ROAD TO DISCOVERY

Journeys are seldom uneventful, but that's no excuse to go overboard

-  Keshav Teiva Poumai

History is filled with goof-ups, coincidences and sometimes events of sheer dumb luck that went on to shape cultures, traditions and much more. Case in point being the Indian misnomer that the explorer Christopher Columbus gave to the native people of the Americas. Thinking he had made it all the way to the eastern shores of Asia, Columbus mistakenly called the indigenous inhabitants of the little Caribbean island where he first set foot on, Indians. Columbus was gravely mistaken, as explorers and cartographers soon discovered, yet his error continues to this day when the term ‘Indian’ is casually used to refer to indigenous people across the Americas.

India, which at the time was taken for granted as all of southern and eastern Asia, was a rather general expression in the minds of Europeans. How commodities were shipped from the East had something to do with this blurry mental geography. Europeans tended to believe that all of these Asian commodities originated in India since the wealth of China, Japan, and other Southeast Asian islands were first transported to ports on the southern edge of the Indian subcontinent before being sent elsewhere. It was essentially a gateway to all the coveted spices, silk and more!

Columbus set sail with a passport from his sponsors, Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, declaring that he represented them on his voyage toward the regions of India. The trouble he caused once he landed in what he thought was India is a story best saved for another day. On his return to Europe, he was still convinced that he had found India. Soon enough it had become pretty clear that Columbus had missed India by a long shot. However, despite the debunking of Columbus’s ‘India’ myth, Europeans continued to refer to the indigenous people of the Americas as Indians.