The three essays in this book represent the Mary Flexner Lectures given in 2009 at Bryn Mawr College. Subrahmanyam is a leading historian of the Indo-Portuguese encounter in the early modern period, known especially for his work on economic history and his critical biography of Vasco da Gama. In recent years he has turned his craft to cultural history, experimenting with South Asian historiography and examining Persian and Telugu chronicles. In these lectures he is not so interested in grand theories and societal encounters; rather, he reminds readers that encounters between Europeans and South Asians were individual affairs, and cultural encounters happened not between entire societies but between parts of those societies, constantly in flux. In other words, he is arguing that the very interest of cultural history lies in its messiness and complexities. The only way to demonstrate that interest is by delving into sources. Like a gourmet chef with a fine sense for herbs and ingredients, Subrahmanyam knows his historical sources, gathered from libraries and archives in Europe and Asia, and written in Persian and a variety of South Asian and European languages. He offers his skills by serving the reader three delectable dishes, to wit essays or experiments in cultural history, which represent the best of fusion cooking and his own mastery of historiographies both Eastern and Western.

At the heart of the first essay is the 1565 fall of Vijayanagara, when the Hindu king Rama Raya was slain by the combined forces of the sultans of Ahmadnagar, Bijapur, and Golkonda. This momentous event in South Asian history, when Muslim gunpowder overwhelmed a larger Hindu army, provides a venue for Subrahmanyam to peruse the different Persian, Sanskrit, and Portuguese sources in order to tease out the meaning of Rama Raya's confrontation with his erstwhile protégées. Far from being an Islamic-Hindu confrontation, as claimed by some scholars, Subrahmanyam traces the quarrel back to courtly insults and the personal animosities that developed between the old Hindu king and his younger Muslim protégées.

In his second essay, “Courtly Martyrdom,” Subrahmanyam uses the work of Manoel Godino de Erédia, a mestiço from Melaka and ex-Jesuit, to reconstruct the story of Luís Monteiro Coutinho, a Portuguese captain captured by the Sultan of Aceh during the 1583 siege of Melaka and subsequently blown apart by a canon in Aceh. Here he offers us a fascinating picture of the world of Portuguese fidalgos and Lusophone mestiços in Portuguese Asia.

The third and final essay, “Courtly Representations,” discusses Indo-European exchanges in the visual arts. The lively interest in European artistic techniques in the court of the Mughal was more of a co-optation, and testifies to the diverse cultural claims and tastes of a court that had pretensions of universal power. More original is the other side of this exchange, the importation of South Asian visual images to Europe, in which the Dutch would play an important role in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

These three, delightful courses are preceded by a copious appetizer (the Introduction) and a light dessert (the Conclusion). Subrahmanyam's main purpose is not so much to discuss theories of cultural exchange (such as “acculturation,” or “hybridity”), but rather to remind us of the indispensability of historical intelligence, knowledge of sources, and critical thinking. By using right and rich ingredients and applying his knowledge of his craft, he has prepared a savory intellectual feast, while reminding us of the vacuity of those scholars who present us with menus (theories) without actually serving up anything edible.