After the Battle of Talikota, the peninsula south of the Krishna evolved along very different lines from those of the northern Deccan. Following Rama Raya’s disastrous defeat and death on the battlefield, his brother, Tirumala, rescued the imprisoned king, Sadaśiva – together with courtiers, government officials, the harem, military personnel and 1,500 elephants laden with treasure49 – and set out to relocate the capital in more secure territory. This was the fort of Penukonda, 200 kilometres south-east of their abandoned metropolis. But the disruptions caused by the shock of defeat had plunged the empire into a state of chaos that persisted for the next six years, during which Sadaśiva, the last Tuluva emperor, mysteriously died. Tirumala’s efforts to pick up the pieces of the stricken state were further stymied by domestic turmoil, including a bitter dispute with his nephew, Rama Raya’s son, over leadership of the Aravidu clan. By 1570, however, Tirumala felt sufficiently secure to crown himself the first Aravidu monarch of a reconstituted state of Vijayanagara, to be succeeded two years later by his son Śriranga I (r. 1572–85).
Prior to the Battle of Talikota, the empire had sprawled over the entire peninsula south of the Krishna, excepting the Malabar coast. But after the calamitous events of 1565, most of Vijayanagara’s former territory gradually fell under the control of either its enemies to the north or its own vassals to the south. In 1592 the state’s capital was again relocated, from Penukonda to the stronghold of Chandragiri, another 200 kilometres to the south-east. The site was not only more distant from the northern sultanates; it also lay within just ten kilometres of one of the most popular temple-shrines in south India – that of Venkateśvara, near Tirupati. The Aravidu rulers (1570–1669) were well aware that kings of Vijayanagara’s two preceding dynasties – the Saluva and Tuluva – had both legitimized their rise to power in good measure by lavishly patronizing this key pilgrimage centre.50 The Aravidus would do the same.
Owing to increasing pressure from the sultans of Bijapur and Golconda, however, after 1604 the dynasty was compelled periodically to shift its capital eighty kilometres further south, to Vellore. In 1623 Sultan Ibrahim ‘Adil Shah II of Bijapur captured Kurnool, a stronghold strategically located near the juncture of the Krishna and Tungabhadra Rivers. Ten years later his successor, Muhammad ‘Adil Shah (r. 1627–57), invaded Vijayanagara’s former capital of Penukonda. In 1635 his generals seized Ikkeri, a former Vijayanagara dependency whose ruler moved his capital further south to Bednur. In 1638 they captured Bangalore, and several years later besieged Vellore. Stimulated by their ancient rivalry with Bijapur, as well as their own appetite for expansion, the rulers of Golconda launched assaults on Vijayanagara territory in the eastern Deccan, in 1642 capturing all the forts along the Andhra coast down to Pulicat. In the following year, their forces took the powerful stronghold of Udayagiri, 100 kilometres inland from the Coromandel coast. In 1644 Bijapur captured Bankapur in the western Deccan. As the two sultanates now found themselves competing for much of the same territory, in 1646 they agreed that any further spoils seized from Vijayanagara would be divided between them on a two-to-one basis in favour of Bijapur – a ratio indicating the latter’s greater power.
As Vijayanagara’s centre of gravity migrated deeper into the peninsula, its rulers became ever more dependent for support on their tributary vassals to the south.51 In the wake of the empire’s much earlier annexations made by Krishna Raya and Achyuta Raya, local administration had been left to military chieftains known as ‘nayakas’. Some of these were Telugu warriors appointed as regional governors by the Vijayanagara emperor; others were local chiefs whom the central government recognized as tributary vassals. Two important Telugu nayaka lineages in the Tamil-speaking South, those of Madurai and Tanjavur, claimed direct links either to Krishna Raya or Achyuta Raya, while a third, that of Jinji (or Gingee) in the northern part of the Tamil zone, did not emerge until the 1590s. In the Kannada-speaking south-western plateau, the nayaka lineage of Ikkeri (later, Bednur) is traceable to a local chieftain whose authority had been recognized by the Vijayanagara court shortly before 1565. Further south, the Wodeyar ruling lineage of Mysore was similarly descended from a local chieftain who had been a tributary vassal of Achyuta Raya.
