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Conversation
On Courting India
Nandini Das*†
,
nandini.das@exeter.ox.ac.uk
Charles Tripp‡
Abstract
Nandini Das, winner of the British Academy Book Prize 2023, discusses her experience of writing her prize-winning book Courting India: England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire (Bloomsbury, 2023). Courting India offers a fascinating history of Thomas Roe, the first English ambassador to the Mughal Empire, and his four years in India (1615–19), a mission generally judged to be a failure, with Roe failing to make much headway in securing diplomatic relations or trade agreements. Roe did, however, leave an extensive account of his time in India in the form of a journal, which has proved helpful in reconstructing the nature of his encounter with the Mughal court. The Mughal emperor, Jahangir, and his courtiers, seem to have had little interest in Roe, who was regarded as something of an exotic curiosity or an irrelevance. This ground-breaking book provides an insider’s view of a Britain in the making, a country whose imperial seeds were just being sown. It is a story of palace intrigue and scandal, lotteries and wagers that unfolds as global trade begins to stretch from Russia to Virginia, from West Africa to the Spice Islands of Indonesia. At an event held at the British Academy in January 2024, Professor Das discussed the book with Professor Charles Tripp FBA, chair of the Book Prize panel of judges.
Keywords
IndiaStuart England, James IThomas RoeJahangirMughalsempirebook prizeWe are here to celebrate Nandini Das’s outstanding book, Courting India: England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire; to have a conversation about the book and how it came into being; and to ask her to reflect on her experience of being shortlisted and winning the 2023 British Academy Book Prize. Nandini Das is Professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture in the English faculty at the University of Oxford.
Nandini, could you tell us a little about yourself, maybe give us some idea of the scope of your research, and how and why you came to be interested in early modern literature?
My research has always been concerned with travel, which I myself find slightly surprising because I have a terrible sense of direction. Perhaps that is why my interest in travel has always been thoroughly and firmly textual. I am particularly interested in cross-cultural encounters: what happens when individuals and cultures meet. Some of that is perhaps rooted in my own experience as an international student coming to the UK for the first time. My undergraduate friends still remind me many decades on that for the first week all they heard from me whenever I met or saw something interesting or different was that I had read about this somewhere, so textual knowledge always came first for me.
As a literary scholar, my initial work was on what are called prose romances, the precursor to the novel in some senses. Many of them adopt that familiar template of the protagonist setting forth on a journey, so narratives of travel have always interested me. More recently, however, I have been particularly drawn to the mechanisms of cross-cultural encounter and what determines how such encounters unfold. New worlds, I would argue, are hardly ever completely new because so much of that is framed by things we have seen, read and heard, and that is partly what I have been trying to untangle in Courting India.
So people process new experiences, fitting them into something more comfortable and familiar? I suppose the transition from the kind of work you had been doing on travel literature, on individual travellers, to this extraordinary episode of travel has a logical sequence. In other words, the history that you then develop becomes part of that story.
It does. It is also important to recognise that, when we think about those larger cultural moments or what we think of sometimes as quite abstract points in history, we invariably discover that their course is determined through and by individuals, and individual perception in those cases matters. In some ways, in methodological terms, you could say Courting India is a micro-history of one particular moment. It is an account of four years—a very telling four years at a point of crucial importance for the English in India—but it is still a short period of time.
However, what I was particularly interested in when I was looking at the story of this embassy is how far backwards and forwards the resonances of that moment go. That is particularly what I am interested in, that cross-cultural encounters do not emerge out of a vacuum, neither do they usually disappear into a vacuum. This is certainly the case for Roe: in his encounter with things he sees in India, you can trace elements, little fragments and glimmers, not only of the world in which he grew up in 16th- and 17th-century England, but of still older influences from continental Europe, from the fragments of Classical literature that he might have read.
And then, projecting forward, as Roe’s embassy itself became a text, a piece of cultural memory to be consumed, you become increasingly aware of how important this very early embassy became in terms of the frameworks that it was setting up for later encounters, not only in India, but elsewhere across the globe as English colonial and imperial enterprise began to take shape.
On the point that you make about language and image, presumably, your familiarity with early Renaissance or Renaissance literature and literary forms would have shaped the way you approached him because he was trying to frame what he experienced in ways that would be understood by educated contemporaries. Do you think that this shaped how he perceived what he was encountering? Another aspect in your account which is so brilliant is that you present the other side of the encounter, and you make us realise that what he is perceiving is not exactly what he was seeing but rather he was perceiving it in that way.
Yes, in so many ways. It will not seem strange perhaps to anyone in this room that language helps to shape our reality at multiple levels. For Roe, to some extent, language and rhetoric gave him a framework within which he could fit what seemed strange, alien and unfamiliar, but it also allowed him to articulate things in a way so that his audiences, his readers at home—and he had multiple audiences at home—would perhaps understand this experience that no one else was going through, apart from him, within that small coterie of people.
