Portuguese India
Portuguese colonies in South Asia (1505–1961)
The State of India, also known as the Portuguese State of India or Portuguese India, was a state of the Portuguese Empire founded seven years after the discovery of the sea route to the Indian subcontinent by Vasco da Gama, a subject of the Kingdom of Portugal. The capital of Portuguese India served as the governing centre of a string of military forts and maritime ports scattered along the coasts of the Indian Ocean.
Francisco de Almeida, the first viceroy, established his base of operations at Fort Manuel in the Malabar region, after the Kingdom of Cochin negotiated to become a protectorate of Portugal in 1505. With the Portuguese conquest of Goa from the Bijapur Sultanate in 1510, Goa became the major anchorage for the Armadas arriving in India. The capital of the viceroyalty was transferred from Cochin to Goa in 1530. From 1535, Mumbai (Bombay) was a harbour of Portuguese India, known as Bom Bahia, until it was ceded to Charles II of England in 1661 as part of the dowry of Catherine de Braganza. The expression "State of India" began regularly appearing in documents in the mid-16th century.
Until the 18th century, the viceroy in Goa had authority over all Portuguese possessions in and around the Indian Ocean, from Southern Africa to Southeast Asia. In 1752, Mozambique was granted its own separate government; from 1844 on, Portuguese Goa stopped administering Macao, Solor and Timor; and became an actual province of Portugal. Despite this, the viceroy at Goa only controlled limited portions of the Portuguese settlements in the east; some settlements remained informal private affairs, without a captain or câmara (municipal council).
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Portuguese India” as portuguese colonies in South Asia (1505–1961). Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as portuguese colonies in South Asia (1505–1961). Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q323904. VIAF identifies the subject as 149523305. The Library of Congress control number is n84145213. Authority coordinates are 2.189, 102.384. 2 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1505, 1510, 1530 and 1535.
A concise general-reference account can conceal disagreements about scope, terminology or the weight assigned to individual sources. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
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- Subject orientation
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- Establish the record: confirm the title “Portuguese India”, its source revision and the description used here.
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- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Portuguese India” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.