The debacle at Talikota, however, forced Tirumala and his Aravidu successors to confront powerful centrifugal forces, since the chaos that followed that battle tested the loyalty of all these nayakas. The third Aravidu monarch, Venkata II (r. 1585–1614), proved the most successful of the dynasty’s rulers in maintaining some of the integrity, though not the glory, of the old empire. Although recapturing Vijayanagara’s original capital lay well beyond his reach, the emperor did manage to recover key forts that had been seized by Golconda after 1565. For a while he even succeeded in restoring the Krishna as his northern frontier with that sultanate. To the south, he brought rebellious vassals in Kolar and Vellore back into line. But Venkata II had no sons, and his death in 1614 plunged the crippled state into a bitter, four-year succession struggle, with different nayakas supporting different sides in the conflict. Worse still, the instability triggered by this war alienated the larger nayaka houses, some of which altogether ceased sending their annual tribute to their Aravidu overlord. This was also when Bijapur and Golconda began launching their aggressive southward campaigns. Nonetheless, a reconstituted Vijayanagara state under the Aravidus managed to limp along well into the seventeenth century, aided not least by the mutual rivalries and nearly constant warfare among its nominally dependent nayaka vassals.
Between 1570 and about 1650 those nayaka states – in particular the three in the Tamil country (Jinji, Tanjavur and Madurai) – evolved a distinctive style of articulating their political authority. The old Vijayanagara empire had celebrated and practised classic norms of Indian kingship, which included sponsoring Vedic sacrifices, protecting the Hindu social order and donating land to Brahmins, understood as ritually superior to the rulers. By contrast, the nayakas of the Tamil zone were proud of their humble, Śudra origins and even inverted the classic conception of social order by placing Brahmins in a position subordinate to themselves. Moreover, as seen in contemporary Telugu literature patronized by these courts, their conception of kingship was structured around profligate expenditures on deities, courtesans, Brahmins, poets and, most conspicuously, on adorning and feeding their own bodies. Rather than supporting Brahmins with donations of land, they fed them on a vast scale: one text claimed that the nayaka of Tanjavur would not eat his breakfast until he had fed 12,000 Brahmins. Nor did these nayakas present themselves in managerial or bureaucratic roles, devoting themselves instead to elaborate rounds of ritual. Contemporary texts focus especially on their sexual prowess, with their conquests of hosts of women effectively substituting for the warrior ideal of conquering other lands. For them, the symbolism of kingship replaced its substance. Put differently, symbolism had become the substance of kingship.52
Even though these states functioned as de facto successors to the old Vijayanagara empire, the nayakas of the southern peninsula refrained from proclaiming their outright independence from their nominal Aravidu overlords. Mysore’s Wodeyar lineage of rulers went the furthest in the latter direction. In 1610 Raja Wodeyar (r. 1578–1617) seized Vijayanagara’s provincial capital of Śrirangapattanam from the Aravidu governor, marking a decisive break from imperial authority. And yet, although his successors adopted grandiose titles such as ‘supreme lord of kings of great kings’ and ‘emperor of Karnataka’, they continued to acknowledge Vijayanagara’s formal overlordship in their inscriptions. By the end of the seventeenth century, by which time the Aravidu dynasty had come to an end, Mysore’s rulers had even adopted Vijayanagara’s imperial boar seal, suggesting the enduring prestige of the old empire, as well as the Wodeyars’ self-image as its rightful heirs.53
