Comment by mturmon

This strange history is poetically recalled by Salman Rushdie in the first pages of The Moor's Last Sigh:

I repeat: the pepper, if you please; for if it had not been for peppercorns, then what is ending now in East and West might never have begun. Pepper it was that brought Vasco de Gama's tall ships across the ocean, from Lisbon's Tower of Belém to the Malabar Coast: first to Calicut and later, for its lagoon harbor, to Cochin.

English and French sailed in the wake of that first-arrived Portugee, so that in the period called Discovery-of-India -- but how could we be discovered when we were not covered before? -- we were 'not so much sub-continent as sub-condiment', as my distinguished mother had it. 'From the beginning, what the world wanted from bloody mother India was daylight-clear,' she'd say. 'They came for the hot stuff, just like any man calling on a tart.'