Indo Portuguese Diplomacy: During the 16th and 17th Centuries 1500-1663

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The idea of working on this subject had come up over a decade ago when I started teaching diplomatic history of Portugal and noticed that there was a great dearth of works not only on Portuguese diplomatic relations with various states of Europe but also with Asian empires, especially with the Indian,with which they had almost five hundred years of political, economical and social interactions. Strange enough to note that historians and social scientists of the whole world who have dedicated more than three decades in researching variable subjects, recently, but none directly focussed on Indo-Portuguese diplomacy. On the contrary, most of the historians have been quite seriously involved in some unproductive debates on which they have not, so far, reached or appears that they will ever reach to any possible conclusion. The reason of not working on the topic in question may not, possibly, be ever unearthed. But I can assure one thing that it was certainly not due to the lack of documentation. The requirement of an elaborate work on Indo-Portuguese diplomacy has been awaited for long. Besides, it has been noticed that there has been some misinterpretations and wrong conclusion put forward by historians dealing with the Indo-European history, for over half a century, and especially, during the recent pasts, due to the lack of proper knowledge of the subject which has overshadowed the socio-political relations of India. A few decades before, Pandit Sunderlal wrote a book, How India Lost her Freedom, explaining in a very elaborate manner how India's freedom was bartered by a few deceivers in 1757. The present work argues that if at all we have to put a date when the Indian freedom was put to stake, it would be 1498 and not 1757. Most of the diplomatic issues and political relations between the Portuguese Estado da India and the South Indian States have been studied thoroughly in the present work, with critical views. A part from what have been mentioned earlier, this work has also tried to answer some of the theoretical questions, recently raised by the historians, if or if not there was a Portuguese Empire, or whether they brought any changes in existing socio-economical and diplomatic system of India, using mostly the Portuguese and Indian archival sources.