Return of Orta - Mumbai Mirror (4/7/2026)
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V M
Aug 5, 2026, 7:18:44 PM (yesterday) Aug 5
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https://mumbaimirror.indiatimes.com/others/sunday-read/return-of-orta/articleshow/132793430.html
You can feel the hand of history in Sour Stars and Breadfruit Monsoons, the pensive Mumbai solo debut exhibition by Sahil Naik that opened at Experimenter in Colaba on July 31st, with especially delightful resonance in its most ambitious artwork.
Distant Whispers and Lucid Dreams: Garcia da Orta is almost 8 feet by nearly 12 feet, and meticulously composed from emulsion on cement, wood and lime plaster. The impressive wall panel is beautiful and imbued with mystery – trademark qualities in Naik’s oeuvre – but also possesses inherent emphatic power because of this location. Apollo Bunder is just down the old city waterfront from the erstwhile Casa da Orta, more commonly known as Bombay Castle, the fortified 16th century Estado da Índia outpost that became the main part of Catherine of Braganza’s hugely consequential 1661 dowry gift from Portugal to England, and the effective foundation stone of modern Mumbai. 458 years after this remarkable physician/scholar/savant’s death, Orta is back home again.
“Very different stories, each nestled within the others, like a set of Russian dolls,” is how Jonathan Gil Harris evocatively describes the astonishing transcontinental life of Garcia da Orta in his superb 2015 book The First Firangis: Remarkable Stories of Heroes, Healers, Charlatans, Courtesans & other Foreigners who Became Indian.
The first aspect is so famous it landed him on the 20 Escudos currency note in Portugal, as the patriotic scientific hero who wrote the invaluable 1563 cross-cultural treatise Colóquios dos simples e drogas da India, one of the first books printed in India and among the most important foundational texts for modern pharmacology. Just behind that familiar career outline, however, there is another covert layer of meaning, since Orta was crypto-Jewish, from a family of so-called “New Christians” forced to convert after Jews (and Muslims) were banned from Spain (and eventually Portugal) after 1492. That explains why he hedged his bets after arriving in India in 1534, where he managed the astonishing feat of simultaneously being appointed official physician to the Portuguese Viceroys in Goa as well as the Nizam Shahi sultans of Ahmednagar.
Orta’s expertise kept him alive even after the Inquisition was imported into the Estado in 1560, and it is likely its looming threat prompted the writing of his path-breaking book as an implicit warning about the vast knowledge that would be lost if he were killed. He did die unmolested, but just months after his burial at Se Cathedral, his brother-in-law Leonel Gonçalves and sister Catarina were each brought to trial, where they were coerced into confessing “abominable heresies” such as celebrating Yom Kippur, and possibly including, says Harris, “the fact that Orta had been buried with Jewish rites. Yet this was enough for the Inquisition to order, in 1580, that Orta’s remains be posthumously disinterred and incinerated, with the ashes thrown in the Mandovi River.”
In 2015, the Asiatic Society of Mumbai published an excellent hardback facsimile edition of Sir Clements Markham’s 1913 translation of Orta’s masterpiece (copies of which are still available for the bargain price of Rs 500) that includes several intriguing references to “Mombaim, land and island, where the King, our Lord, has made me a grant.” The book is highly entertaining, with reams of up-to-date scientific lore from across the known world of the times, presented in the form of discussions between two garrulous old men, who are both clearly different sides of the author’s own personality. I especially love the 34th colloquy (which simply means conversation) prompted by the arrival of a ship bearing prized mangoes from “that island of mine” in which Orta exhibits all the rapture of a true aficionado.
“This is the first time I’m showing an entire body of work in Bombay, and it feels like a homecoming,” says Sahil Naik, “I think stories pass through time and people, like they’re on a voyage, only to eventually come home. To me, the life of Orta was such - to think of this man finding a life and home in the tropics, and to eventually find a home not too far away from this gallery, is a way of remembering his crucial legacy. Orta listened and learned, he was not interested in just the spice, but in the tree and the land. With this show, we plant him back into his context.”