In your book you describe three inter-related worlds. One is the Jacobean court, another is the court of the Mughal emperors, and the other is this shadowy entity that becomes less and less shadowy as the centuries go on: the East India Company. How do you think these different sources shaped your argument as you developed it? Do you think that they shaped your work or were you finding things there that you had assumed you would find? Were there things that really took you by surprise?
They did and that surprise itself has a very long history. The first thing I wrote in print about Thomas Roe was about ten years ago when I was asked to write an article about a cross-cultural encounter. In fact, I wrote about a moment in Roe’s embassy which later became the central chapter of Courting India. This was about Roe making a bet that no Indian artist could imitate an English miniature that he had carried with him accurately enough. I was thinking of it from the European perspective, particularly through the 16th- and 17th-century idea of imitatio or imitation, and I wondered what the Mughal perception of such imitation would be—or rather, perhaps, the Persian perception at the Mughal court, given that the Mughal court, of course, was deeply influenced by Persian culture in this period.
I started reading about Persian concepts of imitation, including istiqbal, which is one of the ways in which imitation works, and how this particular concept of imitation was linked to ideas of hospitality. If you think about imitation, it is very much like hosting someone. You are welcoming someone into your space but there is also a tension there; when you are welcoming someone into your space, you are also asserting it is your space. In that moment of that bet between Thomas Roe and the Mughal emperor Jahangir, there were two different ideas of imitation juxtaposed against each other. I still remember looking at the account of Roe and thinking, ‘There is no space here for this alternative view’, and that alternative view is what I wanted to really engage with within my version of the story of the early fortunes of both the English and the East India Company in India.
So in this sense imitation has a strong visual aspect. The visual side comes out vividly and you use some wonderful illustrations in the text, but you also describe it so well: there is a sense in which the reader is transported into seeing what Roe sees and what the Mughals see in him. There is a very funny moment when you write about the presents that he is bringing and the visual lack of impressiveness of these presents compared to those sent by the Shah of Iran at more or less the same time. This shows that that the criteria for aesthetic power are utterly different and Roe is beginning to be aware of this, realising that these things are not going to be up to scratch.
That is right. Roe is sent by a state that is struggling—financially, politically, and in terms of its identity. English identity—and this is not British identity at this stage, that would take decades still to evolve—is very fragile. It is being slowly negotiated and Roe becomes increasingly conscious of his own marginality and the precariousness of that identity within the Mughal court. Correcting the lens through which we perceive his interaction with that court was therefore essential, but there was a problem.
You juxtapose Roe’s journal, which is a day-to-day account of his time at the Mughal court, with the Mughal emperor Jahangir’s memoirs, the Jahangirnama, which is also a day-to-day account of the Mughal court. Then suddenly, with a sinking feeling of horror, you realise that while Roe may have taken six pages to agonise over the woefully meagre, inadequate gifts that he had entrusted by his king and Company to present to the Mughal emperor, Jahangir himself, on the same day, has taken six pages to talk about the mating habits of his pet saras cranes. There is no mention of the English ambassador.
Communicating that imbalance as it would have struck Roe, this ambassador from a small island, often meant that sometimes resorting to visual, artistic records was significantly more effective than the textual accounts, which is partly why we have a very grumpy James I peering out from the corner of that Mughal miniature.
It is captured rather well in that image: why was James I suddenly popping up in this miniature?
This is a wonderful miniature which is in the Freer Gallery in Washington DC. The artist is the man with the red turban right in the corner, a Hindu artist called Bichitr. The miniature itself—and this will tell you all you need to know about this particular painting—is called ‘The Emperor Jahangir preferring a Sufi Shaikh to Kings’. There is Jahangir preferring, as we all do, to read a good book rather than pay attention to this waiting queue of global sovereigns. I suspect that the portrait of James I is one of those that was copied by Jahangir’s atelier, his studio of artists, from the selection of copies of the de Critz portrait of James I, commissioned when he became King of England. You can imagine Roe or one of his fellow East India Company employees taking a copy of this portrait and it promptly finding its way into the imperial studios.
That is such an interesting genealogy of the portrait. Before we leave the question of imitation, which seems crucially important because, as you said, it is a notion of hospitality in the visual sense, how much did you also see that in language, in terms and concepts translated or not? Was there a similar kind of receptivity on either side to some of the terms, the concepts, the languages, brought by the other to the encounter?
