![]() ![]() Take the question of whether da Gama introduced a new kind of seaborne violence into the Ocean. The author examines the Indian Ocean as Islamic "lake" and the impact of da Gama and the Portuguese on this. It is a tribute to his exhaustive and inspired scholarship that he carries off his project so successfully. Where most biographers aim at empathy and are analogous to Marlon Brando and the Method, Subrahmanyam recalls the Olivier approach to acting, from the outside in. Sanjay Subrahmanyam solves this problem brilliantly by a sociological approach, whereby Vasco da Gama the man is dissolved into the totality of his multiple impacts on Portugal and the Indian Ocean. ![]() HOW do you write a biography of an explorer of whom little is known except that he was the first European to round the Cape of Good Hope and reach India (1497-98) and that in two subsequent expeditions he acted as a Portuguese Cortes, an implacable exponent of main force, invariably described by his chroniclers as angry or indignant?
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