You can feel the hand of history in Sour Stars and Breadfruit Monsoons, the pensive Mumbai solo debut exhibition by Sahil Naik that opened at Experimenter in Colaba on July 31st, with especially delightful resonance in its most ambitious artwork.
Distant Whispers and Lucid Dreams: Garcia da Orta is almost 8 feet by nearly 12 feet, and meticulously composed from emulsion on cement, wood and lime plaster. The impressive wall panel is beautiful and imbued with mystery – trademark qualities in Naik’s oeuvre – but also possesses inherent emphatic power because of this location. Apollo Bunder is just down the old city waterfront from the erstwhile Casa da Orta, more commonly known as Bombay Castle, the fortified 16th century Estado da Índia outpost that became the main part of Catherine of Braganza’s hugely consequential 1661 dowry gift from Portugal to England, and the effective foundation stone of modern Mumbai. 458 years after this remarkable physician/scholar/savant’s death, Orta is back home again.
“Very different stories, each nestled within the others, like a set of Russian dolls,” is how Jonathan Gil Harris evocatively describes the astonishing transcontinental life of Garcia da Orta in his superb 2015 book The First Firangis: Remarkable Stories of Heroes, Healers, Charlatans, Courtesans & other Foreigners who Became Indian.
The first aspect is so famous it landed him on the 20 Escudos currency note in Portugal, as the patriotic scientific hero who wrote the invaluable 1563 cross-cultural treatise Colóquios dos simples e drogas da India, one of the first books printed in India and among the most important foundational texts for modern pharmacology. Just behind that familiar career outline, however, there is another covert layer of meaning, since Orta was crypto-Jewish, from a family of so-called “New Christians” forced to convert after Jews (and Muslims) were banned from Spain (and eventually Portugal) after 1492. That explains why he hedged his bets after arriving in India in 1534, where he managed the astonishing feat of simultaneously being appointed official physician to the Portuguese Viceroys in Goa as well as the Nizam Shahi sultans of Ahmednagar.
Orta’s expertise kept him alive even after the Inquisition was imported into the Estado in 1560, and it is likely its looming threat prompted the writing of his path-breaking book as an implicit warning about the vast knowledge that would be lost if he were killed. He did die unmolested, but just months after his burial at Se Cathedral, his brother-in-law Leonel Gonçalves and sister Catarina were each brought to trial, where they were coerced into confessing “abominable heresies” such as celebrating Yom Kippur, and possibly including, says Harris, “the fact that Orta had been buried with Jewish rites. Yet this was enough for the Inquisition to order, in 1580, that Orta’s remains be posthumously disinterred and incinerated, with the ashes thrown in the Mandovi River.”
In 2015, the Asiatic Society of Mumbai published an excellent hardback facsimile edition of Sir Clements Markham’s 1913 translation of Orta’s masterpiece (copies of which are still available for the bargain price of Rs 500) that includes several intriguing references to “Mombaim, land and island, where the King, our Lord, has made me a grant.” The book is highly entertaining, with reams of up-to-date scientific lore from across the known world of the times, presented in the form of discussions between two garrulous old men, who are both clearly different sides of the author’s own personality. I especially love the 34th colloquy (which simply means conversation) prompted by the arrival of a ship bearing prized mangoes from “that island of mine” in which Orta exhibits all the rapture of a true aficionado.
“This is the first time I’m showing an entire body of work in Bombay, and it feels like a homecoming,” says Sahil Naik, “I think stories pass through time and people, like they’re on a voyage, only to eventually come home. To me, the life of Orta was such - to think of this man finding a life and home in the tropics, and to eventually find a home not too far away from this gallery, is a way of remembering his crucial legacy. Orta listened and learned, he was not interested in just the spice, but in the tree and the land. With this show, we plant him back into his context.”
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