ABSTRACT
This chapter close reads excerpts from the travelogues of Vasco da Gama and Pedro Alvares Cabral on the Thomas Christians in the context of Early Modern Studies and its privileging of Western Christianity. It argues that the attempts in Global Early Modern Studies to shine light on the margins remain problematic as long as the field maintains the "West is Christian/East is not" binary. Furthermore, and importantly, the close readings also point to the perseverance of the colonial mission in the face of the Eastern Christian. This chapter demonstrates how and why the relationship between Western Christians and Eastern Christians deteriorated and what role colonial ambitions played in the process; how recent studies on the Gama-Indian Christian episodes perpetuate colonial paradigms; and why "The Narrative of Joseph the Indian" in the Cabral travelogue can be seen as a proto-national account, particularly as it becomes one of the earliest Indian Christian instances to successfully expose the motives and goals of the so-called civilizing mission.
