Vasco da Gama and the Spice Trade of Karnataka
Introduction – The Da Gaman Exchange
A great many of us have heard of the Columbian exchange, the process whereby goods were introduced to the Old and New Worlds after the Spanish discovered the Americas in 1492. This is named after Christopher Columbus and involved the arrival of foodstuffs and commodities to Europe from the Americas and vice-versa. Thus, potatoes, tomatoes and tobacco, which are native to the Americas, were introduced to Europe thereafter, and things like guns, horses, cattle and onions were introduced to the Americas from Europe. We hear far less about the exchange which went on between Europe and Asia as a result of the Portuguese discovery of the sea route around Africa to Asia at almost exactly the same time, yet there was such an exchange. For instance, it may surprise many of us to learn, but chillies were broadly unknown to Indian cuisine prior to the arrival of the Portuguese there at the end of the fifteenth century. We might call this the Da Gaman exchange after Vasco Da Gama, the Portuguese explorer who finally arrived to India in 1498. Here we explore a key component of the Da Gaman exchange, chillies, and how they were quickly absorbed into India cuisine through Karnataka and other parts of the subcontinent.
The Portuguese Discovery of India
Let’s backtrack briefly to examine how Da Gama came to be in India and what the situation was with Indian cuisine at that time. This will give us a greater insight into how the Da Gaman exchange introduced chillies into the Karnataka. Beginning as early as the 1410s the Portuguese had begun exploring the western coast of Africa in search of a sea route to Asia by sailing around the African continent. This was in order to capture the valuable spice trade which was controlled by Muslim merchants in the Middle East at the time, who acted as intermediaries between the traders of India and the Mediterranean. It was a slow process at first. For instance, it took until the 1450s before the Portuguese had reached the Cape Verde Islands and parts of Africa near the equator. Things accelerated thereafter and in 1488 Bartholomew Diaz became the first Portuguese explorer to reach the Cape of Good Hope and look out at the Indian Ocean. Thereafter the progress across the Indian Ocean to India was very quick and another Portuguese explorer, Vasco da Gama, arrived there in 1498. The Portuguese were soon establishing trading outposts and military bases in places like Karnataka and Kolkata. There they discovered a cuisine which used heavy amounts of spices, but which was very different to what we perceive Indian food as being today. For starters, there were no tomatoes involved. These would be introduced decades later by the Europeans, who were only just acquiring them from the Americas at the time of Da Gama’s first arrival to India. Secondly, there was no real chilli used in Indian food at the time. Indian cuisine in the fifteenth century was heavily spiced, but not very hot. It was the Portuguese who were about to introduce chillies.
A portrait of Vasco da Gama
The Introduction of Chilli to India by the Portuguese
The Portuguese discovered chilli en-route to Asia. As they voyaged down the western side of Africa and then up the eastern side during the fifteenth century, they stopped in many places and established ports and trading stations. Eventually permanent colonies would be developed at what are now Angola and Mozambique. It was along the Zambezi coast near Mozambique that Portuguese traders who came along as part of Vasco Da Gama’s expedition and those of other Portuguese expeditions began acquiring chillies that they then brought with them to India. Da Gama founded the original Portuguese military and trading station at Kolkata in the late 1490s. Thus it was here that chillies from Mozambique were first introduced into India. Then in the course of the early sixteenth century the sale of chillies expanded around India to places like Byadagi which have become synonymous with chillies in modern times. This was all happening during a period of a quarter of a century between Da Game’s first arrival there in 1498 and his death in 1524 during which the Portuguese man was the most important European explorer and official in India.
A Cuisine Transformed
Indian cuisine was transformed by this Da Gaman exchange. A huge proportion of Anglo-Indian dishes like Madras Curry, Vindaloo and Jalfrezi are all based around large amounts of tomato and chillies. Neither of these food types were really used in India prior to Da Gama’s discovery of the subcontinent by the Portuguese at the end of the fifteenth century. Many dishes which are staples of the cuisine of the Karnataka region today are the direct outcome of the introduction of chillies into the region by Da Gama and the Portuguese. Consider a dish like Bisi Bele Bath, a tangy lentil, rice and vegetable dish which is quite hot and heavily infused with chilli. Even some southern Indian dishes like Maddur Vada, fried vegetable fritters, might have predated the arrival of the Portuguese, but the way in which these dishes were made changed as a result. For instance, it is common for green chillies to be added to these snacks today, whereas they would have been prepared without chilli in the past. Countless other examples could be cited. Thus, the arrival of Vasco Da Gama and the Portuguese to India with chillies at the very end of the fifteenth century transformed the culinary landscape of places like Karnataka and Byadagi. The Da Gaman exchange was more important than we sometimes realise. The original chillies introduced by the Portuguese were the bird’s eye or peri-peri chilli, but it opened up the cuisine of India to the arrival of other types of chilli in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.