Perhaps the most tortured imperial–vassal relationship was that between the Aravidu court and the nayaka of Madurai, near the peninsula’s southern extremity. Because the Aravidu sovereign at Chandragiri no longer possessed the requisite power to serve as a proper overlord, by the late sixteenth century Madurai’s nayakas looked to Vijayanagara’s ‘golden age’ as an alternative source of their own legitimacy. A courtly Telugu text of c.1600, the Rayavacakamu, sees Madurai’s political authority as deriving not from its nominal Aravidu overlord in Chandragiri, whom the text never even mentions, but directly from the glorious reign of Krishna Raya, who had died some seven decades earlier. More fundamentally, the nayakas of Madurai looked for political inspiration to that emperor’s great capital: metropolitan Vijayanagara.54 At the time of the text’s composition, Vijayanagara lay largely abandoned, a ghost city. But in the early sixteenth century, the empire’s glory days, it had been a sprawling megalopolis with an estimated population of between 300,000 and 400,000, making it at the time one of the largest cities in the world.55 More than that, it was so ideologically charged that it functioned rather like a political talisman. Apart from its vast wealth and architectural grandeur, its urban core had served as a stage on which magnificent political ceremonies were periodically enacted, thereby empowering those who possessed the thriving metropolis. As such, the site was not merely the centre of the state’s power: it was the source of its power. Imperial dynasts had derived their political authority by simply ruling over, and from, the great city. But the catastrophe of 1565 severed the bonds between city, ruling dynasty and the mandate to rule. Not only were the empire’s Tuluva rulers succeeded by a different dynasty, the Aravidus: more importantly, by abandoning the partially ruined city for sites deeper in the peninsula’s interior, this new dynasty had become physically detached from the source of the empire’s former legitimacy. The Aravidus were aware of this, of course, for they rather wistfully referred to their new capitals in Penukonda and Chandragiri as ‘Vijayanagara’.
As a consequence of these drastically altered political realities, south India’s nayaka rulers of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries exhibited a chronic ambivalence about their loyalty to Vijayanagara’s Aravidu kings. If they treasured the memory of the great metropolitan capital, their loyalty to the current dynasty was often lukewarm, perfunctory and grudging. A series of dramatic events in the mid 1640s, described by an eyewitness, illustrates not only the nayakas’ uncertain relationship towards their nominal overlords, but also the intensity of their mutual rivalries, their penchant for ritual and symbolism over substance, and the means by which the sultanates of Bijapur and Golconda would ultimately dominate nearly the entire peninsula. Our source is a report to Rome filed by Balthazar da Costa, a Jesuit missionary who served in Madurai from 1640 to 1670. He knew the terrain well, having travelled throughout the Tamil country for three decades. He also had friends in Madurai’s court and disciples in its armies.56
By 1640, da Costa tells us, the nayaka of Madurai, Tirumala, had ceased paying tribute to the aged Aravidu king of Vijayanagara, Venkata III (r. 1630–42), who did nothing about it. But the king’s son, Śriranga III (r. 1642–72), resolved to claim the arrears as soon as his father died and he came to power, both of which happened in 1642. Reflecting his weak position with respect to his subordinate vassals, however, the prince could not be crowned without the consent of his principal nayakas, and not all of them were willing to give it. Nonetheless, Śriranga III’s representative in Madurai pressed Tirumala for payment of his arrears of tribute. When Madurai’s nayaka prevaricated, the king wrote insulting letters to his recalcitrant vassal, swearing that if the arrears were not paid he would flay the nayaka alive and from his skin make a drum to be beaten during processions as a warning to other vassals. Such bombastic threats drove Tirumala to enlist Brahmin sorcerers to practise incantations intended to kill his meddlesome overlord. But seeing that witchcraft had no effect on Śriranga III’s life, Tirumala decided in 1645 to form an anti-Aravidu league with the nayakas of neighbouring Tanjavur and Jinji. For this purpose he proposed to host a trilateral conference of the three rulers.
