Vivek Menezes
The great physician, naturalist and scholar Garcia de Orta was born in Alentejo in Portugal in 1501, into a family on the run from across the border in Cáceres in Spain, where the infamous 1492 Alhambra Decree had criminalized Judaism. By the time this new baby came into the world, his family had converted to Catholicism – at least by all public appearances – but that same hateful prejudice of anti-Semitism would shadow and poison Orta’s entire life even after he fled to Goa (and did not spare him after death either, when his bones were disinterred to be burned in an especially ghoulish auto-da-fé). Nonetheless, in-between were 35 extraordinarily consequential years, during which this obviously brilliant doctor served as prized court physician for the Ahmednagar Sultanate simultaneously with the Portuguese Viceroys, built an island estate that would become the effective foundation stone of modern Bombay, and capped his spectacular transnational career by writing one of the most important books in the history of science.
In crucial ways, Orta is very much like his contemporary and friend Camões, whose experiences in India transformed him into one of the greatest poets of his times, and in fact his very first published verse was a clever word-playing dedication for the older man’s magnum opus Colóquios dos Simples e Drogas e Coisas Medicinais da Índia (loosely translated, the title means “Conversations about the drugs and medicines of India), praising “The fruit of a garden where/ New plants bloom, unknown to scholars.” In fact, this is one of the pivotal, invaluable scholarly works in intellectual history, the first time anyone possessed the polyglot expertise and life experiences to properly compare and juxtapose Latin, Greek, Indian and Arab knowledge systems about any number of interesting plants and medicines. Another way to think of it, however, is as an explicit argument being made by the author about the value of his own life, because by then the Inquisition had followed him to Goa. To some extent, the gambit worked, because the dreaded tribunals arrived in 1560, and his book came out in 1563 with its imprimatur, and it was only after Orta’s death in 1568 that his family was brought to trial for Judaism, for which “crime” his sister Catarina was burned alive the following year (with her ashes thrown in the Mandovi along with her brother’s remains).
Whatever the reason that Orta wrote the book as a self-styled elderly man – in fact he was only 62 – the result is absolutely priceless, and highly entertaining even beyond the dazzling array of scientific knowledge this lifetime traveller and researcher presents to his readers. Each chapter is another wide-ranging conversation between two learned men – one is explicitly Orta and the other “Ruano” is also clearly him but in a more questioning mode – and the two keep on discussing different spices, plants, medicines and animals while sitting at leisure in the author’s comfortable home and garden overlooking the port in Old Goa. The tone is quite casual, but the science is extremely sharp, and full of insights about entire bodies of scientific knowledge that were previously unknown in Europe. This was meant to be a radical intervention, dismissing all prevailing orthodoxies, as the author makes clear from the start: “For me the testimony of an eye-witness is worth more than that of all the physicians, and all the fathers of medicine who wrote on false information".
The book is clearly not “primarily written for professional or social advancement” says the Lisbon-based historian of science Palmira Fontes da Costa in her 2012 paper on the Colloquies. “Indeed, the author claims to already have a successful professional career as well as good, friendly relations with persons of very high social status in the almost thirty years he lived in the capital of the Portuguese Empire in the East. Orta’s plans were far more ambitious. He was concerned with the future and with his position, but in the ranks of the history of medicine. He wanted to claim for himself the status of a new medical authority.” While that never happened to any great extent in his own life, and his celebrity could not even spare his sister and brother-in-law from the unholy Inquisition, it is after his book was translated into Latin around 1600 that it became hugely foundational to the modern Materia Medica, the combined and collected knowledge that underlies scientific pharmacology. Eventually, in the 20th century, in the very sunset of the Salazarist dictatorship, and – rather curiously – skipping over the inconvenient fact that Orta lived and died in perpetual fear of the Portuguese authorities, this great questing scholar was dug up once again to become reinvented as a hero of Portugal, and his face was engraved on the 200 escudo note, on the flip side of an illustration of a 16th century marketplace in Old Goa.
That five-century ride from disrepute in India to national hero in Portugal is yet another thing Orta shares with Camões, but an even more important similarity is that Europe and the West in general has comprehensively failed to understand their real importance. That is why I like and appreciate Delhi-based academic Jonathan Gil Harris’s assessment of both of them in his superb, highly original 2015 book The First Firangis: Remarkable Stories of Heroes, Healers, Charlatans, Courtesans & other Foreigners who Became Indian (which is where I got the term “Judaeo-Muslim Hakeem”). With great insight he describes Orta’s life as “three very different stories, each nested within the others, like a set of Russian dolls. The first is an official story of a colonial Portuguese patriot; the second, a more unofficial story of an individual’s physical transformation in India; and the third, an entirely surreptitious story of an underground international network that cuts across divides of geography and faith. Together, these stories make up a firangi tale that has all the ingredients of a mystery novel: powerful state machinations, exotic drugs, covert religious dissidents and tantalizing clues that lead to a startling climax.”