That is fascinating for two reasons, and this is something as a literary scholar I kept going back to: the issue of language. Roe himself is deeply resistant to learning any of the courtly languages: Persian, Arabic or any of the other Indian languages. He wears his English identity like armour, essentially, but there are others within his group of small-time East India Company merchants who think otherwise. For instance, if you go to the Bodleian Library in Oxford, there is this wonderful little notebook by an East India Company merchant called Robert Hughes, who very endearingly doodles on the side of his word lists. Who doesn’t in the middle of a boring lesson? He is learning Persian, so we know that there are others who are learning Persian. There is the wonderful, terribly eccentric, traveller Thomas Coryat, who is a friend of Roe’s, who reunites with Roe in India, who learns Persian and then decides that he is going to direct his Persian speech-making skills at the Mughal emperor in the hope of getting some support for the next leg of his journey and is successful in doing that.
There is a mixed perception from the English side about linguistic exchange. Some of those give you a little snapshot of where those linguistic exchanges might have occurred. Roe, for instance, suffers from terrible ill-health from the moment he lands until the moment he leaves, so for the best part of his journey he is carried in a form of transport which he calls a palki. And that is indeed the Hindi word for it. Later, it would get anglicised into ‘palanquin’, but at this point you get a sense that it is unmediated in that very phonetic transcription.
On the flip side, Roe is not in a position to give us much of a sense of the linguistic proficiencies within the Mughal court, particularly of the emperor or others within his family, although we know that there were Jesuit tutors for many of the Mughal princes, so there was linguistic exchange. There is a moment in Roe’s diary where he describes how he had been complaining to his own interpreter about the crown prince, Prince Khurram, who would later become the emperor Shah Jahan. He says that the Mughal emperor overhears him and realises that Roe, talking in half-mangled Spanish to his interpreter, is talking about mio figlio, and he immediately calls for the crown prince. Does this give us a glimpse into Jahangir’s own linguistic proficiency? We are not entirely sure, but it is a lovely little opening of the window into that culture.
This was one of the techniques of the court, presumably: you pretend you speak fewer languages than you actually do so that you can surreptitiously understand more things than you might want to admit.
Yes, exactly.
It is an interesting aspect of language exchange and the misunderstandings that accompany it. You mentioned complaining. For anyone who has read the book, one of the constant themes which I thought was so good and often very funny was that Roe complains endlessly about affronts to his dignity, about the weather, about his health, about the food. There is a sense in which it is like an endless 17th-century moan. There is something very personal about it and quite hubristic in some ways because you realise he is charged with this huge mission, and he is just moaning most of the time. Within that, he comes up with some extraordinary perceptions as well.
This is what I found so interesting about Roe, and in a way, it is important to remember that writing about history sometimes means holding multiple things in our mind at the same time. It would be very easy to read Roe as a one-dimensional figure who is deeply resistant to Indian culture, which he was. Roe is fundamentally responsible for setting up some of those assumptions that would regulate English behaviour in colonial India for centuries after him but, at the same time, sometimes without any overt acknowledgement of it, you get these glimpses of interpersonal interaction, which is equally important.
Sometimes, yes, you do sympathise with this man who is alone, away from his familiar surroundings. He is hated by the East India Company merchants who, let’s face it, simply think he is a posh boy who does not know what he is doing, who has been sent by the Company to lord it over them. At the same time, he is conscious of his own sense of responsibility and that complexity is something that I found fascinating in this figure. We could set him up as an object of laughter but that is not all he is and that is particularly interesting.
That comes out extraordinarily powerfully in your writing. As anyone here this evening will have recognised, your communication of your ideas not only has a certain wider resonance, but also an accessibility. I was going to ask you about one of the challenges facing many academics: how can one write accessibly? You have succeeded magnificently, because one of the things we are looking for in the Book Prize are not only works of fine scholarship, but fine scholarship that can communicate itself to others. Was this something that you were doing consciously when you were writing? You wanted to make sure that it was something that you could achieve, without, as you said, simplifying or de-complexifying people like Roe, also comprehensible, accessible in its use of language, in its images and in your analysis.
It was. When I started writing about Roe, I was conscious that I wanted it to be a narrative that you could follow, and you would want to follow, so there is that side of it. It was challenging in the sense that I was constantly oscillating between the English and the Indian perspective. For me, the way to do that was to take this particular narrative format. Perhaps this is not very helpful, but Courting India ended up being the story that I wanted to tell in the way I wanted to tell it. I should say that I am eminently grateful to my editor, who is sitting here, for not even batting an eyelid when I very casually dropped into the conversation, ‘Yes, I have finished it and, oh, by the way, it has 1,200 footnotes.’
I was conscious that I wanted to keep that archival research and articulate the work that goes into our historical research, particularly given much of the public discourse at the moment, where there is increasing scepticism about scholarship, about academic work, the work that we do as researchers, particularly within history and thinking about the past. That was very much at the foreground of my mind. At the same time—and as a literary scholar, again, this is a very hard habit to break—I wanted it to be something that was readable. I was channelling perhaps in some ways, as all good 16th- and 17th-century specialists do, that double duty of usefulness and pleasure. Without the latter, it is very hard to enthuse yourself to do the former.
