The Portuguese, in Present West Bengal and Assam: A Study of Their Enduring Contributions

Abstract

The Portuguese presence in the Bengal delta and the Brahmaputra and Barak valleys has had, on the whole, less scholarly attention than it probably deserves. Where Lisbon ran a formal administration in Goa through the Estado da Índia, its subjects further east were mostly left to their own devices, merchants, mercenaries and adventurers who built settlements bearing little resemblance to Goa and answered to no very clear authority. This paper traces that presence from its sixteenth-century beginnings through to its linguistic, culinary, religious and material effects on present-day West Bengal and Assam, and ends with the descendant communities who still live in the region. Some of what survives is well attested: formal Portuguese power in Bengal barely lasted a century, and yet Bengali still carries hundreds of Portuguese-derived words, and some of Bengal's best-known sweets owe their existence to Portuguese cheese-making. Other parts of the story, particularly around the smaller communities in Assam and West Bengal, rest on thinner and more recent documentation, a point taken up directly below. None of it was planned by anyone in Lisbon. Trade, soldiering and ordinary daily contact did more here than colonial policy ever did, which may be exactly why it lasted longer than colonial policy usually does.