Nandini Das - Courting India: Seventeenth-Century England, Mughal India, and the Origins of Empire

Seventeenth-Century England, Mughal India, and the Origins of Empire

Courting India

By Nandini Das

A sparkling gem of a book that sets the arrival of the British in India in a set of wide perspectives that enables fresh insights into South Asia in the early seventeenth century as well as into English and European history.

Peter Frankopan

In a dazzling literary tapestry, Courting India frames the 161619 embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to the court of the Mughal emperor Jahangir within a wider global context and an even richer cultural matrix.

John Keay

Nandini Dass debut is a marvellous piece of detective work, uncovering the secret machinations and courtly intrigues that shaped the early encounters between two powers.

Amanda Foreman

This is a book I wish I had written! It is a glorious read by a talented historian about an important and rather overlooked journey. Marvellous.

Suzannah Lipscomb

Fascinating and rigorously researched This book is sensuous and evocative and shows so deftly that the past is more nuanced and richly textured than we sometimes consider it to be.

Pragya Agarwal

This well-researched and well-written volume is a work of authority and quality. It is essential reading for the understanding of Britains early encounter with India.

Professor Ian Talbot, University of Southampton

A deep history that sets anew global interconnectedness through artefacts, political intrigues and contested court appointments A fine achievement and a great read.

Professor Ruby Lal, Emory University

A tour de force of detailed archival research and riveting storytelling.

Professor Jonathan Gil Harris, Ashoka University

Nandini Das moves seamlessly between the inner worlds of the courts of seventeenth century England and India, and with a mastery of both. This important book brings the earliest days of the British empire vividly to life.

Dr. Yasmin Khan, University of Oxford

Nandini Dass rich, absorbing account of a critical juncture of global history, the Englishman Sir Thomas Roes embassy to the court of the Mughal emperor Jahangir, charts both a remarkable personal narrative and the prehistory of colonial expansion This is a fascinating story of early modern political and cultural transactions, brilliantly researched and attractively written. It is destined to become the classic treatment of its subject.

Professor Supriya Chaudhuri, Jadavpur University

Serves as a rich repository of cultural memories from the beginnings of the colonial encounter memories that have continuing resonance and relevance in our own era as we grapple with the aftermath of empire.

Professor Jyotsna G. Singh, Michigan State University

This lucid and imaginatively written book tells us a great deal about the hesitant early days of the first British Empire, as a traditionally inward-looking island nation sought to engage with the wider world. Professor Nandini Das captures the mixture of excitement, prejudice, anxiety, misunderstanding and mutual interest that characterised an encounter that did so much to shape the contours of the modern world.

Professor Andrew Hadfield, University of Sussex

Dates: Although the Gregorian calendar was introduced by Pope Gregory III in 1582, England continued to use the Old Style Julian calendar till 1752. Under the Julian Calendar, the year started on 25 March, Lady Day, rather than the now established New Style start of the year on 1 January. This predictably causes confusion in dating English documents, where January 1614, for instance, is the month that comes after December 1614, i.e., what we would indicate as January 1615. In recording dates, I have followed the practice of indicating both the recorded Old Style year, as well as the actual New Style counterpart. So the example here would be given as January 1614/15.

For the sake of simplicity, dates from the Islamic calendar have been converted to the New Style Gregorian unless a specific year or month is included in a quotation.

Transcription: Retaining original spelling, capitalisation and punctuation in quotations gives us a much richer sense of the texture and flavour of the documents that I have used, particularly since so many of them are letters and journals. Modernising them would also mean erasing the moments where early English transliterations of non-English words tend to be strikingly and revealingly phonetic. However, I have made a few adjustments, expanding contractions, regularising the interchangeable use of i/j, u/v, and replacing the now-obsolete long -s (which looks like an f without the crossbar) with s. I have also modernised the old usage of then for than, and used the familiar modern spelling for all proper names and place names.

Persian and Arabic terms have been standardised using a simplified version of Library of Congress systems. Diacritics have been retained only where they will assist readers in finding works or individuals that have not been translated into English. Izaafeh in Persian is denoted with -i or, while terms in Arabic idhafa retain the al- on the second word. Compound names have been standardised as follows for ease of pronunciation, e.g. Nasir ud-Din. This also helps to highlight the often poetic naming conventions of the Mughal court.

Sources: While the original sources used in this book are in several European and non-European languages, I have given English translations wherever texts are quoted, and cited these from readily available printed sources where possible. For most East India Company documents and Thomas Roes journal and correspondence, citations in the book will direct you to the most readily available printed editions, with the caveat that these are often inflected by excisions and selections made by individual editors. In all such cases, wherever possible I have compared the printed version to the original manuscript, and used the manuscript in the instances when significant differences have emerged.

William Baffin, the masters mate of the Anne Royal, worked on his maps throughout the voyage. As the ship went from port to port around the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, charting the coastline was all in a days work for the sailor, but there was another map that posed a much bigger challenge. Contours of a huge landmass unspooled from his pen on to the paper. Carefully, he drew in two great rivers to the east and the west, their tributaries spanning the land like the fingers of protective hands. An enormous, stately avenue lined with trees bridged them, ending in two great cities, one at either end. He marked them like their European counterparts, with pointed steeples and medieval city walls. Under the watchful eyes of the commander of the fleet, the man who supplied him with the meticulous notes to populate the blank space, he inscribed the unfamiliar syllables of their names Agra, Lahor. Regions equally strange and unknown surrounded them Cabul and Multan to the north, Bengala to the east, Deccan in the south empty expanses dotted with mountains and towns.