It also goes back to something you said right at the beginning, which is about the literary forms of the Renaissance and pre-Renaissance, the notion of a journey, of an individual pursuing a journey. It gives you a kind of framework for your story, which has an onward momentum that comes across very strongly in the book. Although, as you said, the momentum ends with a certain damp squib, there is a sense in which it is a recognisable literary structure in the best possible way but also phrased in language that is extremely accessible to anyone. I do not know whether you felt that the language used by Roe himself and by the others, by his contemporaries, was also, in a sense, quite direct—perhaps flowery image-filled, but also quite direct in some ways.
It was. I made a point of not modernising many of the quotations that I have used. I wanted to do that to give readers a sense of those voices, and they are terribly idiosyncratic voices. I wanted to keep that sense and the heft and texture of those voices of East India Company sailors, ambassadors, and inveterate gossips of the 17th-century world, essentially. I also wanted to make sure that I was taking my readers with me on that journey. You are right that the structure of Roe’s experience lends itself to that kind of narrativising as well.
Something that I, and I think the other judges, really admired was the way you resisted what you call in the book at some point a certain predetermination of focus. That is a temptation to see everything in the early 17th century as a prefiguration of what would become the long 200 years of British occupation of India. That is not there at all, which is very refreshing. You are dealing with the events on their own terms without saying, ‘Oh, and this signifies something in the future.’ Do you think that you were able to do that, to some extent, because you were following so many individuals with their complexity, their contradictions, that to see them as simply part of some larger panoply of history was much more problematic and inured you to it to some extent?
Yes, perhaps not in terms of seeing them as part of a larger picture, but in terms of juxtaposing them. Sometimes I had to make a very conscious choice of not assuming that kind of proleptic vision, where you start off from our full knowledge of what the East India Company was going to be, what the British Empire was going to be, and assuming that this is a point of origin from which that develops. Having said that, it is a point of origin from which much of that later history does develop, but in a slightly different way, because the power relationships are so very different in this period. It was one of those cases of being aware of the way in which this particular embassy has been read, the way it has been fitted into a teleology of empire, but also trying to deconstruct that, to see that point of origin in its own right.
To do that, the most useful thing for me was juxtaposition of different witnesses. This is where Roe’s embassy is particularly interesting, because it is very rare that you tend to have so many different, almost eyewitness accounts of the same—in global terms, in historical terms—fairly small window of time. In Roe’s case, I could pretty much juxtapose, and I did have to juxtapose, his account with those of the Mughals, with the Dutch, the Portuguese, the Spanish, and a fair few in between, people like Thomas Coryat, who was not invested in any of those parties, but was very much carving his own way.
One of the things that become apparent is the variety and richness of the sources you use. To be able to do that, you had the good fortune that not only have they been preserved—for the most part, obviously, not altogether—but also that these were very documentary cultures, in the sense that people were communicating with headquarters, with each other, and things were written down. Correspondence was extraordinarily preserved. Again, that may be through haphazard circumstances.
I do not know if anyone here recalls the Epilogue of the book, but they should, because it is stupendous—Nandini describes in detail the Earls Court extravaganza celebrating the British connection with India in about 1890. In many ways, it is a wonderful inoculation against exactly the kinds of things that we were talking about, because in this imperial extravaganza, Roe has been transformed into another character altogether. His whole experience has been transformed as well. The Epilogue is a terrific read, so it would be great if you could describe it and why you chose to include it.
Yes, I wanted to think about how Roe was received later. This is a wonderful moment. This is the Festival of India at Earls Court, put up in the way that only Victorians could imagine. You go for a whole day out, and you do everything from boating on a pretend Mughal Lake, to having your lunch and dinner, where you can go to a restaurant that is for English stomachs, or if you are a braver man, you could go for an authentic curry. It is this wonderful thing. Of course, in the middle of it, you had to have a show. Victorians were great at these extraordinary shows. Roe is brought into this entertainment as one of the first moments of English presence in India.
Goodness, if you read Roe’s journals, you would think the poor man must have been rolling over in his grave because the one thing that Roe was absolutely terrified about was this idea of being an actor, or being accused of being a performer, a pretender. This sense of being inauthentic was something that haunted him throughout his time in India. When he was growing up in London, he was one of those young theatre-going whippersnappers of his day, so he was deeply conscious of English theatrical traditions, where you had Eastern empires being presented on stage, like Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine. His diary is full of little glimpses of theatre. Every moment where he wants to undercut the magnificence of the Mughal court, he compares it to the theatre. For that man to be then transformed into this Victorian theatrical set piece would have been the worst possible fate one could imagine.
He also endures on the walls of the Houses of Parliament, in art.