Tirumala ordered three pavilions to be built nearly a kilometre from each other in a wooded area at the point where his kingdom’s frontiers met those of both Tanjavur and Jinji. When all was ready, he marched to his pavilion with an army of 30,000 infantry and cavalry, supported by many elephants and oxen. His army was ordered to remain on Madurai’s territory while he occupied the pavilion specially built for him. The nayaka of Tanjavur came to the site with an equally large army, which camped on its own territory. Several days later the nayaka of Jinji arrived, but with only 10,000 men since his northern border met territory ruled directly by Śriranga III, and he felt it necessary to guard his domain from a possible invasion by his overlord’s army. After Brahmin priests consulted their auguries to determine the most auspicious time for their meeting, at the appointed hour on a particular Friday in August 1645, writes da Costa:
Tirumala Nayak mounted a magnificent elephant richly caparisoned with a saddle cloth of crimson velvet studded with pearls, and tusks sheathed in gold plates. He wore a rich robe embroidered with gold thread with a turban of the same material, and earrings consisting of eight large pearls, while his necklace and bracelets were of the best diamonds. To guide his elephant, he held in his right hand the ‘angusam’ [ankuśa, iron hook] of which the handle was inlaid with precious stones. On the same elephant sitting behind him was his nephew, dressed in the same style, who presented him with betel. He was preceded by the arms and insignia and followed by the file of elephants mounted by his chief nobles and captains, all dressed in rich garments and wearing huge pendants, earrings, and necklaces. The cavalry brought up the rear while the rest of the army marched past accompanied by the music of numberless martial instruments. It was an imposing and majestic procession well worth seeing.57
Late that afternoon Tirumala and his magnificent retinue arrived at the meeting place, as did the two other nayakas on their respective elephants, which were also richly decorated. In a scene indicating the supreme necessity of preserving their relative status, the three men conversed for about half an hour without ever dismounting from their elephants. Given the ties between elephants and royal authority in Indian culture,58 none of them could have stepped to the ground without appearing to have relinquished his kingly status. Doing so would also have acknowledged his inferiority vis-à-vis the other nayakas. The next day, Tirumala invited his guests to his pavilion for a magnificent banquet, followed by dances that continued far into the night. Had it not been for a fire that broke out in the Tanjavur nayaka’s pavilion the next day, that ruler would have hosted another such entertainment the following evening.
The three men ultimately reconvened in Tanjavur where, after another round of sumptuous banquets, they finally got down to the business of determining how best to deal with their nominal but still-dangerous overlord. Noting that Śriranga III could not be crowned without their consent, Tirumala urged deposing him and setting up a more pliable sovereign. After all, he argued, if the king were permitted to pressure his own state of Madurai, would he not soon be pressuring the other states he nominally ruled? The nayaka of Tanjavur, however, fearing the power that Śriranga still possessed, and apprehensive of the devastation to his lands that a war would cause, urged Tirumala to pay his arrears. The latter retorted that doing so would only enhance the king’s ability to crush all the nayakas, and that the prudent course would be to stand united and attack Śriranga III while he was still relatively weak. Although the nayaka of Jinji accepted this argument, that of Tanjavur only pretended to accept it, for he secretly intended to assist the Aravidu monarch.
Śriranga III was very much aware of these intrigues against him, thanks to spies planted in the courts of all his nayakas. He was especially angered at Tirumala’s resort to black magic to kill him. So he sent his cavalry into the territory of the nayaka nearest his southern frontier, that of Jinji, who immediately left the trilateral conference to confront and repulse his overlord’s troops. In the course of this new struggle, Jinji’s military units intercepted a convoy carrying 100,000 cruzados that the nayaka of Tanjavur had secretly sent to the king, a perfidious act that naturally stirred Jinji’s enmity with Tanjavur. Yet Tirumala engaged in behaviour even more duplicitous, secretly urging Golconda’s Sultan ‘Abd Allah Qutb Shah (r. 1626–72), whose territory lay directly north of the remnants of Vijayanagara territory, to seize as much of Śriranga III’s domain as possible while the Aravidu ruler was preoccupied with Jinji. The sultan did as encouraged, taking Chandragiri in April 1646 and advancing from there to Vellore, then the Aravidu capital, which he besieged. In a state of desperation, Sriranga III threatened that he himself would ally with Golconda if his nayakas would not come to his aid. In these circumstances, all three nayakas outwardly agreed to aid the king, and in May 1646, after peace had been concluded with Golconda, the king, then in Tanjavur, received the three Tamil rulers with honours.
