Portugal's great national poet Luís Vaz de Camões' 1572 epic poem The Lusiads (Os Lusíadas) — widely considered Portugal's national poem — begins as Vasco da Gama’s ships are already in motion across the Indian Ocean, sailing up the coast of East Africa. The gods of Greco-Roman mythology are gathering to discuss the fate of the expedition which is favoured by Venus and attacked by Bacchus.
A literary monument to the Portuguese Age of Discovery, 'The Lusiads' celebrates Vasco da Gama's discovery of the sea route to India as a heroic and divinely sanctioned act. While the poem is often praised for its artistic brilliance and classical ambition, it also served as a cultural text that rationalised and glorified European colonial ambitions in the East. When read through a decolonised lens, The Lusiads is both a poetic chronicle of Europe's arrival in India and an ideological foundation for domination.
Vasco da Gama’s 1498 landing at Calicut (Kozhikode) marked the beginning of a Portuguese imperial presence in India that would last until as recently as 1961. Camões, who lived and was imprisoned in Goa for a time and likely witnessed the workings of colonial power firsthand, framed Gama’s voyage as the fulfilment of divine prophecy. Venus aids the Portuguese, Bacchus opposes them, and the entire enterprise is cast as part of a celestial plan. This mythologizing of conquest as destiny positions India not as a sovereign civilization but as a space waiting to be discovered, interpreted, and claimed by European heroes.
In The Lusiads, India is rendered more symbolic than specific — a prize at the edge of the known world. When Vasco da Gama reaches Calicut, the poem acknowledges resistance from local rulers, especially the Zamorin, but ultimately centers Portuguese actions as the historical event of importance. Indians are portrayed with suspicion or as passive receivers of European knowledge and religion. This Eurocentric framing erases India's rich pre-colonial trade networks, plural cultures, and long-standing engagement with maritime routes across the Indian Ocean.
Camões' epic narrative also aligned with the early ideological mechanisms of colonialism: the idea that Portugal, though small, is divinely chosen to civilise and convert. He called the Portuguese "a people predestined by the Fates", naturalising empire as a moral and religious obligation in the European mission to civilise. This logic justified a whole host of Portuguese injustices from forced conversions to violent suppression of resistance. The glorification of conquest in The Lusiads anticipated and reflected the actual policies of figures like Afonso de Albuquerque and the later Inquisition in Goa.
In postcolonial readings, The Lusiads is often seen as a canonical European text that contributed to the myth of benign — or even benevolent — colonialism. Its elegant stanzas obscure the brutality of empire, presenting violence as heroism and domination as enlightenment. The poem has rarely been challenged in the Lusophone canon, but in Indian postcolonial thought, it cannot be separated from a colonial cultural arsenal that helped legitimise centuries of European conquest.
Today, Camões’ epic holds a dual legacy: as a cornerstone of Portuguese literary history and as a poetic veil over the realities of early colonial intrusion in India. While it remains a masterpiece of 16th-century European literature, its role in shaping colonial perceptions of India — and enabling its subjugation — must also be reckoned with. The Lusiads is both a masterpiece of epic poetry and a complex historical document: it frames the Portuguese Empire in heroic, providential terms, but also leaves traces of the colonial era's moral contradictions.
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