He does indeed. If you happen to rush between the House of Lords and the House of Commons, St Stephen’s Hall has a whole set of murals of great moments of British history. This was post-war; it was one of those ways of building up morale in the country after the Great War. One of those images is Roe presenting his credentials to the emperor Jahangir.
It is along the wall from the Magna Carta.
Exactly, yes. There is King John, there is Walter Raleigh, and there is our man Roe.
He lives on in the imagined pageant of British history.
Here is the wonderful thing, and I loved this moment. You were asking me earlier about moments of surprise within the research. Given that my own is on the 16th and 17th centuries, I have to admit that the 19th century is far too modern for me. When I was looking at the commissioning of the St Stephen’s Hall mural, there was a moment I realised that the man who painted it was the artist William Rothenstein, who was inspired by the time he spent in India with a group called the artists of the Bengal Renaissance, and Bengal is where I come from. This is a group of artists who had rediscovered Mughal art, who had gone to the newly excavated Ajanta and Ellora caves and imitated the paintings from there, and he uses some of that style.
And here is the most wonderful little snippet of insight into Rothenstein. He is a second-generation immigrant. His father had come over to England as a merchant, as an industrialist, to revivify the English wool industry, and English wool is what Roe had been commissioned to sell in India. He had a terrible time of it, as you can imagine. 40 degrees heat in Delhi is not a place to sell English wool. Again, it was that wonderful moment of aesthetic balance where Rothenstein, for me, completes that circle of the beginning and end of British imperial ambitions.
Yes, very apt indeed. One of the main aims of the Book Prize is to celebrate global cultural understanding, and clearly, that is one of the things we found so engaging about your book. There is something interesting about Roe in that sense, and I wondered whether this is something you want to comment on. As you make clear, he retains all his prejudices—religious, racial, linguistic—about India and the Indians. However, later, when he is a Member of Parliament in 1641, he is arguing for a degree of religious toleration or ecumenism. That is an incredibly brave thing to do, to stand up in 1641, just on the eve of the Civil Wars, and to argue for things that were regarded on both sides as heretical.
Do you think there was a trace here, whether it was from India, or because he went on to be ambassador in the Ottoman court as well, of something that did indeed percolate through in that regard, or was it purely, from his point of view, an observation of what it is that makes certain societies prosper?
Roe would have said that it was his pragmatism in this moment, before Parliament is dissolved before the War of the Three Kingdoms, the Civil Wars in England. This is Roe’s last Parliament. He is brought in as a very experienced diplomat to talk about ways in which England could recoup its financial stability on that brink of civil disturbance, and he could not be any clearer. He says the one way for the English monarch, our king, to recoup the fortunes of the nation is to allow people from all religions and all identities to settle and do their business here, as is the practice in the kingdom of the great Mughal, who is one of the richest sovereigns of the world. One of the things that intrigue me about this particular moment is that long percolation of cross-cultural influence. We tend to take a fairly short-term view of cultural response to moments, but sometimes these things take significantly longer to percolate through, and for Roe that was certainly the case. Of course, no one listened to him at that point. Who listens to good advice on the brink of a financial crisis?
That also leads quite aptly to a question of the afterlife of all academic books, all works of art. Thinking about your own book, what kinds of message or theme would you want people to take away from it, to think about, having read it, and to reflect, therefore, upon larger themes of global cultural understanding, for instance? What would you say would be the main themes or ideas that you would like people to take away from this?
The main one for me, and this is the one that I struggled with, that I found particularly challenging, is sitting with complexity. Quite often, particularly when we think about fraught debates, historical and public, binaries are very tempting, but they are also an easy choice to make. Repeatedly, in this particular period, when you look through historical documents, you realise how complex the imperatives behind any given stance or decision could be. For a man like Roe, who is deeply dismissive and critical of Indian society on the one hand but, at the same time, anxious and unsettled by it, how do you analyse that ambivalence, how do you engage with it? Sometimes, again, as I said earlier, it does mean keeping two things in our minds at the same time. Both of those things, contradictory as they might be, can hold true. There is a degree of understanding but there is also a degree of resistance, and they coexist because human beings are complicated and messy. We do not do clear binary thinking.
Some people would want us to do so. The other question I was going to ask is if you can think of a public figure or a politician who you would like to have not only read your book, but actually to have absorbed some of those lessons.
I would much rather that my readership was much wider than single public figures and politicians. Let’s face it, public figures and politicians do not fill us with high hope in the current period that we are living through.
That is true.
Sometimes when you see collective consciousness, collective humanity and sensibility coming together, that gives us some hope, so I would much rather that this book reached a wider readership than one single person who thinks they can change the world.
In a sense, your book itself is an illustration of how you cannot, as an individual, change that world. It is an object lesson that, of course, no politician will ever accept. They may read it, but they will not accept it.