The intrigues did not end there, however. To avoid a clash with ‘Abd Allah Qutb Shah of Golconda, whose armies were in the vicinity and still advancing south, the nayaka of Tanjavur abandoned his alliance with Madurai and allied himself with the Golconda sultan. To counter this, Tirumala invited the sultan of Bijapur to send troops to his defence, aiming to exploit Bijapur’s rivalry with Golconda in order to pursue his own – Madurai’s – rivalry with Tanjavur. But the strategy backfired. Once Bijapur’s 17,000 troops reached the Tamil country, their commanders came to an agreement with Golconda whereby Bijapur would continue the siege of Jinji while Golconda’s troops withdrew to consolidate earlier conquests. In December 1648 the nayaka of Jinji, in despair, surrendered his capital to Bijapur, whose armies continued south. Early the next year both Tanjavur and Madurai were forced to accept Bijapur’s overlordship.
Amidst these realignments of power in the peninsula, meanwhile, Śriranga III had become a king without a kingdom, forced to move about as a guest at the court of one or another of his nominal vassals. For a while he was maintained by Tirumala in the court of Madurai, until late 1647 when he settled in that of the nayaka of Tanjavur. But when the latter gradually decreased his royal guest’s allowance, Śriranga III took the hint and, with his court, settled in nearby forests. He next arranged to repair to the Kannada country as a guest of another notional vassal, Kanthirava Narasaraja (r. 1638–59), the Wodeyar king of Mysore. But by this time his stature had diminished appreciably. As he passed through Tanjavur and Madurai en route to the Kannada country in late 1648, the nayakas of those places – still his nominal vassals – took no more notice of him than had he been an ordinary traveller.59
The advance of Golconda and Bijapur into India’s southern extremities was thus assisted by the duplicity of nayakas who were technically vassals of the Aravidu house, the avowed enemy of the northern sultanates, but who repeatedly invited those two sultanates to intervene in their own affairs. Indeed, the political and diplomatic behaviour of these states harks back to India’s ancient theory of the Circle of Kings, the mandala, which recommends that a king create a ring of loyal, subordinate vassals around his territorial core, and then connive with his enemies’ enemies, construed as potential allies, to defeat and transform them into new allies. By the seventeenth century, however, this practice, derived from classical Sanskrit texts, had become mingled with other courtly practices derived from the Persianate world. Across the southern peninsula, courtiers in the nayaka states had inherited from the old Vijayanagara empire Persian-style clothing, including long tunics and coloured cloaks. This is suggested both by contemporary paintings and by the evidence of Dutch envoys, who remarked on the ‘Moorish’ dress they saw in local courts.60 Moreover, the same Persianate system of military-service tenures that had been fundamental to the old Vijayanagara empire appears to have been inherited by the nayakas of Madurai.61 Mysore’s Wodeyar rulers even used the Persianate title ‘Sultan among Indian kings’, just as Vijayanagara’s emperors had done.62
To the west of Mysore and the Tamil country is a formidable mountain range, the Western Ghats, beyond which lie a hilly lowland and a lush, tropical coastal strip laced with rivers and channels that flow from the mountainous interior. This is Malabar. Hugging the shores of south-west India and stretching 300 kilometres in length and averaging sixty kilometres in width, the Malabar coast bore remarkable similarities to a contemporary coastal area on the opposite side of the planet. The Dutch colony of Manhattan – now the heart of New York City – flourished owing to its commercial connections with the wider world. Although geologically attached to North America, for four decades (1624–64) this ‘island at the centre of the world’ had served as a nexus through which beaver pelts extracted from the American interior were shipped to the Netherlands, garnering immense profits for Dutch merchants on both sides of the ocean.63 And in the process, Manhattan emerged as a free-trade zone, an ethnic melting pot, an experiment in self-government and religious tolerance, a socially fluid frontier and a shipping hub linked to a network of ports dotting the shores of the North and South Atlantic Oceans. Indeed, the quest for North American furs by Dutch merchants was driven by the same forces that had already sent their compatriots – and before them, Portuguese mariners – into the Indian Ocean in search of commodities even more valuable than beaver pelts: spices, and especially Malabar pepper, highly prized as a food seasoning.
