diu and
hallucinogenic nothingness on the wide white sands
of Anjuna?
Love and Samsara is a good must read full of colourful and
tantalizing details grounded in history. It brings to life
the heroes and anti-heroes, their societies and communities,
their experiences and aspirations, the cultural interactions,
the conflicts, the tragedies, the successes, and the rise and
fall of hegemonies and empires at a turning point in world
history.
Alban Couto
A retired officer of the Indian Administrative Service. He
lives in his ancestral village, Aldona, Goa and writes on
social, economic and cultural issues.
FOOTNOTE: This review was written some months ago, before the
death of the reviewer.