Finally, what does it mean to you to have won the prize? For us, it is extraordinarily enriching to have had a chance to read your book, to think of your scholarship, to get a sense of your thinking, and to hear you talk about it so eloquently as well. For you to have won the prize, what kind of meaning does that have?
When I was told that the book had been shortlisted for the prize, I was deeply touched and excited by it because for me personally writing Courting India crosses multiple boundaries. It crosses geographical boundaries, so my challenge was trying to keep both India and England of this particular period equally weighted in our sightlines. It crosses disciplinary subject boundaries, in the sense that history is determined not simply by events, but by the cultural world, the imaginative worlds, the linguistic worlds, we inhabit. For me, it meant a lot that a book prize which is about global cultural understanding would embrace and accommodate this strange kind of dual vision that I was trying to achieve.
You succeeded admirably. I was going to ask you a last question, which is the one that any self-respecting author either dreads or embraces. What is your next project?
The next project is a new history of Tudor and Stuart England, which is written from the perspective of people like Roe, people moving in and out of the country, countless individuals who perhaps may not be as visible as Henry VIII or Elizabeth I, but were instrumental in shaping the nation nevertheless. It is about looking at the way England as a nation was constructed through human mobility and movement.
It sounds absolutely wonderful. Thank you very much indeed.
Thanks, Charles.
Thank you. It will be a work very appropriate for our times, in a way that your book on Roe was as well. Thank you so much for giving such an extraordinarily interesting and eloquent expose of your work, but also for engaging with its ideas and bringing them out so well.
Audience questions and answers
Nandini, firstly, congratulations on winning the British Academy Book Prize. If you look at the economic development cycles across the world, and specifically India, there is resurgent economic growth happening in the country. Especially after Brexit, the UK has been trying to, so to say, court India again, to sign a new trade deal, for instance. I was curious if you had any learnings to share from Sir Thomas Roe’s experience of doing the same, 300 years ago, that the UK can leverage today.
In some ways, we tend to think that we can learn from history by looking back at historical events. Perhaps what history teaches us is more about the drivers of events, rather than simply the replication of them. In those terms, the main thing that Roe and his collaborators in India learned was essentially how complex the Indian scenario was, and the Indian landscape was. That is something that is worth remembering in any period.
In terms of present day, the other thing that perhaps needs to be mentioned is awareness of the past. There is, in both countries, a resurgent drive to erase the past in various ways and that is something to be feared. Without understanding and without acknowledging that past, and the sheer diversity and complexity of it, we cannot hope to learn anything from our historical knowledge.
You said that he had multiple audiences back at home that he was playing to. Could you say a bit more about those audiences, and how that affected what he was writing and saying?
Yes, absolutely. Roe was funded by the East India Company. The East India Company had been trying to send an ambassador to India for about eight years. Ultimately, they decided the only way the state would agree to it is if they bankrolled it and that was the case. For Roe, the two principal audiences, you could say, was the Company, who were more interested in the trade, on the one hand, and James I, on the other. James had taken the throne in 1603, and his ambition was to become the new Augustus Caesar, the peacemaker of Europe. When Roe goes to India, on the one hand, you get a letter, his appointment letter, essentially, from the East India Company, saying, ‘You must get us X, Y, Z licences.’ On the other hand, there is James I, who says, ‘I know that there are plenty of very powerful sovereigns in Asia. You must convince them that I am a force to be reckoned with, and also that my subjects love me dearly.’
There are those two, but of course, there are multiple other audiences. Roe is writing to his friends. These are quite often the movers and shakers of the courtly world in Stuart England. His tone for those audiences is slightly different, slightly wittier, drier. He is also writing to his mother, occasionally. We do not have many of those letters, but we do have his grumbles about how his mother never writes back.
It’s usually the other way around, isn’t it—mothers grumbling about children?
I know. Yes.
Why did Jahangir not respond to Roe in a friendly manner? Particularly as Jahangir had met Jesuit priests in the past, because his father was fond of them, why was it that he was not warm towards Roe? What could have been the reason behind that?
It was not that he was not particularly warm. It simply was that Roe was a very marginal presence in a very large court. This is a court where you had emissaries from multiple countries coming every other month, essentially. I think Jahangir was curious. There are moments where Roe talks about Jahangir essentially grilling him on everything from English customs to how English beer is made. He was particularly interested in the latter, by the way. He is curious, and this is something that comes out very strongly in Roe’s journal and in other contemporary journals by English and European writers of this period.
In some ways, within larger Mughal historiography, Jahangir gets a bad press. This is the problem with being stuck between two hugely influential and charismatic figures, Akbar the Great, Jahangir’s father, on the one hand, and Shah Jahan, his son, who builds the Taj Mahal, on the other. Jahangir is significantly more low-key, caught in the middle of those two, but you get a wonderful glimpse into his life and his court through the English diaries.