For at least 1,500 years Malabar had been the world’s principal source of this ‘black gold’, as the Dutch called the spice, drawing to its shores long-distance merchants from as far away as the Mediterranean basin and the South China Sea. This coastal strip also exported other widely coveted tropical products to eager markets overseas: ginger, cardamom, cinnamon, aromatic woods and hard woods. Already in the first century AD Romans worried about the drain of hard currency going to feed their countrymen’s seemingly insatiable demand for Indian luxuries, especially pepper. By the thirteenth century China had become the world’s largest consumer of black pepper, with Hangzhou alone consuming more than 4,300 kilograms a day, if Marco Polo is to be believed. The Venetian also estimated that, for every boatload of pepper that reached the Mediterranean world, 100 went to China’s busy port of Quanzhou.64
Linked to distant transoceanic markets but cut off geographically and politically from the rest of India, Malabar was, like Dutch Manhattan, something of an island at the centre of the world. Although Vijayanagara had held a loose sort of sovereignty over part of its northernmost coast in order to import war-horses, the rest of Malabar, unlike south India’s nayaka states, was never ruled by Vijayanagara or by any other of the peninsula’s great empires. Ever since the twelfth century it had been divided into a handful of rival houses that, reigning from coastal ports, maintained only a formal sovereignty over their respective hinterlands. The most important such city states included, from north to south: Cannanore, Calicut, Cochin and Kollam. Inhibiting the rulers’ authority was the economic and military influence of a powerful martial aristocracy, the Nairs (or Nayars), who served the rulers as elite warriors. Because the Nairs also held superior rights to the coast’s rich hinterland, and because Brahmins collected dues on temple lands, Malabar’s coastal kings, unlike the rulers of India’s agrarian states, were unable to impose land taxes in areas over which they claimed sovereignty. But they did have an alternative source of income. Owing to strict taboos barring high-caste Hindus from seafaring, the region’s lucrative overseas export sector was handled entirely by foreigners – first Romans, then Jews, Christians, Tamils, Gujaratis, Sinhalese, Malays, Chinese, Persians and, especially, Arabs. Such an arrangement met local kings’ need for revenue, the bulk of which was derived from taxing the export of locally produced commodities that the entire world seemed to crave.65 Foreign traders, writes a classical Tamil poet, ‘arrive with gold and leave with pepper’.66
This singular political and commercial structure partly accounts for the Malabar coast’s demographic profile, unique among India’s subregions. By the early twenty-first century a little more than half its population was Hindu, with the remainder divided almost equally between Muslims and Christians. The latter were composed mainly of Syrian Christians, so called owing to their presumed Middle Eastern origins and their use of the Syriac language for liturgical purposes. They traced themselves back to Jesus’s apostle Thomas, who is thought to have reached Malabar in the mid first century and founded churches in at least seven coastal cities, all of which were centres of spice exports. By the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries local Christians appeared as pepper-brokers and port revenue officers in southern Malabar, especially Kollam, and, by the fifteenth century, as ship owners, brokers and merchants in Cochin, Kayamkulam and Kodungallur (Cranganur). By this time, too, the community had acquired a substantial base in Malabar’s interior. Many Syrian Christians were recruited as warriors in service to Hindu lords in southern Malabar’s pepper-growing interior, in this respect functioning as a separate caste, much like the Nairs. In fact, ruling houses gave these warriors titles and land grants, and a status equal to that of the Nairs. They endorsed the offices of Syrian Christians’ chief clerics and endowed and protected Christian churches in the same way that they patronized Hindu temples. For their part, the Christians adopted many Hindu rituals, were given access to Hindu temples, and until the late sixteenth century intermarried with the Nair community. Leading Christian clerics even took part in the trappings of Malabari kingship, such as travelling with large entourages of elite warriors (chavers) sworn to die protecting their patron.67
