Faire and well-formed : Portuguese Eurasian women and symbolic whiteness in early Colonial India

Abstract

In the Lusiad, published in Lisbon in 1572 and regarded by some scholars as the national epic of Portugal, Luis de Camoens describes how the Greek gods helped the Portuguese to acquire their Indian possessions in a spectacular narrative of myth, legend, and maritime travel account. The so-named age of discovery at the end of the end of the fifteenth century and the repositioning of Europe from its marginal position on the far western fringes of Afro-Eurasia to a central position in the world economy was part of a broader exchange of ideas and bodies across both vast and more easily accessible distances, where European colonies become sites for the reproduction and transformation of new social distinctions. After the completion of the first circumnavigation of the globe by Magellan in 1521, the cultural gaze of Europeans was widened through the notion of “discoverie,” and the interconnectedness of the new capitalist world-system saw the Portuguese become the first European presence in a global web linking Portugal with Africa, the Americas, and Asia. The largely male encounter with the “other” inevitably led to the proliferation of travel narratives that attempted to make sense of the place of interracial intimacy as part of the discourse of a new world system. In the Lusiad, the offspring of Portuguese men and Indian women emerge as the corporeal metaphors of the imagined anxiety felt in the early modern European mind toward sex across the racial divide