Is the slightly sort of supercilious Englishness that Thomas Roe has something that is individual about him, or does it come from the Middle Temple or from the East India Company? Does that come from English society at the time and to what extent does that influence future statesmen in their dealings as foreign diplomats around the world?
Roe is conscious of his marginality at the Mughal court. He is conscious of his almost permanent hovering on the edge of bankruptcy as the English ambassador. He is cash-strapped all the time, so one of his defence mechanisms in some ways is by representing that magnificence, as I said, as a theatrical show, something that is empty of weight and actual meaning. That feeling itself is quite mixed, because you realise from time to time how conscious he is of that unequal distribution of power.
There are others who are also products of the same society, who feel and react very differently, and this is something that I try to accommodate within Courting India itself, because we are so fortunate to have multiple other records. One of my favourite moments, for instance, is the juxtaposition between Roe’s sense of the musical world of Mughal India, which he thinks is this loud, cacophonous realm where you cannot hear each other clearly, and there is linguistic confusion and all other kinds of confusion. Juxtapose that with a very minor East India Company merchant, who writes in his journal about lying in his bed in this cramped little warehouse that the East India Company factory had hired in Ajmer. It is the day of the full moon, and he says in the distance he can hear the voices of women from the various houses, singing praises to the moon, singing religious songs. You suddenly get this glimpse of deep awareness of a resonance of faith, a resonance of musicality, a resonance of beauty in some ways.
That juxtaposition is important. Again, as I said earlier, the fundamental thing that I try to convey through the book is the complexity of cross-cultural encounters. Each nation engaged in such a moment are complex entities in themselves, so you have multiple perspectives coming together at these moments.
Did you have any difficulty staying as an independent, impartial observer? It seems that you are very sympathetic to Roe, and his plight and his situation there. Did you have difficulty staying away and not getting involved and saying, ‘Why is he doing this?’ or ‘Why has he not done that?’
That is an interesting question. It is tricky to assume in any period that history is impartial. History is always written from perspectives framed by that particular period, by our own positionality, so I am very conscious of my own positionality as a writer of Indian origin, but within a UK academic and research scenario. I am also very conscious of my positionality as a woman. It is perhaps less common, I would say, in treatments of empire for women to get the central presence that I have afforded them within Courting India. For me, that was important. It was equally important to give space and voice to the three-year-old Mughal girl who dies at one point, around whom Mughal state business comes to a standstill. That awareness of my positionality was important to me, rather than trying to achieve a degree of elusive objectivity, which I do not think is possible for any writer to achieve. In fact, it is quite dangerous for us to assume that we can.
I have a question relating to your feelings about Thomas Roe. He seems to have been particularly ill suited to the task that he was given. That is my understanding from the book, anyway. Is that a sense that you share, and is that down to the individual or would actually anybody from his position in society at the time have been particularly ill suited to that task? Is it about the individual or is it about the societal context from which he came?
Yes, he is ill suited to this particular task. In fact, you do wonder why Roe is chosen at this particular moment. I suspect, as quite often is the case with political appointments at this point, he is chosen particularly because he was known in the right circles. Very bluntly put, he had the right connections within the mercantile world on his father’s side. His uncle and his grandfather were Lord Mayors of London, so he had deep connections with the trading companies. On the other hand, his mother had remarried into courtly circles, so he had those courtly connections as well.
He is in a way deeply unsuited, and this is partly the problem that he faces in India. He is also himself very conscious of how out of place he is. He is deeply conscious of the scepticism with which the ordinary English merchants treat him. Significantly, and this goes back to your earlier question about the sympathy for Roe, the important thing is to understand the pressures on the individual. On Roe, there were multiple pressures from multiple perspectives, and that is what makes him interesting. It is about the way in which an individual responds when they are trying to triangulate these multiple forces that are trying to negotiate for their attention.
I have two questions. After writing this book, how do you feel it improved or changed you as a writer? Secondly, as you wrote about the complexity of these individuals in this period of history, did it influence or challenge the way you view British influence in India, like colonisation that would come soon after?
Your first question was about how this book has changed me as a writer. I am going into full confessional mode here, but I have never been a very organised writer. Again, in the spirit of the full confessional mode, I have now discovered the joys of an Excel spreadsheet. Weep in sympathy with me on that one, but it was particularly important for me to ensure that I was negotiating the real complexity of multiple strands of narratives, but also paying attention to the way I was telling that story. I was deeply conscious of the responsibility of telling that story well, particularly maintaining that balance of the Indian and the English perspective in this period, and the continental European perspective as well. This demanded careful, meticulous planning on a scale I had rarely had to undertake before. That is something that I will certainly carry through into the next book I am writing, which is, again, one of balancing multiple strands. And in answer to your second question: the fundamental change is understanding the long history of many of those colonial assumptions. When we think about the British Empire, we tend to think of it as a history that really in a way begins in the 18th century onwards, late 17th perhaps, but certainly 18th and 19th century is the core. Yet so many of the absolutely fundamental assumptions of race and power were sowed in this particular earlier period and that is important.
To give you a small example, take the communal memories of the Partition of India. Many within this room are much more aware of the complexities of that history than I am. One of the very familiar phrases that keep coming up with that historiography is that of ‘divide and rule’. That will be familiar to many of you here, that British policy of divide and rule within India. Yet is a phrase that is also used by Francis Bacon in advice to James I in very early 17th century in the context of keeping his troublesome Parliament in check, and it is used repeatedly by the governors of the East India Company in the context of managing internal tensions within the Company. The East India Company, remember, is a fledgling corporation in this period, and they are conscious that they have this whole bunch of people, somewhere over the seas in India, on whom they have no direct control. They also have their investors in London, around Fenchurch Street, where their headquarters are. One of the challenges that keeps cropping up in East India Company policies, therefore, is how they could control those people over there in India who were spending EIC time and resources on independent trade, taking a little bit of money on the side, apart from looking at company profits. The way they did it was by dividing and ruling them. You allow the people there to report on each other. You separate them so that they cannot collaborate to compete with or eat into the company’s profits. Unless we understand that history, that very long history of the way in which power is manipulated, it is impossible to unpack the complexities of the way empire develops later on. For me, that was the absolutely foundational learning that I took away from the research.
I want to pick up a bit from a previous question and think about the tensions that exist around an ambassador and the need of an ambassador. It seems to me that in history you often have ambassadors who are more English than the English because they have to maintain that truth to what they were, or they go and embrace the country that they are in. In a later generation, in the next century, as a wife of an ambassador, Mary Wortley Montagu would be an example of somebody who embraced learning about it. In your reading, do you find that there is that sort of divide, or is there a grey area in the middle? I am wondering whether the role of the ambassador forces you one way or the other, forces you towards a binary behaviour.
If you asked Thomas Roe, he would certainly say it was the former rather than the latter, that you absolutely had to maintain your English identity. There were plenty of handbooks, if you were that way minded in this period, that you could buy from the printers’ bookshops around old St. Paul’s, which would tell you how an ambassador should behave, and they were all fairly clear about an ambassador’s role. An ambassador was supposed to be, they would say, a reflection of the sovereign that they were representing, so whatever you were doing was absolutely the direct reflection of your monarch and Roe was deeply conscious of this.
This is partly the reason why, despite the protests—and no doubt, sufferings—of his companions, he insists that they all wear English wool all the time in India. You have to take pity on his poor foot soldiers and bearers, essentially, but he is conscious of his presence. Again, this is that complexity we were talking about earlier. This is a man who is bankrolled by the East India Company. He is a trade employee, a business employee in that sense, but he is also conscious of his identity as a representative of his sovereign and of his nation.
In some ways, that makes this embassy particularly interesting because I have talked about how this embassy is one of the foundational points where an English view of India is being formed but it is also one of those foundational points where an English view of England and what it means to be English is also being formulated by Roe. Both of those are deeply intertwined. You cannot disentangle the two. One way of making sense of the world is by identifying and articulating who you are and vice versa, and that is exactly where Roe struggles.
Was Sir Thomas Roe on a hiding to nothing given the Crown–East India relationship/situation?
When I started writing this book, there was a moment where I thought, ‘Oh, goodness, what am I doing? I am telling the story of an abject failure.’ This is a man who has set out with a brief that he does not fulfil. In fact, he is so terrible at it that the East India Company will not send another ambassador for about eighty years after this. Mind you, they did have a small matter of a civil war at home to resolve in between, but even despite that, Roe is in many ways a failure in his mission, in his embassy, but it is particularly that failure that I find interesting.
When we are talking about cross-cultural encounters, we tend to glorify moments of significance and this is what happens with Roe in that Victorian show, for instance. It becomes this grand moment. Quite often historical moments of encounter are rather silent ones. They are everyday in their nature and that is what makes them so fascinating.
Charles Tripp: It is the retrospective which builds them up. It is true.
Thank you all for the questions that you have asked, which were so interesting. Above all, thanks to Nandini for giving us the chance to ask these questions of the writing of such a wonderful book, but also for answering them so fully and for holding us spellbound with the nature of her account, the narrative, the story, the journey that she has taken us along with in this book. Thank you very much, Nandini.
Thank you.
Cite
DOI: 10.5871/jba/012.a09
Published on: 22 May 2024
Volume: 12
Issue: Issue 1 & 2
Article view count: 232
Article download count: 3
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© The author(s) 2024. This is an open access article licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International LicenseCite this article
Das, N. with Tripp, C. (2024), ‘On Courting India’, Journal of the British Academy, 12(1/2): a09 https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/012.a09Crossref
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Received
October 2022
Accepted
May 2023
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July 2023
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