Meanwhile, from at least the ninth century onwards, Arab Muslims began to play a prominent role in Malabar’s overseas commerce. By the eleventh century, Arab brokers controlled the long-distance spice trade between India and China and dominated the maritime trade between India and the Middle East. Owing to Malabar’s central position in the Indian Ocean and the natural rhythm of that ocean’s two annual sailing seasons, the south-western and north-eastern monsoons, Arab mariners found Malabar’s ports to be natural sites for the supply, trans-shipment and warehousing of commercial goods. As a result, communities of Arab merchants, the pardesis (foreigners), put down permanent roots along the coast, conducting long-distance trade with kinfolk or trusted partners in ports across the entire Indian Ocean, especially the Arabian Sea. By the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries Muslims dominated overseas trade in Malabar’s central and northern sectors as pepper cultivation spread northwards. By then one port in particular, Calicut, had become Malabar’s premier site for exporting pepper throughout the Indian Ocean region. In the 1340s Ibn Battuta saw thirteen large Chinese junks anchored beside the city. Although Calicut had no natural harbour, the Moroccan globetrotter considered it one of the world’s largest seaports.68 He attributed the city’s prosperity to the scrupulous attention that Calicut’s ruler, the so-called Zamorin, gave to the security of merchants and their property. The Zamorin – from samudra raja, or ‘king of the seas’ – not only protected his resident merchants: he also fostered a climate of religious tolerance, even letting Muslims build their mosques with tiled roofs, a privilege allowed for no other structures in the kingdom except royal palaces or Hindu temples.
Under such favourable circumstances Malabar’s Muslim community – especially in Calicut, but along the northern coast generally – flourished and swelled in numbers as low-caste labourers such as dock-workers, shipbuilders and other communities ancillary to the maritime trade converted to Islam, and as the residents from overseas increasingly intermarried with the local society. This new, hybridized Arabo-Malayali community, called the Mappilas, spoke Malayalam, dressed like the Nairs, except for their caps and beards, and practised matrilineal inheritance, again like the Nairs.69 Reflecting their historic ties to the Arab maritime world – especially the Red Sea region, a hub for shipping goods to the Mediterranean zone – Malabar’s Muslims followed the Shafi‘i branch of Islamic law, the same one followed by the peoples of Yemen and the Horn of Africa. By contrast, Muslims across north India and the Deccan followed the Hanafi school, then dominant across Anatolia, the Iranian plateau, Afghanistan and Central Asia – that is to say, the Persianate world. A similar pattern is seen in Mappila architecture, which reflects local Malayali, not Persianate, traditions. Rather than the pointed arches, domes, minarets and vaulted ceilings that are associated with the Persianate visual vocabulary, Malabar’s older mosques – and also its older Syrian Christian churches – feature the same multi-tiered roofs, sloped wooden window panels and elaborate gables that are found on the coast’s traditional palaces and Hindu temples [see Fig. 9]. Indicating the coastal region’s relative isolation from the rest of the peninsula, these characteristically Malabari architectural features are not found elsewhere in India.
At the very end of the fifteenth century Malabar’s society was upended by the abrupt arrival of Portuguese mariners driven by Roman Catholic crusading zeal and a quest for direct, maritime access to Indian spices, in particular pepper. Vasco da Gama’s pioneering voyage from Lisbon to Calicut in 1498 was followed by a second one led by Pedro Cabral. Shortly after reaching Calicut in 1500, Cabral seized a Muslim cargo ship, provoking a mob attack on a Portuguese warehouse in which a number of Portuguese died. Cabral retaliated by seizing five nearby merchant ships and slaying their crews. He then spent a full day bombarding the city before sailing down to Cochin. Since that city’s ruler viewed the Portuguese as a counterbalance to his rival, the Zamorin of Calicut, he allowed Cabral to establish a fortified trading post under his protection. This marked the first European toehold on Indian territory. In 1502 Vasco da Gama, returning to Calicut with twenty ships and nearly 1,000 men, sank a merchant ship sailing from Mecca, drowning 700 pilgrims, and then demanded that the Zamorin expel all Muslim merchants from the city. When the Zamorin refused to comply, da Gama also bombarded the city and then sailed down to Cochin, where he stationed a flotilla of ships at the post established by Cabral. This violent and monopolistic approach to trade quickly internationalized warfare on the Indian Ocean. In 1508, warships of Mamluk Egypt joined those of the sultanate of Gujarat to defeat a Portuguese fleet near Chaul (forty kilometres south of Mumbai), and nine years later an Ottoman fleet prevented the Portuguese from conquering the Red Sea port of Jiddah.
The sixteenth century thus saw an entirely new relationship between Malabar and the outside world, which in turn led to profound changes within Malayali society. In the course of that century the Syrian Christians would face mounting pressure to align their theology, liturgy, rites, ecclesiastical structure and socio-cultural practices with those of the Roman Catholic Church. This provoked powerful resistance, culminating in 1665 with the emergence of two rival communities. One followed Roman Catholic authority as mediated by European missionary bishops, and the other – the ‘Jacobite’ or ‘Orthodox’ Syrians – adhered to the authority of prelates in Antioch, as mediated by hereditary Malayali archdeacons.70
Malabar’s Muslim society was no less transformed by this sudden European intrustion. The Portuguese intervention led to the nearly complete withdrawal of Malabar’s resident community of foreign (pardesi) Arab merchants. This, in turn, created a space for indigenous Mappilas to expand their own operations, which they did by establishing transoceanic commercial networks and dodging Portuguese patrols, or by sending consignments of pepper overland to the sultanate of Gujarat, a sworn enemy of the Portuguese, and exporting them from Gujarati ports. Second, Portuguese assaults galvanized the Mappilas into a unified community and instilled in them a mentality of holy war directed at the Portuguese. This appeal to militancy was made explicit in an Arabic text that, composed in the 1580s and widely circulated in Malabar, identified the Portuguese not as infidels (kuffar) but as ‘Franks’ (al-frange), a term meant to evoke memories of the Crusades several centuries earlier.71
In sum, the advent of Portuguese operations in early-sixteenth-century Malabar, soon followed by similar operations elsewhere on Indian shores, exposed local communities to a style of commerce that was entirely new to them. This was the idea of armed trade, symbolized by the cannon carried on Portuguese caravels and the string of fortified trading posts that appeared along much of the Indian Ocean rim. Nonetheless, to label the centuries following 1498 the ‘Vasco da Gama epoch’, as some have suggested, is surely an exaggeration. By 1600, after a full century of doggedly pursuing commercial monopolies, Europeans were buying only 10 per cent of Malabar’s pepper production, estimated at about 10,000 metric tons a year.72 What is more, the Portuguese could never keep northern Europeans from discovering the knowledge they had painstakingly gathered regarding the winds, currents and ports of the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans.