Europe's India: Words, People, Empires, 1500-1800 2016036668, 9780674972261

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title page
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication
Contents
Preface
INTRODUCTION: Before and Beyond “Orientalism”
1 ON THE INDO-PORTUGUESE MOMENT
2 THE QUESTION OF “INDIAN RELIGION”
3 OF COPRODUCTION: The Case of James Fraser, 1730–1750
4 THE TRANSITION TO COLONIAL KNOWLEDGE
BY WAY OF CONCLUSION: On India’s Europe
Abbreviations
Notes
Index

Citation preview

EUROPE’S INDIA

Europe’s India WO R D S , P E O P L E , E M P I R E S , 1 5 0 0 – 1 8 0 0

Sanjay Subrahmanyam

Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 2017

Copyright © 2017 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of Amer ica First printing Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, author. Title: Eu rope’s India : words, people, empires, 1500–1800 / Sanjay Subrahmanyam. Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016036668 | ISBN 9780674972261 (alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Europe— Civilization— Indic influences. | India— Civilization—European influences. | India—Foreign public opinion, European— History. | Europeans— Attitudes— History. | Orientalism— History. Classification: LCC DS446 S78 2017 | DDC 303.48/240540903— dc23 LC record available at https:// lccn.loc.gov/2016036668

For Jaivir Singh

CONTENTS

PR EFACE ix

Introduction: Before and Beyond “Orientalism” 1 1 On the Indo-Portuguese Moment 45 2 The Question of “Indian Religion” 103 3 Of Coproduction: The Case of James Fraser, 1730–1750 144 4 The Transition to Colonial Knowledge By Way of Conclusion: On India’s Europe

ABBREVIATIONS 327 NOTES 329 INDEX 383

211 286

PREFACE

Kinder statt Inder (“Children in place of Indians”): this enigmatic and arresting slogan put forward by a conservative politician was much on people’s minds in the years 2000 and 2001, when I happened to be visiting and learning German in Berlin. It referred to the perceived threat of a mass invasion by educated Indians, armed with degrees in computer science and such, who would arrive in Germany and thereby deprive “real” Germans of their livelihood. Some timid moves had been made by the German government to give a few visa concessions to computer scientists, and this was the populist reaction: why not make our own baby computer scientists rather than importing them from India? At the same time, as part of a small group of Indians visiting a prestigious academic institution in the German capital over that year, we were also frequently assured of how much middle-class Germans “loved” India, not only in the abstract and at a distance, but by visiting it regularly, and even by bringing a strange dish called Currywurst into their gamut of fast food, or Imbiss. Allegedly invented after World War II, this dish consisted of pork sausage (or Bratwurst) topped with tomato paste (or ketchup) and seasoned with some odd form of prefabricated curry powder, which had apparently been obtained from British troops stationed in Germany. Perhaps the Currywurst was my Proustian madeleine; at any rate it did lead me to the first concrete steps toward this project.1 But a germ of this book may have existed before then, even if somewhat unconsciously. A couple of years earlier, in May 1998, I found myself in Kozhikode and Kochi (or, if one prefers, Calicut and Cochin) ix

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with a varied cast of characters, for a strange event that was ostensibly intended to reflect on the fifth centenary of the arrival of Vasco da Gama in India, and its long-term implications for Europe-India dealings. Each of those present—from Amiya Bagchi and Partha Chatterjee to Kesavan Veluthat and Raghava Varier—brought a different perspective and expertise to bear on the reflection, and I continued to mull over the enigma of Europe’s relations to India in the following years. However, a variety of other projects—on historiography, on Indo-Persian travel accounts, on go-betweens and “aliens,” and so on— always took precedence. Eventually, however, I have managed to clear enough mental space to address this project, and I hope that the gradual mulling over (a process modeled on the winepress, rather than the hot house) has had a positive effect on the end product. Some scholars are apparently disciplined enough to organize their lives sequentially, so that one project follows another in orderly fashion. Most, I suspect, are not, and I certainly belong to the latter and quite disorderly category. Since I tend to think about various intellectual projects at once, they sometimes get in the way of one another, and the conflict can—at worst— even bring the business of research and writing to a calamitous standstill. The reasonable way around it is to prioritize, and to decide which projects are “big” and which ones are “small,” or to place them on front and back burners, at least for a certain time. External deadlines can at times be useful in this respect too, so long as one responds well psychologically to the stimulus of grumpy letters or irate messages from a volume’s editor or from a press for whom one has a long-overdue project. All this is by way of an approach to this book, whose central themes—as I noted above—I may have been thinking about intermittently since at least the late 1990s, when I was also teaching for an extended duration at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris). I began addressing some of its questions there, as part of my weekly seminar at 11 AM on Tuesday mornings in 105 Boulevard Raspail, and even spoke casually of the project to one or two publishers, with whom my conversations never extended beyond a vague expression of interest to a firm commitment. My interest was further sparked by co-organizing a two-day conference in early 1998

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entitled “Doors to Asia,” in which some of the themes in this book were discussed by a variety of participants; but I was also probably influenced by some edited volumes that I was given at the time and which had emerged from the Pa risian milieu, such as L’Inde et l’Imaginaire (1988) and Rêver l’Asie (1993).2 These reflections eventually led me in turn to think at great length and more systematically about two impor tant works that had appeared at roughly the same time. The first and lesser-known of these was Partha Mitter’s Much Maligned Monsters (1977), a dense work of considerable originality produced under the supervision of Ernst Gombrich.3 I have read and reread my copy of this book, and will freely admit that it was in many respects another point of intellectual departure for this one. I was fortunate at much the same time to meet and have discussions with Partha Mitter himself on several occasions, and these meetings became more frequent during the brief time (from 2002 to 2004) when I taught at Oxford and he was navigating between Brighton and Oxford. However, my approach, unlike his, was not primarily from the viewpoint of art history, but as an archive- and text-based historian who also sometimes used images. Nevertheless, despite some differences of method and opinion here or there, it is important for me to note this intellectual debt from the outset. The other book was far more celebrated and also controversial, namely Edward W. Said’s Orientalism (1978). Although this work was already sometimes discussed in Delhi when I was a doctoral student in the early 1980s, its impact there only attained important dimensions in the latter half of the 1980s—by which time it had already been elevated to the status of a cult classic elsewhere. Since Said had mainly focused in his work on the Arabic-speaking “Orient,” it fell in the fi rst instance to two Chicago-based scholars to attempt to “apply” his insights to India. One of these, Bernard Cohn, did so in a series of essays that was eventually collected as a short book, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge (1996); the other, Ronald Inden, first published a long and somewhat intemperate essay entitled “Orientalist Constructions of India” in Modern Asian Studies in 1986, following it up with a book on the same subject four years later, entitled Imagining India.4 By about 1990, when the Saïdian strand of

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thought had made a significant impact on Indian historiography via Subaltern Studies, a counter- current equally emerged, largely expressed by orthodox Marxist literary critics and historians. These writers centered their criticisms on what they felt were Said’s own unjustified attacks on Marx’s writings regarding India and the “Orient” more generally; but they were also concerned about rescuing some “good” Orientalists from being tarred with the same brush as the others. For example, the Hungarian orientalist Ignác Goldziher (1850–1921) was described as being free of prejudice in his writings on Islam and Muslim societies, and thus treated as a direct ancestor of scientific Marxist historiography.5 The debate has now gone on for a quarter-century, producing a complex set of refractions, with the Saïdian and Foucauldian interpreters of colonial Indian history now being opposed not only by proponents of orthodox Marxist historiography but by defenders of the so-called continuity thesis, some of whom have wished to paper over differences between precolonial and colonial political regimes and knowledge systems. Adding further complexity to the mix is the emergence of a strand among intellectual historians of Europe who yearn to reestablish the innocence and purity of their “heroes’ ” motives both before and during the Enlightenment. Such historians (who often unabashedly term themselves “fossils”) would thus see depictions of India or West Asia in seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury texts as simple and transparent acts of “translation,” unconnected to questions either of power or of actual and potential violence; they are indeed strange bedfellows of the orthodox Marxists mentioned above.6 Behind their writings, one can often see a barely concealed anxiety regarding the identity-politics of contemporary Europe, and a desire to affirm their own genealogies as “knowing subjects.” From my own point of view, while gladly admitting the force of a certain number of critiques of Orientalism (which most scholars would now admit is a quite careless and slapdash work on a variety of historical matters), I fear that the critics of the book may at this point be at risk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater in their eagerness to score trivial points.7 In the first place, it seems to me that at least some of Said’s critique of Orientalist knowledge should be separated from its ostensible anchoring

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in Foucault’s more general theory of knowledge / power, which—as is by now well-known—is neither linked in any particular way to the study of colonies and empires nor associated with other “exotic” objects. Indeed, French historians who had closely collaborated with Foucault, when paying critical tribute to his work in the early 1990s in works like Michel Foucault: Lire l’œuvre (1992), for the most part resolutely turned their backs on questions of empire and colony.8 Second, it appears to me perfectly legitimate to ask how the concrete and institutional conditions within which certain forms of knowledge were produced affected both the form and the content of the knowledge itself, rather than assuming—in some falsely naïve manner— that knowledge is by its very nature neutral and innocent, and just one of those things of which “more is better than less.” If the institutions in question included imperial political formations, then they too must be taken fully into consideration. But let us make no mistake: this is very much a post-Saïdian book, rather than an effort to return to and revive old quarrels, or merely pick at old scabs. The organ ization of the book then is broadly, but not strictly, chronological. It opens with a lengthy introduction, which sets out inter alia the contrasting situations of a series of Frenchmen in Mughal India, including that of the celebrated philosopher-traveler François Bernier. The purpose of these juxtaposed vignettes is to underline the varied social positions and intellectual stances that Europeans (even those from a single nation) could take in and on India, even within a limited time frame such as the seventeenth century. The Introduction also provides a sweeping chronological outline of the three centuries under examination, as the Europeans gradually were transformed, albeit in fits and starts, from marginal coastal players to substantial territorial conquerors. The first chapter then moves on to a close consideration of the sixteenth century, the extended moment of Indo-Portuguese interaction. This chapter sets out to show how the Portuguese adopted two broad modes of understanding, one more textual and philological (best represented by chroniclers such as João de Barros), the other more oral and ethnographic, often stemming from their experience as Christian missionaries. It analyzes how a series of significant topoi emerged in the course of the century, which then persisted into the subsequent period as durable intellec-

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tual anchorages, or even lenses through which India was read. Notable among these was the much-debated term “caste” (from the Portuguese casta), but there were also a number of other concepts which different writers approached through a variety of perspectives. Eventually, by the end of the sixteenth century, we perceive the crystallization of certain stable forms of understanding, with respect to both the north Indian polities of the time (such as the emergent, and supposedly “despotic” or “tyrannical,” Mughal empire), and the societies to be found at the time in peninsular India. The second chapter considers a series of texts from the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries that describe and analyze the question of “Gentile religion” in India. Predominantly produced in peninsular and southern India, these texts provided both an empirical density that had been absent in the sixteenth century (though they too were rarely based on rigorous procedures of translating Indian materials), and a contrasting and fragmentary set of images and visions. Yet, contrary to what might have been expected, by the early eighteenth century such widely diverse materials were being harnessed in the ser vice of a set of projects to demonstrate that the Indian “Gentiles” (or, more rarely, “Hindoos”) all belonged to a single religion, just as “caste” was understood not as a loose orga nizing principle but as a rigorous and unitary system. Even so, attitudes could and did vary, with significant consequences. Chapter 3 thus proceeds on a detailed examination of the career and context of a single figure, that of the Scotsman James Fraser (1712–1754). Resident in western India for extended periods in the 1730s and 1740s, Fraser chose to apprentice himself to a series of Indian masters, and was thus initiated into a fair level of knowledge concerning the Indo-Persian culture of the time. His knowledge of, and respect for, the “gentiles” (and more particularly the baniyās of Gujarat) was apparently far more limited. Through a set of initiations, Fraser was able to collect an important corpus of texts and describe them clearly for European readers of the time. One way of approaching a figure such as Fraser could be through a broad concept like “empathy,” but this would probably be both inexact and unduly sentimental. Rather, it may be said that what we witness with him is a distinct sense of the value and scholarly integrity of the in-

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tellectual traditions he found in western India, even if they were not the same as (or even similar to) those from his own “native” cultural context. However, we may note that such attitudes were also related to a particular political context, when Eu ropeans still did not try to dominate the subcontinent. Chapter 4 closely follows the vicissitudes of a series of diverse Europeans—a Frenchman, a Portuguese, a Franco-Swiss, and a Scotsman—into the latter half of the eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century. Although some of these figures also emerged as major collectors of Indian materials— one of them, Antoine Polier, possibly brought back the first extensive version of the four Vedas to Europe—their attitudes toward Indian society and culture had begun to be transformed, at times into a barely concealed mixture of distrust and contempt and on other occasions to a clear sense that what they beheld was both exotic and intrinsically inferior to their own culture. At the same time, there is a clearer emergence in this period of a common sense of “Eu ropean” identity among these same actors, in the face of their extended experience of alterity. In sum, readers will be aware that three common trajectories have been used to represent (or emplot) how Europeans saw India between about 1500 and 1800. One of these is simply cumulative, as a slow move from lesser to greater knowledge, mediated by ever-growing and deeper contacts. A second is a portrayal in which an initial set of prejudices, often based on deep religious hostility, gave way to a far more “objective” understanding, largely on account of the secularization of European knowledge-forms, especially as a result of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment is given the place of prime mover in this trajectory, also on account of the assumption that it encouraged a far more self-critical approach on the part of its thinkers. The third viewpoint radically rejects the first two and portrays the existence of a persistent and stable (or at least homeostatic) set of misunderstandings, and mistranslations, as characterizing the relationship between Eu rope and India, sometimes through some version of the idea of “cultural incommensurability.” In an earlier work, Courtly Encounters (2012), I dealt at length with this last construct, and I will not repeat my arguments here. Suffice it to say that

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this book rejects all three of these common portrayals, the first two as being quite simplistic forms of teleology, and the third as being for all intents and purposes ahistorical in nature. Dif ferent forms of knowledge and modes of knowledge-production existed, and sometimes they and their adherents struggled bitterly with one another. This is the reason a close attention to context is always essential, and this is also the reason it is no simple matter to provide a stark outline of this work and its main thrust. I must therefore hope that the reader will approach this book not through a lecture en diagonale, but with some attention to the precise construction of each chapter and its arguments. This book has been written in a variety of institutional settings, and thus reflects the outcomes of a number of dif ferent intellectual conversations. The time afforded me by a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 2011–2012 was crucial to getting the project on its feet. Some of the research was done when I was Kluge Professor at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., in the summer of 2013, and I would like to take this opportunity to thank Carolyn Brown as well as other staff of the Kluge Center for their help and hospitality. My home institution for the past decade or so, the Department of History at UCLA, was where most of the research was done, thanks in particular to the rich resources of the Charles E. Young Research Library and the aid of its staff (and despite its notoriously cranky catalog). Extended periods spent at the Collège de France in Paris since 2013 have helped me bring a slightly dif ferent perspective to this project, and the discerning reader will surely find a hint of Gallic flavor here or there. In 2016, I delivered a series of six lectures with the general title “L’Europe et l’Inde: Collections, représentations, projections, XVIe–XVIIIe siècles,” at the Collège in which I polished my reflections, even as I was sending this manuscript to press. Lectures and seminars in several institutions across the continents have also been helpful in bringing my scattered thoughts together, and I thank all those who have welcomed me and commented on this work when it was in progress, whether at Boston University, the University of Delhi, Vanderbilt University, the University of Arizona, or Northwestern University. By way of individual names, I shall mention only an essential few: Alaka and Kaushik Basu

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(in their Washington, D.C., incarnation), Naindeep Singh Chann, Partha Chatterjee, Carl Ernst, Jorge Flores, Kathy Fraser, Carlo Ginzburg, Hal Gladfelder, Grégoire Holtz, Rajeev Kinra, Maria Augusta Lima Cruz, Giuseppe Marcocci, Claude Markovits, Peter J. Marshall, Velcheru Narayana Rao, Amina Taha-Hussein Okada, Kapil Raj, Jonathan Spencer, Frédéric Tinguely, Kesavan Veluthat, and Ângela Barreto Xavier. As always, I am grateful to my old friend and intellectual ally Muzaffar Alam for his generosity and unstinting help. Caroline Ford accompanied the project through its highs and lows, and across its diverse and sometimes difficult institutional and archival settings. Bill Nelson was as prompt and efficient as ever with the maps. To all of them, my thanks, and to many others who are not mentioned here individually. The book is dedicated to an old friend and comrade-in-arms (as well as pots and pans), going back notably to IEG Hostel and the “bad old days” of the Charpai Wars in Delhi’s Shalimar Bagh.

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INTRODUCTION Before and Beyond “Orientalism”

For the rest: beware of Mughal women [andare attento con as mogolie] In Bengal, there is a very large number of Portuguese who have taken refuge and are ruined, and whose women are a burden on everyone over there. Almost all the Dutch and the English have their own [women], but even so they are often nicely trapped, and not only do they lose their souls, but also their goods and their bodies. And this even more so if they begin to drink this bowl-of-punch [ce bouleponge] in quantity, as well as arrack; whereupon they become incontinent and rotten with the mal de l’Inde, and at any rate they shake all over. Good provision must therefore be made for Spanish wine against the bad air, but taken in full moderation. —François Bernier, Mémoire (1668)

The “Mal de l’Inde” Unwary Europeans could come to grief from a variety of causes in India: fire in the towns, alcoholism, unscrupulous women. Or so it appeared to the French doctor, philosopher, astronomer and traveler François Bernier, who found himself in the great western Indian port city of Surat in late 1667 and early 1668, roughly a decade into the reign of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb-‘Alamgir (r. 1658–1707), while seeking a passage home after about ten years spent in India. At this time, Bernier was in his late forties, and he believed himself to be generally well-respected among the diverse community of Eu ropeans resident in the États du Grand Mogol, though he had his occasional detractors. Complex forms of class resentment seem to have existed then too, dividing where sentiments of race and religion 1

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ostensibly united. For these Europeans were often self-made men, or somewhat more rarely women; in their occupations, they ranged widely from Catholic priests and artillery experts to translators, jewelers, painters, builders, and merchants. A few were aristocrats or close enough, but many were really in India because it meant the possibility of social mobility that they could not easily have had access to in Europe. Bernier was at neither of the two extremes of this spectrum. Rather, he was known by other Eu ropeans to possess a superior formal education: born in Joué (in the region of Anjou), he had spent time in the 1640s in Paris, studying with the noted philosopher Pierre Gassendi, professor of mathematics for a time in the Collège Royal.1 After travels in Germany and Italy, accompanying a well-born Provençal gentilhomme by the name of François Boysson, Bernier had returned to France in the early 1650s to become the secretary of Gassendi, whose work he had by now already defended publicly and in print against some of his more violent critics. At the same time, he managed to obtain a medical degree from the Faculty of Montpellier, and in the process came to be well-acquainted with the anatomist Jean Pecquet, one of the better-known members of that faculty at the time. When the sickly Gassendi died in Paris in late October 1655, it might have been expected that Bernier would have stayed on in France to help publish and further divulge the works of his master. Instead he chose—for reasons that are still not entirely clear beyond the stereotypical “desire to see the world” (le désir de voir le monde)—to leave France on a long voyage. In early 1656, he set sail from Marseille for the eastern Mediterranean, where he can be found later that year, tending to a plague epidemic among the expatriate French community at Rashid in Egypt. After spending nearly two years between Cairo, Jerusalem, and other nearby sites, Bernier decided to strike out even farther east. A voyage via the ports of Jiddah and Mokha in the Red Sea in 1658 seems to have brought him, by the end of that year or perhaps in early 1659, to Surat, the same port where he found himself again nearly a decade later, in early 1668. In the intervening years, we know from Bernier’s own testimony and some other sources that he managed to find a powerful patron

INTRODUCTION

in the form of the Iranian amīr and intellectual Mulla Muhammad Shafi‘ Yazdi, who held the title of Danishmand Khan; this noble, who had probably arrived in India as a trader in the 1640s, had by the later years of his career attained the post of mīr bakhshī and the elevated mansab rank of 5000/2000.2 Bernier came to be known and appreciated generally in the Mughal court for his medical skills, and by Danishmand Khan personally for his knowledge of the classical tradition in Greek and Latin, and of more contemporary Eu ropean intellectual developments. In a letter to his erstwhile companion and patron, François Boysson, Seigneur de Merveilles, ostensibly written from Delhi in December 1664 (though reasonable doubt can be cast on this dating), Bernier noted that “my Navab or Agah, Danechmend Kan, awaits me in the camp impatiently. He cannot deprive himself of philosophizing during the entire post-dinner concerning the books of Gassendy and Descartes, on the globe and the sphere, or on anatomy, rather than pass the whole morning on the great affairs of the kingdom in his capacity as Secretary of State for foreign affairs, and of Grand Master of the Cavalry.”3 Bernier’s self-presentation here, as on many other occasions, was deliberately Janus-faced: if, on the one hand, he had apparently brought the best of European knowledge in its post-Galilean moment to the Islamic world of the Mughals, he also eventually brought the reality of the Mughals to a European audience.4 Four works published in 1670 and 1671 by the Paris publisher Claude Barbin quickly consolidated his reputation as the principal interpreter of India in Europe in his generation: first, the Histoire de la dernière révolution des Estats du Grand Mogol, and the Evenemens particuliers; and then the two epistolary collections from 1671, both entitled Suite des Mémoires du Sieur Bernier. Many of these were quickly translated by the mid1670s into English, Italian, Dutch, and German, assuring him an even larger audience. But Bernier in Surat, in March 1668, was called upon to play a rather dif ferent role than the “cosmopolitan” guise in which he usually presented himself in these published works.5 Rather, he was being appealed to as a patriotic Frenchman to place his considerable knowledge of the political, cultural, and commercial scene in India at the disposal of the newly-formed Compagnie royale des Indes Orientales.

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This chartered trading Company was largely the brainchild of Louis XIV’s powerful minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert, and its first ships had left France for the Indian Ocean in March 1665.6 From an initial base in Madagascar, a fleet of vessels, under the command of the Company’s surly and quarrelsome director-general François Caron, eventually reached Surat in mid-February  1668 with the intention of establishing trade factories in the Mughal domains.7 These ships had already been preceded by a set of envoys, sent overland via Iran to Agra, who had attempted with limited success to obtain concessions from the Mughal court. It was in these circumstances that Bernier penned a Mémoire . . . pour l’établissement du commerce dans les Indes, a text that he never chose to publish during his lifetime, for reasons that will become evident. In this text, Bernier set himself several tasks. First, he described the strategies of self-presentation that the French should employ, in comparison to the other Europeans who had preceded them to India, notably the Portuguese, the Dutch, the English, and the Danes. Second, he laid out the key personages through whom business could effectively be transacted at the Mughal court and beyond, such as in the Deccan sultanate of Golkonda. Third, he offered detailed advice on the proper conventions and practices regarding trade, as well as more generally what it meant to be a European in India. In short, he temporarily abandoned the lofty perspective for which he is usually known for the nitty-gritty of realpolitik, including the calculated use of what he insistently terms “dissimulation.” Here is how he began his text: I have some grounds for suspecting that our rivals have spread the impression at Court that the French belong to a king who is very powerful and that we are a warlike, imperious and turbulent nation. Therefore, it seems to me that it would, at the beginning, be a good thing to try to remove from the mind of Aurangzeb and the ministers every ground for fearing that we should one day become too powerful in these regions. For, at the Court, people remember well what the Portuguese used to be and already they are beginning to be very jealous of the power of the Dutch, because they hold, as it were, at their door [of the

INTRODUCTION

Mughal empire], all these fortresses of Ceylon, Paliecatte, and Cochin, that they sell spices and copper at an excessive price, dearer than ever did the Portuguese, that they carry out justice for themselves by force, threatening and capturing their ships from Moka which carry their Agis [hājīs] or pilgrims there for Mecca, and return laden with the riches of the goods which they have taken there with them, and that they attempt by all sorts of devices to ruin the trade of the people of the country. This being so, it will be enough, in my opinion, for the present to speak little of the power and greatness of our King, contenting ourselves with saying simply that he is one of the great ones of Frangistan, and not to insist so much as to say that he is greater than the King of England or of Portugal or of Denmark or of Holland, for these are the only ones they know; God helping they will in time learn well enough how matters stand. The time is not yet. There is little mistaking the ominous flavor of that last phrase: il n’est pas encore temps. It obviously suggests that the time will come when the French nation will be revealed in its full glory and power, but for now the order of the day must indeed be concealment and dissimulation. Bernier then lays out the principal personages at the Mughal court for the Company’s purposes: on the one hand, the wazīr Ja‘far Khan ‘Umdat al-Mulk, and his son Namdar Khan (as well as a certain Mulla Saleh, who was a close member of their circle); on the other, Diyanat Khan, the sometime head of the dīwān-i buyūtāt and his son Rustam Khan, “our great friend who speaks Portuguese and Latin.”8 There was also the ace-in-the-hole, in the form of Danishmand Khan himself, but he had to be used with caution, in view of his difficult relations with Ja‘far Khan. All in all, it seemed to Bernier that it was the wazīr who had to be brought around, and convinced that the French were no threat, unlike the aggressive Dutch. I think it above all necessary to make Jaferkan [ Ja‘far Khan] thoroughly understand, and this must be done tactfully, the real reason which the French have had for founding this Company and for coming to India. Our object must be, as I have said, to

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disabuse them of all prejudicial suspicion [tout mauvais soubçon] and to make them thoroughly understand that it is for the good of Indistan. We must try to make them thoroughly understand these points; that of all the Frangis the most industrious and the greatest workers are the French, that it is to France that almost all the commodities go from foreign countries to be worked up there, that France is as it were the general karkané [Persian kārkhāna, workshop] of Frangistan, and as it were the warehouse to which all the nations of that region come to supply themselves with manufactures; that in consequence they have need of an abundance of commodities of all kinds; that they are obliged to go and seek them out in foreign countries, such as in Italy and the kingdom of Kondekar or Grand Seigneur and others which are sold there much dearer than in Indistan; that further they are obliged to take a great quantity of those commodities which the Dutch and the English bring from the Indies and to buy them very dear at the price which they wish, that for these reasons the merchants of France in a body went to pray their King to permit them to found a company, like the Dutch and the English, to come themselves to the Indies to trade, to take there their scarlet and other wares, and to bring back those which the Dutch bring back and come and sell them so excessively dear. The line that Bernier wishes to sell then is, as he well knows, far from the truth, since he is well aware that the principal initiative for the Company comes from the French Crown, and not at all the merchant class. However, he would rather that this be kept from high Mughal functionaries; “it would be à propos,” he writes, “not to reveal and perhaps even to deny that our King has a share in the capital of the Company.” The formal embassy sent to the Mughal court should also be a modest affair, rather than one surrounded by too much of a show. It would be best “if every thing at all times gave the impression of the merchant, of the stranger newly arrived.” Further, Bernier was also aware that the French had a certain number of other skeletons in their closet in Asia. Chief among these was the case of a corsair by the name of Hubert Hugo, a Dutchman

INTRODUCTION

who had recently operated in the western Indian Ocean in 1661–1662 using French letters- of-marque (issued by Louis XIV’s uncle, the Duc de Vendôme), and who in his ship Den Swarten Arent had repeatedly attacked Mughal and other shipping.9 On this matter, here is what Bernier writes: As for the question of Huges, he who came some years ago to execute that pretty business at Moka, I do not think that they will reopen it; but in any case if they were to talk about it I should advise adroit dissimulation on that subject as far as possible, and then if they insisted, to say that he is not a Frenchman, that he is a Dutchman, and, if it seems expedient, that they have had his goods and that they have let him out of prison; that the French had never been to the Indies and that if he [Hugo] had brought a few of them, he must have deceived them making them believe that he was going to take them to the Canaries or to some other islands. These are things which I have already said because this business has passed through my hands as I informed Mr. Carron; I was protecting the honor of my nation and did a good deed to the Dutch. My advice would be that that man should not come to Indistan, at least so soon. Our enemies might well make it an excuse for making us hated and try to make us pass for pirates, seeing us support a man who passes for a pirate and for a pirate of Moka, which is the worst of all; all the Muhammadans being very regardful of these vessels, seeing that they carry their Agis or Pilgrims for Mecca. Bernier’s sage advice does not seem to have fallen on fertile ground. The French did not manage— any more than the Portuguese, the Dutch, or the English—to persuade their Indian interlocutors that they were a peaceful nation, engrossed solely in commerce. But his Mémoire does underline some of the fundamental tensions that existed in Euro-Indian relations in these centuries of “contained conflict,” which preceded the formal conquest of India by the English East India Company. At the heart of the matter was the relationship between alterity and self-representation. How did the Eu ropeans perceive India and Indians, and how did these perceptions change

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over time? How did various European nations present themselves, and how dif ferent were they supposed to be from one another? The French faced a par tic u lar problem, because they had come somewhat late to India, as they did to America. Despite some failed, and indeed rather amateurish, attempts in the course of the sixteenth century, they had not managed, even as late as 1620, to establish a single commercial outpost on the subcontinent.10 In this matter, they had been outdone by many of the other powers in Western Europe, a matter of ongoing embarrassment. In January 1624, the merchant and explorer from Normandy, Augustin de Beaulieu, who was at that time on official business in Rome, had sought to remedy this state of affairs.11 Beaulieu had returned to Europe in late 1622 after an extended sojourn in Southeast Asia, notably in Aceh, where he had obtained some trading concessions from Sultan Iskandar Muda.12 An inveterate maker of plans and projects, Beaulieu addressed one such in a letter to an unknown correspondent, undoubtedly someone quite highly placed in the French state apparatus or nobility. The letter itself was personally carried by an unnamed Englishman, who it turned out had approached Beaulieu five or six months earlier through a third party with a concrete plan to break into the India trade. The mysterious go-between had at first left him suspicious, and besides Beaulieu feared that having an English collaborator would mean that the Dutch and English would get together against him, as they had done on an earlier voyage he had made to Banten in 1617. He then explained his change of heart. “But, the said carrier [of the letter] having taken the trouble to pass through these lands [Rome] himself, and having explained to me the voyages he had made, the places where he had been employed, and the profits that could be gained from such an enterprise, it awoke in me the desire that I had always had to help conduct an honorable and profitable voyage which, following what was proposed to me by my interlocutor, would be to go to the lands of the Great Mogol, which is the most honorable and profitable enterprise that the French can carry out in the East Indies.” Beaulieu had convinced himself that the French would be better received at the Mughal court than any other European nation [que nulle autre nation d’Europe], and that the enterprise in question would at one and the same time yield profits to the entrepreneurs

INTRODUCTION

involved and be of general utility to France, the more so because it would mean trading with “the greatest and richest prince in all of the Indies.” In order to do so, he added, the French would need to have a large sum of liquid cash [argent comptant], but also “diverse manufactures, niceties, and the rarities that are made in Paris, concerning which he [the Mughal] is very curious and which he pays for more liberally than any other prince of the said Indies.” The reputation for opulence and generosity of the Mughal emperor Nur-ud-Din Jahangir (r. 1605–1627) was thus at the center of the presentation, as was the great prosperity of his domains. But equally important for the success of the project are the personal qualities and history of the Englishman who had sought Beaulieu out. Here is what he says about him: The carrier [of the letter] . . . has been employed by the English Company in the court of the said Prince, where he remained for about two years and came to be very well-known there, even by the Great Mogol, with whom he had the honor of speaking several times, and he sold him a great number of precious stones and rarities which produced most notable profits for the English Company; and I am well assured that the greatest advances or profits that the English have made in the East Indies stem from the very free traffic they have with the said country, as this carrier will be able to tell you precisely and carefully, if you do him the honor of hearing him out; he is English by nation, and has seen a great deal and made the voyage to the Indies both by sea and overland, speaks good Persian, and will make an opening for you in the trade in silks from the said country, which remains an excellent plan [beau dessein] and there is no-one who can speak of it more pertinently than him; he is married and even took his wife to the court of the Great Mughal. He has rendered great ser vice to those of his Company, and I have heard that he is highly esteemed in the Indies by those of his nation, who considered him one of the ablest men who had been in the ser vice of their Company; but because of some unhappiness he had with it [the Company], he withdrew, and he is not the only one, for several other Englishmen have been making overtures

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to me for some time, regarding similar voyages. The said gentlemen of the English Company, like those of the Company in this country, are much too keen to turn the screws on people who have rendered them faithful ser vices. There are enough concrete elements in this description to help us get a full sense of the man’s identity: a Persian speaker who had resided for an extended period in the Mughal court, had even taken his wife there, and was greatly interested in the jewel trade; someone who had made trips to India from England by the Cape Route as well as overland through the Ottoman Empire and Iran, but who by the early 1620s had left the Company’s ser vice. A careful look at the records of the English East India Company makes it clear that only one man fits this profile: Richard Steele, a native of Bristol, who appears a number of times in the Company’s archives and papers in the 1610s and 1620s. His first appearance is in 1614, when he and a certain Richard Newman were sent from Aleppo to Iran in pursuit of the somewhat infamous and crooked John Midnall (or Mildenhall), who had embezzled funds from his compatriots and fled overland toward India. Midnall had visited India earlier, during the last years of the reign of the emperor Akbar, and claimed some expertise on the area, but he was no longer alive in the 1620s when Beaulieu wrote his proposal. Over the course of the 1610s, Steele then spent more time in Safavid Iran, and came to be relatively wellacquainted with the Persian language and culture.13 But rather than being perceived as an asset, this aspect—as well as his general penchant for self-promotion, and eccentric engineering projects— brought him into conflict with powerful men, such as the English ambassador to the Mughal court, Sir Thomas Roe.14 Roe portrayed Steele and his wife, Frances Webbe, as thorns in his flesh while he was trying to negotiate at Jahangir’s court. When they all returned to London in 1619, Steele was accused by the Company of having “wronged my Lord Embassador by a false and surmised contestation and arrogating a higher title and place to himself then ever was intended,” and it was also noted that but he “hath brought home a great private trade, [and] put the Company to an extraordinarye charge by a wife and children.”15 One can thus see why Steele was

INTRODUCTION

disgruntled, but so far as we are aware, he was never able to implement his project with Beaulieu, even though he had apparently even indicated his willingness to become a subject of the King of France (Beaulieu writes: “si on prenoit quelque resolution en ladicte entreprise, il se ferait naturaliser”). Rather, he returned briefly to the ser vice of the English Company, and after another brief stint in Indonesia in the years 1626–1628 disappears from view.16 Beaulieu makes it clear, however, that he did not depend on Steele alone to engage with the Mughals. Among others whom he believed he could count on at the Mughal court at this time, he mentioned “a Frenchman named Augustin Guerand . . . who is the most favored foreigner of the said Prince [ Jahangir],” a garbled reference to the jeweler from Bordeaux, Augustin Herryard, who had also briefly been an associate of Mildenhall.17 The unusual career of Herryard merits some mention here, notably as a foil to that of Bernier. He first appears in London in 1604, in correspondence with the powerful politician and spymaster, Sir Robert Cecil, who had apparently engaged him to produce some false gems.18 Then, in around 1609, he seems to have set off for the Islamic world, as we learn from a handful of letters that he wrote while at the Mughal court. In one of these, addressed to the veteran French diplomat, Charles Cauchon de Maupas, Baron du Tour, from Lahore in April 1625, Herryard explains how he came to be in Jahangir’s entourage: Monsieur, The first acquaintance I had with your Lordship was in London when the King sent you to congratulate King James, the new King of England, on his arrival from Scotland. I have since been several times to see you at the Hotel de Venise in the Faubourg St. Germain, and you have known me as a man of curiosity. Among other things I was expert at counterfeiting precious stones; but as my age increased my ambition increased also, and in order to obtain public esteem it was necessary for me to render some remarkable ser vice to my King and Lord. The year before Henry the Great [Henri IV] died, I decided to travel in the Kingdoms of the East; and fi nding nothing in Egypt, Arabia, Mesopotamia, Babylonia or Persia worthy of a King, I passed on towards this King of the Indies, commonly

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called the Grand Mogor or Mougoul, here entitled Jangir [ Jahangir], which means Conqueror of the World, the eighth in descent from the Great Tamerlane, who took prisoner the Grand Turk, Sultan Bajazet, and carried him away a prisoner in an iron cage in the year 1397, and he died on the way.19 Herryard had apparently arrived in Agra around 1612, after having spent some time in Isfahan, where he seems to have made the acquaintance of Englishmen like Robert Sherley. His skill and ingenuity as a craftsman were quickly recognized at the Mughal court, and he also came to be on good terms with the Jesuits there. We gather all this from the letters of the English East India Company’s factors, but also from a letter from the Frenchman himself, written to his compatriots in Istanbul in 1620: I have been in this country eight years. All the Frenchmen I had brought with me died in the first year, and thereafter I took service with this King, the Great Mougoul, who at first gave me 4 crowns a day (120 a month), but now during the last year he has made me a captain of 200 horse. I made him a royal throne in which there are several millions of gold and of silver, and several other inventions such as cutting a diamond of 100 carats in ten days. It is impossible to believe the magnificence of this King and I shall mention only three [aspects] of them; his large diamonds; his large balas [rose-tinted] rubies of which he alone has more than all the men in the world; and when he marches through his kingdom, he takes with him fifteen hundred thousand [1,500,000] human beings, horsemen, soldiers, officers, women, and children, with six thousand elephants and much artillery which serves no purpose but to show his magnificence. He has given me two elephants and two horses, a house valued at eight thousand livres, and his likeness in gold to put on my hat, which is a mark of honor corresponding to the Order of the Holy Spirit in France. I am married and have a child of two years. Nonetheless, I have always an itching desire to revisit my own country [ma patrie]. Some years past I wished to take leave [lisanso], but the King did not wish to give it to me.

INTRODUCTION

Did Herryard in fact enjoy as much success as he claims he did, to the point that the Mughals did not wish to let him go? Consider his claim, while ending one of letters, that he is now entitled “Honaremand, which is a name that the King has given me, in Persian it means an inventor of arts [qui est un nom que le Roy m’a donné en Persian veut dire inventeur des ars].” Intriguingly enough, this finds confirmation in Jahangir’s own memoirs, in a passage from March 1619: On Thursday the eighth [March 18], I‘timad-ud-Daula invited me to a kingly party in his quarters, and I honored him by accepting. . . . Among his offering was an extremely elaborate and intricate throne of gold and silver. The legs were made in the shape of lions holding up the throne. It had taken three years and a lot of work to produce and had cost four hundred fifty thousand rupees. The throne was made by a Frank named Hunarmand, who had no equal in the arts of goldsmithery, carving and other skills. He had made it extremely beautifully, and I awarded him the title [of Hunarmand].20 In another passage a few days later, Jahangir confirms the gift to the European craftsman of cash, a horse and an elephant. Herryard claimed that the emperor had even taken the trouble to give a name to one of his children, to wit, “Serviteur de Christ,” which we may take to be a rendering of the Persian ‘Abdul Masih. Married to an Indian woman who had converted to Christianity, Herryard had at least one other son, whom he had named Louis in honor of the French monarch. Yet, as one reads through his letters, one gathers that Herryard had progressively lost contact with the French and France. He thus uses a pidgin, in which Italianate and Iberian usages substitute for those in French, as we see from the regular appearance of words such as autro, lisanso, and throno. It does not seem, however, that he was tempted to convert to Islam, and his attachment to Christianity remained strong even in the last of his extant letters, written from Chaul in the Deccan, in March 1632, while he was on his way to Goa to help the English Company in its negotiations with the Portuguese viceroy, the Count of Linhares. In this letter, he regretted the death of his “well-beloved master” Jahangir, and the succession of Shahjahan,

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whom he qualified as a tyrant who is “hated by the great and the small [aie de grans e petits],” and also noted for his cruel behav ior toward some of his cousins who had converted to Christian ity during the previous reign. Bernier and Herryard are thus contrasting figures in many ways: the one a libertin, the other a believing Christian; the one a man of letters, the other a craftsman. But the two were also separated by a somewhat dif ferent attitude to the matter of commerce, even if—as we have seen above—Bernier had his own clear views on that matter. The doctor’s distance from the realities of the trading world may be distinguished from Herryard’s sustained interest in dealing in curious and exotic objects, be they jewels, artefacts, or even animals. In the 1610s, Herryard had a marked obsession with elephants, and he spoke often of sending them to Europe to turn a large profit, or as sumptuous gifts.21 In October 1614, the English factor at Agra wrote to Surat, stating that Robert Sherley had recently “departed, carrying the Frenchman’s [Herryard’s] elephant with him, and swore to me, he would make him juggle for another.”22 Herryard himself then wrote in 1620 that “I sent an elephant through Persia with Don Roberto Charly, father [sic: for brother] of Don Antonio Charly from here. I intend to ask again next year for leave and to bring with me another elephant.” A few years later, by the time of his letter to the Baron du Tour, he had realized that things had not gone well on this front. In that missive, he noted how he had acquired “two elephants, of which the King gave me the male and the Prince the female. I sent one of them with the Englishman Don Roberto Charly, now at Madrid as Ambassador of the King of Persia; but learning that it had died nine months into the journey, I sent afterwards a tiger and two hunting leopards to chase deer and two other animals for coursing hares, called siagons [siyāh-gosh, lynxes] which are unknown in Europe; and after nine months’ travel, namely at Espahan, my servant was imprisoned at the time when the King of Persia took Ormous, and all my animals died. I also sent a rhinoceros, but as it was savage [ furieux], they tried to pierce its snout, from which it died.” Even in the last of his letters, of 1632, Herryard noted his chief possessions for his projected return to Europe (which he never carried out): “I

INTRODUCTION

have an elephant and several other animals, and a certain large diamond which will enable me to pass the rest of this life.” It was effectively on account of his reputation as a collector, and a “man of curiosity [homme curieux],” that Herryard seems to have attracted the attention of the great armchair intellectual and antiquarian Nicolas-Fabri de Peiresc. Peiresc sought out the other to build up a credible picture of Mughal India and its products, most notably its precious stones (pierres précieuses), and shell formations (coquillages de mer). In a letter to Herryard dated July 1630, sent via a series of New Christian intermediaries, Peiresc asked him to provide as much information on these subjects as he could, “for the public good” (pour le bien du public).23 It is unknown whether this letter ever reached Herryard, nor is there any trace of a response in Peiresc’s rather extensive collection of papers.24 Nor indeed can we be entirely certain that Bernier—whose master Gassendi was something of a disciple of Peiresc—had extensive knowledge of the French artisan and jeweler who had preceded him by a few decades in the Mughal court.25 These linked vignettes regarding two Frenchmen in seventeenthcentury Mughal India have been intended to serve as an introduction to the larger set of problematics that this book seeks to address. They bring to light the ambiguous nature of relations, on the one hand, between Eu ropeans and Indians, and on the other hand between dif ferent groups of Europeans in India. Both Herryard and Bernier were far more than men of passage; rather, each had extensive dealings in India, and entered into complex systems of patronage and ser vice in a courtly milieu. Both speak of having affective relations with their patrons, Herryard with Jahangir, and Bernier with Danishmand Khan. Yet, they are also capable of putting considerable distance between themselves and India, portraying it in a manner where the exotic and the uncomfortable (des choses étranges, in Herryard’s words; le mal de l’Inde for Bernier) regularly come to the fore, so that the reader in Europe is left in no doubt that they are not in the process of dissolving into the exotic milieu. In this context, the links with other Europeans appear crucial, and an examination of Herryard’s career, for example, makes it amply clear that he

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had close relations with several Englishman like Sherley, Steele, and Midnall on the one hand, and with the Iberians on the other. The same is true in large measure for Bernier, who regularly mentions his deals with the Dutch, but also with the other “Franks” who were to be found at the Mughal court. Then again, when the occasion arose, rivalries between Eu ropean nations could dominate, as when the question of the French Compagnie des Indes was broached. The chapters that follow take a broadly chronological line of development, to show how these dif ferent tensions played out between the time of the discovery of the Cape Route (and the regular establishment of maritime contacts between Europe and India), and the Eu ropean conquest of the later eighteenth century. In part, the narrative is naturally a “cumulative” one, because the number and variety of agents involved in these relations grows more dense and complex with the passage of time. From a sixteenth century dominated by the Portuguese, with a handful of Italians and Germans on the fringes, the seventeenth century sees a considerable layering of the European presence, attracted in part by the emergence in the latter half of the sixteenth century of a new power on a subcontinental scale, the “Great Mughal.” Eventually, by the eighteenth century, one arrives at a varied political economy: on the one hand, the presence of Europeans in the coastal settlements that they could sometimes directly control (such as Goa, Cochin, or Madras), on the other hand, a still vigorous set of “indigenous” polities, in which the European successors of Herryard and Bernier found a place, but which they gradually came to subvert. Before examining these processes in detail through a series of case studies, we may take an extended moment to consider the entire chronology between 1500 and 1800, by way of a bird’s-eye view.

A Bird’s-Eye View Though political, military, and diplomatic contacts between the spaces denoted as Eu rope and India date back at least to the time of Alexander the Great (356–323 BCE) and the Indo-Greek kingdoms, and then continued to be maintained at the time when the Roman Empire was at its zenith, the date 1500 still marks an intensification

INTRODUCTION

in the nature and extent of these dealings. Alexander was of course a somewhat mythical figure, who was reinvented century after century, as the nature of relations changed.26 Further, whereas once the contacts had essentially concerned the Mediterranean fringe of Europe, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they increasingly came to center on northwestern Europe, including France, the Low Countries, and eventually even the British Isles and Scandinavia. It was not as if the medieval centuries, from about 900 to 1400 CE, had not seen some travelers and merchants come and go between southern Europe and India. The most famous of these was undoubtedly the Venetian Marco Polo on his way home from China in the late thirteenth century, but we can add other names to his, whether of missionaries or others. Nevertheless, at the time of the fi rst direct Portuguese voyages into the Indian Ocean at the end of the fifteenth century, European knowledge concerning India was relatively meagre.27 Unlike the Arab-speaking world, which had a good deal of continuous contact with “al-Hind” (as India was termed by them), the Spanish and Portuguese voyagers of the second half of the fifteenth century had a somewhat vague notion of the contours of the Indian Ocean.28 Even the exact geographical dispersion of the products in which they were interested—which were mainly pepper, high-value spices, silk, and precious stones—was not entirely known to them. The years between 1498, when Vasco da Gama’s fleet first arrived in the port of Calicut on the southwestern coast of India, and 1505, when the first Portuguese viceroy of the Indies, Dom Francisco de Almeida, was sent out from Portugal, were thus years of rapid apprenticeship.29 But the process of learning was anything but simple. This was for a number of reasons, some quite practical and others more conceptual or intellectual in nature. The only language of the Indian Ocean region the Portuguese knew (somewhat) on arriving was Arabic, and this seems to have served them quite well in the early years. But they soon discovered that even in order to do simple things like buying and selling, as well as negotiating the conditions of trade with courtiers and kings, they needed to go beyond Arabic to Malayalam, Malay, and Persian, and then eventually to Swahili, Konkani, Kannada, and Tamil. In the second half of the 1510s, they came into

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direct contact with the world of East Asia, in which Chinese was extensively spoken. So far as we can see, the first Portuguese traders who learned these tongues— such as Duarte Barbosa, who was in Kerala and learned Malayalam in the fi rst quarter of the sixteenth century— did not go much beyond a spoken version of the language. They also depended more often than not on fi nding able intermediaries—frequently converted Jews and Muslims—who would make the effort of translating other languages into Portuguese for them.30 But by the second quarter of the same century, it is clear that the Portuguese had begun to gain a more defi nite sense of the nature and extent of Asian written materials, both in the context of diplomatic dealings and of missionary efforts. It became evident to them that behind each of these languages was a complex culture and sometimes a very extensive literary tradition. Grappling with these traditions was necessary, for example, if one wished to have a better sense of the “religious” beliefs of those whom one encountered and wanted to convert to Christian ity. Further, by the middle decades of the sixteenth century, India (and Asia more generally) had become a real object of interest for secular Eu ropean intellectuals. How could one write a history of India without being able to access the textual traditions of the Indians themselves? Faced with such issues, chroniclers like João de Barros (1496–1570) set out to collect at least some of the relevant materials, whether in Persian or the Indian languages, in the process of writing texts like the Décadas da Ásia, the first part of which appeared in print in 1552, followed by a second and a third part in 1553 and 1563, respectively. Here, Barros distinguished himself from his contemporaries in Italy such as Giovanni Battista Ramusio, who though they produced large compendia of written materials on Asia—Ramusio’s Navigationi et Viaggi (1550) being a recognized classic— did so without much reference to Asian textual traditions.31 Therefore, we can say that beginning in the sixteenth century, the process of representing what India was in Europe became linked in a variety of ways to collecting objects and written materials on that part of the world. Furthermore, the objects that were collected were sometimes of sufficient cultural density and complexity that they

INTRODUCTION

had to be interpreted and translated in the sense that a sheaf of cinnamon or a sack of pepper might not (although other, lesser-known “drugs and simples” sometimes required a form of translation for a Eu ropean audience). The entire process can be seen as a multiple unfolding of dif ferent dimensions of a knowledge complex. It is also important to underline the fact that the participants in the process were many and varied; if some of them were Asian traders, intellectuals, and courtiers who spoke to the Portuguese and gave them knowledge, they also included a whole gamut of social and professional categories within Portuguese colonial society itself: missionaries, trading representatives of the Portuguese Crown (who were called feitores or “factors”), physicians, mariners in search of sailing directions, military specialists, and others including painters and printers. Two specific examples from the mid-sixteenth century can give us a sense of the diversity of such actors and their projects. One of these was the “New Christian” or converted Jewish physician Garcia da Orta, who was born in Portugal into a family of Jews of Spanish origin around 1501, and who came to India around 1534 after having studied medicine in various universities in Spain. Some other members of Orta’s family also eventually came to Asia, but they remained largely discreet. The physician, however, gained some real prominence and was close to a number of important political figures, such as the governor Martim Afonso de Sousa, who ran the government of the Portuguese Estado da Índia at Goa between 1542 and 1545. Orta’s activities as a trader and physician eventually took him out of Goa into the Deccan, and he also appears to have held a property in the islands around what eventually became the territory of Bombay.32 He certainly knew Arabic quite well before arriving in Asia, and he added to this some knowledge of Persian, probably while working at the Muslim courts of the Deccan, which welcomed “Frankish” (that is to say, Portuguese) physicians as well. This distilled theoretical and practical knowledge was eventually put by him into an extremely important work entitled Colóquios dos simples e drogas e coisas medicinais da Índia (Colloquies on the Simples, Drugs and Medicinal Products of India), which was printed in Goa in 1563, a few years before Orta died. Though he was eventually denounced posthumously to

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the Inquisition for having secretly been a practicing Jew, this work remained a major reference on Indian plants and other medicinal products. An illustrated Spanish version appeared in 1578, but the crucial translation that helped spread Orta’s work was that of Charles de l’Écluse (or Carolus Clusius), a physician based at Vienna, Frankfurt, and Leiden, whose Latin version, Aromatum et simplicium, had already appeared in 1567, very soon after the original was produced in Goa by the German printer Johannes von Emden. Even if he does not seem to have directly consulted the extensive body of Persian treatises on medicine (tibb) that were available at that time in the Deccan, Garcia da Orta seems to have had access to their world. A more complicated relationship with Asian knowledge traditions can be seen in the case of his contemporary, the aristocrat Dom João de Castro (1500–1548), who was not merely an accomplished military commander and navigator, but was also interested in pursuing theoretical investigations regarding such subjects as cartography and terrestrial magnetism. Castro was also a good draftsman, and a number of his maps, sketches, and rutters (mariner’s handbooks, or roteiros) have survived.33 It is possible that they too built in part on the local knowledge that he gained while navigating the Indian Ocean in ships where the crews were made up in a large proportion by Indians and other Asians, though this is less evident than in the case of Orta. At any rate, the influence of the work of men like Castro was passed on to the great mapmakers of Portuguese Asia, like the somewhat shadowy figure of Fernão Vaz Dourado (d. 1580), who produced a set of spectacular representations of the lands of Asia in his Atlas, which became the basis for later printed maps in the Netherlands. These representations were important for turning the page definitively on the Ptolemaic vision of that part of the world. Though these maps of India depended, for example, on knowledge based largely on coastal navigation (so that most of the place names were located on the coast, rather than in the interior), they produced an approximate vision of the regions of India with which the Portuguese had the most dealings: from west to east, Sind, Gujarat, the Konkan, Kanara, Malabar, the Coromandel coast, Orissa, and Bengal. They would also serve as the basis for the knowl-

INTRODUCTION

edge of the first Dutch and English merchants who arrived in those regions at the turn of the seventeenth century.34 Of course, Portuguese curiosity extended much beyond such “secular” subjects as medicine, botany, navigation, and cartography. They were also anxious to know as much as they could about the “religions” that were practiced in India, for which they often used the word “law” (lei), as was common in Europe at the time. The Portuguese who arrived in Asia in the first half of the sixteenth century certainly had some notions regarding Islam, or the “law of Muhammad” as they called it, though these were often quite crude. They had to rediscover the difference between Sunnis and Shi‘is in the course of their dealings in the Deccan and the Persian Gulf, but this eventually became an abiding trope in their representation of political alliances in the Indian Ocean. They saw one network, a Sunni one, that was oriented toward Istanbul and the Ottoman Empire, and another, a predominantly Shi‘ite one, that drew inspiration from the newly emergent Safavid dynasty in Iran. Some of the more perspicacious among them, like the anonymous writer (or writers) of a text entitled Primor e Honra da Vida Soldadesca no Estado da Índia (Excellence and Honour of the Soldiering Life in the State of the Indies), written around 1580, noted that the Shi‘ites had a particular devotion to the figure of ‘Ali, and also to a succession of leaders (imāms) that the Sunnis did not revere.35 However, so far as we can discern, no Portuguese intellectual of the time seems to have gone to great lengths to collect copies of the Qur’an, let alone Qur’anic commentaries, or other more obscure texts from any Muslim tradition.36 However, by the end of the sixteenth century, some European visitors to Asia— such as the Vecchietti brothers from Florence, Giovan Battista and Gerolamo—became interested in Judeo-Persian materials as well as Persian translations of the Gospel.37 The materials collected by them are among the earliest Indian (or IndoPersian) manuscripts to appear in European collections, and which still survive. They do not have a great deal of bearing, however, on the study of Islam. It was the other religious beliefs and practices in India (and South Asia, more generally speaking) that posed a far greater conceptual

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problem so far as the Portuguese were concerned. The people to whom these pertained were classified by the Portuguese as “gentiles” (gentios), and they included what we today might call Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains. In order to discuss them, Portuguese authors— both civilian and ecclesiastical—resorted to two complementary modes of functioning. One was to argue by analogy, suggesting that there was a correspondence between the “gentile” practices and those of the Christians; the other was to argue by contrast, opposing what the “gentiles” thought and did radically to the beliefs and practices of the Christians. As regards the former, Portuguese authors attempted to identify the key places of pilgrimage (romaria) in India, in order to argue that they were in a sense the “gentile” equivalent of Rome, Compostela, or Jerusalem. By the late sixteenth century, this list (which was somewhat variable) included such centers as Benares, Puri, Tirupati, Kanchipuram, and Ramesvaram. For example, the Portuguese chronicler António Bocarro wrote in the 1630s that Tirupati was “a very large city, which is Rome to them, only for pagodas, which the Gentiles of this whole Orient arrange to have made, and the more devout and power ful the person who has them made is, the larger they are.”38 As regards Buddhistdominated areas such as Sri Lanka and Burma, the Portuguese attempted again to argue for equivalences between their shrines and relics and those with which they were more familiar in Europe. Again, by the latter half of the sixteenth century, they struggled to understand what the “sacred books” of the “gentiles” might be, and a well-informed writer such as the Augustinian soldier-turned-priest Agostinho de Azevedo (from whom the chronicler Diogo do Couto borrowed liberally) had understood that such books had names like veda, śāstra, purāna, and āgama. Couto was to note in one of his chronicles that “they [the gentiles] have many books in their Latin, which they called Geredão, which contain all that they are to believe, and the ceremonies they are to do. These books are divided into bodies, members and articles, whose originals are the ones which they call Vedaos, which are divided in four parts, and these in another fifty-two.”39 But analogies had their limits. Some Portuguese were certainly aware that by taking such an approach they were running the risk of

INTRODUCTION

making the religion of the “gentiles” appear too close to Christianity, and thus more acceptable in character than they should. Debates that emerged by the end of the sixteenth century on the nature of possible “accommodation” between Christian and “gentile” doctrines reflect this discomfort. They were possibly less aware that the whole process also ran the risk of imposing an artificial homogeneity on the entire body of “gentiles” by attributing to them a single theology, a single set of holy books, and a single set of common practices such as pilgrimages. Further, while Sanskrit might be somewhat like Latin, and Tirupati a bit like Rome, it was also crucial for the Portuguese (as well as the other Europeans who participated in their material and spiritual enterprise) to stress the radical contrasts that they saw existing between the truth of their own religion and the falsity of others’ beliefs. These contrasts were mostly presented using forms of ethnography, such as when Couto remarked on the altogether strange use to which cow’s urine was put in certain “gentile” rituals. One of the chief markers of such difference was of course the satī, or the “gentile” widow who was cruelly cremated or buried alive along with her dead husband. This scene had already figured in Eu ropean portrayals of India before 1500, and it came to be repeated ad nauseam in the course of the sixteenth century. Practically every travel account needed to have such a scene of widow-burning, and travelers vied with each other for improbable descriptions of their own conversations with such widows while on the way to the funeral pyre.40 Eventually, European illustrations on India, whether manuscript or engravings in printed books, also made this a central part of their representation of the religious life of the “gentiles.” Unfortunately, the corpus of such illustrations remains quite limited for the sixteenth century. We do have both manuscript maps (noted above), and some cityscapes and other sketches made by men like Dom João de Castro or the maverick chronicler Gaspar Correia. But the chief printed works by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century concerning India are remarkably bare when it comes to illustrations. The works of the chroniclers João de Barros, Fernão Lopes de Castanheda, and Diogo do Couto were all printed without woodcuts or engravings, and the same was even true of Luís Vaz de Camões’s Lusíadas. The engraver Jörg Breu the Elder from Augsburg

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did illustrate the German translation of the travel account of the Italian voyager Ludovico di Varthema (which appeared in 1515), but he chose to do so largely in a monstrous vein, pointing to the grotesque and repulsive in the practices of the “gentiles” of India.41 Some watercolor paintings and tapestries were made in the mid-sixteenth century, usually to commemorate military events such as the two sieges of Diu (in 1538 and 1546), but they chose for their part to present India and Indian (or more broadly Asian) actors in a classicizing vocabulary, as if they were representing the battles between Alexander and Darius. This is the case of Jerónimo Corte-Real’s illustrations to the epic poem Sucesso do Segundo Cerco de Diu, for instance.42 A remarkable exception to this rule is a rather strange work from the middle years of the sixteenth century generally known as the Codex Casanatense, from the name of the cardinal in whose library it came to be deposited in Rome, after having passed through Goa and Lisbon (where it was in around 1628). Made up of seventy-six watercolors, with a rather limited amount of explanatory text in Portuguese inscribed on each, this work covers the physical characteristics, dress, and other habits of the coastal peoples across the gamut of the Indian Ocean, from the Cape of Good Hope to the South China Sea.43 Where India is concerned, par tic u lar attention is devoted to Gujarat and the Konkan, as well as Goa; eastern India and Bengal are less represented in these illustrations. However, the Tirumala-Tirupati temple is referred to in at least one illustration as the “pagoda that is called Tirumala [paguode que chamão Tremel ].” Circumstantial evidence suggests that the work was produced in the middle decades of the sixteenth century, during the reign of Sultan Mahmud of Gujarat (whose portrait atop an elephant may be found in the album). The style of the illustrations, as well as the use of certain conventions in the presentation of the human figures, suggest that these were painted by one or more Indian artists, possibly from “either Mandu or Gujarat.”44 In other words, a European patron was involved, and it is probably he who provided the inscriptions in Portuguese, but the actual execution was not the work of Europeans. Instead, we are dealing with a highly stylized auto-ethnography. Unfortunately, this work does not seem to have been transformed into

Khwaja Safar at the siege of Diu (1546), from Jerónimo Corte-Real, Sucesso do segundo cerco de Diu, Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, Lisbon, Coleção Casa de Cadaval no. 31, Canto 2, fl. 17v.

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engravings, or reached the market for the printed book; it probably circulated in a limited way among the circles of Catholic missionaries. Overall then, the sixteenth century witnesses some significant changes in the representation of India in Europe, but there are also obvious limits to the extent of change. Few collectors emerged in Portugal, Spain, or Italy who actually possessed either manuscripts or other artistic and antiquarian objects from India. It is probable that among those who did were João de Barros, who seems to have owned some Persian manuscripts, and the New Christian traveler Pedro Teixeira; some such texts seem also to have found their way to Philip II’s library. Unfortunately, none of these actual manuscripts have come down to us. On the other hand, despite the existence of considerable missionary activity in many dif ferent parts of India, there is no evidence currently that manuscript or palm-leaf works in Sanskrit from any of the Indian traditions made their way to Europe at this time. At best, abridged versions of the doctrines of the “gentiles” were produced, sometimes by Jesuits in their missions in Goa and southern India. Other objects that were collected included Indian painted textiles, which were traded in growing quantities in the last quarter of the sixteenth century; some intricate ivories, and elaborately carved wooden objects (sometimes with ivory or mother-of-pearl inlay) also made their way into collections. One may occasionally find such objects listed by the shipboard scribes, on the vessels that were returning from India via the Cape Route. When the English captured some of these vessels in the Atlantic in the last decades of the sixteenth century (such as the celebrated Madre de Deus), such objects also whetted their appetite, as indeed did the precious and semiprecious jewels that the Portuguese often used as a convenient way of repatriating fortunes from India.45

The Emerging Palimpsest This situation evolved considerably after 1600. Some of the reasons for the change are evident, namely the successive entry of a number of other European actors—English, Dutch, Danes, French, and so on—into the trade of the Cape Route. To be sure, even during the

INTRODUCTION

sixteenth century, the Portuguese enterprise had been somewhat multinational in character, and a certain number of Spaniards, Italians, and south Germans were associated with it from the very outset, whether as traders, officials, or missionaries. Less known, but not totally insignificant, was the participation of men from towns like Antwerp and Bruges, at least one of whom wrote an eyewitness account in Flemish of the second voyage of Vasco da Gama in 1502–1503, which was printed in Antwerp in 1504 under the title Calcoen (a distortion of “Calicut”).46 In the years up to 1550, the Portuguese maintained a very active trading presence in these cities (in part through the so-called feitoria de Flandres), so that Indian spices and other goods were traded in Antwerp and Bruges, and the merchants there kept their fingers on the pulse of the India trade. Later in the century, the Coutre brothers from Bruges, Jacques and Joseph, spent a good deal of time as traders in India and Southeast Asia, eventually returning to Eu rope in the 1620s, and Jacques then produced a highly entertaining Spanish text of his Vida (or “Life”), with descriptions of his life in Portuguese Asia and commercial and diplomatic dealings with a wide variety of interlocutors.47 The names of others from the same region, including some gunners and artillerymen, appear periodically in the letters and texts of the period. Since they were very often subjects of the Habsburg crown, the period from 1580 to 1640—when Portugal was successively under the rule of three of the Philips—was particularly propitious for the presence of such men in Portuguese Asia. While one should not draw too sharp or exaggerated a contrast between the modes of functioning of the English and Dutch after 1600, and their Portuguese rivals, it is still useful to emphasize some of the salient points of difference. Clearly the missionary impulse was much attenuated in the case of the former when compared with the latter, and this had an influence on how India was seen and represented. Further, the geographical spread of the presence of both the English and Dutch before 1660 tended to focus on three regions: Gujarat, the Coromandel coast of southeast India, and Bengal. But they also came to have a commercial presence in northern India and a greater proximity to the great centers of Mughal power— such as Delhi, Agra, Lahore, and Burhanpur— than the Portuguese

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had had in the previous half-century. In fact, for their dealings with the Mughals, the Portuguese often depended on Jesuit mediation, and this meant that the lines of communication frequently focused on religious questions, not simply in Goa but even in northern India. An account such as that of the Dutch Company’s factor Wollebrant Geleynssen de Jongh (from the fi rst half of the seventeenth century), reveals some surprising attitudes. Geleynssen knew Gujarat in particular rather well, and his account begins with a description of “de stadt Brootchia” or Bharuch, before moving on to a description of other major cities and towns such as Surat and Ahmadabad, as well as a set of broader reflections. Of Bharuch itself, we gather that “this town is pretty well-peopled with folk, Moors, Benjans and also Persians, who are born in this land itself; the said Benjans, who are here the most populous of the three nations, bring the most business into the town, as they control the greater part of the trade.”48 The baniyās directly inspire him in some comparative reflections (“this is a nation that is not unlike the Chinese in terms of covetousness, though not quite so fraudulent as the former”); but the Dutch factor is also adept at accumulating a series of small observations of one or the other sort, regarding the giving of alms and the maintenance of hospitals, and even sprinkles his text from time to time with an example of what he terms “the common Hindustans proverb.” Naturally, the text is unable to escape from periodic reflections on the arbitrary character of the Mughal polity, the oppression of the poor, and the overall injustice, but Geleynssen does insist that “no one is hindered or harassed in their beliefs or godly worship, but instead each one lives freely,” a marked contrast to the European situation of the time. In fact, he is willing to go even further, in his search for affinities between the Muslims and the religion of the greater part of the Dutch. Thus, a rather striking passage states: They [the Mughals] like the Roman or Catholic religion a good deal less than the Reformed one, and this is because those Papists make use of images in their churches (which is against their [Muslim] law), as the Moors do not believe in honouring or making use of images, and so have no images at all in their

INTRODUCTION

temples, houses or places of worship that are made of wood, stone or other materials; they prefer a pile of silver or gold that they can sell, and make jewels or bracelets or such things with, in which respect too they agree very well with the Reformed [Dutch], who prefer silver and gold to stone and wooden images.49 This relatively favourable view can be quite easily contrasted to other writers, especially on southern India, with which the Dutch East India Company (VOC) had contact in these years. One remarks that many of the Dutch— and especially the Protestants among them—had a markedly more favourable view of the “Moors” than of the “gentiles.” We may consider the following passage, for example, from the 1677 account by Adolph Bassingh, a Dutch Company factor resident at the Nayaka court of Tiruchirappalli: The religion or imagined worship [religie of vermeende godsdienst] of these people are no less curious as horrible and can also not be described in particular due both to the various sects among these people and the fact that they rather not reveal them to everyone, indeed, not even to the common man of their own nation. And since there are entire books in our language, which have been published, on the heathen worship in these and neighbouring lands and Your Honour has resided a considerable amount of time in these lands where this religion is observed, I deem it even less necessary to speak of it extensively and will limit myself to this little in general terms. They recognise an eternal being from the light of nature and believe there is one God, consisting of three persons named Wisno, Roetra and Bramma. These three persons are given the single name of Ixora. . . . . Notwithstanding the fact that their imagined God [gewaande God] is omniscient and equally informed of all that occurs on earth, he deems it below his dignity and too cumbersome to gather information of every thing himself. They hold that in the afterlife awaits nothing but continuous, excessive sensuality, which they will enjoy with their own or much better bodies than those with which they died.50

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Bassingh then goes on to note the temples (or pagoden), which “are so dark inside that one is forced to use lights in order to see.” Inside these sinister edifices, there are “curious and horrific figures,” including those of animals, often with bodies that are “much deformed,” while others are such that “decency prevents [one] from putting them on paper.” The purpose of all of these structures is clearly predatory; “these heathen temples and idols annually swallow up a lot of money.” The Dutch factor then mentions other regular practices that horrify him, such as possession, self-mortification, and hook-swinging, and devotees who throw themselves under the wheels of temple chariots. Bassingh, like most other commercially-minded Eu ropeans in India who were his contemporaries, apparently did not learn to read any Indian language. In southern India, some of the Jesuits did acquire some proficiency in Tamil, as well as Telugu and even Sanskrit. Their counter parts in Mughal India often acquired Persian, but this was usually put to use in producing translations into Persian of Christian texts such as the Gospel, the lives of the saints, and so on, rather than in collecting and analyzing the intellectual production of Mughal officials. It is remarkable that Jesuits like Jerónimo Xavier and Manuel Pinheiro never seem to have considered it of use to acquire the great Mughal texts that were being produced around them, such as the chronicles of Shaikh Abu’l Fazl and Nizam-ud-Din Bakhshi. In contrast, the impulse to collect was far stronger with both the Dutch and the English. The reasons for this seem to have been complex. Some clearly have to do with the emergence of a new orientalism in Western Eu rope in the closing decades of the sixteenth century, which was in turn partly an offshoot of Biblical scholarship. Beginning with Joseph Scaliger in the late sixteenth century, the study of Persian materials to establish a more reliable chronology had become a preoccupation in Leiden; linguistic explorations comparing Persian with the European languages were for their part promoted by Frans van Ravelingen (or Franciscus Raphelengius, 1539–1597), a Flemish scholar who like Scaliger also eventually taught at Leiden. Such studies were subsequently consolidated in the early seventeenth century by two important figures, Thomas Erpenius, and his

INTRODUCTION

successor Jacob Golius. By the time of his death in 1624, Erpenius had acquired and begun a study of Mir Khwand’s great Timurid chronicle, a version of which had been in the possession of João de Barros. Though his Persian manuscript collection eventually passed in large measure into the possession of the University of Cambridge, Erpenius’s work was continued by Golius.51 While some of these scholars, such as the Protestant minister Louis de Dieu, continued to see the study of Persian and the “Orient” more generally, primarily through the prism of religion and Christian polemics, it is clear that others went on to far more secular subjects: history and politics. Where politics was concerned, the first half of the seventeenth century saw an upsurge in interest in “mirror of princes” texts written in Persian. Chief among these were the Gulistān and Bustān of Shaikh Sa‘di Shirazi (ca. 1210–1292), in which Golius had a marked interest, and of which a first approximate translation was produced by the Frenchman André du Ryer.52 A German student of Golius, Georg Gentz (or Gentius) eventually published an edition and complete Latin translation of the Gulistān in 1651. The growing interest in recovering a proper history of dynasties like the Mughals also led the Dutch Company employee Francisco Pelsaert, who had spent a good deal of time in northern India, to prepare both a Kroniek (or chronicle) and a Remonstrantie (or contemporary description) of the Mughals, which eventually served as key sources for the Leiden-based geographer and humanist Johannes de Laet, when he wrote his De Imperio Magni Mogolis (1631). It is possible that Pelsaert informed himself at least orally of the rough contents of some of the Mughal chronicles through the translators in the Dutch factory at Agra, where he worked for some seven years.53 The first half of the seventeenth century thus saw a consolidation in Western Europe of a milieu of collectors, who were interested in a variety of objects and cultural products from India: manuscripts, but also paintings and other precious handicrafts made by the expert artisans of the subcontinent. Some of these collectors were clearly royalty and aristocrats, whether based in Prague, Paris, Madrid, or Vienna; others belonged to an emergent bourgeois milieu and sometimes had substantial investments in the shares of the East India Companies; still others were scholars based in universities.

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Some of these objects were acquired in the context of a gift economy, in that Europeans arriving and seeking trade concessions in India usually brought with them what the Dutch Company’s factors called schenkagie goederen: clocks, mirrors, musical instruments, and other curiosities, including prints and books. In the seventeenth century, the Mughal chronicler Bhimsen reported, for example, that “news arrived from the land of the Franks that a supernatural being (dev) had appeared there, with the head and face of a horse, and the body of a human being. The Franks had cleverly captured it alive, but in a few days, it died. However, its portrayal [taswīr] was sent by them to the [Mughal] emperor.”54 Thus, while European prints and woodcuts made their way regularly to India from the last quarter of the sixteenth century, creating a real vogue among Mughal artists like Kesu Das for Christianthemed paintings on subjects such as the nativity, the crucifi xion, or portraits of the saints, Mughal paintings had become available to European collectors after about 1610. The embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to the Mughal court in the 1610s brought some back; in around 1620, Renold Elstrack—reputedly the most successful English engraver of the time— produced a portrait engraving entitled “the true Pourtraicture of the Great and Most Potent Monarch, Padesha Shassalem called the Great Mogoll of Easterne India,” based on a somewhat eccentric reading of a Mughal painting of the ruler Jahangir (r. 1605–1627).55 In the Netherlands, figures like Erpenius, Golius, and De Laet produced the major impetus behind the drive to collect materials and eventually enshrine them in Wunderkammers, or antiquarian collections. It is possible that they even intervened with the directors of the Dutch East India Company in order to instruct their employees in India and Iran in this sense. In the case of England in the 1620s, on the other hand, the impulse came in good measure from figures like William Laud, the controversial archbishop of Canterbury under Charles I, himself a friend of Sir Thomas Roe and closely associated with the University of Oxford.56 Perhaps under Laud’s influence, the Stuart monarchy began to exert itself somewhat in the direction of constituting an Indo-Persian collection. In late February  1634, Charles I wrote to the court of directors of the English East India

INTRODUCTION

Company asking for a supply of Arabic and Persian manuscripts and the Company’s factors in Iran responded in late November of the same year, stating that they were making efforts to meet his demands.57 The head of the Company’s Surat establishment, William Methwold, was also informed of the matter, and he and his council responded at some length regarding the problems in such an enterprise, but assured the monarch they would do their best.58 What happened to the Methwold manuscripts remains uncertain, but other manuscripts that were sent by the Company’s servants to England in this period have been traced. The most celebrated of these, now in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, is an illustrated one, the so-called Laud Rāgamāla, containing some thirty paintings and many specimens of calligraphy.59 Another significant manuscript from Laud’s collection is the Dīwān-i Anwarī of the great twelfth-century poet, which had once been in the library of the sixteenth-century ruler of Ahmadnagar, Burhan Nizam Shah I. So, in effect, the archbishop came to possess a mix of poetry and diverse prose, some of it with a religious or cosmological content, but his agents did not lay their hands on any of the great Indo-Persian chronicles of the close of the sixteenth and the dawn of the seventeenth centuries. As to Charles I, only one significant Persian manuscript came into his direct possession, a copy of the Gulistān of Shaikh Sa‘di, sent to him directly as a gift by the Mughal emperor Shahjahan in the late 1630s.60 Over the latter half of the seventeenth century, manuscripts and objects from India continued to accumulate in dribs and drabs in various English collections, though none were probably of the quality of Shahjahan’s Gulistān. Academic figures were often central to this process, among whom we may count Edward Pococke (1604–1691) and especially Thomas Hyde (1636–1703), both orientalists based at Oxford, and in Hyde’s case also playing the role of “eastern interpreter” at court.61 Pococke and Hyde had broad horizons, and looked into materials in Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, and Persian, as well as—for Hyde, at least— Malay and Chinese. Further, Hyde’s interest in Zoroastrian ideas led him to the study of ancient Persian, and thus to a quest for authentic manuscripts held by the Parsi communities in western India, which he used to compose his Historia religionis veterum Persarum (1700). Though he never traveled to India,

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he had contacts with several Englishmen there, including the free trader Thomas Bowrey, and the important but somewhat obscure clergyman George Lewis. Three years before his death in 1729, Lewis gave over his monumental cabinet made up of a mixture of coins and other objects to the University of Cambridge, where he had completed a degree at Queen’s College in 1689, before spending the years from 1692 to 1714 at Fort St. George in Madras as chaplain and librarian.62 Profiting from the recent Mughal conquest of the Coromandel region, which until 1686–1687 had mostly been under the sultanates of Golkonda and Bijapur, Lewis had gone about collecting a mixture of manuscripts, very largely in Persian. Fifteen years into his stay in India, Lewis’s knowledge of Persian was thought sufficient for him to be used to translate secret correspondence in Madras, and Governor Thomas Pitt even considered sending him as envoy to the Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah in early 1709.63 Some of Lewis’s manuscript acquisitions are predictable for a clergyman, such as a Persian translation of the Qur’an, or Persian versions of the four Gospels. But they also include an interesting mixture of other texts and materials, such as Persian historical works, lexicography, and belles-lettres, as well as epistolography; he also collected many of the classical poets of the Persian tradition. Most of these manuscripts were not illustrated, but there were some exceptions to this rule.64 Though few paintings from India seem to have come into Britain in the course of the seventeenth century, this was certainly not true of continental Europe. The Vatican came to possess at least one curious and unfinished collection of Mughal portraits that was probably acquired through Jesuit intercession in the period of Pope Urban VIII (1623–1644).65 But the most important such flow was undoubtedly into the Netherlands, through the good offices of the factors of the VOC in India. Indeed, over the course of the seventeenth century, several quite competent Dutch painters had made their way to Asia, either to pursue that calling or simply as commercial employees of the Company. In the case of Mughal India, they included Hendrik Arentsz Vapoer in the 1620s and early 1630s, as well as Isaak Jansz Koedijk, who was in Surat and Ahmadabad in the 1650s and some of whose paintings are even today fairly well-known (albeit not on Indian themes).66 Both Vapoer and Koedijk were in contact with

INTRODUCTION

Mughal courtly and administrative circles, and it is certainly conceivable that they took the opportunity of being in India to study Mughal paintings and albums.67 Another painter from the midcentury, Philip Angel, actually did collect a set of paintings on the ten avatāras of Vishnu while in India, but these were not from the Mughal atelier; his intention appears to have them accompany a text which he translated into Dutch from a Portuguese original, also with narratives on the various incarnations of the same god.68 With the growing interest in Europe on the religious practices of the “gentiles” or “heathens” of India, such illustrations eventually came to influence European engravings in printed works on the subject, beginning with Philippus Baldaeus’s Naauwkeurige beschryvinge van Malabar en Choromandel (1672), itself based on extensive and unacknowledged borrowings from other sources. Whether through the intercession of such traveling Dutch painters or not, Mughal and Deccani paintings also began to appear in the personal collections of members of the Dutch bourgeoisie by the middle and later decades of the seventeenth century, and these works date usually from the reigns of Shahjahan and Aurangzeb. Their owners included men from leading Amsterdam families such as the Witsens, Occos, Grils, and Van der Hems. Equally, they came to attract the attention of some of the leading Dutch artists of the day. Rembrandt copied a number of such paintings, over twenty in number, mostly from the court-atelier of Shahjahan. It seems, however, that his purpose was to use these sketches and drawings as material toward paintings on themes from antiquity, based on the oftused argument that habits of body and gesture from the ancient world were still preserved intact in the “Orient.” Other painters were more literal-minded; Hendrik van Schuylenburgh, who was commissioned in the 1660s by the VOC to make paintings of their factories in Bengal, appears to have used Mughal paintings as ethnographic sources to fi ll in the background and context of the factory with Mughal soldiers, peasants, a satī scene, and even a hook-swinging episode. Most extraordinary in this respect was the painter Willem Schellinks (1623–1678), who had clearly examined some of the very same paintings as Rembrandt. Clearly fascinated by the court and

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figure of Shahjahan, and then in the late 1650s and early 1660s by reports concerning the succession war between that monarch’s four sons, Schellinks made at least four oil paintings on Mughal themes.69 Two of these represented a somewhat clichéd form of exoticism, one showing Shahjahan and his sons on horseback during a hawking expedition, and the other with the monarch watching musicians and dancers. These are not all that far in conception and spirit from the Brazilian paintings of Frans Post or Albert Eckhout from the same broad period. But the other two, which form a pair, were remarkable for their playfulness and intelligence. They show a fantastic court scene that draws on conventions in Mughal painting concerning composite animals, which become the mounts of the four princes, Dara Shukoh, Shah Shuja‘, Aurangzeb, and Murad Bakhsh. Schellinks is clearly aware of the outcome of the contest, since he portrays Aurangzeb with a bloody dagger in his hand. He also introduces, or “quotes” from another Mughal convention, namely of having deceased rulers—here the emperors Akbar and Jahangir—present in apotheosis. These paintings are a remarkable testimony to how Mughal painting could not merely be viewed, but reused creatively, in another tradition of representation. If we compare it with its literary counterpart, namely John Dryden’s play Aureng-zebe (1675), which in turn draws upon published European travel accounts of the period, there is clearly much to be said in favor of Schellinks’s way of representing an exotic reality.70

Toward Conquest By the early eighteenth century, therefore, several seemingly stable conventions regarding the representation of India in Eu rope had been established. It is of course not entirely satisfactory to see these as mere arbitrary impositions, or the fevered fantasies of Europeans with a poor knowledge and limited experience of India. Rather, there was a relationship— albeit a complex one—between collection and representation, between the accumulation of knowledge and its schematic organization. The two most important spheres of Indian life that were represented by the early eighteenth century were undoubtedly those that

INTRODUCTION

may be termed “politics” and “religion.” With regard to the first of these, the Europeans who arrived in the sixteenth century found a somewhat fragmented political sphere, where about half a dozen kingdoms jostled for space. Among these, the most important was arguably the extensive southern kingdom of Vijayanagara, to which the Portuguese devoted a great deal of attention, although they did not neglect either to deal with the Deccan sultanates, Bengal, or Gujarat. Then, in the second half of the century, the rules of the game changed with the emergence of the Mughals. By the 1570s, the Mughals had conquered Bengal and Gujarat, and by the 1590s they had taken Sind. The seventeenth century was thus essentially a balancing act between the hegemonic Mughals and their smaller rivals, who impeded or at least slowed down their expansion. This meant that the principal preoccupation of the most important European travelers to seventeenth-century India, such as Francisco Pelsaert, François le Gouz de la Boullaye, François Bernier, Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, and Nicolò Manuzzi, was Mughal rule.71 While some of these writers argued, like Boullaye, that Mughal rule was essentially “soft” and accommodative in character, others put forward the notion of the Mughals as a tyranny or “despotism,” where an overwhelming form of state power crushed both the subjects at large (peasants, artisans, and merchants all included) and the “aristocracy” made of rājas and Mughal-appointed amīrs. And yet, when centralized Mughal power fell into decline over the first half of the eighteenth century, with the emergence of powerful regional dynasties in areas such as Awadh, Bengal, and Hyderabad, European observers experienced a curious form of nostalgia. The humiliating defeat that the Mughal ruler Muhammad Shah underwent at the hands of the Iranian monarch Nadir Shah in the late 1730s was seen by some of them as quite unfortunate.72 Others quickly grasped that the diminished Mughals were a soft target, and that the circumstances that had emerged represented a remarkable opportunity. Thus, first in the area around Madras, then in Surat, and eventually in Bengal in the late 1750s and early 1760s, the English Company repeatedly intervened in regional politics, until it was able to gain a substantial foothold in the political system and siphon off a good part of erstwhile Mughal revenues for its own benefit. The Mughals

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were still represented as “despots,” but as weak and ineffective ones who had betrayed their own traditions and were thus clearly unfit to rule. East India Company servants in the middle decades of the eighteenth century continued to collect Indian objects, manuscripts, and paintings, but these collections were amassed under changed circumstances and for dif ferent ends. Naked extortion came to play a part in the constitution of collections. We can see this with one of the most successful collectors of the late eighteenth century, the unscrupulous Richard Johnson (1753–1807), an amateur musicologist who used his political leverage at Awadh and Hyderabad in the 1780s to put together an impor tant body of manuscripts, paintings, and objects.73 His contemporary, the Franco-Swiss mercenary Antoine Polier— discussed at length in Chapter 4—was equally deft at putting together groups of paintings and objects, often in response to requests and orders from friends and patrons in Europe.74 Though Johnson and Polier discovered a real market for these objects in the context of the late eighteenth century, the meanings and uses of the objects had shifted somewhat. Collection and representation had come somewhat uncoupled. By 1800, histories written in Persian were not necessarily seen as key sources for writing a history of India, though some works—like that of Muhammad Qasim Firishta— still enjoyed a certain prestige.75 Mughal paintings were enjoyed as aesthetic objects, but the “real” visual representation of India was increasingly left to visiting European artists and engravers, who produced an academic vision of an India of ruins and picturesque landscapes. The matter of “religion” proved rather more complex.76 As is proposed in Chapter  2, one way to examine this issue is to use as a sounding board the massive work of Jean-Frédéric Bernard and Bernard Picart, Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde, which appeared in multiple volumes in Amsterdam between 1723 and 1737.77 Bernard and Picart belonged to a Huguenot milieu with Deist inclinations, and they were apparently influenced by the radical Enlightenment in the manner in which they conceived their project. In their volume on India, they compiled what they considered to be the most authoritative accounts available in Europe at that

INTRODUCTION

time, and added to these their own comments and glosses (most of which were written by Bernard). They also lavishly illustrated the work, sometimes with their own engravings and sometimes with images borrowed from other texts. It is interest ing to see what they kept in and what they left out. First, Bernard and Picart excluded almost every thing written before 1630, probably considering it to be too archaic and too inflected with Catholic prejudice. The works they reproduce thus begin with the writings of Henry Lord, English chaplain at Surat, who wrote an account of the baniyās and Parsis (or Zoroastrians) in that city in the 1630s.78 They follow it up with a truncated version of an important work by the Dutch Protestant minister, Abraham Rogerius, on the “heathendom” of India. Rogerius had been at the Dutch settlement of Pulicat (just north of Madras) in the 1640s, and he drew much of his information from a Brahmin by the name of Padmanabha. This included elements drawn from the Sanskrit works of the great fifthcentury author Bhartrihari.79 Complementing Rogerius’s infinitely detailed work was another one, which appears as an anonymous text in Bernard and Picart, but which was probably authored by the seventeenth-century Jesuit João de Brito. Finally, included in the work was a shorter text by a French intellectual and traveler La Créquinière comparing Indian “gentiles” and European Jews, as well as excerpts from a whole host of other celebrated authors such as Bernier, Tavernier, and Baldaeus. Apparent in these works as well as the accompanying commentary is Bernard and Picart’s tendency to see the religion of the Indian “gentiles” as monotheistic, with a single god at the veritable center of the system. However, this was not the more popu lar view that was held by many Europeans, according to which the Indians believed in many competing gods, and in fact usually practiced a form of “idolatry.” The view of Bernard and Picart would eventually come to be displaced even in intellectual circles by the early nineteenth century. British authors such as Edward Moor, in his influential work The Hindu Pantheon (1810), would produce a detailed iconography of the gods and goddesses of India, based on images that they had collected, or sometimes pilfered, from Indian temples.

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Increasingly in the nineteenth century, the term “Hinduism”— which had never been used as such in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—would come to denote the entire complex of beliefs of those denizens of India who were not Muslim, Christian, Jewish, or Zoroastrian.80 By the mid-1810s, the Bengali intellectual and reformer Raja Rammohan Roy was using the term, as indeed were a number of British administrators. Whereas Rogerius’s vision of Indian “heathendom” had been of a number of competing and chaotic groups living cheek-by-jowl, the nineteenth century view of a single underlying “Hinduism,” with dif ferent concrete manifestations, would become the basis of a new set of arguments regarding undesirable superstition and necessary reform. This view would be carried through into the twentieth century, and into the self-image of even some key leaders of the Indian nationalist movement. The progressive seizure of power in India after 1750 by the English East India Company was bound to have a major effect both on the processes of collection and the logics of representation.81 Company rule, properly speaking, can be thought to have lasted for roughly a century, from Clive’s victory in Bengal in late June 1757 to August 1858, when—in the immediate aftermath of the great Indian Rebellion of 1857—the Crown assumed direct control over its Indian domains under the Government of India Act. This century was marked by wave after wave of scandal and corruption, a perfectly logical outcome of the extremely irregular form of semiprivatized governance that Company rule represented.82 It saw the rise to prominence of various networks of power and influence, most notably of the Scots, who had an overwhelming influence over India between about 1750 and 1830. One of the best-known of such peddlers of influence was Henry Dundas, Viscount Melville (1742–1811); and it was precisely from the ranks of such Scotsmen that many of the great Company-period antiquarians would be drawn; their numbers include Colin Mackenzie, James Tod, and William Erskine, all of whom were administrator-scholars, usually with small armies of Indian servants who were available to do their bidding. It is impossible to quantify in any precise terms the extent of the looting that accompanied the Company’s campaigns in India, some of which fed private collections in Eu rope. Whole libraries were

INTRODUCTION

seized, temples were stripped of friezes, deities were summarily shipped off, even small Mughal tombs or their trelliswork were taken away to distant destinations. Some of this was the handiwork of unscrupulous private individuals, but some was undoubtedly done with official connivance. Many of the most sumptuous Mughal manuscripts were thus offered in “tribute” in this context, and they include such masterpieces as the Pādshāhnāma from the period of Shahjahan, now in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle. These works now had a real market in Europe and were enjoyed as exotica, rather than seen as necessarily playing a direct role in the representation of India. The tension between the logics of collection and representation is visible in the functioning of two of the most important colonial cultural institutions set up in the period, the Asiatic Society in Bengal and the Survey of India. The Asiatic Society was founded in early 1784 by Sir William Jones (1746–1794), a judge and administrator with a somewhat inflated view of his own abilities and competence. He and his associates began publishing the journal Asiatic Researches in the late 1780s, and this journal ranged far and wide, dealing with every thing from Indian music, astronomy, and mathematics to gods, ruins, and inscriptions. Some of its work was philological, and required the aid— and sometimes the decisive intervention—of Indian intellectuals; other parts were essentially ethnographic in character, and supposed that the writer and observer was necessarily external to the culture that was being described.83 These activities again implied that objects would be collected, or in some instances that images would be copied. One of those later associated with the Asiatic Society was the surveyor Sir Colin Mackenzie (1754–1821), most of whose activities were located in southern India. Mackenzie managed to put together an enormous collection of texts and objects, with the view to providing a comprehensive history of the southern part of the subcontinent. Mackenzie’s Scottish roots served him particularly well at a time when the Indian administration was dominated by men like Sir Thomas Munro and Lord Minto.84 These activities on the textual and philological front, which included Sanskrit as well as the Indian vernacular languages, eventually created a form of tension, both in Britain as well as on the

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European continent. The fi rst Company administrators of the generation of Henry Vansittart and Warren Hastings had tended to approach India through Persian, the main language of Mughal administration. With the passage of time, however, Persian came to be somewhat demoted in its role and the academic understanding of India was to be increasingly associated with Sanskrit, a language which was thought to be more relevant to the study of ancient Indian culture. The creation of the prestigious Boden Chair in Sanskrit at Oxford in 1832, first occupied by H. H. Wilson, is one indication of this change; the Collège de France in Paris had meanwhile already appointed Antoine-Léonard de Chézy to a chair in Sanskrit in the mid-1810s. Over the course of the nineteenth century, even as the mass of Indian texts and materials in Eu ropean collections grew exponentially, a new attitude can be observed, a simultaneous glorification of the distant Indian past and a denigration of the present moment. The Indians, it was thought, had once been great, at the moment when they had produced the Vedas and the Upanishads, or the early Buddhist corpus, or the great epics like the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyana. However, they had then fallen into the clutches of superstition and sloth, a process that had been further aided by the centuries of Muslim rule after the foundation of the Sultanate of Delhi in around 1200 CE. British rule would thus bring progress and enlightenment, stirring the slothful “Hindoo” from his centuries-long slumber. Perhaps the most celebrated of the nineteenth-century classical Indologists, the German-born Oxford professor Max Müller (1823–1900)—while he was apparently sympathetic to India (a country he never visited)—held views that were not too distant from these. On the other hand, the British politician Thomas Babington Macaulay was among the most dismissive in his global judgment on the worth of Indian culture. But many others, from James Mill to Karl Marx (who famously wrote on India in the 1850s) were no less certain of the lowly status of the Indian culture they believed they saw before them, and of the historic role that the British Empire would play in setting Indian society back on the rails, both metaphorically and literally. To be sure, other voices were also heard expressing a somewhat dif ferent opinion. One of these was that of the eccentric French ori-

INTRODUCTION

entalist Garcin de Tassy (1794–1878), who insisted in works like Histoire de la littérature hindoue e hindoustanie that northern Indian vernacular culture and literature were vigorous objects eminently worthy of study.85 This was part of a quarrel, ongoing even today, on the relative significance of “high” and “low” (or “folk”) elements in the understanding of Indian culture. Broadly the same line of argument was carried further by men like the Irish-born George Grierson (1851–1941), who studied oral epics, and other aspects of northern Indian peasant life, regarding academic orientalism as overly concerned with the study of “pandit religion.” Further, the consolidation of a Romantic movement in Europe in the course of the nineteenth century also saw some intellectuals valorizing at least a part of Indian culture, as represented in its ancient texts.86 These textual materials were certainly not the only means through which Europe imagined India in the course of the nineteenth century. The direct circulation of human beings equally played a very important role. Europeans regularly made their way to India as mercenary soldiers, administrators, and traders and in a variety of professions during the entire period of Company rule and brought back their impressions of India, as well as their offspring, who were sometimes of mixed descent. From the second half of the eighteenth century, Indian visitors came to Britain and Europe in some numbers, and this continued through the nineteenth century. Some of these were men like Mirza Abu Talib Isfahani, who was in Europe between 1799 and 1803, and left quite an impression on many members of high society.87 The changing technology of transportation was in part responsible for the growing ease of human circulation, with the eventual opening of the Suez Canal in November 1869 marking a significant step in the process. Changing technologies were also partly responsible for shifting regimes in the circulation of images. European artists were beginning to appear in India in increasing numbers in the second half of the eighteenth century. By about 1800, they had produced a vogue for picturesque works depicting Indian ruins and vistas, of which the most celebrated can be seen in the aquatints of Thomas and William Daniell, in their Oriental Scenery. Engravings and lithographs of Indian scenes and figures continued to appear and

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find a ready market in the next several decades, both as freestanding works and accompanied by texts, of which an excellent example is Louis-Mathieu Langlès’s Monuments anciens et modernes de l’Hindoustan (1817–1821). While ostensibly realistic in their representational conventions, these works helped consolidate images of an India of romantic and desolate ruins. Europeans continued to be preoccupied until the events of 1857–1858 with a certain number of new and old orientalist topoi—namely, monuments, royal figures and darbārs, thugs, “suttee,” and “nautch” girls—but a somewhat greater diversity was now present in the palette of images and representations. So much then for the “big picture,” and the long chronological sweep. It is time now to return to the sixteenth century, and the new beginnings of a European-Indian relationship inaugurated by the consolidation of the Portuguese-dominated Carreira da Índia, or Cape Route. The chapters that follow trace the emergence of the multiple images of India in Eu ropean eyes over three centuries, through a variety of actors and their perspectives. If some of these perspectives stress analogy and “sympathy,” others are noted for their emphasis on the negative, whether in the analysis of political organization, social structure, or belief-systems. It may also be useful from the outset to clarify what this book does not intend to achieve. It is above all not an encyclopedic account of European engagement with India in the early modern period, an exercise which— even if it were considered worthy of attempting—would require many volumes and some thousands of pages. Further, several aspects have been deliberately set aside here, sometimes because they have been dealt with competently elsewhere. The history of Euro-Indian commerce in this period, for example, is not one of the central themes treated in a systematic fashion here. Nor will a straightforward political narrative be attempted.88 Rather, we focus on a history of representations and, in a related vein, on a history of knowledge formation. If these involve the realm of words above all, the question of images also figure periodically in our analysis.

1 ON THE INDO- PORTUGUESE MOMENT Ganges, no qual os seus habitadores Morrem banhados, tendo por certeza Que, inda que sejam grandes pecadores, Esta água santa os lava e dá pureza. The Ganges, where every man of Hind Washes himself and dies, knowing for sure, That even if he has greatly sinned, In that holy water he is rendered pure. —Luís Vaz de Camões, Lusíadas (1572), 10.121

Introduction Some three decades into the Portuguese presence in Asia, in the year 1528, the Portuguese governor of the Estado da Índia, Lopo Vaz de Sampaio, was somewhat perplexed to receive a letter from Gujarat. The letter, written in a rather clear scribal hand, addressed him not in Portuguese or Persian, but in French. This is how its contents ran (in a more-or-less literal translation). To the most high and powerful lord [blank space] Governor of India, under the high power of the very illustrious, invincible and most victorious King of Portugal. Thirty-six poor, miserable, Christians of the nation of France, held in captivity and servitude in the mountain of Chanpaner, in the hands of the great dog [grant chien] Bahador,1 supplicate the very high and powerful lord [blank space] Governor of India, under the high power of the most illustrious and invincible King of Portugal. We supplicate your high and noble lordship, that it may please you to take pity, compassion and have mercy and 45

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grace on [this] desolate company, who have been brought and conducted to these parts from over there in a ship [nef ] called La Marie de Bon Secours, also termed Le Grant Engloys, belonging to the merchants of Rouen; under the charge and direction of a Portuguese who called himself Estiene Dies [Estêvão Dias], who was the captain, pilot, merchant, organizer and entrepreneur of the said voyage, under the permission of the King and of Monseigneur de Bryon, Grand Admiral of France. Which crew was misled and seduced by the said captain and merchants of the said ship, and by the master named Jehan Breulhy de Funag, who gave them to understand that the said ship was only going to the island of Sainct Thome or to the Magnicongue, and that if the said captain could not find a lading in the said places, to go to the land of Brazil in order to find a lading for the said ship, as is stated in the certificate and contract of the said captain. Even the contract of the companions and mari ners with the master of the said ship which was passed before the registry of Honfleur states the same.2 The claim is thus made that rather than infringing on the monopoly of the Indian Ocean trade that the Portuguese claimed by view of Papal Bulls and the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), the ship’s crew was under the impression that they were destined on a trading mission for West Africa, Brazil, or the São Tomé archipelago. Misled by the Portuguese Dias, and his other partners, they now find themselves instead in India, in the hands of Sultan Bahadur of Gujarat (r. 1526–1537), in his great fortress-capital of Champaner. How could this turn of events have come about? The letter continues with its explanation: Which crew, in all good faith, undertook the said voyage, and they navigated so far that on the 20th day of November of 1527, we arrived at the port and haven of Quiloa [Kilwa, in East Africa], in which place we wintered, remaining there until the fifth day of the following April, while awaiting favourable weather; for our said captain gave us to understand that he would never take us to a place where the Portuguese had dominion or

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trade, while telling us that he wished to go to Dieu [Diu], a port of Canbaye [Cambay, or Gujarat]; and we had neither acquaintance nor knowledge of these places, for none of us had even heard of them. We raised anchor, and went to sea, and navigated so far that on the 25th of May we arrived before the city of Dieu. Then, having anchored in the said place at the roadstead, the said captain made it known to some foists [small galleys] that came to speak to us that we were merchants, and that they should give us an assurance to trade with them, which was granted to us; but after the assurance had been given, they held back our said captain on land and took the said ship and merchandise, and even our own bodies were taken, and held, and placed in perpetual captivity and servitude. All this is posed as a sign of the lack of faith and honor on the part of the Diu authorities, but the context was in fact one where the Gujarat sultan (like his father, Sultan Muzaffar) had faced almost annual attacks by Portuguese fleets off his coast since around 1520. The arrival of an unknown European ship, ostensibly desiring trade and amity, was undoubtedly something of a novelty in the context. As for Estêvão Dias, he seems to have been a rather slippery character in his own right, as the remaining half of the letter now recounts to the Portuguese governor. And therefore, noble Sire, we are miserable, and have no hope save in God and in your noble lordship, for if your noble will so desires, your great power can act, for if Your Highness does not see to it, we are on the route to perdition, for our said captain [Dias] is negotiating hard with the King to have his own liberty, and in fact the King has granted it to him and he goes about everywhere with the King, and it is clear that he does not wish ever to go to [Portuguese] India or negotiate to take us with him, and if your noble lordship does not remedy this, we shall be the children of perdition. But whatever happens to us, or is done to us, we will live and die in the Holy Catholic Faith of Jesus Christ: for we have been interrogated many times on which skills and things we know how to practice, for our said

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captain has entertained the King and the lords who have said that they will do us many favours and our captain has communicated this to us, to which we, and especially our bombardiers, have responded that in this land with this rabble [avec ceste quenaille], we have no desire to be any greater than we [already] are, for we would prefer to live in poverty with our Christian brothers rather than to be great lords with the enemies of the Faith. May it please Your Highness to turn your sweet countenance and survey with your pitying and merciful eye these poor Christians, who ask you for your pardon, and that your noble lordship might be enriched by the gift of pity for, excellent Sire, it is a virtue that is more divine than human to pardon, for it is the nature of God the Creator to pardon poor sinners when they ask him for pardon and mercy, and you should not permit that so many souls be lost and spent in the hands of these damned dogs. And therefore, noble Sire, may you be turned towards mercy and pity towards these poor Christians rather than to the rigour and severity of justice! By doing so, you will merit the grace of God, to whom we pray that He grants you a good and long life, with perpetual triumph and glory. The interest expressed by the mercantile milieux of Dieppe, Honfleur, and Rouen in the Iberian overseas possession in the 1520s is quite well-known.3 The main figure involved was the corsair and entrepreneur Jean Ango, but a number of others—including some Italians and Portuguese— could be found around him, with ambitions in the Atlantic, but eventually also spilling into the Indian Ocean.4 Not long after the voyage of the unfortunate letter-writers cited above, the brothers Jean and Raoul Parmentier set off on an expedition to Sumatra, never to return; however, materials concerning their travels did survive and were even published.5 In the middle decades of the sixteenth century, a certain amount of information regarding the Indian Ocean came to accumulate in the hands of those in the ports of Normandy, contributing to the creation over several decades of the celebrated “Dieppe school” of cartography, which gave visual expression to the knowledge gathered, among

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others, from men like Estêvão Dias, who led the failed Diu voyage of 1527–1528. This school was partly based on practical knowledge, though one cannot underestimate the role played by armchair intellectuals such as Pierre Desceliers, the abbot at Arques-la-Bataille and something of a pioneer in the matter of making world maps.6 The letter from the anonymous Frenchmen in 1528 brings home a number of other curious aspects of the early Portuguese presence in the Indian Ocean. The first is the desire on the part of the Crown, whether Dom Manuel (r. 1495–1521) or his son and successor Dom João III (r. 1521–1557) to keep a relatively tight lid on concrete information concerning the Indian Ocean and Asia in the first decades of the sixteenth century. Almost all texts that the Portuguese produced and circulated in the years before 1530 were rather vague concerning the specifics, even when they were stridently propagandistic in nature. This certainly had an effect, and we can see that the Norman mari ners of 1528 were woefully ill-informed. But other Eu ropeans seem to have been less constrained in their access to information, whether cartographic or commercial, often using quite unscrupulous means. A celebrated example of this is the so-called Cantino planisphere, surreptitiously acquired in Lisbon by Alberto Cantino, the agent of the Duke of Ferrara in that city in 1502. Equally, in the fi rst two decades of the sixteenth centuries, some of the Flemish, Germans, and Italians who sailed to India on board Portuguese ships began to put out accounts for audiences elsewhere in Eu rope. As early as 1504, there appeared in Antwerp an anonymous printed account in Flemish called Calcoen (a distortion of Calicut), whose author described his own participation in the second voyage of Vasco da Gama to India in 1502–1503.7 It begins thus: “This is the voyage which a man wrote himself, how far he sailed with seventy ships from the river of Lisbon, in Portugal, to go to Calicut in India, and this occurred in the year 1501 [sic].” Laconic in the extreme, it goes on to describe the fleet’s experiences in East Africa, the celebrated attack by Gama on a ship carrying returning hājīs from Mecca, and then offers a mere handful of other details. These include the Portuguese difficulties with the authorities at Calicut, and their happier dealings at Cochin, as well as with the so-called St.  Thomas Christians in the region.

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On the 2nd day of November we sailed from Calcoen 60 miles to a kingdom called Cusschaïn [Cochin]; and between these two towns is a Christian kingdom called Granor [Cranganor, Kerala], and there are many good Christians; and in this kingdom live many Jews, and they have a prince there. You understand that all the Jews of the country are also subjects of the same prince. And the Christians have nothing to do with anybody, and they are good Christians. They neither sell nor buy anything during the consecrated days, and they neither eat nor drink with anybody but Christians. They willingly came to our ships with fowls and sheep, and caused us to make good cheer. They had just sent priests to the pope at Rome to know the true faith. Nor is the text particularly prolix in terms of the commercial or ethnographic details it provides in its remaining pages. One of the more extended passages runs as follows. The people of this country have black teeth, because they eat the leaves of the trees and a white thing like chalk actually with the leaves, and it comes from it that the teeth become black, and that is called tombour [Arabic tanbul, betel] and they carry it always with them wherever they go or are traveling. The pepper grows as the vine does in our country. There are in the country cats as big as our foxes, and it is from them that the musk comes, and it is very dear, for a cat is worth 100 ducats, and the musk grows between his legs, under his tail. Ginger grows as a reed, and cinnamon as a willow; and every year they strip the cinnamon from its bark, however thin it is, and the youngest is the better. The true summer is in December and January. A few years later, the South German commercial firm of Welser sent an agent, a Bavarian merchant named Balthasar Sprenger, to India along with the entering Captain-Major (and later viceroy) Dom Francisco de Almeida. On his return in 1506, Sprenger published an

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account that eventually gained a certain level of notoriety and inaugurated a series of such accounts in German concerning India in the sixteenth century.8 An aspect of some consequence here was the presence in Augsburg (where the Welsers based their affairs) of a number of prominent artists proficient in the art of the woodcut. One of these, Hans Burgkmair, seems to have drawn on a version of Sprenger’s account to produce iconic scenes of southern Indian life, notably one showing the “King of Cochin” (Der Kunig von Gutzin) being carried in a palanquin.9 Not long after, Burgkmair’s contemporary, Jörg Breu, produced illustrations for the 1515 German translation of the Itinerario of Ludovico di Varthema, a Bolognese adventurer who had also sojourned in early Portuguese India and produced a somewhat fanciful account of his experiences.10 Breu’s images famously underlined the horrific and monstrous aspects of the gods whom the Indians worshipped, and appear to have become the prototypes for the representation of a vast spectrum of religiosity in the non-European world, with “Calicut” coming to stand in for anything from Africa to Brazil. Even if the Flemish and Germans appeared to have taken the early lead in diffusing materials regarding Portuguese encounters and experiences in the Indian Ocean, it was the Italian intervention which may be said to have truly made the difference. We have already noted the existence of Varthema’s curious text, initially published in 1510, but quickly translated from Italian into other languages, notably Latin in 1511, and the very popu lar Spanish version of 1520. Two other important documents from the traveler and intellectual Andrea Corsali then appeared in print in Florence, the Lettera allo illustrissimo Iuliano de Medici venuta dell’India (1516) and the Lettera allo ill. Laurentio de’ Medici ex India (1518). But such crumbs could only serve to whet the appetite. The major project—in some respects a turning point for the reception of India in Europe—was to be that of the Venetian bureaucrat and intellectual Giovanni Battista Ramusio, who served as the secretary of the senate in the island republic for some thirty-seven years, and ended his life as secretary of the Council of Ten. Though he seems to have traveled very little, Ramusio had an extensive network of contacts and intellectual interlocutors,

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The King of Cochin (Der Kunig von Gutzin), engraving after Hans Burgkmair (1508), British Museum, London, Nr. 1957,0705.55. © Trustees of the British Museum. (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

including some of the best-informed Italians of the day. He was certainly aware that relatively little regarding the Portuguese Estado da Índia was freely available in Europe, notwithstanding the existence of a few projects of compilation such as Fracanzio da Montalboddo’s hugely successful Paesi novamente retrovati (1507), and the Protestant theologian Simon Grynaeus’s Novus orbis regionum ac insularum veteribus incognitarum (1532). He thus launched into the production of his massive Navigationi et Viaggi, which eventually appeared in three volumes (albeit out of order) between 1550 and 1559.11 In the fi rst of these volumes, Ramusio produced versions of wellknown texts, as well as hitherto unknown ones, including abridged versions of the great narratives of Duarte Barbosa and Tomé Pires. By the early 1550s, therefore, the European reader could gain access to an India made up of dif ferent elements, whether in terms of politics, society, or religion. Had merchants and sailors from Dieppe or Honfleur decided to depart for Gujarat in 1557, rather than 1527, they would have had no excuse for not having a decent sense of the commercial and cultural geography of the Indian Ocean world. This would surely have included a clear notion of powerful Muslim polities there, notably in the area of the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf as well as western India. They could have gathered easily that even the Islamic world was divided somewhat between those (like the Sultans of Aceh in Sumatra) who favored the Sunni Ottomans, and

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Lahore M U G HA L

0

Delhi

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0

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Agra

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E M P I R E Ahmadabad Cambay G U J A R AT Diu Surat Gulf of Cambay Daman Bassein Bombay Chaul

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U R RA A P KANA

Honavar Bhatkal

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Kollam

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IJ

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Madurai

B AY O F BENGAL

São Tomé

Nagapattinam

Tuticorin

Cape Comorin

Pulicat

SRI LANKA (CEYLON)

Colombo INDIAN OCEAN

Eu ropean settlements in Asia before 1600. Map by William L. Nelson.

others—like some of the rulers of the Deccan—who were closely attached to the Shi‘i Safavids. Moreover, they would have known by then that a large population existed of what the Portuguese termed gentios (gentiles), peoples who were neither Muslim, nor Christian, nor Jews. Indeed, the reader of Ramusio could have gained a reasonable insight into the state of play in the Indian Ocean area in about 1520, and the real difficulty would have been in keeping abreast of subsequent developments. This would be the task of the Portuguese chronicles, which eventually took the lead from the Italians as the sixteenth century wore on.

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The Iberian Chronicling Tradition The analysis of the early modern Portuguese chronicling tradition takes us back to the medieval Islamic past of the Iberian Peninsula. It is obvious enough that the southern part of Iberia (including what would later be a good part of the kingdom of Portugal) was heavily influenced by the Arabic language and its literature for over seven hundred years, from the early eighth century CE onward. Much has been written about this period, and the echoes of the lively (and even violent) polemic that arose between Américo Castro and Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz on the nature of Islamic influence on medieval Spanish culture have not entirely died down even today.12 It seems from the perspective of today that neither was particularly right: if Castro was too eager to invent and sustain a golden moment of convivencia between Muslims, Christians, and Jews in the medieval period, Sánchez-Albornoz has been justly criticized for his hyperskeptical stance in relation to Arabic sources and his obsession with an essential “Spanishness”—or hispanidad— among a multitude of other sins. Leaving aside the broad contours of this debate, a specific issue was the importance and “reliability” of an Arabic-language historiography that was produced in the Iberian Peninsula and in North Africa over several centuries. Curiously, even recent votaries of a version of convivencia have preferred to shy away from this question, instead looking to belles-lettres and mysticism as the main areas to be explored in the composite culture apparently shared by the adherents of the three Mosaic religions in Iberia at the time.13 This is not to say, of course, that the Arabic historiography produced in Iberia has been neglected by specialists in the last hundred years or so—far from it.14 We can turn to the classic work of Évariste Lévi-Provençal and his unfi nished, multivolume Histoire de l’Espagne musulmane for proof of the contrary with regard to the first centuries of the Muslim presence in Spain.15 Other philologists and historians in Spain also participated fully in this work, and among them we may count such celebrated names as Ambrosio Huici Miranda and his Colección de crónicas árabes de la Reconquista.16 In the 1970s, Pedro Chalmeta Gendrón cast a critical eye on the weaknesses and philological blind spots of this earlier historiography, and in a

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series of essays proposed a useful scheme to classify the considerable historiographical production in Arabic of medieval Spain (or perhaps Iberia, given the ambiguities inherent in the word “España”). To be sure, Gendrón noted the presence of a vast number of genres, ranging from biographical dictionaries to mixed “novelistic” works in prose and verse. But he centered his analysis above all on two distinct types of historical production: the more primitive and loosely constructed khabar (plural, akhbār), which he termed “a discontinuous and intemporal history,” based largely on an accumulation of episodes and anecdotes, and with minimal attention paid to causal schemes; and the more complex tārīkh, a sequenced chronicle-style history with elaborate notions of causation, which he saw as eventually triumphing over khabar and overtaking it. This is how he developed the contrast between the two: Here [in tārīkh], everything is contrasted to khabar: one no longer writes for a group but for the State and therefore with selfcensorship with regard to whatever was or might be considered to be unedifying. This would no longer be spontaneous, popular and anonymous work, but personal, thought through, worked on; priding itself in the fact of copying documents and archives, instead of [spoken] words, with a sense of being “well-read.” It would be the labour of literati, of cultivated people, of intellectual circles, of those who—with the exception of the desire for chronological stability—would centre every thing on the State (which could be global or regional), thus ensuring that the earlier multi-focal viewpoint would to a certain extent disappear.17 Such works of tārīkh, we know, proliferated at the time of the Caliphate of Córdoba, but they can equally be found in the last centuries of Muslim Spain, with the Nasrids in the south for example.18 They sat side by side with works in Latin and the Iberian vernaculars, and at times described the same events or processes from another angle of vision. On some occasions we can even see a historian in Latin drawing explicitly on works in Arabic as sources; this is the case, for example, with the Historia Arabum of the archbishop of Toledo, Rodrigo Ximénez de Rada (1170–1247).19 Furthermore,

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given the complex and cross-cutting relationship between the Nasrids and the Marinids, there is every reason to link the world of Iberian tārīkh production to the more general historiographical reflection that one usually associates with Ibn Khaldun, whose family had long been settled in Seville and who himself spent time in the 1360s at the Nasrid court at Granada.20 It is another matter that much concrete work remains to be done to establish the precise connections between Ibn Khaldun’s more general philosophical and sociolog ical reflections and the actual work of writing history at that time, including his own ventures in that direction.21 It is difficult to say to what extent the southern part of what eventually became the kingdom of Portugal was implicated in this world of Arabic historiography. There is no doubt that few real boundaries existed for the circulation of literati between the west (al-Gharb alAndalus) and the center of the Iberian Peninsula between the eighth and twelfth centuries.22 A few celebrated intellectuals can certainly be pointed to whose careers testify to this fact, such as Ibn Bassam al-Shantarini (d. 1147–1148), the author of a multivolume biographical dictionary entitled al-Zakhīra fī mahāsin ahl al-Jazīra, who moved from his native Santarém to Seville.23 A generation later, we have the instance of Ibn Sahib al-Salah (d. 1198), a native of Beja who both served and wrote a history of the Almohads entitled al-Mann bi-alImāma.24 However, with the consolidation of the Christian kingdom of Portugal in the later twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, one may discern a gradual closing of such possibilities, which are likely to have been increasingly limited as the Portuguese Reconquista took its course from the time of the near-legendary Battle of Ourique (1139), to the eventual capture of the Algarve by the king Dom Afonso III (1249). Nevertheless, Arabic speakers continued to be found in the kingdom of Portugal, particularly in the principal urban centers of the south. Lisbon (formerly al-Ushbuna), for example, continued to have its “Moorish quarter” (mouraria) until the early sixteenth century, and we cannot exclude the possibility that a certain number of Jewish and Christian intellectuals had some exposure to the Arabic literary tradition in other towns that had been prominent in the time of Muslim rule, such as Mértola (Martula), Évora (Yabura), Silves (Shilb), and Santarém (Shantarin). However, it has often been

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remarked that in contrast to southern Spain, little or no traces of manuscript collections have survived in Portugal, and even the practice of writing Romance languages in Arabic script (aljamia or aljamiado) remained rather limited to the west. In 1499, some five thousand Arabic manuscripts were burned publicly in Granada on the orders of Cardinal Cisneros, but by that time nothing approaching that number of works even existed in all of Portugal.25 In other words, one can quite safely state that by the latter half of the fifteenth century, a quite considerable social amnesia regarding the Arabic language and its literature (including its historiography) had come into place in the now consolidated kingdom of Portugal. To be sure, the Portuguese presence in North Africa—from the conquest of Ceuta in 1415 onward— ensured that not all was forgotten at the oral level.26 Arabic continued to be used for day-to-day contacts in Morocco, as well as in correspondence with sovereigns and local notables of that area. But in Portugal itself the only groups of literati who seem to have continued to pursue its use into the sixteenth century were in the medical profession, as we see from the case of the visiting Flemish intellectual Clenardus, or Nicolas Cleynaerts (1495–1542), who attempted to learn Arabic while employed as a tutor to a Portuguese prince in the 1530s. We learn from his letters that the only solution that he eventually found was to seek out a Portuguese physician in Évora by the name of António Filipe (Antonius Philippus), and to learn the language through books on medicine.27 Certainly, the works of Ibn Bassam or Ibn Sahib al-Salah were not to be found easily by this time in their places of birth. In a seminal essay from three quarters of a century ago on the teaching of Arabic in Salamanca during the Renaissance, Marcel Bataillon wrote: “Renaissance Spain was at one and the same time the country best suited to become a seedbed of Arabic scholarship and the country least inclined to play this role.”28 Perhaps Portugal was not quite as well placed, but it was certainly no more willing to play this role than Span was by the late fifteenth century. There was of course a great irony to all this, as indeed to the fact that at this time Arabic and other “Oriental” languages were far better represented at the level of both teaching and manuscripts in Italy than on the Iberian Peninsula.29 For, as we well know, in the

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later fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, two of the most impor tant Iberian states— Castile and Portugal— set about constructing dispersed empires on a world scale, which required them to come into contact with other peoples and cultures. This was a bloody and complex process, the cultural and political consequences of which are still with us today. Part of the difficulty lay in the fact that these very states were also simultaneously in the process of redefining their internal cultural politics in a rather radical fashion. The same decade that saw Columbus’s voyages to the continent that he would never call America, and Vasco da Gama’s arrival on the southwest coast of India, also witnessed the expulsion of the Jews and the partial expulsion of Muslims from Spain, and a similar (but somewhat variant) process, involving a larger dose of conversion in Portugal. Eventually, on account of the vagaries of the Columbian voyages and the nature of the Treaty of Tordesillas, the Spaniards were never to have extensive contact with Muslim populations overseas, save in the Philippines.30 In the case of the Portuguese, however, the problem turned out to be quite dif ferent. Already their fifteenth-century advances into North Africa had brought them into conflict with a series of Muslim states, a process which many ideologues of the time tended to see as the resumption (after a hiatus) of the logic of the Reconquista. Yet, ironically, this was not simply an encounter with a familiar “enemy,” for all that the same word Moor (or mouro) was used by Portuguese through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to designate Muslims wherever they found them. Rather, it was an enemy who had become strangely unfamiliar because nothing had been done institutionally to preserve knowledge concerning them. Part of this process was therefore the rediscovery of Islam, a process that the missionary orders of the Counter-Reformation would still be struggling with in the early seventeenth century. A second aspect was the rediscovery of the history of Muslim peoples, which required an investment in both old skills that had been unlearned and altogether new ones that a dif ferent context imposed on the Portuguese. In the Indian Ocean, the Portuguese were thus to rediscover the world of the tārīkh. It is well-known that over a century and a half separated the Portuguese “reconquest” of the Algarve from their capture of the North

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African outpost of Ceuta in August 1415, the moment usually taken to mark the beginning of Portuguese overseas expansion. These intermediate years did not see the emergence of a significant chronicling tradition in Portuguese. Rather, it was probably in the later 1410s that we meet the first important Portuguese chronicler, the chief archivist (or guarda- mor) of the royal document collection (the Torre do Tombo), Fernão Lopes, who worked under the direct patronage of the prince Dom Duarte and was eventually made official chronicler in the 1430s, when that prince assumed the throne. Lopes was a prolific and respected writer in his time, but is generally thought to depend on oral and popu lar materials to a somewhat greater degree than on the archives that were in his charge. He was also capable of somewhat sustained reflection on the matter of historywriting itself, rather than simply treating it as something that was self-evident or a banal and practical matter.31 In his well-known prologue to the first part of the Crónica d’El Rei Dom João I, for example, he argued that the central struggle of the historian was against “affection” (afeição), or what a recent critic has termed “the problematic, affective impulse that compels history-writers to misrepresent events in their texts to the advantage of benefactors and homeland.”32 Thus, when describing the contests between Portuguese and Castilians in the late fourteenth century, one might be tempted always to present things in the best possible light for the Portuguese, but this temptation should (so Lopes thought) be stoutly resisted. This was why Lopes himself claimed that he had “with so much care and diligence seen great volumes of books, and greatly varied languages and lands [grandes volumes de livros, e desvairadas linguagens, e terras], and even public writings from many archives [muitos cartórios] and other places, in which after long vigils and great travails, we could not have any greater certainty in the content of this work.” Lopes has already made his position on the matter of the completeness of knowledge clear in any earlier passage: “for to err is nothing else than to believe that what has come down to us is the truth, and misleading oneself through ignorance of ancient writings and varied authors, one can well state an error.”33 Despite (or then again, perhaps, precisely on account of) this claim to a dispassionate history that takes account of all possible sources,

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Fernão Lopes’s work is somewhat overshadowed by that of his successor Gomes Eanes de Zurara (or Azurara), a prolific writer who is best known for his Crónica dos feitos notáveis que se passaram na conquista da Guiné por mandado do infante D. Henrique (often abbreviated as the Crónica da Guiné). This is in large measure a panegyric work devoted to the praise of the prince Dom Henrique ( brother of Dom Duarte), who for several decades was largely responsible for the enterprise of the Portuguese exploration of the African west coast and its commercial exploitation. Though partly an autodidact, Zurara was erudite, and his range of citations and references runs from Aristotle and Avicenna, to Boccaccio. However, the extent to which he made use of materials coming, as it were, from the “other side,” in the Crónica da Guiné, was rather limited. In a significant passage in his invocation (dedicated to the Infante Dom Henrique), he does show some awareness of the issue: Other voices [outras vozes] very contrary to these I have recounted thus far sounded in my ears, for which I should have felt great compassion had I not found them to be from outside our law [ fora de nossa ley]. For countless souls of Moors addressed me, both on this side and the other [of the Straits of Gibraltar], of whom many had died by your lance in this most cruel war you have always waged against them. And others presented themselves before me loaded with irons, their countenances pitiable, men who were captured by your ships through the great strength of the bodies of your vassals; but in these I noticed that they complained less of their ultimate fate than of their initial one, that is, of the seductive error in which that false schismatic Maffamede [Muhammad] left them.34 Here the Muslim “voice” does exist, but only as it is imagined by Zurara; and this act of imagination can be easily cauterized as it were by the mere fact that they belong to a rival faith, which is significantly not greatly demonized beyond being called “schismatic” (cismatico). Interestingly, some years later in 1467, while writing the Crónica do Conde Dom Duarte de Meneses, about the captain of the fortified settlement of Alcácer-Ceguer, he went somewhat further. On

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this occasion, we are told that Zurara “took care to obtain information from the Moors themselves, both from such as visited Alcácer and from those he met when accompanying D. Henrique [de Meneses] to treat of matters with the inhabitants of the neighboring places.”35 However, these contacts seem to have remained within the domain of the oral. There is, however, one intriguing reference that suggests Zurara in fact did have some limited access to the written materials and formal historiography produced in North Africa. This is a passage in his earliest historical work, the Crónica da tomada de Ceuta (dating to 1449–1450), in which he discusses the origins of the city. And it is recounted by Abilabez, who was a man of great learning [grande doutor] amongst the Moors, that this city was founded two hundred and thirty-three years after the destruction wrought by the flood. . . . And he states that the city’s founder was Noah’s grandson, and that this was the first city he founded in all the lands of Africa, and because of this named it Ceuta, which means “beginning of beauty” in the Chaldean language.36 And he states that he ordered that some letters be chiseled onto the first foundation stone. “This is my city of Ceuta which I have populated above all with people from my lineage [minha geração]. Its citizens will rank above all the nobility of Africa. There will come a day when the blood of diverse nations will be spilled over its possession [seu senhorio], and its name will last until the end of the Last Judgment.”37 What is of interest here is the specific textual reference and invocation of authority, for it is a nod in the direction of the great saintly figure of Sidi Abi al-‘Abbas al-Sabti (d. 1204), and may even be drawn from his hagiography al-Tashawwuf ilá rijāl al-tasawwuf wa-akhbār Abī al-‘Abbās al- Sabtī. Abi al-‘Abbas (Zurara’s “Abilabez”), as his demonym “al-Sabti” indicates, was born in Ceuta but then moved to Marrakesh, where he emerged as a major Sufi figure in the twelfth century.38 If one had to cite an authoritative Muslim savant, one could scarcely have done better for that time and place. But this Arabic reference in Zurara is very much the exception and not the rule. This situation remained the case for the next

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half-century or so, even after the Portuguese had rounded the Cape of Good Hope to enter into the commerce of the Indian Ocean. We have already noted the role played by the Italians, the Germans, and the Flemish in these early years. The first completed and published text that can be said to approximate a chronicle of the Portuguese in Asia is, paradoxically, a work in Castilian. This is the Conquista de las Indias de Persia e Arabia que hizo la armada del rey don Manuel de Portugal, jointly produced by Martín Fernández de Figueroa (who had been in Asia) and the humanist Juan Agüero de Trasmiera, and was published in Salamanca in September 1512, a mere thirteen years after Vasco da Gama’s return to Lisbon from his first voyage.39 In this work, we are first given a short and somewhat inaccurate account of the early Portuguese voyages before entering into more interesting materials dating from 1505, when Figueroa himself arrived in the Indian Ocean accompanying the Castilian captain (and native of Salamanca) Pedro de Añaya, who was a part of the fleet carry ing the first Portuguese viceroy of the Indies, Dom Francisco de Almeida. After Añaya’s death in Sofala in June 1506, Figueroa continued to see vigorous action on a number of occasions and the text recounts a series of military episodes, including Afonso de Albuquerque’s aggressive moves at Hurmuz in 1508, the combat against a Mamluk fleet at Diu in 1509, as well as the Portuguese dealings with and capture of Goa in 1510. Naturally, much of this combat was with Muslims (moros), to whom the text usually shows consistent hostility but also some confusion (as on one occasion where we are told that the enemies were not strictly moros but infi eles, some of whom were actually gentiles). But the basis for all that is recounted is once again for the most part essentially oral— and not textual. Agüero, who himself writes in the first person, treats Figueroa as an informant and presents him in the third person. The chronicle thus mixes Figueroa’s personal experiences with hearsay, rumor, and references both to earlier works on Asia (such as those by Marco Polo and Poggio Bracciolini), and the medieval Iberian romance tradition. This movement to-and-fro between the chronicling tradition and the travel account was never quite resolved during the rest of the sixteenth century, as shown in another celebrated text, the Peregrinação of Fernão Mendes Pinto.40

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But Pinto’s work, published in 1614, takes us somewhat beyond the limits of the present exercise, which intends to concentrate on the great chronicling tradition of the first century or so after Gama’s arrival in Asian waters. A conventional and well-established history exists of Portuguese historiography in relation to the Indian Ocean in the sixteenth century, which— like all conventional historiographies—is not entirely devoid of virtues.41 It tells us in effect of four great chroniclers, surrounded by a host of minor ones, as well as a complex set of relations with historians of Portugal itself in the same period. These chroniclers are Fernão Lopes de Castanheda (1500–1559), João de Barros (1496–1570), Gaspar Correia (ca. 1492–1563), and a clear generation later Diogo do Couto (1542– 1616).42 In the constellation surrounding them are many, many others, ranging from Brás de Albuquerque, to Leonardo Nunes, António de Castilho, António Pinto Pereira, and the anonymous writer of a valuable early sixteenth-century chronicle which bears a certain resemblance to the text of Castanheda.43 Further, we have the great central chroniclers operating out of Portugal in the same period, who treated the Asian experience as part of a global history of the Portuguese monarchy; among these, the most important were Damião de Góis and Jerónimo Osório. The bulk of these writers produced their chief works in Portuguese, but Osório (1506–1580) chose to write his De rebus Emmanuelis regis Lusitaniae in Latin, which seems for a time to have given his chronicle greater circulation and accessibility than some of its competitors (and the approbation of even the skeptical Michel de Montaigne).44 The same conventional historiographical analy sis divides the four Portuguese chroniclers of Asia in dif ferent ways. One obvious orga nizing matrix would place Barros and Couto, who were both officially appointed chroniclers, on the one side of a divide, and Castanheda and Correia on the other on account of their unofficial character. But some analysts have objected that this gives too great importance to structures of patronage in historiographical production, while neglecting the content and nature of the texts themselves. They would point to the deeply conventional nature of Castanheda’s text, the História do descobrimento e conquista da Índia pelos Portugueses, its almost obsessive attention to the faithful copying of documents

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from the royal or vice-regal chanceries into the chronicle, and its reluctance to say anything that might be seen as at all embarrassing to the Portuguese Crown or the upper nobility that led Portuguese actions in Asia. By this light, despite his plainer style and lack of rhetorical flourish, Castanheda does not appear that far from Barros, even though he saw the official chronicler as his chief rival.45 One of the chief passages in Castanheda sets out this opposition and rivalry. Here, he asserts that his authority as a historian derives from the fact that he has lived through “wild and terrible storms, during which I saw myself on the point of death and without hope of life”; further, as a soldier in Asia, he had gone through “a thousand dangers in frightful battles with countless cannon and musket balls.” This was a history then that wished to distance itself from claims of erudition: Castanheda made it a point to insist that he “did not learn [his history] in my house, nor did I send to ask about it in writing from those who knew it.” The barbs are clearly directed at João de Barros, the official historian, who had never been in Asia and only had spent one period on the west coast of Africa. This is the point of Castanheda’s claim that “the time that I spent in India, and what I saw there, was of great help to me in order not simply to be satisfied with what I was told, for if this had not been so, I could easily have been misled, as one who had never set eyes on that land, nor could tell whether or not things could be done in the places where they happened.”46 This precedence given to personal experience and the status of eyewitness is even more acute in the case of another chronicler of the time, the somewhat mysterious Gaspar Correia.47 Correia arrived in Asia at a quite young age, during the governorship of Afonso de Albuquerque (1509–1515), perhaps in his late teens or around twenty. In the four decades and more that he spent there, he traveled extensively, above all in the littoral territories of the western Indian Ocean, but also in the Bay of Bengal, and conceivably even as far as Southeast Asia. He appears to have held scribal, secretarial, and other minor bureaucratic offices, and was a fairly accomplished draughtsman who made both cityscapes and portraits of political actors to illustrate his own work. His most significant historical work for our purposes was the Lendas da Índia (“Legends of India”), which had almost cer-

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tainly been completed by about 1550 (or not long thereafter) but which remained a shadowy text— cited and used by a mere handful of authors and chroniclers—until its eventual publication in the nineteenth century. Prior to that he had also written a history of the kings of Portugal, of which only a fragment has come down to us.48 Correia is a prolix and puzzling author, the epistemological status of whose work remains controversial to this very day. By the nineteenth century it was surrounded by a certain aura, as a sort of samizdat chronicle, which had been deliberately suppressed by the Portuguese nobility (and especially the Gama family) because of its frank and even irreverent contents. Where another chronicler, while recounting the history of a siege in which the Portuguese managed to outwit their besiegers, would suggest that they did this through superior information, Correia might state in a properly subaltern mode that the intelligence was gathered by a Portuguese soldier who went to urinate from the ramparts of a fortress and overheard a conversation in the undergrowth.49 There was also the engaging fact of the high ethnographic color of the chronicle, and its extensive if improbable descriptions of life in Asia, from temple festivals in South India to ostensible exchanges of correspondence between Asian monarchs transcribed from the Persian into Portuguese. In the twentieth century, progressive Portuguese historians pointed to his total lack of subservience to official hierarchies and their demands, and the fact that his book was not dedicated or contained within a scheme of captatio benevolentiae. Here was a historian, it was stated, who as a Spinozian avant la lettre actually wrote history sub specie aeternitatis, with no imagined audience other than posterity in general.50 But the mammoth edifice of Correia’s chronicling really does not withstand close scrutiny in this regard.51 To be sure, he— like Castanheda—is largely untouched by the Counter-Reformation or even by the earlier demands placed on Portuguese empire-building by Franciscan or other missionary ideologues. But his chronicle is constructed around a number of recurring features that would bear mention and that place him at a great distance from the point of view espoused by Fernão Lopes. First, it is clear that Correia was heavily steeped in the tradition of Iberian chivalric fiction, works like the Libro del caballero Zifar, Amadís de Gaula, and even perhaps

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Tirant lo Blanc (although this last is less likely).52 In and of itself, this is not surprising—the Agüero-Figueroa text also contains references to Amadís, while the earlier text of Zurara contains its share of hints in the direction of this literary tradition. But what might be unnerving for his latter-day admirers is the use that Correia makes of this tradition. Whole sequences seem to be directly derived from this chivalric logic, as has been pointed out with regard to his narrative sections concerning the voyage of Paulo and Vasco da Gama to India in 1497–1499. Further, Correia invents characters (of whom there is no trace in any other chronicle or archive), giving them archchivalric names such as Lançarote (or Lancelot) and placing them at the center of action for stretches in his chronicle. A second important characteristic of Correia’s chronicle is his desire for ecumenical closure, particularly in relation to the problem of the partial expulsion of the Jews from Portugal. He manipulates the figure of the Jewish astronomer Abraham Zacut, making him nothing less than the providential agent of the first Portuguese voyages into Asia when in fact Zacut almost certainly had no relationship to these expeditions.53 Again, this continues the tradition of Zurara in part—where the figure of the Infante Dom Henrique is surrounded by an overwhelmingly providentialist odor—but Correia takes matters into far deeper waters. Third, there is the matter of Correia’s alleged access to materials in Asian languages such as Persian, Arabic, and Ottoman Turkish, in particular diplomatic correspondence. These appear particularly in the sections where he deals with the Sultanate of Gujarat in the 1530s, in the years immediately preceding and following the death of Sultan Bahadur Shah in 1537.54 Once again, the materials that Correia presents are highly implausible and are not confirmed elsewhere—unlike the diplomatic letters cited by Castanheda, many of which have close equivalents in the archives.55 From all of these points, we are obliged to conclude that Correia was producing a text in an interesting hybrid genre, moving freely between the chronicle (as it was understood not simply by us, but by his own contemporaries), and the romance-cum-travel-narrative. Of Asian languages, there is a possibility that he may have had some notions of spoken Malayalam in view of the years he spent in Kerala, but one cannot

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believe that he moved in the world of written texts in languages other than those of the Iberian Peninsula (and perhaps a little Latin). This takes us to the most important of the Portuguese chroniclers for the purposes of this chapter, João de Barros. Because he was the officially appointed chronicler of the fi rst phase of Portuguese empire-building in Asia, we know a great deal about Barros.56 He was not merely a historian but an author in a number of dif ferent areas and genres, ranging from panegyrics and grammars, to allegorical and polemical works, and even a curious chivalric romance which he wrote as a relatively young man in around 1520, the Crónica do emperador Clarimundo donde os Reys de Portugal descendem. His chief work, for our purposes, is Da Ásia (Of Asia), a work which claimed in its subtitle to deal with the “the deeds [dos feitos] that the Portuguese did in the discovery and conquest of the seas and lands of the Orient.” Divided following a classical model, that of Livy, into ten book-long segments, the work is hence sometimes known as the Décadas da Ásia. The first three volumes appeared in print during Barros’s lifetime, in 1552, 1553, and 1563; but the fourth was cobbled together posthumously from manuscript fragments and other borrowings by João Baptista Lavanha, and appeared in 1615. Every thing points to the fact that Barros, unlike Correia, had a heightened sense of generic distinctions and wished to guard against the possibility of contamination. He was not alone in this among his contemporaries. For example, the Castilian chronicler Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, slightly older than Barros, authored a romance entitled Don Claribalte (published in 1519), in which the action was largely located in exotic England, though apparently translated by the author from a mysterious Ur-text with the help of a Tartar.57 Fifteen years later, when writing his own chronicle of the Spaniards in America, Oviedo hastened to assure his readers that in this work he was not “telling them nonsense like the lying books of Amadís and those which depend on them,” while elsewhere he wrote of his unhappiness with “various and fabulous treatises, full of lies and based on loves and luxuries and boasting, in which they recount so many and such great follies [tractados varios e fabulosos, llenos de mentiras, e fundados en amores e luxuría e fanfarronerías, en que se cuentan tantos e tan grandes disparates].”58

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Since Barros bears the heaviest burden of all the sixteenth-century Portuguese chroniclers in the matter of defining and defending an ideology of expansion and empire-building, it is often all too easy to overlook the complexity of his work and to portray it as one dimensional.59 One cannot doubt that his room for maneuver was severely limited, when one compares him with Correia or even Castanheda. His successor, Diogo do Couto, who began the business of official chronicling after the Habsburg takeover of the Portuguese Crown in 1580–1581, was also somewhat better located to express his own idiosyncratic opinions because his work was not foundational but reactive.60 Barros himself was aware of the fact that he had only one real predecessor, namely Zurara. In the prologue to the work, addressed to the king Dom João III, he states It has been one hundred and twenty years—for it is of this period that this work treats—that your arms and victory pillars have taken possession not only of all the maritime territories of Africa and Asia, but even of other greater worlds which Alexander might have regretted for he had no word of them; yet there has been no-one who has anticipated me in my work, only Gomes Eanes de Zurara, chief chronicler of these kingdoms [in describing] the affairs of the Infante Dom Henrique, from whom we confess we have taken the greater part of his foundations, as we do not wish to rob him of his due.61 What are the keys to understanding this chronicler in all his complexity? Here, we must return to a set of interesting suggestions made by the late savant Charles R. Boxer in one of his later (and briefer) works, a biography of the chronicler.62 Boxer singles out for attention a relatively obscure work written by Barros in around 1531, a de cade after the Crónica do emperador Clarimundo. This is the strangely titled Rópica Pnefma (or Spiritual Merchandise), an allegorical colloquy conducted between Understanding, Will, and Time on the one hand, and Reason on the other. Eventually banned by the Inquisition in 1581, this was a strongly anticlerical work that was also marked by the heightened influence of Erasmus and his thought on Barros. The work is undoubtedly a curious mixture, though Boxer

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(following the pioneering work of I. S. Révah) terms it “one of the most singular and important works published in Portugal during the old regime.”63 It has a significant dose of anti-Jewish sentiment in it as well as virulent criticisms of the Old Testament, and may in part have been an exhortation to New Christians ( Jewish and Muslim converts) to leave their faiths behind. But it also shows Barros somewhat at odds with courtly life, railing against the venality of the priesthood, and—most interest ing for our ends— expressing doubts about the violent means used in promoting overseas expansion. Although we might suppose that his authorial voice is most often expressed through the embodiment of Reason, it is often the other participants who are given stronger and more convincing arguments. But it is Reason still which is allowed to argue that Christian ity has always spread through peaceful means and not by the force of arms “like the people of Moses did, and the sect of Mohamed, nor by the favor of princes, as did many heretics past and present, but only through the fervor of the faith and of the Holy Spirit which spoke through them.” Even so, when it eventually came time to write his vast chronicle Da Ásia, Barros was clear about how he wished to frame the problem of Portuguese expansion: for him, the struggle against Islam was and would remain the fundamental issue to be confronted. The very first chapter of his work is entitled “Of how the Moors came to capture Spain; and after Portugal was entitled a kingdom, how its Kings launched themselves overseas, where they went on to conquer, both in the parts of Africa, and in Asia: and the reason for the title of this work.” So, in the beginning, to understand why the Portuguese found themselves in Africa and Asia, one had to return to the Muslim conquest of Iberia. Here is Barros on the subject: There having arisen in the land of Arabia that great Anti-Christ Mafamede, more or less in the year 593 of Our Redemption, he so worked the fury of his iron, and the fire of his infernal sect by means of his captains and caliphs, that in the space of a hundred years they conquered in Asia, all of Arabia, and part of Syria, and Persia; and in Africa all of Egypt before and beyond the Nile. And as the Arabs write in their Tarigh, which is a

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summary of deeds which their caliphs accomplished in the conquest of those parts of the Orient, at the same time there arose from there and advanced great numbers of them in order to populate these [lands] of the west, which they call Algarb, and we corrupt into Algarve, beyond the straits; and with the force of their arms they devastated and laid waste the lands, and made themselves lords of the greater part of Mauretania Tingitana, in which is included the kingdoms of Fez and Morocco, though at this time our Eu rope had not felt the persecution of this plague. However, with the passage of the time, during which God wished to pass over the sins of Hispania, awaiting her penitence in regard of the heresies of Arius, Helvidius and Pelagius on account of which she was most set upon (even if they had been extirpated by the Holy Councils celebrated there), in place of penitence, other many more grave and public sins were added on. And what eventually came to be the last straw towards her [Hispania’s] condemnation was the force used on the Cava, daughter of Count Julian [of Ceuta] (even if this was only the ultimate cause, and accidental in nature, according to certain writers). On account of which the Justice of God was provoked, and he used his Divine and ancient judgment which was to castigate public and general sins through the actions of [other] public and notable sinners, and to permit that one heretic be whipped by another, thus avenging himself on his enemies in this way through other, even greater, enemies. And since in that time, these Arabs were the greatest [enemies] He had, as they had infested the Roman Empire and persecuted His Catholic Church, before using them to castigate Hispania, he wished first to castigate them in their heresy by setting alight a competitive fire amongst them regarding who would be seated on the pontificate of their abomination, with this title of Caliph, which at that time was the greatest dignity amongst their Sect.64 It is amusing to note here the use by the usually solemn chronicler of the folklore regarding the “last Visigoth king” Don Rodrigo and La Cava, a staple of both the Arabic and Spanish literary corpus.65 But Barros now also enters into considerable details regarding the

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travails of the Umayyad Caliphate in Syria, focusing in particular on the fourth Caliph, Marwan ibn al-Hakam and the Marwanids (who he terms “Maraunion”). This takes him over the course of some pages first to discuss the dissensions between Shi‘is and Sunnis, then the problems between the ‘Abbasids and Umayyads, and eventually to link the matter up with Iberia, through the figure of ‘Abd alRahman (d. 788), the Umayyad descendant who came to settle in and consolidate Muslim rule at Córdoba. The notion of fitna seems to be translated by him loosely using the term fogo de competência. The chronicler can now proceed rapidly to survey a certain number of issues regarding the Reconquista, and the personage of Portugal’s founder-king Dom Afonso Henriques, before giving a schematic presentation of the overall structure of his work and its logic. Yet, what is of particular interest is an insistence on the authenticity of the source materials used: Barros notes that he has constructed his narrative by “following what the Persians and Arabs write in their Tarigh . . . which we have in our power in the Persian language.”66 For Barros then, the very nature of crónica demanded an encounter with tārīkh.

Philological Encounters In his prologue to the first Década, João de Barros presents an outline account of how he came to write the work. He notes that in 1520 he asked the king Dom Manuel to allow him to embark on the project, showing the king his text on the Emperor Clarimundo as a sample of his style. The king had approved of the matter, but progress had been slow. The succeeding ruler, Dom João III—to whom the prologue is addressed— gave Barros a series of administrative charges which had complicated matters; but as one of these had to do with the Casa da Índia, it had also allowed him to have access to letters and correspondence that were directly relevant to the task of chronicling. Barros thus seems to have spent the late 1520s and the bulk of the 1530s preparing this work, of which a first draft (or so he claimed) was ready in about 1539. The work was explicitly conceived as one of armchair scholarship, distinct from anything that came from the pen of a Fernández de Figueroa, a Castanheda, or a Correia.

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The chronicler intended to bring together five sets of materials: older histories such as that of Zurara; the letters and papers normally generated by the Portuguese expeditions to Asia (and to a more limited extent those of the Spaniards) and their administration there; oral accounts gathered from those participants who returned alive, and to whom Barros had privileged access; written accounts in Portuguese, whether of travel or geographical surveys of a sort that were becoming increasingly common by the 1530s, some of which were spontaneous in composition and others solicited by Barros himself; and, finally, written materials in Asian languages. It is the last of these which particularly distinguishes Barros from Correia and Castanheda, and which made him a model for a certain number of later writers such as Couto. But what was the written Asian corpus on which he could really depend? It is obvious that the Portuguese were somewhat unprepared for the linguistic complexity of the Indian Ocean world in the early sixteenth century, to which their sole initial access was through Arabic (save on the odd occasion when they found a Castilian speaker among the Muslim merchants there). They quickly came to learn of the existence of Malayalam in their dealings in Kerala, and a few— such as the celebrated Duarte Barbosa— appear to have quickly applied themselves to learning the rudiments of that language even though their initial diplomatic dealings in southwestern India (as in East Africa) were conducted in Arabic. By the time of the viceroyalty of Dom Francisco de Almeida (1505–1509), a spectrum of further languages had come to be dimly defined for them, including Sinhala, Malay, Tamil, and perhaps Kannada (for their dealings with the Vijayanagara state in southern India). Chinese loomed on the horizon, though it is unclear whether they had much direct contact with Chinese speakers before the second decade of the sixteenth century. But the real discovery for them was the importance of Persian, a language with which they had had little reason to be familiar. Persian was particularly important by 1500 in two respects: diplomacy and historiography. The diplomatic aspect came to the fore a few years into the century, first in Portuguese dealings with the Persian Gulf (and Hurmuz), and then in relation to the Deccan and Gujarat. While Arabic could be, and was indeed, used at times in

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these dealings—as we see from the earliest letters of the wazīr of Hurmuz, the Bengal-born eunuch Khwaja ‘Ata Sultani to Afonso de Albuquerque in 1508—Persian was manifestly the language of preference in these chanceries and the Portuguese had to adapt to these realities.67 It is currently unclear who the very fi rst formal interpreters used by the Portuguese were for this purpose, but within a decade or two they were able to get by comfortably using a mixture of intermediaries: Persian merchants who had acquired elements of Portuguese;68 the odd Persian-speaking convert to Christianity from Islam or Judaism; and a number of Portuguese who had a certain intimacy with the sultanates of India, at times even becoming renegades. In the 1510s, the personalities of some of these interpreters emerge clearly: Alexandre de Ataíde, a Sephardic Jew who served Albuquerque in a number of delicate tasks in the Persian Gulf and elsewhere (and who eventually managed to return to Cairo and to Judaism); the more slippery Francisco de Albuquerque, also a Sephardic Jew; and a certain Miguel Nunes, a converted Muslim merchant, who served Albuquerque’s successor Lopo Soares de Albergaria.69 Earlier, we have the instance of the polyglot Gaspar da Índia, an Ashkenazi Jew who had been captured by Vasco da Gama on his first voyage in 1498, who—like his son Baltasar—was both a translator (língua) and a notoriously prolix but unreliable source of strategic information.70 Translating letters and conveying messages was one thing. But for those who ambitiously sought access to the historiographical traditions of others, matters were immeasurably more complicated. Barros, for his part, improvised a set of solutions for a variety of languages, and even acquired a Chinese slave through whom he claims to have been able to access certain (for us) unidentifiable works in Chinese that he had acquired, perhaps through his friend Fernão Peres de Andrade who had visited Canton in 1517 in the course of one of the earliest direct contacts between the Portuguese and the Ming Dynasty. What precisely could be found in his library in terms of texts in Persian and Arabic is also largely unclear, though some educated guesses can be hazarded. The function that these texts played in Barros’s work was twofold. First, they allowed him to pepper his chronicle with erudite digressions on such matters as the

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history and origins of the game of chess.71 More importantly, on each occasion that the Portuguese in his narrative encountered a new polity or came to terms with the geography of a new region on the littoral of the Indian Ocean, he was able to throw in a chapter or more regarding the history of the place, using not only materials in Portuguese but those in an Asian language of relevance as well. Thus the second book of the Década Segunda begins, for example, with the departure of Afonso de Albuquerque in 1507 from the island of Soqotra (off Yemen) for the great port city of Hurmuz in the Persian Gulf, which Barros claims was “so renowned in the whole world as the most celebrated emporium and entrepôt (escala) thereof.” But on the arrival of Albuquerque’s fleet before the port at the end of September 1507, the chronicler abruptly halts his narrative of warfare and raiding to introduce a chapter entitled “Of the site of the City Ormuz, situated on the island of Gerum; and of its foundation, and the kings it had since it was founded until the year 1507 when Afonso de Albuquerque arrived there.” In it, he notes that a good part of the information is derived, by him, from “the chronicles of its kings, which were translated for us from the Persian [as Chronicas dos Reys delle, que nos foram interpretadas de Persico].”72 Recounting the events of 1510 in the same volume but a good number of pages later, Barros comes to Albuquerque’s attack on Goa, and in a similar vein introduces a chapter entitled “How the Moors made themselves lords of the Deccan kingdom and the state of Goa.” On this occasion, his discussion of sources is somewhat less laconic: There is a considerable divergence on the [matter of the] entry of the Moors by arms into India, between the Gentiles and them, particularly in regard of the concordance of dates; because the Moors of the Gujarat kingdom write of it in one way, those of the Deccan kingdom in another, and the chronicles of the Gentile kings of Bisnaga [Vijayanagara] take another route; but they all agree on one matter, that the conqueror was the king of the Delij [Delhi] kingdom. And in this account that we have made, since we have had all these chronicles and they were translated for us, we will follow the version now of the Moors who became lords of the Deccan kingdom of which

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we speak, because they conform closely in the matter of dates with the General Chronicle of the Persians, which is the Tarigh of which we made mention in the beginning, which we possess together with other volumes of history and Persian cosmography from those parts.73 Now the Sultanate of Delhi had developed a rather elaborate historiographical tradition, largely in Persian, from the thirteenth century onward. This dominance of the Persian literary language relegated Turkish largely to the oral sphere (though a good part of the Sultanate’s elites were in fact ethnic Turks by origin); as for Arabic, it retained its importance but largely in the context of law and Islam rather than as a language for writing history. The reason for the hegemonic position of Persian was related to the fact that the major cultural influence on the Delhi sultanate came from the Ghaznavids, who in the tenth and eleventh centuries had emerged as a power ful political and cultural force in what is today Afghanistan. It was in their court that major works of Persian historiography such as Abu’l Fazl Baihaqi’s Tārīkh-i Mas‘ūdī and Abu’l Nasr ‘Utbi’s Tārīkh-i Yamīnī came to be composed; the great poet Firdausi also had a good many contacts with them. This tradition was further developed in India, the fi rst major example of which may be Minhaj al-Siraj Juzjani’s Tabaqāt-i Nāsirī from the mid-thirteenth century. In the fourteenth century, the considerable work of the historian and theologian Ziya al-Din Barani further consolidated this historiographical stream; he was followed in turn by other authors, such as Shams-i Siraj ‘Afif (writing in the early fifteenth century), Yahya Sirhindi, whose Tārīkh-i Mubārakshāhī comes to us from about 1450, as well as ‘Ali bin Mahmud al-Kirmani with his slightly later Ma’āsir-i Mahmūdshāhī. To these prose works, we may add the more difficult versified texts that drew inspiration from Firdausi and his Shāhnāma, and which range from the prolific oeuvre of Amir Khusrau to ‘Isami’s Futūh al-salātīn, which also concerns the early expeditions of the sultans into the Deccan.74 Did Barros in fact have access to any of these texts, or to others which—though we find them referred to in biographical dictionaries or other sources—have not survived in manuscript to our day? Our

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difficulty lies in the fact that there are in fact very few extant Persian chronicles dealing with the Bahmani Sultanate of the Deccan, or with its successor states until the last decades of the sixteenth century. For Barros’s agents in India to have acquired such texts sometime between 1510 and 1540 would mean that the works he consulted may have either been the versified Bahman Nāma of Shaikh Fakhr al-Din Azari and its continuations (a rather unlikely option), a shadowy work by Shaikh ‘Ain al-Din Bijapuri, or the chronicles— once again seemingly lost to us—of Mulla Da’ud Bidari, Tuhfat al- Salātīn, and Mulla Muhammad Lari, Sirāj al-Tawārīkh.75 Whatever these texts were, they were poorly interpreted and translated for the chronicler, as we see from the following sequence. According to what these Deccanis say, in the years 707 of Mahamed, which is 1300 of Our Redemption, there was in the kingdom of Delij a Moorish prince called Xá Nosaradim, who was so powerful in terms of men, and the state of his lands, that on account of his great power he wanted for the further glory of his name to conquer India. With that greed, he descended from those parts of the north which neighbor the sources of the rivers Ganges and Nile with a great number of people on horse and on foot, until he had conquered all his neighbors who were Gentiles, and he reached the kingdom of Canará, which starts at the river called Gate which is to the north of Chaul [and runs] to Cape Comorin.76 If we can take the rough date and the broad circumstances to be correct, the only possible identification of Xá Nosaradim (or Nasir alDin Shah) could be with Sultan ‘Ala al-Din Khalji of Delhi (r. 1296– 1316), who did indeed lead a great campaign into the Deccan. Barros now speaks of how an independent kingdom came gradually to be founded in the Deccan by one of the captains of this king, a certain Hábed Xá (who still remained dependent on Delhi), and then by the latter’s son Mamud Xá, who is said eventually to have thrown off the yoke of Delhi, founded the city of Bidar, and made it his capital. Without entering into par tic u lar details regarding further chronology, Barros then rapidly takes us to the fragmentation of the

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Bahmani Sultanate and the emergence thence of states such as Bijapur under Yusuf ‘Adil Khan Sawa’i, the very states that the Portuguese had to contend with after 1500 in their attempt to take Goa and other port cities. But even a quick examination of this passage makes it clear that it could simply not have derived from the Persian chronicling tradition. The only chronologically plausible monarch termed Nasir-al Din Shah was Nasir al-Din Mahmud (r. 1246–1266), son of Sultan Iltutmish, and he could not have been confused with the later ‘Ala al-Din Khalji and Muhammad Shah Tughluq, the two sultans of Delhi most closely associated with inroads into the Deccan. Since Barros does not seem to have been given to inventing sources, the only explanation for this comes from the suspect philological basis of the entire exercise: we do not know who Barros’s translators were, or the extent to which they were really capable of reading whatever Persian texts they had before them, and the chronicler himself had no means of acting as a check on the exercise. Even some decades later, Portuguese archivists were to complain to the king that there was effectively no one in Portugal who could read the few Persian texts they had on hand, and it was suggested that they simply be sent back to India.77 It thus appears clear that considerable precautions must equally extend to other materials from the category of tārīkh that Barros stated he had consulted. At one point he notes, for example, that he was well informed regarding “Tamor Lam [Tamerlane], whose life we have in Persian, and at the time we had composed this history, we had put a good part of it into our language.”78 Again, toward the end of the Década Segunda, he enters into an elaborate excursus concerning Shah Isma‘il Safavi of Iran, and writes: “Some authors have written about him but without true information. Here we will treat briefly his origin, sect and fortune, in keeping with what we have come to know from the writings of the Persians themselves, and the rest concerning his power and state we will leave for our [book on] Geography. But before we come to him, for a better understanding, it is useful to treat the birth and sect of Mahamed, and this account will extend to his death following some Latin authors, but the greater part according to the Tarigh of the Moors, which is the life of the caliphs who succeeded him.”79 This is the same text to which Barros

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has referred on many dif ferent occasions in his work, and it is possible to identify it as none other than the massive and encyclopedic work of Mir Muhammad ibn Sayyid Burhan al-Din Khawand Shah (known by his nom de plume of Mir Khwand), entitled Tārīkh-i Rauzat al- Safā’ fī Sīrat al-Anbiyā’ wa’l-Mulūk wa’l-Khulafā’. Mir Khwand lived between 1433 and 1498, ending his life at the Timurid court at Herat during the reign of Sultan Husain Baiqara.80 Generally known as the Rauzat al- Safā’ (or Garden of Purity), this work was barely a generation old when Barros would have come across it. But it possessed a number of significant advantages besides its encyclopedic character: it dealt with pre-Islamic Iran, it contained a detailed history of the prophets (anbiyā’), caliphs (khulafā’), and kingdoms coming up to the end of the fifteenth century, and it was apparently quite freely available in manuscript.81 We learn this from the Portuguese traveler Pedro Teixeira, who, in the closing years of the sixteenth century, drew on it extensively and even translated portions of the text after his own fashion (which is to say loosely and with numerous asides). Teixeira noted that when in Iran, he asked after kings and ancients who were referred to by Greek and Latin authors, but was distressed when no one had heard of them. He continues: I then became most perplexed, and communicated my desire [to know more] to some Persians who were knowledgeable men and of uncommon reading, and after long discussions they advised me that in order to get rid of my confusion and embarrassment, and since I wanted to know of their kings, I should follow what was written in their Chronicles, whose authors as closer witnesses [como testigos más cercanos] would render things less confused and with greater certitude than other nations, who either on account of passion or of distance (or at times the two taken together) allowed themselves to be rather misled in relation to them. The advice quite agreed with me, and wishing to profit from it, I made inquiries and learnt that the book that had the greatest authority for them in history was one that they call Tarik Mirkond (which is the Chronicle of Mirkond); I looked for it and obtained it and busying myself with it, though it is very diffuse and universal with regard to Persia and its dependencies,

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I did not take more than what I offer you here, which is the number and succession of their kings, from the fi rst to the one who lives today, which as it is a novelty and has not been brought to light by anyone else, seemed to me to be worthy of presentation.82 Teixeira, who was quite well-educated, was aware that he was not the first Portuguese to make use of the text; “of this chronicler Mirkond,” he writes, “our Portuguese Juan de Bayrros makes mention in his Décadas, but since he lacked a translator [por falta de intérprete] he gave us no more information about him other than his name.” On the contrary, Barros had drawn to the extent he could on what was translated to him of Mir Khwand, but he lacked the resources that Teixeira, residing in Hurmuz, had at his disposal. Teixeira’s work, including its sections from Mir Khwand and Turan Shah’s history of Hurmuz eventually appeared in Spanish in Antwerp in 1610. As in Firdausi’s Shāhnāma, the first Persian king here was Kayumars, followed by Siyamak, Hushang, Tahmuras, and Jamshid. But there is cosmogonic comfort here for the Christian (as well as Islamic and Jewish) viewpoints, for these kings are all made descendants of Noah. Kayumars is thus presented as the son of Aram, son of Sem (or Shem), the son of Noah; the ancient Iranians in this view are thus Semites, and their history is presented as entirely postdiluvian.83 To be sure, what Teixeira produces in relation to the Persian materials are not faithful translations but loose paraphrases, often interspersed with his own remarks, long digressions, and interpolations. Nevertheless, these must be taken far more seriously than what Barros was able to achieve, and we are reluctantly obliged to abandon Charles Boxer in his claim that “although Barros did not know any Asian languages, he can be termed a pioneer Orientalist.”84 Nor is it possible wholly to defend the view that his “systematic and discriminating use of primary Oriental sources was something quite unprecedented”; unprecedented it may well have been (and quite distinct from Castanheda or Correia, let alone his predecessors), but systematic and discriminating are not quite the adjectives that come to mind.85 What is of interest, however, is the manner in which Barros’s claims to incorporate the tārīkh tradition and his repeated gesturing

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in that direction had effects on those who followed him. The effect is particularly dramatic with Barros’s official successor Diogo do Couto (1542–1616), a man of far more humble background and limited erudition than Barros.86 Given the legitimacy that Barros had lent to the Persian and Arabic chronicle as a source, Couto could not afford to ignore these either when he took up the Décadas da Ásia from Década Quarta. But despite his long residence in Goa, it is evident that Couto simply did not even have the textual resources that Barros did sitting in distant Lisbon. While he claims time and again to use Persian and other indigenous chronicles, for instance with regard to the Deccan, Gujarat, and the Mughals, it is amply evident that Couto based his work almost entirely on oral tradition: conversations with Portuguese mercenaries, visiting ambassadors, and the odd Muslim prince who could be found in Goa. Yet, to admit that in this respect he was closer in spirit to the likes of Correia than Barros would have been intolerable to Couto. He thus had to invent a virtual library that he cited and claimed was at his disposal, which modern scholars continue to puzzle over and attempt to disentangle.87 The sixteenth century did not see transformations and adjustments in the tradition of the crónica alone. The Perso-Arabic tārīkh produced in the Indian Ocean too was considerably modified, for a variety of reasons. One of these was deceptively simple, namely the need to write histories that dealt with new elements such as the Portuguese themselves. One of the most celebrated of these new texts, completed in the late 1570s, is the Arabic text written by a certain Shaikh Zain al-Din ibn Ahmad Ma‘bari, from a Yemeni family settled in Ponnani in central Kerala, and entitled Tuhfat al- mujāhidīn fī ba‘z ahwāl al-Burtukāliyyīn (A Gift to the Holy Warriors in [the form of] Some Accounts of the Portuguese). Commencing with some theological considerations regarding just war, and the need to conduct it against the Portuguese, the work then goes on to detail the history of the settlement of the Muslims in Kerala, and what are viewed as the “strange customs” of the infidels (Hindus).88 Somewhat over half of the work, however, is devoted to detailing the atrocious acts of the Portuguese newcomers, and a chronological account of dealings with them. What is of interest for our purposes is the autonomy of this narrative, which does not seem to depend on or re-

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flect Portuguese works in any way. The chronicles of Castanheda and Barros, once published, surely reached at least a few libraries and personal collections in Cochin and Goa, but they remained outside the reach of a Zain al-Din. In a similar vein, the great and prolific savant of Gujarati origin, Qutb al-Din Muhammad Nahrawali (d. 1582), does not seem in his Meccan residence to have had access to Portuguese materials while composing such texts as his celebrated chronicle al-Barq al-Yamānī fī al-Fath al-‘Usmānī (“The Lightning of Yemen in the Victory of the Ottomans”).89 Had he done so, he might have thought twice about suggesting that the great Arab navigator Ahmad ibn Majid was somehow responsible, while inebriated, for the Portuguese being able to learn the secrets of navigating the Indian Ocean. But matters changed as the sixteenth century drew to a close. Even if they never became quite as well-versed as their Ottoman counterparts were with the chronicles of the Spanish Habsburgs regarding America, Mughal court-savants did begin to gather knowledge regarding the Europeans and render it into Persian.90 An example of this is Tahir Muhammad Sabzwari in his Rauzat al-Tāhirīn, but an even more significant case is that of ‘Abdus Sattar ibn Qasim Lahauri. Sattar was for a time closely associated with the Jesuits resident in the Mughal court and helped them translate Christian polemical and other works into Persian.91 In this process, he also acquired a fair understanding of Latin, which he then employed to write a text entitled Samrat al-Falāsifa (“The Fruits of Philosophers”), very largely based on paraphrasing the fifteenth-century work of the Dominican archbishop of Florence, Antonio Pierozzi or Saint Antoninus (1389– 1459), Summa Historialis or Chronicon partibus tribus distincta ab initio mundi ad 1360. This three-volume work appeared in print between 1474 and 1479, and was reprinted several times thereafter in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries; the Jesuits apparently carried it to the Mughal court as part of their library.92 Whether they gave Sattar access to other, more recent, materials in Latin (since he apparently did not read Portuguese) remains unclear. This opening was, however, less dramatic than another significant shift that took place with regard to the Persian tārīkh, at least in its Mughal incarnation. This was the project to begin translating

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“Hindu” materials, whether from Sanskrit or the Indian vernaculars, into Persian (and to a lesser extent into Arabic). Some of these were works with a marked theological or philosophical content, and we might say that here the Mughals revived the old Ghaznavid project of savants such as Alberuni in the eleventh century.93 But unlike Alberuni, who had a hearty contempt for works with historical pretensions produced in India, the Mughals also produced “translations” (or paraphrases) of texts that they understood as historical. This was particularly gratifying for a class of Hindu scribes who were increasingly being acculturated into the world of Persian letters and who embraced this new ecumenical horizon with some enthusiasm. By the end of the sixteenth century, the alarming consequences that this might have were becoming evident to at least some Muslim intellectuals of the time. Thus Muhammad Qasim Hindushah (known as “Firishta”), a historian of Iranian origin resident in the Deccan, wrote in the preface of his own extensive tārīkh: The infidels (kāfirs) of India like those of China say that Noah’s tempest did not reach their country, and instead reject it. . . . They attribute strange and bizarre deeds to Ram, Lakhan et cetera, which do not correspond to the human condition. . . . All this is words and sound which has no weight in the scale of reason. . . . The Hindus say that from the time of Adam more than 100,000 years have passed. This is totally false, and the fact is that the country of Hind, like the other countries of the inhabited quarter of the world, was settled through the descendants of Adam. . . . The oldest son of Ham was Hind, who reached the country of Hind and settled it in his name. His brother Sind reached the country of Sind, and settled Thatta and Multan in the name of his children. Hind had four children: Purab, Bang, Dakan and Nahrawal, and each settled a kingdom, which even today are known by those names.94 Firishta seems to have realized that this embrace by the Mughals and other Muslim dynasties of an alien historiography could plunge them headlong into rejecting, first the narrative of Noah and the Flood, and then the very notion of a single Adam from whom all of human-

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kind descended. Over a half-century later, European savants such as Isaac de la Peyrère would make a move in a similar direction, using arguments that emanated from the discovery of the New World or dealings with the Inuit.95 This version of a pre-Adamite argument was, however, made on an entirely dif ferent basis in Persian historiography, on account of the translation of Hindu materials and the new legitimacy enjoyed in the late sixteenth century by at least some Zoroastrian texts.96 There is little doubt that such thoughts would not have appealed to Barros or Couto, and at any rate could scarcely have escaped censorship in Counter-Reformation Portugal. Had it been other wise, the coming together of crónica and tārīkh might have had far more dramatic consequences than those described here. In any event, these processes allowed the Iberians to suspend their amnesia with regard to their Islamic past and produce their version of “world-history” in the sixteenth century.

From History to Ethnography During the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the Iberians (as well as those other Europeans who functioned under the broad carapace of the Estado da Índia), used at least two overlapping modes to comprehend India. The first of these, which we have focused on thus far, was broadly historical, and in some measure also philological as a consequence. The second approach, more common and also better known today, was ethnographic in nature. The two bestknown early texts of this latter sort were written by Tomé Pires and Duarte Barbosa, and both were drawn upon by Ramusio to an extent in his compendium. These men were middling officials in the early Estado, and each possessed reasonable scribal skills. During his Asian sojourn, Pires was largely located in Southeast Asia, especially in the city of Melaka, which the Portuguese had conquered in 1511, and his work Suma Oriental thus carried a distinctly Malay geographical perspective.97 India, and its regions, are thus seen largely through the prism of their role in the Southeast Asian trade, and the information on India also seems to have been gathered from the extensive Indian merchant community in the Malay Peninsula. The preoccupations of the Suma, a rather telegraphic text, also appear to

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be largely commercial in nature, and it is primarily intended to convince those in authority in Portugal of the validity of the governor Afonso de Albuquerque’s ambitious policies. In contrast, Barbosa— who arrived in India as a young man as early as 1500—remained largely based in Kerala, where his preferred base was the northern port of Kannur (Cannanore). A skeptic with regard to Albuquerque and his ambitious plans, Barbosa was a part of a group of prominent members that included a Diogo Pereira, nicknamed “the Malabar.”98 With the exception of one brief visit to Portugal, Barbosa, like Pereira, seems to have been a fi xture on the Indian scene for nearly five decades, until his death sometime in the late 1540s.99 Though they did hold offices from time to time, Barbosa, Pereira, and others of their ilk came by the late 1510s to be known by an emerging designation, that of the casado morador. This meant that one was settled in one of the centers of the Estado proper, rather than on its fringes, or in frontier areas such as Bengal, Burma, or Orissa. Albuquerque himself had had the idea of promoting this group as a sort of creole petty bourgeoisie, on which the Estado da Índia could depend in a variety of ways—fiscal, moral, and commercial. In a precocious letter to King Dom Manuel, written in October 1512, after the capture of Goa and Melaka, but before his attempts on Aden and Hurmuz, Albuquerque argued that “if Your Highness is contented with the trade between these parts and those Kingdoms [Portugal], and you set aside the trade here, with the tributes, and homages, and perquisites of your fleet you can sustain ten thousand men in India; and if you wish you can raise up four or five powerful men, with great power and great revenues [homeens grandes de grande mando e grande renda], who will be enough to control everyone, with the help of Our Lord.”100 Though groups of casados did gather in Hurmuz, Melaka, Cochin, and Kannur, the most important center that emerged for this class after 1530 was undoubtedly Goa. An interesting tax document from 1535 counts up some 700 households among the moradores portugueses living in the city and its suburbs. Those enumerated excluded the members of the nobility, as well as clergymen, soldiers, and members of the governor’s entourage, as well as temporary residents (who would later be designated solteiros).101 The average wealth was somewhat modest—at 480 pardaus per household—but what

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was already clear was a yawning gap between the richest casados in the city—men like Galvão Viegas, Pêro Garcia, Francisco Rabelo, Duarte Pereira, Jerónimo Ferreira, Vasco Fernandes, Manuel de Vasconcelos, Cristóvão de Figueiredo, and António Correa— and others with a mere fraction of their means.102 There is little doubt that the casados as a group grew to have a considerable sense of their importance, and even a sense of resentment against those who came and went from Portugal, while spending short stints with official positions in Portuguese Asia. A letter from the casados of Melaka to the King, written in 1525, makes this attitude clear. The settlers [moradores] of your most populated fortress and noble city of Mallaca make it known to Your Highness how it is now fifteen years since the time when the said city was conquered through the force of arms, in which seizure most of us were present, and we married in the said city to render ser vice to God and Your Highness, and we brought our women who were infidels [que eram emfieis] to the Holy Catholic Faith, and thus we indoctrinated them as the Holy Mother Church of Rome orders us, and in this way we acted to keep peace and friendship with the said people of the land, and thus we aided during this whole time to sustain [it] and to fight against our enemies by night and day, on sea and on land, using paraos and manchuas and lamcharas, suffering many wounds to our own persons with a great deal of blood that was spilt from them.103 Armed with the virtuous notion that they served the king “well and loyally so far from our native place [nossa naturaleza], and our perpetual and eternal patria,” these settlers thus asserted that they were in a real sense the backbone of the Portuguese presence in Asia. With the passage of the generations, the sense of corporate rights based on conquest certainly diminished to an extent. On the other hand, the idea equally emerged that long and near-permanent residence in India established another kind of superior right: that based on knowing the country well. Three of the important Portuguese chroniclers of the sixteenth century made strenuous assertions along

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these lines: Castanheda, Correia, and Couto. The latter two clearly belonged to the category of the casado, even if some parts of Correia’s life and movements remain rather obscure. Couto has even been described as the self-appointed “spokesman” (porta-voz) of the casado class, given his constant gibes at fly-by-night officials from Portugal, who he claimed came to make a rapid and unscrupulous fortune in India, and then quickly left.104 But what status does this in fact give their knowledge, in particular their ethnographic understanding of India? It has been plausibly claimed by Joan-Pau Rubiés that “the unprecedented ethnographic analysis displayed in a text like Barbosa’s Book of what I [sic] saw and heard in the Orient was the intellectual creation of a colonial elite in formation whose novel horizon was a settled, prosperous life in India.” In other words, even though Barbosa was not fundamentally concerned, for example, with the problem of administering an Indian society in all its complexity, he wanted those Portuguese who came to Asia after him to have the benefit of his experiences in dealing with what they would have seen as an exotic and often hostile environment. It thus requires considerable acrobatics to then conclude that “Barbosa and Pires share an almost identical aim, to give a fresh account based on direct experience and reliable reports of the ethnological realities of the Asian world encountered by the Portuguese,” and that access to these “realities” was really no more than a matter of “decoding indigenous rules” through appropriate “language-games.”105 Such a claim seems to place a writer like Barbosa in a role of near-transparent objectivity, and it does so not by an investigation of his procedures, but on the basis of an a priori judgment. To bring this out further, let us consider some crucial aspects of Barbosa’s description of society in India, which he arrives at having passed in his description from west to east, rapidly encompassing East Africa and Ethiopia, Arabia, the Persian Gulf, and Iran.106 Barbosa enters his description of the “Kingdom of Guzerate,” informing his readers that this is now “the first India,” as distinct from the region of Sind (or Dewal), which he apparently considers to be outside India proper. As regards to Sind, he has given few social details, beyond the fact that while the king is Muslim, “the greater

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part of the folk are Moors with some Gentiles who are wholly subject to them”; he also notes that the people there speak Persian and Arabic, as well as “their own tongue.” With regard to Gujarat, he is far more prolix, given his awareness that the kingdom “is very great and possesses many towns and cities,” with a large merchant population as well as a “great abundance of goods.” In his quite detailed description, we review not only the individual ports from Kathiawar to Surat and Daman, but also several of the inland political centers such as Champaner and Ahmadabad. However, from the very outset, Barbosa wants to provide us with a sense of the social divisions in Gujarat. The first category he mentions are thus Rajputs (Resbutos), followed in turn by Baniyas (Baneanes), then Brahmins (Bramenes), and fi nally Bhats (Pateles). Descriptions of each of these run as follows.107 •

“Before this kingdom of Guzarate belonged to the Moors, there were in it some Gentiles whom the Moors called Resbutos, who at that time were the cavaliers and the defenders of the land, and made war when it was necessary. They kill and eat meat and fish, and all other sorts of viands, and even today many of them live in the mountains, where they have very great settlements, and they do not obey the king of Cambaia, but rather make war on him all the time.”

•

“There is in this kingdom another sort [outra sorte] of Gentiles who are called Baneanes, who are very great merchants and traders; they live among the Moors with whom they conduct all their trade. These do not eat meat, or fish, or anything that dies, nor do they kill, nor do they even wish to witness the killing, for their idolatry forbids it, and they hold to this in such an extreme way that it is an astonishing thing.”

•

“There is also another law [outra lei] of the Gentiles who are called Bramenes, who among them are priests [sacerdotes], and the people among them who administer and govern their houses of prayer and idolatries [casas de orações e idolatrias], which among them are very great and have many revenues, and there are also many which are sustained through alms [esmolas].”

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“Among these [Brahmins], there are others who only serve as messengers, and they are able to travel everywhere safely, with no-one doing them any harm, even when there is war, or thieves; they are called Bhats [Pateles].”

What is significant here is that Barbosa is not positing a coherent social system, merely various categories for which he uses terms such as “sort” (sorte), or “law” (lei). In closing his discussion of Brahmins, he does further note the following: “And as they only marry once, if the husband dies, the woman never marries again even if she is a girl, and the same for the husband; their sons are their full heirs, also in status [na dignidade também], because Brahmins must be the sons of Brahmins.” However, he does not in this discussion extend this rule regarding heredity to the other sortes or leis of Gujarat. Barbosa then returns to a discussion of social categories and distinctions in his account of the kingdom and city of Vijayanagara (“Narsyngua” or “Bisnagua”), a good number of pages later. The opening passage of this section runs as follows: In this kingdom of Narsinga, there are three laws of Gentiles [três leis de gentios], and each one of them has a very distinct law unto itself, and besides their customs are very different from one another, principally those of the kings, great lords, cavaliers and men of arms, who can marry, as I have said, with as many women as they want and can maintain. Their children inherit their goods. The women are obliged, according to a very ancient custom, when their husbands die, to burn themselves alive with their corpses which are also burnt, and this is so that they may be honored.108 This passage, as well as those that follow in Barbosa’s account, has attracted considerable attention from modern-day analysts. It helped further enshrine as a topos the figure of the satī, or forcibly cremated widow, into early Portuguese writing on India; this figure had already appeared first in classical accounts of India, then in Italian writings by Marco Polo and Niccolò de’ Conti, and would have an extended afterlife into the twentieth century.109 But it also both re-

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peats and diverges from his description of social categories in Gujarat. In Vijayanagara, Barbosa devotes the greatest attention to what he terms the royalty and “cavaliers,” and it is their women on whose practices he dilates at great length. Less attention is thus devoted by him to the “other law of Gentiles called Bramenes,” who, as he writes—repeating nearly verbatim the phrase from his description of Gujarat—“are priests and governors of their houses of prayers.” He notes further that they wear “three linen threads over their shoulders as a mark of dignity,” that they have certain privileges (such as exemption from capital punishment), and that they are both rich and well-fed (albeit vegetarians, as opposed to the warriors, who eat “meat and fish and other viands except cow, which their perverse idolatry forbids”). To complete the picture, Barbosa then mentions the existence of “another law of people” (outra lei de gente), who are like Brahmins, but to whom he does not give a name. The fact that they wear a stone around their neck that they worship suggests that he refers here to Virasaivas or Lingayats. At first sight, it is tempting to draw a parallel between Barbosa’s tripartite scheme and the late medieval Latin conceptualization of “three orders”: oratores (those who pray), bellatores (warriors), and laboratores (workers).110 However, while he does seem to have a clear notion of sacerdotes and cavaleiros, whether in Gujarat or Vijayanagara, Barbosa’s third lei remains fluid and ill-defined; in Gujarat, there are thus traders present, but no peasants and artisans worthy of mention; in Vijayanagara, all these categories beyond warriors and priests prove to be evanescent. It is when he passes in his description to Kerala, we see that Barbosa in fact has no great schematic principles in mind at all. Thus: “In this land of Malabar, everyone uses a single language called Malayalam [maliama]. All the kings are of the same law and custom [lei e costume], more or less, but that of the people is very dif ferent, because you must know that in all of Malabar, there are eighteen laws [leis] of native Gentiles, each one separated from the other, to the point that one does not touch the other under pain of death or the loss of goods, so that each one has laws, customs and idolatries for itself.”111 Barbosa then sets out a description of the most significant groups (or leis), beginning with the Brahmins, the Nayar warriors, the Vyaparis (or merchants), the potters, and so on; he

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proceeds thereafter to a brief description of what he terms “eleven laws of others who are lower, with whom the others do not mix or touch, under pain of death.” Clearly, his far longer exposure to Kerala society, and his partial knowledge of Malayalam, allowed Barbosa here to provide a more extensive set of group names than he was able to do elsewhere in India; he also had a far better-defined conception here of “laws” that had limited contact with each other to the point of not touching, of the existence of groups that were higher and lower in status (thus, phrases like outra lei de gente mais baixa), and also that they had dif ferent “idols in which they believe.” As a consequence, the reader is given a sense of a far more diverse society in Kerala than in Gujarat or Vijayanagara, fi nely divided into a large number of professions, especially among the laboring classes (as distinct from priests and warriors). In his summing up of Barbosa’s ethnographic vision, Rubiés thus aptly remarks: “The word most used by Barbosa to distinguish these social groups is ‘law’ (lei). The implicit meaning of this concept, as used in Barbosa’s report, is the formal recognition of a social regulation which defines a limited group, rather than the looser idea of accepted and characteristic behaviour, for which he uses ‘custom’ (costume) or ‘use’ (uso).”112 What is particularly worthy of note is that the word casta very rarely appears in this account, or indeed in others by the Portuguese from the first three decades of the sixteenth century.

The Emergence of “Caste” In his important and revisionist account of “caste” as a totalizing category, the ethnohistorian Nicholas Dirks famously argued that rather than “some unchanged survival of ancient India,” caste in fact was “a modern phenomenon, that is, specifically, the product of an historical encounter between India and Western colonial rule.”113 He noted further that Duarte Barbosa had “reported some features of a caste order after extended stays in India, in particular on the basis of his stay in the great kingdom of Vijayanagara,” but equally emphasized that Barbosa “did not mention the varna system of the four ideal caste groups, nor did he moralize about caste in one way or another.” Therefore, it was suggested, while it was no doubt to the

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Portuguese that one might turn for “the initial use of the term casta to refer to the social order in India,” there was little of interest to be found in their archives. Dirks even claimed that “subsequent European writings about India add little to his [Barbosa’s] account and frequently comment even less on things like caste,” until the latter half of the eighteenth century.114 A more recent account, by Sumit Guha, of caste as a key descriptor, takes a somewhat dif ferent line of argument, while according a greater significance to conceptions and usages before 1750. Yet his schematic argument linking the usage of the term casta to “racial ideologies in the West,” and in particular to Iberian preoccupations with the “purity of blood” is hardly convincing. Emphasizing that “casta was initially a collective noun that referred to a pure bloodline or species,” Guha argues that this was why “it was deployed as a category by the sixteenth-century Iberian pioneers of globalization to describe what they perceived as various biologically distinctive (and ranked) social groups generated by Western expansion in the Americas and Asia.”115 Yet, at the same time, Guha seems somewhat aware that casta in fact belonged to a body of related and often interchangeable terms such as nação, estirpe, and gente, some of which did not carry exactly the same connotations with regard to the “purity of blood.”116 Casta, from an etymological viewpoint, particularly lent itself to speak of bloodlines for horses or dogs, or varietals (cépage) in the case of grapes. Most importantly, he wholly ignores the fact that lei rather than casta was the most important term used by the Portuguese in India to speak of social distinction and collective identity before 1530. A rare pictorial ethnography produced in the middle decades of the sixteenth century of peoples and customs of Asia also shows the complex set of usages that still prevailed at that moment. The seventy-six images show a diversity of scenes from the Cape of Good Hope to East Asia, and a large number of these images are devoted to life in western India. Recent close analyses of this work—the socalled Codex Casanatense— suggest that the artist or artists were themselves from western India, though it is clear that they worked in collaboration with one or more Eu ropeans, who also provided brief annotations to the paintings, and who may have both suggested

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the themes and provided the overall structure to the codex. After comparing the paintings to other contemporary visual and textual materials, Jeremiah Losty thus concludes: There is nothing in the Codex that an Indian artist could not have produced without setting foot outside his home town. None of the paintings bar one includes any architectural features that indicate that the artist must have been there in order to see and depict them and the only one that does, the bathing tank in Ormuz, imposes a peculiarly Indian structure onto the barren island. The artist, we would suggest, is relying on verbal descriptions or the most amateurish sketches to guide him in the depiction of these foreign peoples and relying on his own knowledge to fill in the blanks. His depictions of foreign costumes are almost always suspect. His habitual choices of what appear to be the normal female costume and hairstyle worn by women in Goa, and the southern Indian sari for depictions of women from elsewhere, suggests that he was based there when he painted these pictures, and he would certainly seem to have seen high ranking Portuguese men and their womenfolk on occasion. Yet even for these representations he could be copying from pre-existing studio sketches.117 This said, the captions still retain their own interest, including for the terminology they use. The central category here is gente, already used to describe the so-called Fartaquis in southern Arabia, and consistently employed thereafter in the context of Iran and India. The codex often uses simple ethnogeographical designations along with gente, such as khorāsānī (“coraçones”), shirāzī, and sindī, but also pathān, rājpūt, navāyat (“naitiás”) and baniyā. The term lei does continue to appear on occasion, as in the following passage: “ These people [gente] are called Resbutos; they live in the forests of the kingdom of Cambaia. They sustain themselves by robbing, and [also] die thereby. They are very valiant men, and great horsemen and archers. Their law [sua lei] is of the Gentiles.” The sole occasion when the term casta appears is the following (against Image XXXV): “Gentile woman from the caste of the muleteers [casta de almocreves], who is buried alive with her husband after his death.”118

Closed carriages to transport elite women of Gujarat. Biblioteca Casanatense, Rome, Figurae Variae . . . in lingua lusitana, Ms. 1889, 45–46.

Woman of the muleteer (almocreve) caste being buried alive with her dead husband. Biblioteca Casanatense, Rome, Figurae Variae . . . in lingua lusitana, Ms. 1889, 63–64.

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It is therefore only in the second half of the sixteenth century that casta emerges as the dominant usage to describe social groups and categories in the context of Portuguese India (and Asia more generally). It is by no means limited in its usage to “Gentiles”; for example, in the chronicle of Diogo do Couto, one can find such usages as de casta abexim (“Abyssinian by caste”), mouro da casta de Mafamede (“A Moor of Muhammad’s caste,” meaning a Sayyid), or even de casta Italiano (“of Italian caste”), and these suggest that the term was used in much the same sense as Arabo-Persian terms such as nasl, qaum (plural, aqwām), or tā’ifa. However, it is only with the growing importance of Catholic missionary intervention in India from the 1540s onward that this term gained ground, not merely as a loose descriptor— as lei might have been for Barbosa—but in a systematic and even systemic way. As a recent analysis of this “Catholic Orientalism” notes, the Jesuits were at the forefront of such moves after the 1540s, and “the world of paganism and idolatry was an enigma they came to solve, all the while working on its total destruction.” Further, it is aptly noted, “the study of the nature and the origin of idolatry in vivo and in action, and, most importantly, in the missions beyond the reach of Portuguese colonial support, forced the missionaries to reinvent and reformulate categories and distinctions.”119 One of the key texts was produced not by a Jesuit, but by a former soldier-turned-Augustinian friar by the name of Agostinho de Azevedo. In his text, written in the closing decades of the sixteenth century, entitled “Of the Opinions, Rites, and Ceremonies of All the Gentiles of India”, Azevedo laid out a seductive panorama, according to which the gentiles’ beliefs could be comprehended above all from access to a textual corpus of knowledge. He presented his work as containing knowledge that “until now was never written down, neither by our chroniclers nor by other men of curiosity who seek out new things.” He continued: It is to be known that among all the Gentility of the Orient, there is kept and sustained a single opinion regarding the knowledge of God, and the creation and corruption of beings, which is a lesson that is taught in their schools by their Brahmins who are the masters of their religion [sua religião]. On this, they have

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many books, and their Latin, which is called Geredão [Grantham] which contains every thing which they are to believe, and all the ceremonies that they are to conduct. These three [sic] books are divided into bodies, members and articles, the origins of which are what they call Veados, which are divided in four parts. These are [divided] in another fifty-two parts, in the following way: six are called Xastrà, which are the bodies; eighteen are called Puranà, which are members; and twenty-eight are called Agamon, which are the articles.120 It has been pointed out that while Azevedo in real ity “knew no Sanskrit and had no extensive missionary experience, he was able to put together a compilation of data on Indian classical literary tradition that was exceptionally well informed for the period.”121 While this may indeed be true, we must still ask ourselves whether his activities— and those of his other contemporaries— are better classified as “discovery” or “invention.”122 Rather than pointing out, as Barbosa had casually done, that the dif ferent leis of gentiles even in Kerala worshipped many and diverse “idols,” Azevedo and others who followed would insist not only that the gentiles had a “religion” (religião), but that they were all of a “single opinion.” A pressing desire behind this was to characterize both gentile belief, and society more generally, as possessing a strongly systemic character. Azevedo’s purpose in putting matters thus is made clear by him in another passage of his text, this one on the central subject (for him) of casta. As for the castes, the greatest impediment there is in the conversion of the Gentiles is the superstition that they maintain in their castes, without being able to touch or mix with others who are not of their profession and of the same caste, whether superior or inferior, or those of one rite [hum rito] with those of another; and they are so abominable in this matter that it has already happened that many have reached the end of their lives rather than touch the food of another, or their affairs, for fear of losing caste [perderem a casta] and becoming unclean [inmundos].123

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Vaidiki Brahmins, from Real Biblioteca del Real Palacio de Madrid, “Dibujos de la India Oriental,” II / 1612, no. 2. © Patrimonio Nacional.

Sannyasis, from Real Biblioteca del Real Palacio de Madrid, “Dibujos de la India Oriental,” II / 1612, No. 38. © Patrimonio Nacional.

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It is therefore incumbent upon him to make clear to the reader why this concept is so crucial for Indians, and especially gentiles, and how it works not as a casual descriptor, but as a coherent totality, and thus as a formidable barrier. Here is Azevedo again, this time in a lengthy and crucial passage: In all of this Orient, there are four castes [quatro castas] which are the basis of all, according to a book called Jadegual Tutan [Cātikaḷ Toṭṭam], which is to say the orchard of castes, which is their book of nobility. The first caste is that of the Rayas, which is a most noble nation [nação] from which all the Kings of Canara derive, and they believe themselves to be the most ancient and famous in the business of arms in these parts, just as the Goths are in Europe; and they inspire such confidence on account of the great fidelity with which until now they have served both in peace and in war, and they serve as the bodyguards of the kings. They believe that it is better to lose their lives than lay down their weapons, and so they earn a double salary. They are men of pleasant conversation, courteous, loyal, and wellmannered. The second caste is that of the bramenes, though they would wish to precede the others, both on account of their priesthood [sacerdocio] and their letters, and on this issue there are as many divisions among them as among our learned men regarding whether arms have precedence or letters. The third caste is that of the chatins, who are merchants rich in gold, silver, precious stones, silks, cloth and other valuable goods. In all kingdoms, they are held in high esteem because of the profits that their revenues produce. The fourth caste is that of the balalas [veḷāḷar] who are the farmers [lavradores]. These are held in esteem, and kings can marry their daughters because it is said that they are the men who provide sustenance to kingdoms. From these four castes, there derive another one hundred and ninety-six, and these are also divided into two parts that are called Valange [valankai] and Talangem [sic: iḍankai], which is to say those of the right-hand and those of the left, and these [left-hand castes] as they are inferior to the others, cannot even pass them in the streets with their processions or marriages; and

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as these caste privileges [privilegios de casta] are ancient, even the Gentiles themselves can have difficulty in determining of which caste they are.124 It is clear from a number of elements in this passage—the mysterious work allegedly entitled Cātikaḷ Toṭṭam, the reference to right- and left-hand castes—that Azevedo’s key references came from southern India, and more specifically from the Tamil country. But what was crucial here was his access to some form of Sanskritic textual knowledge (even if mediated orally through Tamil), which enabled him to put forward the scheme of four varnas not merely as an abstraction but as a concrete and systemic reality, which mapped in turn to four castas: Rayas, Brahmins, Chettis, and Velalas. Equally important was the fact that Azevedo’s work did not remain confidential—far from it. Rather, it was plagiarized wholesale and incorporated very rapidly into the influential official chronicle of Diogo do Couto, Da Ásia, Década Quinta, where it appears in chapters 3 and 4 of book 6.125 In turn, when later writers of dictionaries and glossaries looked to an authoritative understanding of what casta in fact represented, it was to Couto they often turned.126 Azevedo’s role was perhaps effaced in the process, but his understanding remained in place, and was further reinforced by his text’s considerable acceptance in both lay and missionary circles, eventually also influencing such authors such as Abraham Rogerius (d. 1649), and John Zephaniah Holwell (1711– 1798).127 Side by side with the continued use of casta as a loose and somewhat casual term to describe ethnicity, whether on its own or together with other terms such as nação, we can thus witness the emergence by about 1600 of a far more specific usage, where it could also be used to unlock the arcane mysteries of the Indian “Gentile” world as a system.128

Conclusion Over the course of the sixteenth century, several tens of thousands of Europeans—largely Portuguese, but also a fair sprinkling of Spaniards, Italians, Germans, Flemings, and a very small handful of Frenchmen and Englishmen— reached the Indian Ocean via the

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Cape of Good Hope. We can by no means be certain of their exact numbers, let alone how quickly they died, how long they stayed, or how often they returned to Europe. In around 1540, it was suggested by Dom João de Castro that there were some six to seven thousand Portuguese between East Africa and the Far East; three decades later, Diogo do Couto proposed over double that number. In the 1630s, there seem to have been at least five thousand Eu ropean casado settlers in dif ferent establishments of the Estado da Índia, and about eighteen hundred members of the various Catholic religious orders spread across Asia.129 Yet only a small minority from among these have left an extended trace in writing, and even fewer took a proper interest in the Asian societies that surrounded them. A common enough profile was of the trader resident in the Portuguese settlements of Goa and Cochin, who might be well-informed enough about the pepper and spice trade, or even the political vagaries that impinged on important markets, but remained woefully ignorant about anything that passed for social or cultural knowledge regarding India. An example of this was the Augsburg-born merchant Ferdinand Cron, who passed several decades in and around South Asia between the 1580s and the 1620s, but whose knowledge of it seems to have for the most part been politico-economic in nature.130 The interpretative struggle of the past decades regarding those who claimed in the period to produce positive social and cultural knowledge for European consumption has been between three distinct positions. First, there were those who took these writings at face value, assuming that they were simply “sources” like any other; this attitude was common enough until the early twentieth century, even if the occasional text was disqualified because it was too improbable. Scholars would often thus validate texts in Arabic, Persian, or the Indian vernaculars by the extent to which they confirmed or contradicted what was found in Eu ropean accounts.131 A second position, emerging in the 1970s, tended to view the European materials as potentially highly distorted, either because a set of overwhelming prejudices (regarding race, religion, and the like) colored their authors’ lenses, or because their authors simply did not have the competence to produce the kind of knowledge they claimed. The latter

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is a concrete claim and as such can be subject to procedures of falsification. The third position, which has gained a fash ionable place since the late 1990s, argues that “the main impetus for this [European travel] literature was scientific and instrumental,” and that even if some forms of ideological distortion might exist, Eu ropeans in sixteenth-century India could still “decode a cultural system” and that one need not be particularly skeptical about them, even when their knowledge claims could not be verified.132 It may thus be worthwhile to close with an interesting example, that of a Jesuit treatise regarding the Mughal court, written in the early seventeenth century. This text was produced after some form of Jesuit presence had existed in that court for over three decades; several Jesuits also claimed varying degrees of fluency in Persian, familiarity with well-placed courtiers, and a personal acquaintance with the Mughal emperor and his family. The text begins, blandly enough, with an evocation of the grandeur and wealth of this kingdom. The Great Mughal, King Jahangir [ Jamguir], holds court in the famous city of Agra, a very celebrated and renowned city because it is one of the richest of all the Orient. It is also the largest and most opulent city that this King has in all his Kingdoms. Agra lies in the midst of them, as the head and princess of all cities. The King is so fond of its freshness and good air that he elected it the Lady of all his other cities. The city is advantageous to the King’s and his children’s health, and thus he made it his seat of power.133 The text goes on to rehearse a number of Jesuit themes regarding the Mughals, notably their habit of giving public audience through a decorated window ( jharoka), as well as their fondness for sports and entertainment involving animals. The enormous resources that the ruler possesses, as well as the extravagant praise that he expects and receives from his subjects and courtiers are stressed. Yet, periodically, the Jesuit author reminds us that the emperor is given to fits of anger and jealousy, and to killing his close relatives in those circumstances. Of one cousin, he notes: “He will have the same fate of his relatives because this is the end that the majority of the relatives and brothers

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of Moorish kings eventually meet.” Luxury, greed, and ostentation thus are the themes that run like red threads through this court, and the long Jesuit familiarity with names and details (as well as the occasional administrative term in Persian) hardly affect the framing, only reinforcing it by giving their account a greater veneer of credibility for readers. It is thus scarcely a surprise to read the overall evaluation of the monarch in the text. One could say that this King is not a Moor, nor Gentile, nor Christian, because he has no law [ley] in which he believes firmly like other people; he is a barbarian who lives by fate and fortune [vive ao nasibo], follows his appetites, and is full of great pride and the vainglory of the world. He thinks that he alone is lord of all, and he is very cruel, and vengeful—with no mercy at all.134 Here is a view then that is produced neither by a lack of familiarity with the Mughal court, nor indeed by a lack of favor shown by Jahangir until that time to the Jesuits, who received a number of grants and fi nancial subsidies from the emperor. Yet, it was in texts like these that the seeds were probably laid for a secular denunciation of the Mughals (as indeed their Muslim neighbors to the north and west) as “Oriental Despots,” possessed of arbitrary power and incapable of adhering to any rule-bound system, even that laid down by a proper adherence to Islam. Was this line of development inevitable then? Perhaps not. But it is—among other matters—to the posterity of images like these that we will turn in the following chapters.

2 THE QUESTION OF “INDIAN RELIGION” When I said to them [the Indians] about this, that in the cold countries it would be impossible to observe their law [on bathing] during the winter, which was a sign that it was a pure human invention, they gave me this rather amusing response: that they did not claim that their law was universal; that God had made it for them and it was for that reason that they could not receive a foreigner into their religion; that for the rest, they did not claim at all that our [religion] was false; and that it might well be that it was good for us and that God had created different paths to go to heaven, but that they did not wish to accept that our [religion] being valid for all of the earth, theirs was nothing more than a fable and pure invention. —François Bernier, “Lettre à Monsieur Chapelain” (1667)

Introduction European perceptions and constructions of India in the early modern period tended to focus, as noted in Chapter 1, on a number of recognizable topoi. Among these, the concept of “religion” and consequently of religious difference, undoubtedly occupied a central place in European perceptions of India in the early modern period. As is well known, the first Portuguese voyages to India in the late fifteenth century suffered in this respect from something of an epistemological deficit, for while they were relatively comfortable with the three categories of Christians, Muslims, and Jews that they knew from medieval times, they also had a greatly undertheorized category of heathens or “gentiles (gentios),” which they only gradually realized would have a far greater importance in the world of the Indian Ocean than in the Europe they had left behind. To be sure, the Iberians had encountered some such fourth category not only in 103

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the ancient past (as with the Greeks and Romans) but in their present, fi rst in the Canaries, then in West Africa, and fi nally and most recently in the Caribbean. But as Joan-Pau Rubiés has rightly noted, “the gap that separated the ‘gentiles’ from Tenerife or Guinea from those in Calicut or Vijayanagara was a significant one.”1 The central difficulties were two in number. First, as discussed in Chapter 1, the practices of these “gentiles” had to be observed and given content, especially because these were practices that were clearly linked to textual traditions. Second, and thornier perhaps, was the move toward portraying these dispersed practices as a coherent, if wrong-headed, system, a move which an abstract concept like “religion” demanded. We need to note at the very outset that perhaps as recently as a quarter-century ago the simple idea of religious difference under the umbrella of a common defi nition of “religion” was quite unproblematic to most. There were, to be sure, the three great Mosaic (or Abrahamic) religions, which stood in some sort of genealogical relationship to one another, and in a quite clear chronological one. These three, in particular Christianity and Islam put together, accounted comfortably for a good part of the world’s population. Then, on the fringes of this religious core zone, were ostensibly other religions, as studied and defined in university departments of religion, but also happily embraced by Weberian sociologists of civilization: Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Daoism, perhaps Shinto, and still more doubtfully Confucianism. In 1956, the celebrated British anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard could quite confidently write of Africa and produce a work on Nuer Religion, and other research on various sorts of “primitive religion” was much in the air.2 Even if the well-known artist Gottardo Piazzoni, when asked “and what is your religion?” replied ironically “I think it is California,” he was surely an exception. It was in this context that the anthropologist Clifford Geertz proposed his celebrated definition (in 1966) of “religion as a cultural system” wherein he set out a universal collection of criteria as follows: religion is “(1) a system of symbols which act to (2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and

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(4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.”3 Though Geertz’s definition—which draws a part of its power of seduction from the fact that it mentions neither God nor the supernatural in its core statement—has enjoyed widespread popularity and continues to form the basis for many courses on the anthropology of religion, it has also been sharply criticized on various grounds. The most widely quoted of these critiques comes from the pen of Talal Asad, who sought (as he stated) not “to advocate a better anthropological definition of religion than Geertz has done” but rather to radically “problematize the [very] idea of an anthropological definition of religion by assigning that endeavor to a particular history of knowledge and power (including a particular understanding of our legitimate past and future) out of which the modern world has been constructed.”4 What Asad meant by this, of course, was that the idea that religion was either universal and present in all societies, or stable in a given society over time, or even definable, was highly dubious, and indeed essentialist.5 He thus advocated that the student and scholar should begin by “unpacking the comprehensive concept which he or she translates as ‘religion’ into heterogeneous elements according to its historical character.” Besides, it is quite clear that from Asad’s point of view, the historical process by which “religion” has come to be seen as a universal grid using which societies can be analyzed is linked above all to the history of Christianity from medieval times onward. Though his work considers both Christianity and Islam, it is noticeable that the Islam he analyses is almost always modern (and post-1800) and has usually been subordinated in some way to Christianity in an epistemological sense. To understand the career of “religion” as a master concept is, in this view, above all to understand how it was deployed within Christian discourses of similarity and difference. In 1988, at the median point between the first and second appearances in print of Asad’s celebrated essay, a work was published in French that truly had the potential to transform the field that he had sought to address. This was a joint work, about 250 pages in length, and conceived in an essay form; its authors were historians with a

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distinctly anthropological bent of mind, and the work was entitled De l’idolâtrie (“Of idolatry”). More significant perhaps than its title was its subtitle: Une archéologie des sciences religieuses, an obvious evocation of a work by Michel Foucault published two decades earlier.6 In De l’idolâtrie, Carmen Bernand and Serge Gruzinski set out to demonstrate how the religious sciences of today had very largely emerged in the sixteenth century in the context of the European encounter with the Americas. They showed how a vocabulary that had existed from classical times, in relation to early Christian ity and its “others,” was redeployed in the context of new dealings with forms of “idolatry,” but also suggested that the intervention of some writers in the sixteenth century—notably the celebrated Dominican friar Bartolomé de la Casas (1484–1566)— significantly changed the terms in which Mesoamerican cultural practices were analyzed as forms of idolatrous religion. While this work was certainly read by authors interested in the problem of the more-or-less contemporaneous European encounters with India and China, it did not significantly enter those discussions. Discussions that have been ongoing since then regarding the “invention of Hinduism” might well have profited from this comparative perspective, but they have significantly lacked it in point of fact.7 This chapter returns to some of the themes touched upon by Bernand and Gruzinski, using as a sounding board the compilatory work of the engraver and printer Bernard Picart, Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde, which appeared in multiple volumes in Amsterdam between 1723 and 1737. Picart’s massive work, which he put together with his Huguenot collaborator Jean-Frédéric Bernard, has attracted a certain amount of attention in the recent past, and the visual aspects of its Indian sections have been quite carefully analyzed by Paola von Wyss- Giacosa.8 Given its enormous—indeed universal— scope, one can see that it almost automatically lends itself to a series of comparative questions.9 It hence seems useful to return to the Indian sections of the work to ask a short but complex series of analytical questions. What did Picart include and what did he exclude from his compilation and why? What was the broad relationship between texts and illustrations? And fi-

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nally, what was the broad effect or implication of this exercise in epistemological terms? It is possible, of course, to treat Picart’s work within a sequence of varying strategies for the representation of extra-European cultures, which move steadily from the unrealistic to the realistic. This is the broad point of view espoused as a framework by Donald Lach and his collaborators in the multivolume work Asia in the Making of Europe. As they write of the early modern centuries leading up to the Enlightenment, “the number of books about Asia being printed in Europe, the wide diffusion of these books in all scholarly languages, and the references in both popular and scholarly writings to these books and to information about Asia, all enabled seventeenth-century European readers to obtain a better-informed idea than previously of the reality of Asia and a clearer image of its dimensions, its peoples, and its various languages, religions and cultures.”10 There is a studied tone of neutrality here. What is being dealt with is not “knowledge” and even less “representation” but simply “information”: the result is thus that Europeans are over time “better-informed” as information accumulates. Such a view of course ignores a subtle warning that had been sounded considerably earlier. In an important work on a “history of European reactions to Indian art” published some three decades ago (and fifteen years before the work of Lach and his collaborators), the art historian Partha Mitter had devoted an extensive early chapter to what he termed “Indian art in traveller’s tales.” Beginning with Marco Polo and Odoric of Pordenone, Mitter proceeded to survey both textual and visual depictions of what would later be termed “Hindu” gods, goddesses, and religious scenes, devoting some attention to the work of Dutch pastor and plagiarist Philippus Baldaeus, whose work on the subject appeared in 1672. Mitter eventually turned briefly to the place of Picart, writing of how in 1723 “the engraver . . . brought together in his magnificent volumes all that was known in the West about Indian gods.” He further suggested that the century between the 1630s and the time of Picart “witnessed the dissolution of the monster stereotypes and the emergence of authentic images of Indian gods. The incidental details too, such as the human figure

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and the dress in these illustrations, had become convincing.” We may note the vocabulary here: terms such as “authentic” and “convincing” still belong to the language of representation rather than information. Mitter’s clinching argument, which we revisit below, is that these changes in forms of representation were principally the consequence of “the reproduction in books of Indian miniatures on secular subjects.”11 In other words, the real meaning of “authentic” and “convincing” is the recourse by Picart and his sources to Indian forms of visual representation of Indian themes. Still, the tension between image and text remains an unresolved issue here. At the end of the day, the crucial questions when dealing with Picart and his work are relational, the mise-en-rapport of texts, but also of texts and images, and above all of different cultural, civilizational, and religious complexes that others might have preferred to keep distinct and separate.

The Talented Monsieur Picart Picart’s extended section on India occupies a part of the work dealing with the “ceremonies and religious customs of the idolatrous nations,” which appeared in French in 1723 and in English in 1734. This section followed those on the three “Religions of the Book”: Judaism, Christian ity, and Islam. The discussion here refers to the English version, which was also the one that eventually came into the possession of early English colonial administrators in India such as Warren Hastings.12 India in the third volume of the work in English, entitled The Ceremonies and Religious Customs of the Various Nations of the Known World Together with Historical Annotations and Several Curious Discourses Equally Instructive and Entertaining, occupies all of 282 pages, some of which are lavishly illustrated, as the title page of the volume informs us, “with above One Hundred and Seventy Folio COPPER PLATES, all beautifully Designed by Mr. BERNARD PICART, And curiously Engraved by most of the BEST HANDS in EUROPE.” It is, as mentioned above, essentially a work of compilation, a matter regarding with Jean-Frédéric Bernard was not at all apologetic. In 1741, he wrote with retrospective self-righteousness:

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Those who have attempted to render it [Cérémonies etc.] contemptible in terming it a compilation have probably wished to ignore that in subjects such as those which are contained in the collection on ceremonies etc., one cannot do anything else but compile. If the compilation is done with choice and discernment, if one only advances on the basis of sound authorities, a judicious reader ought to be content. To invent, to extend, to add circumstances in order to adorn one’s subject as in a romance, all this is not appropriate in a work which should consist of a description of ceremonies destined to bring out the éclat of the [particular] religious cult, which are often regarded as being essential to it, and of the historical details of their origin, and their establishment etc. One should be exactly true here. Thus one can do nothing else than to being together what can be found dispersed here and there.13 This is a fairly explicit set of claims, as well a statement concerning a certain form of objectivity. Editorial intervention, it would seem, is kept to a bare minimum; as Bernard was also to write, “Far from attributing any glory to ourselves on this matter, we renounce that of being original in the reflections that accompany the descriptions.”14 The first question that hence arises is of the choice of the texts that were included in the three hundred-odd pages on India. These pages appear, we may note, after a section dealing with Iberian America, drawing on such writers as the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega. The texts on India do not in fact appear in the chronological order in which they were originally written or published. This is quite typical of the Picart-Bernard enterprise. Instead, the first, which in a way has pride of place, was originally published in 1704, less than a decade before the French edition of Picart’s opus, and its author is a somewhat enigmatic figure by the name of La Créquinière.15 The work had quickly acquired some notoriety and been published in an English translation (sometimes attributed erroneously to John Toland) as early as 1705; its title as reproduced in Picart’s volume is “The Conformity of the Customs of the East Indians with those of the  Jews, and other Antient Nations.” “Conformity” begins with the explicit claim that the author has spent a fair amount of

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time in India, which endows him with some authority to speak on the subject: “I have liv’d too long in India, not to discourse pertinently on certain Matters, which may possibly appear surprizing to the Reader.”16 This sojourn, which apparently was only of the order of “three or four years” is never given much specific content, beyond the periodic mention of experiences at Pondicherry, the principal factory and fortified center of the French East India Company on the Coromandel coast of southeastern India. As many as eighty-six pages of Picart’s work on idolatry are occupied by La Créquinière’s account, which is organized into some forty sections of unequal length.17 It is a very curious introduction to the ceremonies and customs of the idolaters of India, to say the least. There are two principal problems with La Créquinière’s work, namely the somewhat obscure identity of the author and its direct implications, and the nature of the contents. The name implies that he was a native of Haute Normandie (in the area of Aubevoye), but for long it was not clear whether the name was simply a pseudonym. Though he sometimes appears with “Sieur” before his name, he does not even possess a recognizable first name in the extant literature. Was he in fact an employee of the French East India Company? If so, in what capacity? Certainly it is clear from the tone of his work that he was not in India as a missionary. Was he a gentleman of leisure, traveling for his own amusement, as he also indirectly suggests? Later Orientalists such as Antoine Polier (discussed at greater length below) possessed copies of his work in their personal libraries, but this provides little evidence of his reliability one way or the other. Fortunately, it has finally been possible to trace a single letter from him in the archives of the French East India Company, written from Pondicherry in October 1700.18 In this missive, probably addressed to the minister Louis Phélypeaux, Comte de Pontchartrain, La Créquinière asks for the post of lieutenant which has been refused him despite the fact that he has served for a length of time (depuis longtemps sans avoir eu le credit). Among the character witnesses he cites are the well-known François Martin and a certain M. de Livernan.19 Even with this clue in hand, suggesting that he was a subaltern military officer, the content of La Créquinière’s work proves diffi-

Indian snake charmer, engraving by Jacques Harrewyn, from La Créquinière, Conformité des coutumes des Indiens orientaux avec celles des Juifs (1704), Plate 11, facing page 152.

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cult to penetrate.20 After a prolix and somewhat ill-organized introduction on the broad subject of travels and wonders, he states his principal purpose, which is to compare both the religion (including the “theology”) of the Indians and their customs, with those of the ancient Greeks and of the Jews, both ancient and contemporary. His conclusions are prefigured in an early passage of the work; he states that while there are some parallels in the customs of the ancient heathens and the Indians of the seventeenth century, “the Theology of the antient Heathens scarcely agrees with theirs in one single Par ticular.” In contrast, there is a striking convergence in matter of both customs and religion between Jews and Indians; indeed, La Créquinière is inclined to the end of his work to go even further, averring that besides the “Parallel between the Jews and the Indians with regard to their Customs, religious and civil, we may also compare them together with respect to Genius and the Prejudices they have imbibed.” A remarkable feature of La Créquinière’s writing on India is its utter banality in purely empirical terms. His first substantive chapter is on the Mughals (and entitled “The Dominions of the Great Mogul,” preceding a chapter “Of Circumcision”), and there is nothing here that a well-read armchair scholar from Eu rope, who had read the standard works on India that were in print in 1700, could not have said. In chapter after chapter, this is then the most striking feature of the work. Manifestly, La Créquinière had no access to textual sources, whether in Sanskrit or Persian, or in the Indian vernacular languages on the “religion” of India. His description of religious practices, and what he terms “theology,” is extremely vague and merely draws upon a series of well-known clichés regarding the subject. As for his ethnography, the part regarding “customs” is scarcely much better. No close description of any particular custom or practice can be easily identified. His remarks, whether regarding superstition, the consumption of commodities, or temple prostitution, merely partake of a broad received wisdom regarding the gentiles and idolaters of India. There is no novelty here. And yet, the thrust of the text is indeed somewhat novel. This is not because of his desire to produce equivalence between the Indians and the people of the ancient Mediterranean, in particular the Greeks. This was a

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hoary trope, one that had been repeated many times over in the view that the Brahmins of India derived their beliefs from the philosophy of Pythagoras. Rather, the boldness of La Créquinière’s view lay, and has lain (as many subsequent observers have pointed out), in his drive to produce a practical and genealogical relationship between the gentiles of India and one of the “Religions of the Book,” namely Judaism. This was thus a form of “promotion,” suggesting that the kind of religion practiced in India was indeed worthy of far more serious notice than a mere relegation into the inferior category of superstition. After a series of rather dull, diverse, and poorly presented remarks, La Créquinière’s text draws these materials together in its conclusion. It is in these passages too that the editorial remarks in Picart’s text (though one suspects the voice is that of Bernard, principally) begin to increase in density. One senses here a quickening of their interest in the enterprise. For in that final analysis, the central worth of La Créquinière lay not in his hands-on understanding of India, but rather in his classical erudition—which he very much wears on his sleeve. As he writes in his opening section: “The Knowledge of the Customs of the Indians was not abstractedly of any Use; that the only Reason for my employing them, was to justify what is related of the Ancients, and illustrate them upon Occasion; in a Word, that I had Antiquity only in View.”21 His text is perhaps three-fourths devoted to materials that he knows from his classical education, with a mere fourth coming from his ostensible Indian experience. Here is how he presents matters by way of conclusion in his thirty-ninth section (succeeded by a rather bizarre fortieth and concluding one: “Of India in general, and the Customs of its Inhabitants.”) •

Indians and Jews, he avers, are both “continual Slaves to Prepossession, which triumphs so much the more over them, as they love and adore their Captivity.”

•

Both peoples are moreover so hidebound that “it absolutely prevents their making any Progress in the Sciences.”

•

Both people are given to rote learning and “getting by Heart the several Things which they say that God or the Gods have done for them.”

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Both people are incompetent in war and make war “only by Starts.”

•

Both are obstinate and given to defending their soothsayers and priests.

•

Both of them “look upon other Nations as profane, and refuse to have any Familiarity with Foreigners.”22

A series of other conclusions follow, largely of a repetitive nature, such as the following indictment: “They never apply themselves to any of the Sciences, but such as are of absolute Necessity; looking upon the rest as Acquisitions, which though they enlarge the human Faculties, they yet make a Man more unhappy, and usually swell him with Pride.” One part of the problem manifestly lies in our author’s almost total unfamiliarity with what he regards as the “theology” of the gentiles of India. He scarcely is able to advance from an early statement where he declares, “I first thought to study only the Religion of the Indians, and was confirm’d in my Resolution by the first Discoveries I had made therein, having observ’d a certain Order between their Principles, and the System of their triple Divinity, viz. Brama, Witsnou, and Devender, as is not found in the Multitude of Gods ador’d by the Greeks and Romans.”23 This establishes his primary distinction between Indians on the one hand, and Greeks and Romans on the other, which leads him in turn to the comparison with the Jews. Yet, as we have seen, the comparison with the Jews is not primarily—or indeed even tangentially—on “theological” terms. Rather it is based on a curious mix of a reading of ancient Latin texts on the Jews, combined with stereotypical (rather than direct) ethnographical observation regarding the Indians. Yet, what is of interest is how La Créquinière becomes, in a sense, the stalking horse used by Bernard and Picart. His text contains footnotes by them throughout its length, but the density and extent of these notes grows apace as one proceeds. Further, instead of merely providing information regarding a Biblical citation or an obscure phrase, these notes also become more and more argumentative and transform themselves into a veritable dialogue with the text itself.

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By Section XXXIX (with the rather misleading title of “Their chief Temples”) this quality is quite evident. Remarking on the text’s claims regarding the “blind Submission” of Indians to the law, Bernard (for we may suppose it was he), states, “This Reflection is in no ways just. The Wars and Revolutions which happened in the Indies, are a Proof that those Nations often make a political, of a purely Religious Affair; and that ’tis the same in Asia as in Europe, where those who are the most zealous Sticklers for the Deity, are not always his best Friends.” Further, remarking on the alleged Jewish neglect of the sciences, another note states sarcastically that if “they neglect the Sciences, and apply themselves to Business only . . . this they do from Judgment and Reflection, well knowing that there is nothing to be got by Learning.” Other editorial remarks are more pointed and devastating still. A starting point may be found at the very beginning of Section XXXIX, as a riposte to the remark on Indians and Jews being mere “slaves to prepossession.” Here, the note runs: We may ask the Author of this Dissertation, what Men are not Subject to these Prejudices? Might they not be compared on this Occasion, with all the People, and all the Religions in the World, not excepting that of the Christians? For we may consider all such Christians as Slaves, who are not able to give any Reason for their Belief. There is no Necessity that a Person in low Life should examine the Particulars of the several articles in the Creed, but then he ought to be able to give good reasons why he believes in them. Such as are negligent upon this Head, are not more acceptable in the Sight of God, than a Brasilian who lives up to the Rules of Morality, and does not devour his FellowCreatures. Let us therefore conclude, that Mankind in general may be compared to one another with regard to Genius and Prejudice.24 We can thus come to a first conclusion regarding the placement of La Créquinière’s extensive text at the very opening of the section on India. It cannot be explained either by its publication date or by the prominence of its author, for in truth he was rather obscure even

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if his text had received a certain amount of attention. Rather it was a bridge-building text, one that opened up the possibility of comparing the religion of the gentiles of India to more familiar religions, using the Jews as a point of entry. Once the door to comparison has been opened, the more pointed remarks can begin to flow in the footnotes: “We also are guilty of the same Fault.” “The Knowledge of a numberless Multitude of Christians goes no further than this.” “The Parallel might justly be drawn with the Christians, to our Shame be it Spoken.” “Our Clergy act in the same Manner, and the Wars which they foment are always the most fatal.”25 The ice has, in a manner of speaking, been broken. The remainder of the compiled texts in the Cérémonies on India can, as it were, breathe somewhat more freely and assume a somewhat more conventional air of direct description without recourse to constant and explicit comparison. A second section of about forty pages, after that devoted to La Créquinière, therefore draws on the rather well-known work by the Reverend Henry Lord, the English East India Company’s chaplain resident at Surat in western India in the late 1620s, and is entitled “A Discovery of the Sect of the Banians containing their History, Law, Liturgy, Castes, Customs, and Ceremonies.”26 Lord, born in 1563, was a curate from Oxfordshire who had accompanied Thomas Kerridge, president of the East India Company’s Surat factory, to Gujarat, and on his return to England had published his text in 1630 under the title A Display of Two Forraigne Sects in the East Indies vizt: The Sect of the Banians the Ancient Natives of India and the Sect of the Persees the Ancient Inhabitants of Persia Together with the Religion and Manners of Each Sect. This text had attracted a certain amount of attention, being one of the earliest published accounts of India linked to the English Company; it was translated into French in 1667 by the quite well-known translator Pierre Briot under the title Histoire de la religion des Banians . . . avec un traité de la religion des anciens Persans ou Parsis, extrait d’un autre livre écrit en persan, intitulé “Zundavastaw” (Paris: Robert de Ninville, 1667). It is the first part of the work that interested Picart, since the latter section concerned the Parsis or Zoroastrians of western India and thus dealt with a social category of “fi re-worshippers” that was probably not central to his conception of the “idolatrous nations.”

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Quite unlike La Créquinière, Lord’s strategy was to make explicitly textual claims. The subtitle that appears in Picart announces this fact, noting that the work was “gathered from their Bramins, Teachers of that Sect: as the Particulars were compriz’d in the Book of their Law, call’d, the Shaster.” The matter is further dilated upon by Lord himself in his introduction or preamble, where he also clarifies that it was very much at Kerridge’s urging that he undertook the work. He adds: “I begun my Worke, and essayed to fetch Materials for the same out of their Manuscripts, and by renewed Accesse, with the Helpe of Interpreters, make [sic] my Collections out of a Booke of theirs called the Shaster, which is to them as their Bible, containing the Grounds of their Religion in a written Word.” This is a somewhat misleading claim on several accounts. Firstly, the term śāstra is no more than a generic term for any normative work; it is thus a broad genre rather than a single book. Second, it would appear that the type of works to which Lord gained access (however confusedly) were in fact purānas, a category of narrative works of varying antiquity and provenance. Further, a certain amount of editing and excising was done by him, as we see in his admission that he left out “for the most Part such prodigious Fictions as seeme independent on [sic] Sense and Reason.” What is left then is a text which (in Picart’s reproduction) is made up of fifteen short chapters. These commence with cosmogony and a creation myth that begins with a single god, an unnamed “Almighty” who “consulted with himselfe, about the making of this great Worke, which Men call the World or Universe.” This God then creates the elements, the Earth and other celestial bodies and eventually living creatures, including men and women. The first man is here Pourous and the first woman Parcoutee, and their four sons are effectively at the origin of the four principal castes (or varna): Brammon, Cuttery, Shuddery, and Wyse, each with his own “Constitution” or inherent nature. Succeeding chapters then detail the adventures of these dif ferent sons, their dispersion and eventual mating with a series of women. Eventually, we learn that the “Divisions and Dissentions” among these sons unleashed a great flood which concluded the “first Age of the World.” Lord obviously did not invent this material, but he certainly fashioned it in order to make the parallels to Biblical materials as close

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as possible. In a second age, he thus begins with mentions of Brahma, Vishnu, and Rudra, but terms them “three Persons of greater Perfection and Excellency than the other” rather than gods. God, “the Lord” or “the Almighty” remains singular for him, the sole “Maker” who is worshipped by these others. It is he who creates the Shaster and hands it to Brahma, as a work in three parts. The first of these is a book of “morall Law,” the second of “ceremonial Law,” and the third concerns “Casts or Tribes.” There are besides eight commandments that he lays down, which are of varying importance depending on one’s caste. These laws were thus established in the Second Age of the world, which however came to an end in an “Uproare of Ungodlinesse.” We then pass quickly to the Third Age, dominated by the figure of Ram, presented once more not as a god or incarnation but simply as the youngest son of the “Chiefe of the Bramanes,” who had survived the earlier destruction. The Reverend Lord gives this age short shrift, eventually moving to the Fourth Age, namely that of Kystney (Krishna), which is also passed over quickly enough. This takes him to some general conclusions, notably that the religion of the Banians is “a composed Fiction, rather than any Thing reall for Faith to lean on.”27 Yet the religion that he depicts is very much one that is seen in a Christian mirror, a monotheism with a single creator and his various agents, rather than a world of many gods. Once more it suggests the perfect legitimacy of making a comparison with the Religions of the Book; indeed the only deeply specific feature of the Indian world as portrayed by Lord is the presence of caste from an original moment. But more flagrant contradictions now begin to appear in the edifice of Cérémonies. The following part of Picart’s work moves forward chronologically, and is once more a text that enjoyed some notoriety in the seventeenth century. It appears in Picart as “A Dissertation on the Religion and Manners of the Bramins,” occupies a little over sixty pages, and was originally authored by Abraham Rogerius (or Roger), a predikant or Protestant minister attached to the Dutch East India Company’s fortress and factory at Pulicat, just north of Madras (today Chennai). The Dutch text by Rogerius was published in Leiden in 1651, two years after Rogerius’s death, under the title De Opendeure tot het verborgen heydendom ofte Waerachtigh vertoogh van

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het leven ende zeden, mitsgaders de religie ende Gods-dienst der Bramines op de cust Chormandel, ende de Landen daar ontrent, but only attained relative notoriety on account of the French translation by Thomas de la Grue, which appeared in 1670 and was entitled Le Théâtre de l’idolâtrie, ou la Porte ouverte pour parvenir à la cognoissance du paganisme caché, et la Vraye représentation de la vie, des mœurs, de la religion et du service divin des Bramines qui demeurent sur les costes du Chormandel et aux pays circonvoisins.28 Rogerius’s Dutch text had not been treated with par tic u lar tenderness by an anonymous editor who took it through press with an extensive para-text, and who was somewhat reticent in his preface (which Picart reproduced), noting that Rogerius’s “Manner of writing is harsh and uncouth, and encumber’d with a great Number of useless Remarks.” This editor, who signed his text A. W., has sometimes been identified as the Unitarian cleric Andrzej Wiszowaty (or Andreas Wissowatius, 1608–1678).29 Despite the editor’s partial incomprehension, it is worth noting a certain form of simplicity to Rogerius’s method, which contemporaries were aware of. Unlike the Reverend Lord, who claimed all sorts of native informants but was unable to provide details of even one, and La Créquinière, whose claims to direct knowledge about India are thoroughly doubtful, Rogerius did indeed have just one close informant—a Smarta Brahmin called Padmanabha, with whom he worked closely in Pulicat. Here is how Rogerius, under suitable tutelage from Padmanabha, defines the subcaste. The third sect [of Brahmins] is call’d Smaertas, and was founded by Sancra Atsjaria. The Smaertas say, that Vitsnou and Eswara are one and the same God, and worshipp’d only under dif ferent Representations or Images, and don’t approve of the Disputes which the two preceding Sects [Vaishnavas and Saivas] have among themselves about either of these Names. These are not distinguish’d from one another by any exterior Mark, and have few Followers among the common People.30 Padmanabha had apparently had some difficulties with his own natal community and hence had taken refuge with the Dutch in Pulicat. In Rogerius he found a close listener, one who was willing to

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insert matters into his Dutch text which were in all probability entirely incomprehensible to any Dutch reader of the period. Thus, the Sancra Atsjaria referred to in the passage above is the Sankaracharya, a major reformist figure of early medieval India, whose nondualist (or monist, advaita) philosophy was in large measure a late response to the challenges posed by Buddhism. In a similar vein, every paragraph of Rogerius’s text—while it may be a delight to the modern philologist—is largely impenetrable to the contemporary European reader. But the text is a triumph of a certain sort of ventriloquism. To be sure, Rogerius inserts his own sour remarks from time to time, including comments regarding the Smartas that are scarcely likely to have found favor with Padmanabha. But for the most part, what we have is a very detailed account of sectarian organization, temples, festivals, and the like, in the region of Madras and Pulicat in the mid-seventeenth century. As it appears in Picart’s version, the text has two parts regarding the Brahmins, the fi rst entitled “Of their Manners and Civil Ceremonies” (and containing fifteen brief chapters), and the second termed “Of the Tenets and Religious Customs of the Bramins” (comprising a further seventeen chapters). For the reader of Picart, some of the chief implications of this part of the work are worth examining. Rogerius renders an India that is far more complex than that depicted by either La Créquinière or Lord. It is also often highly localized in its references, with a mixed vocabulary drawing on Sanskrit as well as Tamil and Telugu, languages much in use in the Pulicat region. He begins by referring to the four great castes (varna), rendering them, unlike Lord, in the usual hierarchical order. He also notes the existence of the Veda, which he states is “of the same Authority with those People, as the Bible among the Christians, or the Alcoran among the Mahometans,” also making it clear that the Veda is the basis for the domination of society by Brahmins. But unlike the previous authors, Rogerius is careful to note the existence of a vast variety of other castes ( jātis), as well as a fifth broad category of untouchables or pariahs. Of these, he writes: The Perreas are the Refuse of the whole Nation, nor have they the Honour to be consider’d as a Caste. They are look’d upon

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as unclean, and are not suffer’d to live in the same Street with the rest, but have a separate Quarter allotted them in every City. Their Villages are always at a Distance from others; they also have their Wells apart; and for fear lest any Person should through Inadvertency go and draw Water out of them, they are obliged to scatter Bones all around, as a Mark to keep every one from coming to them. They dare not walk in the Streets, nor go into those Villages which the Bramins inhabit, nor enter into the Temples of Visnou and of Eswara, lest their Uncleanness should infect the Bramins and the Temple.31 This of course opens the possibility that the Pariahs are in fact not of the same “religion” (Gods-dienst in the original Dutch, a term which in itself poses a slight conundrum) as the others at all, since they clearly cannot worship the same gods. Matters are further confounded when Rogerius begins to write at length of the differences between even categories of Brahmins, noting that they are “divided into several Sects, whence there results a Difference in Manners.” These “sects” include the Vaishnavas, the Saivas, the Smartas (referred to briefly above), the Charvakas, the Pasandas, and the Shaktas, many of which are again further subdivided into more categories. If the Vaishnavas for their part “acknowledge no other God than Vistnou,” it turns out that the Saivas “acknowledge Eswara for the sovereign God, making him superior to Vistnou.” The Charvakas are defined by him as “a kind of Epicureans, that don’t believe in the Immortality of the Soul, and treat every Thing they hear mention’d concerning a Life to come, as foolish and ridiculous.” As for the Pasandas, they “look upon every Thing which the three first maintain as fabulous” and also “abandon themselves to Vice without the least Restraint, and are so wretchedly dissolute, that they have no Regard to any Degree of Consanguinity in their Debaucheries, but say, that every Woman is their own Wife while they are enjoying her.”32 Given these enormous differences, one can see that the reader of Rogerius may have wondered how indeed it was possible to classify all these groups into a single “religion,” unless some of them were simply classified as some form of heretics. At a later moment, there

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are some defensive moves by Bernard and Picart in this very direction, for example when they write: In fine, if the Reader will give himself the Trouble to compare these [other] Explications with the Dissertation on the Manners and the Religion of the Bramins [by Rogerius], he will meet with several Things of the same Nature, express’d under dif ferent Names, and frequently mix’d with such Ideas as have no Manner of Connection. This Imperfection arises from the Confusion, which is found in the Indian Theology; and the Obscurity with which Travellers have clouded it, for want of knowing how to distinguish the Opinions of the several Sects one from the other. An Indian, who should write on the Christian Religion, would make an odd kind of Rhapsody, where he to confound the various Opinions of Anabaptists, Lutherans, Quakers, Calvinists, and Roman Catholics; and should not only heighten them with the mystical and allegorical Descriptions of the Divines of their dif ferent Sects, but interlard his Work with Stories out of the antient and modern Legends.33 Nevertheless, Rogerius is able to show that most of the Brahmins do share a certain number of social and ritual practices and even some beliefs. Yet his emphasis is always on variation, at times subtle, at times very broad. The “theological” is clearly subordinated in this part to the ethnographic, and the devil is very much in the details. In the second part of the text, on the “Tenets and Religious Customs of the Brahmins,” Rogerius is eventually obliged to narrow his focus and look far more closely at the Vaishnavas, Saivas, and Smartas, and their beliefs. A large proportion of this exposition is devoted to Vishnu and his avatāras, or what are termed his “ten Corporeal shapes,” which include the Buddha and the fi nal horse-like apocalyptic figure of Kalki. We also have chapters devoted to temple festivals, places of pilgrimage, and customary practices on eclipses, and so on. Besides Siva, some mention is also made of a popu lar goddess, Gangamma, whose cult was popular in the region of Pulicat itself. As a consequence, we might say that on each occasion when Rogerius attempts to impose some order or unity on the “hea-

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thendom” that the title of the book claims to open a door to, further exceptions and complexities emerge. The anonymous editor, A. W., was clearly somewhat embarrassed by this confusion. In his preface, he thus attempted to wrestle the structure back into that of a single godhead, arguing that “idolatry is one of the ill Effects that flows from the immoderate Gratitude which Mankind have paid to illustrious Personages.” Brahma, Vishnu, and Mahadeva (another name for Siva), he suggested, were in fact simply “intended to denote, the Almighty Power, the Providence, and the Justice of God, which they [the Brahmins] might have express’d after an allegorical manner, and according to the Genius of the Easterns.” The anonymous editor also claimed in closing the work that the reader of Herodotus would find it evident enough that the Brahmins had “sprung from an Egyptian Colony . . . [as] prov’d by the Conformity of their superstitious Practices with those of that antient Nation.”34

Reconciling the Irreconcilable Two thirds of the way into Picart’s and Bernard’s exposition on the gentiles of India, the reader may well have been seized by a sense of vertiginous confusion. In many details and even in their broad claims, the three texts that have been presented so far contradict one another. Rogerius, in par tic u lar, despite the valiant efforts of his overzealous editor, seems to lead in the direction of an ever-more confusing vision of confl icting beliefs, multiple gods, and crisscrossing hierarchies even among the Brahmins, let alone among the larger group of gentiles. The only illustrations and visual records that have been offered thus far are four rather classicizing ones, depicting what are allegedly Brahmin ascetics performing penances that correspond to a chapter by Rogerius on “Good Works and Religious Austerities.” It thus falls on the fourth substantial text to render some order in this confusion, and it is promisingly entitled “An Historical Dissertation on the Gods of the East-Indians.” It is relatively short, at about thirty-five pages, made up of some nineteen chapters, and ends rather abruptly. It bears no direct attribution in Picart’s presentation, unlike the previous texts by Lord and Rogerius.

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But its proximate source turns out to be a text by Charles (or Gabriel) Dellon, born in 1649, a French Huguenot physician who had traveled to Asia and been imprisoned by the Inquisition in Goa. Dellon wrote at least two travel accounts, besides an account of the Inquisition that became celebrated and was also drawn upon in its place by Picart and Bernard. However, in 1709 (and then again in 1711), there appeared a new edition of his works in three volumes, entitled Voyages de Mr Dellon, avec sa relation de l’Inquisition de Goa, augmentée de diverses pièces curieuses (Cologne: Héritiers de Pierre Marteau). In this version we find an addition, namely a section that is entitled “Histoire des Dieux qu’adorent les Gentils des Indes.” Dellon recounts how he came upon this addition: it had originally been written in Portuguese by a very knowledgeable and very pious Portuguese priest, who had spent an extended period of time in India. This priest happened to return to Portugal on the same ship as Dellon and, “on finding himself ill from scurvy, and beyond hope of any cure, placed his extract on the Religion of the Gentiles in his hands.” Dellon claimed to have kept this text for a long time without translating it, but that in the end he had done so with the simple purpose of bringing out the “mad beliefs of these Indian idolaters.”35 Here is how the “Historical Dissertation” begins, and we can see that for the Eu ropean reader it might have been something of a relief after the deep immersion in Rogerius. The Indian Idolaters, whom we call Gentiles, unanimously agree that there is one God; but there is not one among them, who does not form such Ideas to himself, as are altogether unworthy [of] the Holiness and Majesty of the Supreme Being. These mistaken People have certain Books, in which all they are to believe is contain’d, which are of as great Authority among them as the holy Scriptures with us. In some Parts of these Books, God is declared to be a spiritual, an immense, and eternal Substance; in others we are told, that there is no other God than the Air we breathe; in others again, that the Sun is God, and that he only creates, preserves, and destroys all Things. This last Opinion is one of the most general, insomuch that the

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greatest Part of the Idolaters worship this Planet, prostrating themselves several Times on the Ground at his Rising and Setting.36 What is particularly curious about this passage, and the pages that follow it, is that it appears to be very closely related to a text that had been set down but not published at the time, by the Venetian traveler Nicolò Manuzzi (1638– c.1720). This is a section of Manuzzi’s very large and quite ill-organized text that is generally known to posterity as Storia del Mogol, and is entitled “Breve notizia di quel che credono e discorrono gli Gentili di quest’India circa l’essenza di Dio.”37 Manuzzi’s Italian text eventually found its way to the Marciana Library in Venice, but a French copy was also in the possession of the Jesuit college in Paris with a section entitled “La Religion des Gentils.”38 It is, however, increasingly clear that Manuzzi and Dellon had the same source, namely a text written by a third party or parties, and which can be found in several manuscript recensions as “Relation des erreurs qui se trouvent dans la religion des gentils malabars de coste de Coromandel dans l’Inde.” In turn, this turns out to be the translation of a work in Portuguese written by the quite celebrated Jesuit João de Brito (1647–1693).39 Brito, who joined the Society of Jesus in 1662, worked in the southern Tamil country intermittently from the early 1670s and was eventually killed there in a dispute with the Setupati rulers of Ramnad. At any rate, the text of the “Historical Dissertation” continues to have a version of the same tone as the first two texts in Picart’s compilation, a tone quite distinct from that of Rogerius. Thus, however absurd the religion of the gentiles is made out to be, it is nevertheless not shorn of key monotheistic features. A single central God is still presented as the prime mover, under the name of Parama-Bruma, even if it is asserted that some of the gentiles believe there may be as many as “three hundred and thirty thousand millions of Gods” of a subordinate variety. The text then takes us to the existence of a first woman by name Paraxacti (Sanskrit: parāśaktī), of whom we have already encountered a version in Henry Lord’s text. She is presented as being in the first place the mother and then the wife of the trinity of gods, Brahma, Vishnu, and Rudra (or Siva). This then leads us to

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rehearse what are termed the “adventures” of these three gods, including the “incarnations” of Vishnu. Ten of the chapters of the account are accounted for in this manner, following which we have views of “Paradise” and “Hell,” as well as of the “human Soul.” Perhaps the most intriguing of the later chapters are two at the very end, which reflect on the fact “that most Articles in the Heathen Doctrine bear some Affinity to that of the Christians.” These differ from other versions of the text, and are a manifest attempt at reconciliation with Christian doctrine to which someone like Manuzzi was clearly opposed in principle. Manuzzi’s version states, “It will be seen that their religion is nothing but a confused mixture of absurdities and coarse imaginings, unworthy even of the rational man; much less has it the least trace of Divinity as its author.”40 The text by Brito that Picart prints is far more conciliatory in its tone. This reconciliation goes rather far at moments in the last chapters, as in the following claim: “Such as reflect seriously on the principal Points of the Doctrine of the Heathen Indians, will soon be of the Opinion, that these Idolaters were formerly acquainted with the Mysteries of the Christian Religion; and that the Truths which were undoubtedly deliver’d to them, have been insensibly chang’d for want of evangelical Preachers, who might continue to explain them to the People.” We find here a further variant on earlier claims: from the gentiles of India who derive from the Jews (as in La Créquinière), to those who are monotheists by instinct (as in Lord), we are now in the face of a theory where the gentiles of India are lost Christians. Even Picart and Bernard are somewhat skeptical in the face of this claim; they write in a footnote that “all this is poorly prov’d in this Chapter.”41 Still, a version of the same claim continues to be entertained in a vastly exaggerated fashion in the following brief chapter, comprising of the reproduction by a letter from Father Jean-Venant Bouchet— a Jesuit rather better-known for his contributions to cartography and astronomy—to the rather celebrated bishop of Avranches, Monseigneur Pierre-Daniel Huet.42 Huet sympathized manifestly with the idea that the Indian gentiles derived their ideas from the Jews, and Bouchet was happy to confirm to him that at any rate “the Indians are no ways tainted with the Absurdities of Atheism.”43 In his letter,

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he then proceeds to enter into a wild series of speculations on a loose argument concerning either linguistic affinities regarding names or the correspondence of narrative sequences. Thus the Indian Brahma, it seemed to him, was none other than Abraham; the goddess Sarasvati for her part was Sarah. Krishna, who was carried across a river in flood by his father, corresponded to Moses. Mount Meru, sacred to the Indians, was little else than Mount Sinai. Yet, Bouchet was not content to leave matters at drawing parallels between Jews and Indian gentiles. Rather, he made a stronger claim: for him the Indians “were formerly Christians, but afterwards, from Time immemorial, relaps’d into the Errors of Paganism.” In a slightly more modest vein he asserted, “I shall not pretend to affirm this Notion [the Trinity of the Heathens] agrees very exactly with the Christian System. However, it at least shews they once had a purer Light, though it has been since clouded by the Difficulties of a Mystery, which is so far above the Reach of Man’s weak Reason.” It remained then for Picart and Bernard to draw all of this together in a final section, entitled “Supplement to the Preceding Dissertations: In Which Several Ceremonies in the Religious Worship of the East Indians Are Explain’d.” This section occupies some forty pages and is most lavishly illustrated, unlike those that preceded it. The gambit is set out at the very start. The manner of making the religion and the “Religious Worship” of the East Indian gentiles commensurable with that of other known religions will be to seek equivalences, first, between gods, and then in the manner in which they are worshipped. This is a logical extension to the texts that we have looked at so far in the compilation, many of which sought to make such genealogical and / or diffusionist arguments, placing the religion of the Indian gentiles in a relationship with the Jews, the Egyptians, or the ancient Christians. The closing text thus begins with the figure of Brahma, a god who has figured significantly in several of the excerpted accounts. It summarily rejects the attempt to equate him to Pythagoras, or to a series of Egyptian, Chinese, and Japanese gods. Instead, Bernard (for we may surmise that it was again his hand behind the text) suggests that Brahma is the “Son of Quivelinga” (meaning the Sivalinga, literally the sacred phallus of the god Siva), who in turn is “no other

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than Priapus, or Nature.” There is some affinity here to a part of La Créquinière’s text, save that here the matter is pushed a step further. The Supreme Being for the “eastern Idolaters,” it is asserted, is Nature, and Brahma is hence nothing other than “Providence.” Thus, from the scheme of the comparison between individual gods, one moves to a higher level of abstraction: Nature first, then Providence, as a “Creator [who] is nevertheless dependent, and a created Being.” Based upon this sort of reasoning, which includes a dash of iconography, some narrative, and a creative use of structural positioning, we can arrive at one further equivalence. Thus, Ixora (or Isvara, meaning Siva) “is the Matter, which several Philosophers, ancient and modern, supposed to be infinite and eternal.” We thus have the triad QuivelingaBrama-Ixora yielding Nature-Providence-Matter. Here, the ingenuity of the system of equivalences has run its course. The sons of Ixora are discussed, but cannot really be decoded. These include Quenavady (Ganapati or Ganesa), the elephant-headed god, and also briefly Superbenia (or Subrahmanya), apparently “agreeable in Ixora’s Eyes . . . because of his Wit.” A long passage similarly follows on the subject of Vishnu, who it is declared “governs the World, and resides in the Sea of Sugar” but is nevertheless “inferior to Ixora.” Picart and Bernard speak at length of his ten avatāras (which they translate using the deeply charged word “incarnations”), and this also permits them a lavish set of illustrations, on which more will be said below. These discussions, and further narrative sections on Vishnu and Siva, lead at the very end to a set of more ethnographic chapters, on “Indian Processions,” “Pilgrimages of the Indians,” “Penances, Austerities, and other Customs,” “The Adoration of the Indians, and their Religious Dances,” “The Veneration the Indians pay to Serpents,” a section relating to the building of “Pagods” or temples, and still others on diverse topics such as ablutions, holy ashes, feasts, and fasts, with a fi nal section on the “Studies of the Bramins” with some attention paid to the Sanskrit (or “Hanscrit” language). All these sections are constructed in a similar fashion. Some editorial comments are made based on the texts that have been compiled, but we are also provided with extended quotations from a series of authoritative travelers and missionaries, who are listed here in chronological sequence:

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First of these is the Roman aristocrat Pietro della Valle, who it is noted “we quote with Pleasure, because of his great Exactness, and the curious Researches which we meet with in his Voyages.”44 Della Valle had been in India in the early 1620s, but his travels in the form of letters were only published in the 1650s, with versions then appearing in English, French, and German.

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A second major source is our old friend, the French traveler and disciple of Gassendi, François Bernier, who had been established as an authority on India from the time of the publication of his Histoire de la dernière révolution des états du grand Mogol, in 1670. It is with a long series of quotations from Bernier’s views of the Brahmins of Benares that the section of the Cérémonies on India in fact draws to a close.45

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A third source was the Dutch missionary Philip Balde, better known as Baldaeus, whose work on southern India and Sri Lanka, Naauwkeurige beschryvinge van Malabar en Choromandel, der zelver aangrenzende ryken, en het machtige eyland Ceylon, had appeared to much acclaim in Amsterdam in 1672. The section of it that the Picart volume drew on was entitled Afgoderye der Oost-Indische Heydenen, and it has been clear now since the early twentieth century that this text drew extensively on two previous works, that of a Jesuit Jacobo (or Giacomo) Fenício, and possibly to a lesser extent on the work of a midcentury Dutch author and painter who had traveled in India, Philip Angel.46 As Jarl Charpentier has written of Baldaeus, it is now “fairly incontrovertible . . . that the work of Baldaeus on Hindu my thology lacks every ounce of value as an original source,” adding further that “Baldaeus never in any way deserved the reputation for being a conscientious and reliable writer in which he has for long time rejoiced.”47 However, paradoxically, this may be irrelevant to its place in Picart, precisely because it appears in a compilation where the originality of authorship vanishes somewhat from view.

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A fourth significant source is the work of the Augsburg-born Jesuit Heinrich Roth resident in the Mughal domains, access to which was gained through the Jesuit polymath Athanasius

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Kircher, and his work China illustrata, of which a French translation appeared from Amsterdam in 1670.48 Roth’s explanations of the ten “incarnations” of Vishnu are counterposed to those extracted from Baldaeus’s text. To these we can add a number of other sources that are mentioned in passing, or in a footnote, such as the voyages of John Fryer or the travels of Charles Dellon. There were also a number of sources for the illustrations, particularly those in the last section on the “Supplement to the Preceding Dissertations.” Before turning to that question, we may attempt to draw up a provisional set of conclusions regarding the sources for Picart-Bernard on India, both those that were included and those that were excluded. 1. The compilation shows a marked preference for seventeenthand early eighteenth-century sources, and systematically sets aside those from the sixteenth century. None of the chief Portuguese chroniclers who had been published (and at times even translated into French or English) are textually cited or referred to in the notes: João de Barros, Fernão Lopes de Castanheda, Diogo do Couto (himself a plagiarist of some talent, as already noted), are all equally absent. Not even the Dutchman Jan Huyghen van Linschoten and his late sixteenth-century Itinerario gets a direct mention. There seems to be a presumption that useful and credible European knowledge about India and its religion begins in about 1620. 2. There is no particular preference shown for “secular” travelers over missionaries, or indeed for Protestant missionaries over their Catholic counterparts. Indeed, when the subject that was being dealt with was “religion,” it was almost impossible to imagine the absence of missionary knowledge. However, there is a marked preference for texts that already exist in a French version, as opposed to texts that require an extensive investment in the act of translation.49 3. There is, however, one glaring and interest ing omission in this respect: the work of François de la Boullaye–le Gouz, an aristocrat from Anjou who had undertaken extensive travels

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in Eurasia in the 1640s and published his extensive Voyages et Observations in two editions, one from 1653 and the second from 1657.50 Boullaye’s work is a remarkable one from several points of view, and the knowledge on which it drew essentially came from a sojourn in western India. Like other authors collected by Picart, he claimed that the gentiles of India believed that “there is one God, Creator of Heaven and Earth, infi nite, all-powerful and very wise.”51 He referred to Indian gods such as Rama and Krishna using the term simulacres, to distinguish them from this all-powerful God, somewhat as the Dutch authors of the period at times used the term afgodt as opposed to Godt. Boullaye is further one of the first published Eu ropean writers to give a specific name to the gentiles of India; he terms them “les Indou,” further noting that “India in the Indian language is called Indoustan, the habitation of the Indous who are the ancient inhabitants of the Indies.” Further, Boullaye’s text appeared with some quite interest ing illustrations, which were originally thought to have been from his own hand, but which we now know drew on the work of more than one Indian artist from western India.52

Picturing “Religion” The matter of the illustrations to Picart’s volume on the gentiles of India has been extensively dealt with by Von Wyss- Giacosa in her quite exhaustive 2006 work. Her approach is essentially genealogical, and she deals in turn with the depiction of the gods and that of the “festivals, processions and rituals.” Effectively, it can be established that a very large number of the plates that appeared in Cérémonies were simple reproductions of plates that had appeared elsewhere, often in quite celebrated works of the seventeenth century. Interestingly, of the principal works that Picart and Bernard chose to use as textual elements in their compilation, none except La Créquinière came accompanied with readymade illustrations of any significance. The original frontispieces of Lord’s and Rogerius’s works carried a few poor sketches, and the French version of

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Rogerius did a little better. The handful of illustrations from La Créquinière—though not wholly devoid of interest—was probably judged too simple or schematic to be of use. Thus, the bulk of the illustrations come packed into the last sections of the work, with the editorial comments and attempt at synthesis. Published Portuguese works on India in the sixteenth century were very rarely illustrated, not even Garcia da Orta’s celebrated text on drugs and simples. An exception is the treatise that Cristóvão da Costa derived from it, eventually published in Salamanca.53 The account of Italian traveler Ludovico di Varthema had appeared in print in the early sixteenth century with characteristically monstrous images, which though increasingly implausible were for long decades never really replaced.54 Portuguese illustrations tended to remain in the form of tapestries or some rare manuscripts. It is with the second half of the seventeenth century that more richly illustrated texts start to appear, of which Le Gouz de la Boullaye’s work seems to be a pioneer. Two of the significant works that follow him are that of the Huguenot jeweler Jean-Baptiste Tavernier and Baldaeus, and the armchair scholarship of Kircher and Olfert Dapper, whose Asia of 1681 carries many engravings from the hand of Jacob van Meurs. Two strategies were attempted in these depictions, which we may broadly term—with tongue only slightly in cheek—as “etic” and “emic” in character. These engravings from Tavernier, Dapper, and Kircher were certainly used in quite an extensive fashion by Picart. The first, “etic” style appears in the engravings that come with the publication of Linschoten’s text, which seem largely to have been produced by Jan van Doetechem. These are plainly conceived to be European-style representations, using a visual vocabulary akin to that which might have been used for any part of the world, save for some minor attention to the costumes. We do not know the extent to which Linschoten participated in this enterprise himself. But what is certain is that in the muscular, heroic figuring of the individuals who are seen parading in the bazaars of Goa or on the streets of Java, there is nothing of the visual vocabulary of representation in use in those places. To this extent, Linschoten continues the conceptual language employed in the tapestries celebrating Portuguese victories in mid-sixteenth century Asia, where the conventions employed

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are not too dif ferent from those of an Italian or Flemish artist of the period depicting the Persian wars of the Greeks. It may be said that this continues to be the case with Tavernier, whose family connections clearly permitted him to have access to a far richer spectrum of illustrations, which clearly appear to have much enhanced the value of an other wise rather confusing and ill-organized work; the trend toward more intensive illustration in the European style may then be found in a variety of other works of the second half of the seventeenth century. When Picart put his mind to illustrating scenes from daily life, such as festivals and rituals, it is to this vocabulary that he seems to have turned instinctively. The other solution, the “emic” one, was far more complex to implement. There were both practical problems and conceptual ones. The chief practical problem was that of gaining access to Indian images that could serve as a basis for engravings. In the course of the sixteenth century, it appears that no Portuguese or other European had thought properly to collect visual representations in India, whether in the world of the Mughals or further south. Perhaps they did so, but whatever than may have been did not survive and come to us. Matters changed in the course of the seventeenth century, indeed in a rather substantial fashion. Partha Mitter attempted to produce a “select synoptic table of major early collections of Indian art in Europe” some three decades ago, but this list is now somewhat in need of revision.55 One of the earliest collections of finished and partially worked Mughal miniatures may be found in the Vatican Library (the so-called Barberini album), and dates from the period between the reigns of the Mughal emperors Jahangir and Shahjahan.56 It typified many of the seventeenth- century Eu ropean collections of Indian art in that it focused largely on the individual portrait, a feature that has also been noticed in regard to Venetian collections of Ottoman art in the same period. Collective scenes, or “emic” representations of an ethnographic nature, do not seem to have attracted the same attention. One can see this from the largest accumulations of Indian art in seventeenth-century Europe, which are those in the Netherlands. By the middle decades of the century, Rembrandt and those around him were beginning to manifest a certain curiosity in this art and even collect it through their contacts in

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Scene of satī, engraving by Jan van Doetechem, from Jan Huyghen van Linschoten, Itinerario, voyage, ofte schipvaert (1596).

the Dutch East India Company. It has even been argued that one can find numerous references to Indian paintings and albums in Dutch dowries, wills, and the like by the late years of the century.57 Yet, what impact did this have on the world of an engraver like Picart? Picart certainly had some connections to the world where Indian art was collected in Europe.58 The chief link was to the celebrated Giovanni Antonio Baldini (1654–1725), a traveler who amassed a large collection of Oriental objects and paintings in Piacenza, Italy. Baldini had traveled to England, the Netherlands, France, and Spain, and was a correspondent of Newton besides having been admitted as a member of the Royal Society in 1713 together with his friend, the astronomer Francesco Bianchini. In Henri Châtelain’s Atlas Historique, for which Picart was the engraver, we find the following note: “One is indebted, as are the four following plates, to the Count Jean Anthoine Baldini, no less to be recommended for his excellent knowledge than for the particular care which he takes to collect diverse pieces that are rare and curious, and are the worthy fruits of his travels.”59 The plates in question are rather interesting, but equally

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of interest is the larger collection from which Baldini drew. Unfortunately, this collection was dispersed at his death, and only a few elements of it can be still traced, such as a volume of forty-seven portraits from India and Iran now in Paris.60 However, the well-known scientist Antonio Vallisnieri produced a description of this collection, which makes it clear that it was one of the largest in Europe at the time.61 It included two spectacular paintings that formed the basis of two engravings by Picart: one allegedly depicts the fort in Agra at the time of the emperor Jahangir (but is in fact based on a Rajput painting of Udaipur palace), and the other the Battle of Samugarh during the war of succession in Mughal India in the 1650s.62 Neither of these is to be found in Cérémonies since their subjects do not correspond well to the theme of the volume; instead they can be found in the Atlas Historique. In general, we may imagine that the problem with Baldini’s collection from Picart’s viewpoint would have been two-fold: the emphasis (as in most contemporary collections of “oriental” art) was far too much on portraiture; and further, themes that could be termed “religious” were not really present. The two plates in Cérémonies which do seem to derive from the earlier Atlas Historique (and thence perhaps to Baldini’s collection) where the composite plates, each with four portrayals of penitents, ascetics, and jogīs, though two of these clearly have a European conceptual framework rather than an Indian source. Other collections of Indian art with a content that could be read as “religious” did exist in western Europe by 1700, but Picart probably did not have access to them. This includes an album of Indian rāgamālā paintings from western India, probably acquired through the English East India Company’s factory in Surat and presented to Archbishop William Laud, who in turn presented it to the Bodleian Library in about 1640.63 A further possible source might have been the engraver Anton Maria Zanetti (1680–1757), who had worked with Picart after having trained with Niccolò Bambini, Antonio Balestra, and Sebastiano Ricci in Venice, as well as in Bologna with Giovanni Maria Viani. A celebrated personage in Venetian artistic life in the eighteenth century, Zanetti was not only an engraver, but also a printer, collector, and scholar; it was his son, Antonio Maria Zanetti the Younger (1706–1778), who prepared a catalogue of the

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manuscripts in the Biblioteca di San Marco (or Marciana) in Venice, where a collection of important paintings on Indian religious themes commissioned by Manuzzi to accompany his version of the text on the “Gentiles of India” had come to rest in the early 1700s.64 These included some truly complex ethnographic and satirical drawings on life- cycle rituals, satī, as well as penitents and ascetics, probably executed at Manuzzi’s behest by textile painters in the region of Madras and Pondicherry. Yet, in the fi nal analy sis, only one truly substantial set of “emic” representations made the cut with Picart as it were, and even these had undergone some modification. These were the so- called daśāvatāra paintings, representing the ten forms or “incarnations” of Vishnu, which Picart presents in two versions, one apparently closer to the Indian style taken from Kircher and the other directly deriving from Coenrat Decker’s engravings for Baldaeus’s text. Yet, Kircher’s illustrations, which allegedly derived from his contacts with the Jesuit Heinrich Roth, already bear signs of confusion. The order of avatāras appears incorrectly as (1) Parasurama; (2) Krishna (in fact Vamana, the dwarf); (3) Matsya (the Fish); (4) Varaha (the Boar); (5) Narasimha (the Man-Lion); (6) Rama; (7) Krishna as Jagannatha; (8) titled Krishna again, but the iconography is of Kurma (the Tortoise); (9) titled Bhavani, but in fact Buddha; (10) Kalki, the last apocalyptic avatāra.65 In the sixth avatāra, the multiple arms of Ravana are shown sprouting from the elbow and not from the trunk of the body, a characteristic European transformation. In contrast, the engravings in Baldaeus, and following him Picart, do proceed in the correct order: Matsya, Kurma, Varaha, Narasimha, Vamana, Parasurama, Rama, Krishna, Buddha, and Kalki. Hence, the exact source for these engravings remains something of a puzzle. Jarl Charpentier identified a set of ten paintings in the British Museum that may have accompanied the works of the Jesuit Father Jacobo Fenicio (1558–1632) and Angel but also had concluded that “the pictures in Baldæus must have been taken from another set of drawings.”66 A second daśāvatāra collection that accompanies the second copy of Angel’s manuscript, which is presently in a monastery in Belgium, may then be the source for Baldaeus.67 Yet we can see that while the engravings preserve key elements of iconography, they

“Troisième incarnation,” or Varāha avatāra of Vishnu, in Bernard Picart, Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde (1723–1743), Vol. 1, Part 1.

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also considerably transform the visual language in two respects: first, they introduce perspective in a determined fashion through rolling (usually hilly) landscapes in the background; second, they somewhat refigure both the human figures and especially the animals. To preserve the “emic” as entirely “emic” was thus usually something that the engraver revolted against, the rare exceptions being Picart’s fine versions from the Baldini collection.

Conclusion To conclude, the massive work by Picart on Cérémonies et coutumes stands as a monument for a number of dif ferent reasons, but above all on account of its scope and ambition, which far exceeds that of earlier works in Europe. A comparison with a work such as Alexander Ross’s Pansebeia: or, A view of all religions in the world (1653) from two generations earlier strongly confirms this sense.68 Yet, the very scope of the work posed considerable problems. To put it simply, too much textual material on India and its “Gentiles” had accumulated in the years between 1500 and 1700.69 Worse still, in the period after about 1590, rich visual material had been added to the feast, with the publication of Linschoten’s Itinerario marking a point of departure that led to a transformation in the course of the seventeenth century, largely in the Low Countries and France. Suddenly, the feast was too rich and too difficult to digest, and this explains some of the difficulty we have with Picart (and Bernard) on the question of the gentiles of India. The seventeenth century had seen valiant attempts in Europe to struggle with Judaism and Islam in manners that went beyond simple dismissal and expressions of contempt. Yet, there were sound and relatively straightforward grounds to link the three, because they participated in a single genealogy of prophecy as well as a textual tradition. After all, Islam recognized Jesus and Moses as prophets, even if not as the “seals of prophecy.” The difficulties presented by the gentiles of India were of quite another order. Did they in fact possess a “religion”? If they did, how could one cordon it off from their “civil” practices? Was it to be found primarily in texts, or in ceremonies and daily practices, or in a combination of the two? These questions had of course troubled Catholic

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missionaries ever since the mid-sixteenth century. By the latter half of the seventeenth century, a form of common sense united most Eu ropean writers on this question. There was indeed a “religion,” although they—with a few exceptions like Le Gouz de la Boullaye— were yet to give it a single name. There were indeed authoritative texts like the Vedas or Puranas, even if they were often yet to be fully identified, let alone translated. Above all, there were gods, and from the essential qualities of these gods certain abstract principles about them could be formulated, thus rendering the “religion” of the gentiles of India comparable to other “religions,” and permitting a global view of what religion itself might be. At the outset of this chapter, it was noted that a growing skepticism emerged in the past half-century concerning the validity and legitimacy of this view. Cantwell Smith, for example, opposed the use of the substantive term “religion,” even if he was willing to admit the adjective “religious” and hence might not have found the title of Picart’s work objectionable. Other writers have since gone much further, though not necessarily with interesting results.70 The problem of religion can be posed in two distinct contexts, one where what is really at issue is “conversion,” and one where conversion is absent. The first of these dominated missionary thought in India as well as China in the later sixteenth century and was posed effectively as follows: in order for a gentile to convert to Christianity, what could he retain and what did he need to abandon from his unconverted self? Demarcating that which had to be abandoned became the key to the definition of the field of the gentile religion.71 In contrast was a second strategy, one in which Picart and Bernard participated. Here, the definitions of religion centered on the problem of the possibility of comparison, which preceded a universal, perhaps deist, project. In this they were, interestingly, not entirely alone. In the middle years of the seventeenth century, an intellectual in eastern India (but who had been a great wanderer in his time) wrote an extensive text entitled Dabistān-i mazāhib, “School of Sects (or Theologies).”72 The term mazhab, of which mazāhib is the plural, is generously translated by a standard Persian dictionary as “mode of conduct, doctrine; a religious opinion; a sect, a religious order; canon, law, rule, institution, regulation.” Yet looking at the choice of objects in this encyclopedic

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“Diverses Pagodes et Penitence des Faquirs,” in Picart, Cérémonies et coutumes, Vol. 2, Part 1.

work, one can see that those that are listed are essentially what we would term “sects,” “faiths,” or “religions,” including Judaism, Christianity, the Sikhs, and a vast number of groups who would today figure under the broad rubric of “Hindu.” Many details are still lacking regarding the author, a certain Mirza Zu’lfiqar Azar Sasani, but it has been speculated that he was closely linked to the prestigious figure of the mystic Azar Kaywan, who migrated from Iran to India in the late sixteenth century; what is certain at any rate is that he was himself a sort of Zoroastrian ‘Ishraqi (or Illuminist).73 Was this text an exercise then in the epistemology of empire-building on its author’s part? Hardly so. Rather, it was an attempt by a relatively marginal intellectual figure to organize a disparate set of tex-

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tual and ethnographic observations into a single, comparative, and then universal framework. The terrain of observation in this case was really the Indo-Islamic world, rather than the world at large. In order to explain what motivated his exercise, the author describes the general attitude of the Azar Kaywani mystics in these matters: When any one, stranger to their own faith [kesh] becomes acquainted with the community of this sect, they do not speak ill of him, but commend the path of his faith, and accept whatever he says, omitting nothing by way of respect and courtesy, on account of their own faith. This is because they believe that God can be reached through every faith. . . . They do not hold it proper to hurt anyone without gain. If someone has some work with them, whether for salvation or for this world, they do all they can to be with him and assist him. They abstain from all practices of intolerance, malice, jealousy and hatred or preference of one community [millat] over another, and of one faith [kesh] over another. They consider the learned, the mystics, the upright ones and God-worshippers of every faith their friends, and they do not call ordinary people bad, nor denounce the worldly ones. They say, of him who does not seek faith, of what use is denouncing the world to him? Such denunciation [they say] is the act of the envious.74 Certainly, traces of a similar attitude could be found even in certain intellectuals of the Mughal court, notably the celebrated Shaikh Abu’l Fazl (1551–1602), and in the later tradition that drew on his work in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.75 But equally striking is Mirza Zu’lfiqar’s repeated insistence on his own “impartiality,” and indeed intellectual equidistance from all that he surveys. Some, who affirm the traditional sharī‘at, which they present in words outwardly contrary to reason, are famous [mashhūr]; they are found in five divisions [panj firqa]: Hindus, Jews, Magians, Christians and Muslims. All five divisions claim that their sharī‘at is sound, and on the basis of their own sharī‘at, they introduce a text according to their own belief.

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After fi nishing this book, it became apparent that some important people have said that [books such as] The Congregations and Cults [Kitāb al- milal wa’l-nihal of Muhammad ibn ‘Abdul Karim Shahristani] and Insight for the Public [Tabsirat al-‘awāmm of Murtaza Razi], which have presented [various] beliefs and religious teachings, are not devoid of partisanship, so the reality of religion remains concealed. Also, after them many groups have come together in this demand, and [so the author] performed the writing of this book. And in this realm of practice and city of creed [kirdāristān-i ‘aqīda-ābād, i.e., the Dabistān], whatever has been written of the beliefs of diverse groups is from the tongue of those who hold that belief and from their book, and it is established from encountering people in the present state of every group, even as the followers and devotees honor its name. This is in order that even the scent of fanat icism and partisanship should not appear, so the author has no other aim from this encounter save that of the translator.76 Such claims are naturally not to be taken literally, but they are nevertheless significant as forms of self-conscious positioning and subjectivity. A recent analysis of the work notes that Mirza Zu’lfiqar “was born in 1025/1616 and traveled throughout northern India, Kashmir, Orissa, and parts of present-day Afghan istan until the year 1063/1652.”77 These were the circumstances in which he accumulated a mass of “ethnographic” materials in regard to the diverse “sects” (mazāhib) that were active in his lifetime, and which formed the basis of the treatise that he wrote in the end of the 1640s and continued to revise in the years that followed. Mirza Zu’lfiqar apparently did manage at one time or another to speak to a vast variety of figures, “influential Mughal officials and literary men . . . [and] important religious figures—among them [the Sikh] Guru Har Gobind, Chidrup Gosa’in and Sarmad—as well as an assortment of Catholic priests, Tibetan lamas, sanyasis, bairagis and Kashmiri and south Indian Brahmans.”78 He carefully sifted through materials, and in some cases where he was unsure of his understanding had others “check the Persian translation against the original text to ensure its accuracy.” Further, as Aditya Behl has rightly

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noted, for Mirza Zu’lfiqar “the term Hindu does not mean a member of an organized unified religion called Hindusim, in which sense it is sometimes misunderstood at present. Instead, Hindu seems to have a geographical valence, that is, the religions and sects of the people of India (ahl i-Hind), which are innumerable.”79 Though showing an unconscious preference perhaps for “monistic philosophical systems,” what is striking about this Zoroastrian author—unlike the great majority of the European writers examined in this chapter—is his measured distance from an obsessive concern with the monotheism-polytheism dichotomy. One can only wonder what Picart and Bernard would have made of this exercise, had they only known of its existence. It is certainly possible they might have recognized something of themselves in it, though other parts would have surely left them perplexed. Perhaps it would have been another valid reason then for them—and possibly for us too—to reconsider the obstinate myth of a certain trajectory of European intellectual exceptionalism.

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3 OF COPRODUCTION The Case of James Fraser, 1730–1750

Th’ inferior Priestess, at her Altar’s side, Trembling, begins the sacred Rites of Pride. Unnumber’d Treasures ope at once, and here The various Off’rings of the World appear; From each she nicely culls with curious Toil, And decks the Goddess with the glitt’ring Spoil. This Casket India’s glowing Gems unlocks, And all Arabia breathes from yonder Box. — Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock (1712)

A Highland Quarrel In the early 1750s an ugly quarrel with political overtones broke out in the Scottish shire of Inverness. A memoir directed to James Ogilvy, 5th Earl of Findlater, reported that one of the residents there had become unruly and “troublesome” beyond measure and was posing a serious threat to law and order. What made matters worse was that the person in question was himself a justice of peace. The memorialist added: “Your Lordship is best judge whether upon a proper representation my Lord Chancellor will think it proper to name a new Commission of the Peace for the county to prevent so troublesome a man having any power for the future. One thing is certain that it will have a good effect in the country in generall and will prevent a great deall of trouble and disturbance which other wise will happen.”1 The two central figures in this dispute were both linked to the estate of Lovat, which at the time had been forfeited and then annexed by the Crown on account of the deep involvement of its owner, 144

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Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat, in the failed Jacobite uprising of 1745– 1746. Lord Lovat himself had been publicly executed in London on April 9, 1747, and his was one of the thirteen significant Highland estates eventually to be annexed in 1752, and then designated to be administered by the Barons of the Exchequer through their “factors.”2 Quite predictably then, one of the main protagonists was a certain James Grant, deputy factor on the Lovat estate. But it was not against him that the complaint to Lord Findlater was directed. Rather it concerned a certain “James Fraser of Relig,” who it was claimed had used his office of justice of peace to issue “a most extraordinary warrand [sic],” stating his intention “to repell force by force against the King’s Troops when they went to collect the rent on the Musle Scalp [mussel beds].” Instead of allowing the rent to be collected, it was stated, Fraser had “made his constables uplift the rent and kept it to this day.” The appropriate response to such outrageous conduct ought to be, so the memorial stated, that Fraser “be scored out of the List of Justices of Peace.” At issue here were the rich mussel beds that the Lovat estate had rights over, notably in the Beauly Firth. But it was also claimed that this quarrel was only a sign of bigger things to come. “This Mr Fraser will be very troublesome and will take a great deall upon him on account of his success in getting James Grant turn’d oft and upon it a great part of the country will be directed by him which will be of very bad consequences.” Findlater was sufficiently alarmed by this report that he sent it on to Sir Charles Erskine, Lord Justice Clerk at Edinburgh. The latter responded on June 22, 1753, stating that he would “make strict enquiry into the truth of the facts that have been represented to Your Lordship.” A week or so later, he reported progress in the matter, noting that he had been able to obtain a number of documents germane to the affair, including “several enquiries and proofs” that he was having copied. He then added an interest ing note regarding Fraser himself: “The gentleman I never saw but on the circuit at Inverness—where I found him very useful as a Juryman—neither did I ever hear of him as disaffected. He was long in the East Indies, and has the reputation of being uncommonly skilful in the languages and learning of the East.”3 We are dealing, so it would seem, with an unruly orientalist.

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The papers that Erskine collected and had copied were quite extensive and suggest that James Fraser was not a man entirely to be trifled with. Faced with the accusation that he had impeded Grant and others in their duties, he gathered together a substantial number of testimonies, in his turn accusing Grant of significant abuses, the physical mistreatment of persons on the Lovat estate, and major financial and fiscal irregularities. All this was put together in the form of two “proofs,” leading Grant eventually to have to produce a “proof of exculpation” on his own behalf.4 Fraser also entered directly into contact with one of the Barons of the Exchequer, John Maule, a powerful political actor who had earlier been secretary to the Duke of Argyll. Realising that one of Maule’s other charges was Trustee for Encouraging Fisheries and Manufacture in Scotland, Fraser made an interest ing case for himself as someone who was substantially invested in the matter of promoting projects for economic improvement, while simulta neously presenting Grant as one of those who stood in the way of such progress: Honourable Sir: The only apology I can make for taking this liberty is the assurance Mr Grant of Dalvey gave me that whenever I should address you personally or by a letter it should meet with a favourable Reception. The little Time I have been in this country I have chiefly employed in improving my own small Patrimony and have used all my Endeavours to excite in my Neighbours a Spirit of Industry by which they not only better their own Estates but will find employment for numbers of Poor and Idle People who otherways must beg or go into Foreign Ser vice and as some of the Gentlemen have already found their advantage in Improveing their Lands and particularly in raising Lint [flax] others will soon for their own interest fall into the same methods; a great objection to raising of Lint was the Trouble of Dressing it afterwards. That Difficulty is obviated by the Lint Mills one of which I have now near fi nished and am hopefull that in a very little time we shall be under no necessity to Import Flax. A spinning school was lately sett up in

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my neighbourhood and if it had mett with no interruption would have been of Infi nite Ser vice to this part of the Country by Teaching many poor girls to spin so as to support Themselves comfortably and Bring an Advantage by their Labour to the Country.5 Several points in this message require comment. The letter opens with a reference, it would seem, to the prosperous and influential Alexander Grant of Dalvey, a Scotsman from somewhat impoverished roots who had made a great trading fortune in Jamaica and then settled in London in the 1740s, where he became a substantial shareholder in the East India Company.6 It also makes it clear that Fraser had returned not long before to Scotland himself from other climes. But it equally stresses his own spirit of industriousness and entrepreneurship in regard to one of the impor tant questions of the day, namely the attempt to promote manufacturing in Scotland, particularly with respect to the linen industry; as a historian of the matter has noted, “the growth of the linen industry [in Scotland] after 1746 was remarkable . . . [and] most of this growth was concentrated in two shorter periods, between 1746 to 1753, and 1756 to 1760.”7 Fraser was attempting to ride the first of these waves. However, it turned out there was a significant fly in the ointment, in the form of James Grant. All mine and other Justices of Peace their Endeavours to support this school have proved ineffectual against the obstinate oppositions made thereto by one James Grant who stiles himself the Things Factor on Lovats Estate. He is a Turbulent avaritious man an oppressor of the Poor Deterrs them constantly with Threatnings of Removal tho’ there be no just cause, to come into what Terms his avarice requires, and is constantly Embroiling himself and others in Quarrels and Disputes and tho’ he has been guilty of Great Misdeamanners the Justices were cautious of proceeding against him according to strictness as he gives out whatever he does is by authority from the Honourable the Barons. His possessing so many Farms tempts him frequently to insult his Neighbours and if they comply not with

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his measures he informs the Sherriff substitute by Letter that he is apprehensive of being mobbed in the Execution of his office as Things Factor and Desires he’ll order a party of soldiers to support him. This he has done twice lately on account of his own private avarice to the Terror of the poor Country people who know not whom to apply to for protection from this Tyrant who brings armed men to Back him especially as he tells them he acts by superior authority. The image is thus of Grant, swaggering through the Lovat estate with his armed guard of borrowed troops, laying down the law to his far humbler neighbours. Fraser thus suggests that far from rebelling, he is merely standing up against a tyrant. I should not have troubled you with these particulars [he concludes], were I not convinced that I am writting to one who has the Good of his country sincerely at heart and can apply the proper Remedy to such abuses. As far as I can judge the poor people are now obedient well affected and very sencible of the Lenity and Goodness of the Government we have the happiness to live under. This last expression of loyalty to the Hanoverian dispensation did not go entirely amiss. Maule placed this letter and the other papers before the Court of Exchequer in November 1752, and they ordered Captain John Forbes, Factor on the Lovat estate, to inquire into Grant’s character and the accusations that had been made again him. By mid-December he responded, and to the Court’s surprise found against Grant and for Fraser, pointing out that the former had accumulated far too many resources and too much power, and was indeed harassing his neighbours. Grant now launched a counterattack, having his friends and contacts in London spread the word that Fraser was little more than a discontented Jacobite, who was effectively resisting the authority of the Barons of Exchequer as well as the process of annexation. In July 1753, we see Fraser writing in some panic to a number of well-placed friends in Scotland, asking them for testimonials to “his character, his affection to His Majesty & the

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present Happy Constitution.” Some of these letters come down to us. In one of them, Hugh Rose in Kilraick responds to Fraser: “you tell me that Your Principles have been grossly misrepresented at London. This need not alarm you much, if you’ll but consider that it has been a common practice of late years for any man that hates another to call him Jacobite.” One of these letters once again refers to Fraser’s Indian past; the clergyman Robert Thomson testifies to Fraser’s piety and his diligence in attempting to raise funds to build a new roof for the church, “tho’ you had pass’d so much of your life in a hot country.”8 The Grant-Fraser quarrel could have possibly continued for much longer, as in mid-1753 it showed no signs of abating. But unexpected circumstances brought it to an abrupt end, as we learn from the following notes by one Samuel Smalbroke, a family friend of Fraser. January  21st, 1754, Novo Stylo—Died Mr James Fraser at his own house at Rylick near Inverness in Scotland: he went out  Writer to ye Factory at Suratt, then after Returning to England . . . carried his new-married Wife . . . with him to ye Indies, whither he went as Supercargo. Return’d ye 2d time (after 6 years stay) into England, December 1749, where I saw them in London in ye beginning of 1750.9 Fraser left behind his wife, Mary, daughter of Edward Satchwell of Warwickshire, whom he had married in London in late July 1742; with her he had at least one son, Edward Satchwell Fraser (1751–1835), who was thus less than three years old when his father died. Edward Fraser may have fought in the American wars of the 1770s, and he was certainly active as a slave owner and planter in Berbice (Guyana) in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.10 Several of his sons, on the other hand, did eventually take up careers in India, and these include William Fraser—who was shot dead in Delhi near Kashmiri Gate in 1835—as well as the artist, writer, and traveler James Baillie Fraser (1783–1856).11 Long considered the preserve of historians of early colonial institutions in India, who studied the careers of major administrators of the “high” Company period like Thomas Munro and Colin

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Mackenzie, there has been a recent and somewhat surprising revival of popular interest in Scottish dealings with late Mughal and early colonial India.12 The figures that this revival focuses on largely come from the period 1760 to 1830, and they include some whose families were already of mixed race (the case of James Skinner), or who had left Scotland a generation earlier (the case of David Ochterlony, who was born in colonial Boston). It has even been implied that such men had a peculiar genius for cultural accommodation and synthesis, and to the extent that one can read between the lines of such accounts, there would seem to have been at least three reasons for this. The first is a matter of “national characters” and affinities, a somewhat speculative line of reasoning. The second might be seen as a matter of political empathies: that the Jacobite victims of the Battle of Culloden and Bonnie Prince Charlie’s defeat in 1745–1746 could only have sympathized with the fate of other colonized people in distant parts of the globe. The third is gender-related: that in the absence of European women, Kirkpatrick, the Frasers, and others could enter into sexual relations with Indian women, thus facilitating a peculiar form of intercultural communication.13 The events of 1857, the Great Rebellion and its suppression, and above all 1869, and the opening of a route to India through the Suez Canal would have allegedly put paid to such dealings between British men and Indian women. While drawing to some extent on these earlier writings, this chapter seeks to address how a Scotsman such as James Fraser, living in India in the 1730s and 1740s, before the British conquest there had begun in a serious manner, perceive the Mughal Empire, its culture and current situation, and its past history. Was his understanding appreciably dif ferent from that of the British who came half a century or a century later? And what did his attitudes have to do with his intellectual means, that is the forms of knowledge and erudition that he possessed? This may seem at first to be a manner of revisiting Christopher Bayly’s celebrated “continuity” thesis with regard to the mid-eighteenth century.14 But it also allows us to consider the manner in which one knowledge-formation could or could not be subsumed into another. Our guide in this will be with the relatively short career of our unruly orientalist James Fraser of

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Reelig, who was probably born in 1712, and who died—as we have seen—at his home in Easter Moniack in January 1754. Fraser was appointed to a post of writer in the East India Company in about 1730, and served in Mokha on the Red Sea, as well as in Surat and Khambayat. He returned to Britain after a decade to marry and found a family, only to have a second stint in India in the 1740s, also largely in Surat.15 The conventional chronology that dates Scottish interest in the British Empire, and the consequent expatriation overseas on some scale of Scotsmen, to 1707 and the union with England, contains an element of truth in it but also of exaggeration. In point of fact, Scottish interest in India certainly dates back at least to the latter half of the sixteenth century, as we can discern from the writings of that irascible humanist intellectual and historian George Buchanan (1506–1582). Buchanan came by knowledge concerning India in the course of a sojourn in Portugal, and had occasion to reflect on Europe’s sixteenth-century discoveries while at Bordeaux, where he briefly taught Michel de Montaigne. Initially attracted by the worldwide empire on which the Portuguese monarch Dom João III (1521– 1557) had set his sights, Buchanan eventually grew tired of it, as he did of many other things, including Catholicism (he converted to Calvinism in the early 1560s).16 However, he seems to have been unable to convince his pupil James VI (later James I of England) to stay away from meddling in India affairs; James sent at least one ambassador, Sir Thomas Roe, to the Mughal court, and showed a fair interest in the early business of the East India Company.17 At much the same time as Roe, the Scottish Jesuit George Strachan (from Kincardine) had made his way via the Mediterranean to Iran, and may even have visited India. He was able to constitute a fair collection of Arabic, and some Persian, manuscripts, which came to be deposited largely in the Vatican and Naples.18 Strachan certainly had a fair knowledge of Arabic, and possessed some Ottoman Turkish and Persian, though it would seem that little of all this percolated back as far as his native Scotland. We are aware that Strachan had dealings with some of the early East India Company employees in Iran, and we can be equally certain that he was not the only Scotsman to venture into Asia in the

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seventeenth century. However, no full analysis exists yet of the employees of the East India Company by place of origin in the seventeenth century. It is only at the end of the century that some conspic uous Scottish figures come to our attention in Asian waters, usually at the margins of the Company. Perhaps the most famous of these was the Dundee-born privateer William Kidd (ca. 1645–1701), who operated in both the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans before being executed at Wapping after a public trial.19 His slightly younger contemporary, whose precise origins are uncertain, was Alexander Hamilton, who arrived in India in around 1688 and spent several decades there as a “country captain,” as well as being commander of the Bombay Marine for a time. Hamilton authored an illuminating work on private trade in the Indian Ocean, entitled A New Account of the East Indies, which he dedicated to James, 5th Duke of Hamilton, and published from Edinburgh in 1727.20 To these individuals, we can also add the minor activities of some institutions such as the Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies, which existed briefly from 1695, even if the bulk of its dealings were in the Atlantic rather than the Indian Ocean.21 Thus, a trickle of Scotsmen in the Indian Ocean began before 1707, and these numbers then increased over the fi rst half of the eighteenth century before attaining their apogee in the post-Plassey period, and especially during the moment when Henry Dundas, Viscount Melville (1742–1811) played a major role in the affairs of the East India Company.22 By the early 1770s, it has been estimated that the ratio of Scotsmen to Englishmen in the Company’s employ in Bengal was 1:5 (roughly the ratio of the two countries’ populations); of these some 30 were civil servants, a mere 280 common soldiers, and as many as 250 were officers. Analyzing these broad trends for the latter half of the eighteenth century, G. J. Bryant offers this helpful overview. Unlike the Scots who went to North America, those going to the East invariably intended to return to Britain. Also, proportionately more came from the upper classes. Their motives for going and the way they promoted their careers within the East India Company cast a revealing light on the social and economic

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condition of Scotland and the degree of its political and social integration with England in the eighteenth century. Scots went to India largely to improve their financial position; the Jacobites among them also found India an easier place in which to make their way following the backwash of prejudice they suffered in Britain after the ‘Forty-five.’23 Once again the question arises of whether this view, drawn largely from a look at post-1760 migrants, might equally apply to one who made his way to the world of the Indian Ocean in the 1730s and 1740s, when the “pagoda-tree” was not quite so easily shaken. Those Scotsmen who arrived in India in the 1760s and thereafter could count on very dense networks of ethnic solidarity and support, to the point that others sometimes complained vociferously against them.24 As Henry Dundas wrote rather ruefully to the governor of Madras, Archibald Campbell, in 1787: “It is said with a Scotchman at the head of the Board of Control and a Scotchman at the Government of Madras, all India will soon be in their hands, and that the County of Argyle will be depopulated by the emigration of Campbells to be provided for by you at Madras.”25 Even if Dundas deliberately exaggerated, such a sense of collective movement was certainly not as true of those who crossed the Cape of Good Hope eastward in the later seventeenth or early eighteenth centuries. Here, the recent analy sis by George McGilvary proves invaluable in its depiction of the mechanisms of Scottish penetration into East India Company circles from about 1720. He argues that it was in Robert Walpole’s government that the first significant wave of Scots—as distinct from the odd individual— came “to fill posts in the Company’s civil, medical and shipping branches,” as well as taking on the role of free-merchants or country-traders.26 McGilvary carefully demonstrates the central role of the Scottish entrepreneur John Drummond of Quarrel (1675–1742), who together with his brother was first an investor in Company stock and then a powerful and manipulative director from 1722 to 1733. McGilvary notes Drummond’s crucial support in shaping the East India careers of men like Alexander Wedderburn (purser at Surat, and then active in Madras and Bengal in the 1720s and 1730s), John Haliburton,

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Alexander Halkett, Hugh Campbell, Peter and Alexander Blair, and Drummond’s own cousin, George Ramsay. A particular success was James Macrae, one of Drummond’s protégés, a man of limited education and uncertain background, who was first a ship’s commander, but then rose to the high office of governor of Fort St. George in Madras from 1725 to 1730, leaving for home with a fortune estimated at easily over £100,000.27

A Scot in the Indian Ocean World Was James Fraser then a part of the “Drummond network,” like several others of his acquaintance in Surat and Bombay, such as Wedderburn, the Carmichael cousins, and Henry Lowther (the last from a prominent Yorkshire family which Drummond had befriended in London)? This is plausible but by no means certain. What belonging to the network really meant is also unclear. McGilvary for his part notes that “the clannish group of young Scots treasure-hunters sent out by Drummond in this period . . . had in common Drummond’s patronage and the urge to make money very quickly and not much else.”28 In the case of James Fraser, however, one concrete clue links him to Lowther and Drummond, namely a common interest in the coffee trade. At any rate, since we are dealing still with relatively small numbers of men, exceptions seem more frequent than rules. Fraser had two stints of slightly unequal duration in the Indian Ocean, one in the 1730s, and the other in the 1740s. When he first went out as a writer, around 1730, he could not have been much over seventeen. He possibly had some reasonable degree of education, but had not been to university; even later, he would complain about how he was handicapped in his intellectual ambitions by his “want of Latin.”29 His primary center of operation was the great Mughal port city of Surat, though he also spent time in Khambayat, Mokha, and Bombay. The vicissitudes of the port of Surat and its surroundings in the first half of the eighteenth century have been depicted with some finesse, first in a series of essays, and then in an important book from 1979 by Ashin Das Gupta.30 Das Gupta lays out the growing difficulties of the Mughal administration on the one hand, and of various Asian merchant groups on the other, ranging from Hindu

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Eu ropean settlements in Asia, 1600–1800. Map by William L. Nelson.

and Jain baniyā traders to Parsis, Bohras, Persians, Arabs, and Turks. In particular, he points to the period from 1730 to 1732, soon after Fraser arrived in Surat, as one of a veritable “crisis,” culminating in the imprisonment and death by poisoning in July 1733 of the prominent merchant Mulla Muhammad ‘Ali, who had embroiled himself in the city’s politics to a large extent and was perceived as having unseemly political ambitions himself. The ostensible source of the crisis lay in quarrels within the Mughal elite itself, quite characteristic of the reign of the emperor

300 mi 500 km

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Muhammad Shah. Central to the matter was the family of Tegh Beg Khan, the nephew of a former dīwān to the Mughal prince Bidar Bakht, when he had briefly held the post of sūbadār of Gujarat in the closing years of Aurangzeb’s reign. Tegh Beg Khan, with the support of his brothers, made a protracted bid in the late 1720s for control of Surat Castle, which he eventually managed to win with the reluctant blessings of the Mughal court, appointing himself mutasaddī (governor) in place of the earlier incumbent, Sohrab ‘Ali Khan. Tegh Beg Khan’s death in September 1746 was an occasion for further conflict in the city, though his younger brother, Safdar Muhammad Khan, eventually managed to wrest power from a rival contender, the bakhshī or paymaster, Sayyid Mu‘in-ud-Din Khan Burhanpuri (popularly known by his nickname of Miyan Achhan), and held until his death in February 1758.31 This then led to the so-called Castle Revolution of March 1759, when the English East India Company seized hold of the qil‘adārī (or position of castellan) and definitively gained the upper hand over the port city, using as a puppet the very same Sayyid Mu‘in-ud-Din Khan, who had now returned to Surat. The actions of this Burhanpuri Sayyid ironically confirm a trenchant remark in Nizam-ul-Mulk Asaf Jah’s testament: “[it] has been my personal experience that of all the people of the Deccan, the inhabitants of Burhanpur and Bijapur are the least trustworthy.”32 During his fi rst stint at Surat, Khambayat, and Mokha in the 1730s, there seems to be little doubt that Fraser would have kept some track not merely of these events but of the far larger set of political developments across the breadth of the western Indian Ocean. Times were somewhat turbulent with respect not only to Gujarat but to the Mughal Empire more generally. In Iran, Afghan clans from the northeast had seized the capital of Isfahan in 1722 and set aside the Safavid ruler Shah Sultan Husain, leading to a protracted period of succession and dynastic conflicts. In comparison, the Ottoman Empire remained relatively stable, even though Mokha and Yemen (which Fraser knew at first hand) also witnessed some political—and hence commercial—instability. Such matters were no doubt reported on a regular basis in the letters and consultation books of the various English factories in the area. As a writer or ju nior clerk in the Surat establishment, Fraser’s tasks would have included some participation

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in the drafting of such letters, as well as in maintaining the daily records of the establishment itself. This did not actually require him to have any expertise in languages other than English, for each of the European establishments in Surat would have had its share of translators and interpreters. From factory records, it appears that these must have been complex linguistic spaces; besides the chief European language (English, Dutch, or French), they would have been frequented by brokers and merchants speaking and using Gujarati, Persian, and some form of Hindustani, while their political and diplomatic dealings (the so-called country correspondence) would largely have been conducted in Persian or Marathi. Still performing the role of a lingua franca even as late as 1730 was Portuguese, the language often preferred by Asian merchants when writing to their European counterparts. The internal functioning of the factories, as well as their hierarchical organization, had been the object of a thorough-going reform in the 1660s by Streynsham Master and others, which he had in fact begun while at Surat. Master had wished to produce a “plaine & cleare Method” for the keeping of books in place of what he perceived as the prevailing chaos and incoherence; but he and others were also keen on the imposition of moral order and discipline in the space of the factory. The writers were to be taught not merely to draft clearly and respectfully, but also to avoid obscure local jargon and references that might not be clear to their readers elsewhere, including in London. At the level of their daily tasks, they were to perform them in “a handsome convenient roome, large, light and well scituated, near the Chiefs and Seconds lodgings, which shall be sett apart for the office.” Transparency was to be the norm of this world, where the Anglican religion was to be practised usually, and where quarrelling, profanity, blasphemy, gambling, violence against servants, drink, and fornication were notionally frowned upon. Further, as Miles Ogborn has written, “this idealized Christian moral order was combined with a strongly hierarchical sense of social order.”33 Fraser, at seventeen or eighteen years of age, would have begun as it were at the low end of the totem pole; at the other end of it in the Surat factory was Henry Lowther, who had fi rst arrived in Surat in 1719, and returned there by the late 1720s after stints in England

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and Bombay, eventually serving as chief of the Surat factory from August  1729 to March  1736, when he was discharged and disgraced. Lowther was hardly a model of moral probity, and he was notoriously manipulative both as a Company official and as a private trader, even though he liked to accuse the chief and council of the Dutch factory of buying their own cargo “underhand, but at what price no one knows.”34 There is thus little reason to believe that the “idealized Christian moral order” of Master in fact resembled the daily realities of life in the English factory in Surat in the 1730s. It was in this context that Fraser would have made the acquaintance of other ju nior Scottish employees of the Company, such as the aristocratic cousins Charles and George Carmichael, who were sent by their relatives to work at Surat under the protection of Lowther. Das Gupta’s studies of Surat give us a clear sense of the town’s layout in the fi rst half of the eighteenth century. Unlike many Indian port cities of the time, Surat had a long-standing fort, constructed in the middle decades of the sixteenth century by Khudawand Khan Rumi, a powerful figure in the Gujarat sultanate before the Mughal conquest of the area in 1572–1573. Entering the Tapi River from the west, ships normally went upstream past a series of fishing hamlets until they arrived at Swally (Suvali) Hole, the preferred anchorage for larger vessels. Smaller ships and barges went past first the imperial Mughal wharf and then the village of Athwa on the right bank, where the family of Surat’s most important merchant of the time, Mulla ‘Abdul Ghafur, had its own wharf. After a few other gardens and wharfs, still on the same bank, the visitor would presently reach the outer wall (called ‘ālampanāh) and the inner wall (or shahrpanāh), while the older settlement of Rander (which had played a prominent role in resisting Portuguese fleets in the sixteenth century) sat farther up on the opposite, or left, bank. Within the walls, still on the right bank, was Surat Castle and its moat, followed by the customs house and the mint. Nearby was the castle green, or maidān, an important public space for petty mercantile transactions, and beyond it the darbār—the residence of the mutasaddī. Das Gupta adds: Men lived mostly in the inner town which had its attractive corner in the complex of the castle with its green and the darbār.

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Beyond the darbār and farther away from the castle, lived the local Mughal officials in a locality called Sultanpura. As you faced the darbār and Sultanpura from the castle, the mercantile city was on your left, the locality by and large being given the name Saudagarpura. Within Saudagarpura the rich ship-owners and some aristocrats had built houses in a stretch along the river which came to be called the Mulla chakla, named almost certainly after Mulla Abdul Ghafur who lived there. The English Company had its factory here by the river and they were next door neighbours to Ghafur. The grandson of Ghafur built a mosque in 1723 which is still in use by the members of Surat’s Patni jama‘at. The Turkish family of the Chellabies lived in the neighbourhood and had their own mosque, which still stands. The French and the Portuguese lived in the locality, when they lived at Surat. But the Dutch were tucked away at a point where Saudagarpura merged, round the maidān, with Sultanpura.35 In other words, an English Company clerk or factor who lived in Surat in the 1730s was hardly insulated from the mercantile and political world of the city at large, and did not have the prospect of the same distance as his counterpart in Madras or Bombay, both towns with a far stricter spatial division between communities and races. Besides, if—as was the rule rather than the exception— one was interested in private trade, this necessarily meant some proximity with the Asian traders of the port. Some Company employees may have seen this as an unpleasant necessity, but others did not. Das Gupta reminds us, for example, that the Dutch Company factor Jan Schreuder in the 1740s spent many afternoons in the gaddīs, or commercial establishments of the baniyās in Nanavat (an area of Surat where they dominated), “collecting information on who had how much money at Surat.”36 A whole century earlier, another Dutchman, Wollebrant Geleynssen de Jongh, had been employed largely at Bharuch and Agra (with shorter stays in Surat and elsewhere), and his Remonstrantie gives ample evidence that he frequented Asian merchants—both Hindu and Muslim— socially, and had some understanding of both Persian and a vernacular Hindustani.37

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English Cemetery Variav Gate

Dutch Cemetery

Abdul Ghafur

N

TA P

I RIVER

To Rander

Delhi Gate SAYYID ‘Aydarusis PURA English Factory Marjan Inner Shami

Outer Wall (1715)

Wall (1679)

Customs Mint Surat Castle Dutch Factory

BEGAM PURA SALABAT PURA

Salabat Gate

Gopi Talav RUSTAM Main Gate PURA Navsari Gate Athwa Gate

Ja‘far ‘Ali Gate 0 0

.5 .5

1 mi 1

1.5 km

Map of Surat, 1730. Map by William L. Nelson.

Before examining the connections and acquaintances that Fraser made in the Asian milieu of Surat and Khambayat, it may be worthwhile to note one of the crucial ties he came to build within the circle of Company employees. This was with John Cleland (1710–1789), later notorious as the author of Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (or Fanny Hill), published in London in 1748.38 Cleland was just a couple of years older than Fraser, and arrived in Bombay in August 1728 as a soldier, again a couple of years before Fraser made his own way to Surat. His father, William Cleland, was Scottish, born in Edinburgh, but had left Scotland in 1697 to travel extensively in Eu rope and claimed in the process he was capable of “speaking Most of the Languages in Europe”; he then served in wars in Spain, before settling in Surrey, where his oldest son John was born.39 Like many wan-

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dering Scotsmen of his generation, William Cleland had friends on both sides of the political divide of the time: he was close to John Erskine Mar, leader of the Jacobite rebellion of 1715, but also had Whig and Hanoverian friends, who protected him in the context of the political transition of 1714–1715, allowing him to retain a position in the civil ser vice (in the area of tax and customs-collection). One of these friends was the poet Alexander Pope, who eventually became a friend of John Cleland, and who James Fraser in turn came to know through Cleland. The initial phase of John Cleland’s Indian career was smooth, possibly helped by his father’s connections. One of his modern biographers has noted that though he arrived as a mere soldier, “his progression into and through the Bombay civilian bureaucracy had been rapid and consistent.” He began as a noncommissioned soldier, and then was promoted to the gunroom as a “montross” (or gunners’ assistant). But on account of his knowledge of bookkeeping, writing and languages, by August 1730, he had been made an attorney at the Mayor’s Court. By early 1731, he was then taken on as a writer in Company ser vice, but began this new position only in January 1732, as he was absent on a trip to Bengal for about nine months. In September 1733, he seems to have been serving in Surat; the next year, he was back in Bombay, and by November 1734, he had risen to the post of factor.40 At this point, Cleland’s impetuousness and somewhat quixotic nature asserted itself. He took it upon himself to act as attorney for a Khatri merchant from Surat, Lala Shivshankar Bholanath Vasantrai, in a complaint he had filed in the Bombay Mayor’s Court against the English chief at Surat, the notorious Henry Lowther. The gist of the complaint was that Lowther had borrowed about Rs. 40,000 from Shivshankar, had refused to pay it back in full, and was now using his power as head of the Surat factory to deny the Indian merchant his due. Lowther’s defense was disingenuous, and consisted of stating that since Lala Shivshankar was “an Alien born & under the obedience of the Great Mogull,” he could not take recourse to the Mayor’s Court. Cleland mounted a swingeing attack on Lowther, whom he had served under briefly at the Surat factory, but in the process also attacked a number of other power ful members of the Bombay

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administration, accusing them more or less openly of resorting to extortion in their dealings with the Surat mutasaddī. The matter very nearly brought Cleland’s career to a grinding halt, but fortunately for him the authorities in both Bombay and London eventually found it impossible to defend Lowther’s combination of fl agrant corruption and inefficiency. In February 1736, John Braddyll of the Bombay Council was sent out to Surat, accompanied by Cleland, James Hope, and John Williamson, in order “to enquire into Mr. Lowther’s Conduct,” precipitating a major crisis in the English factory there. Extensive documentation regarding what transpired in Surat in February and March 1736 is available to us from a work that Braddyll published at private expense in London in 1746, entitled The Vindication of Mr. John Braddyll against Mr. Henry Lowther.41 This work was apparently meant to respond to an earlier text that Lowther had been circulating, denying the charges against him and making various counteraccusations regarding Braddyll going back to the time when he had been chief of the English factory at Tellicherry (in Kerala). The gist of Braddyll’s charges was that Lowther, with the connivance of his patron, Robert Cowan, governor of Bombay from 1729 to 1734 and a leading part of the “Drummond network,” had transformed the Surat factory into a center of illegal trade and mischief. Closely aiding and abetting him in this was his relative, the steward William Lowther, as well as John Robinson and James Ramsden, both of whom helped him systematically cook the books.42 The lastnamed of these, the son of Lady Ramsden of Byram, had been sent out to India in 1724 on Drummond’s intervention, and he was to play a quite prominent part in the quarrels of 1736. Lowther’s immediate reaction, when Braddyll’s party arrived in Surat, was to resist vigorously, to the point of physically evicting Cleland and the others from the factory premises. But he was then obliged to cede ground little by little, and the investigation began to turn up incriminating materials, some from the various Indian merchants and brokers with whom the factory had dealings. Eventually, in March 1736, Lowther fled the factory and then Surat itself aboard either a French ship, or one of Robert Cowan’s private vessels.43 Holden Furber has summed up his functioning as follows:

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His [Lowther’s] method was to place large sums of the Company’s money in the names of Indian brokers on the Company’s books, speculate with the money himself for months gaining 9 per cent interest on it and then repay sufficiently frequently to avoid suspicion. Between 1724 and 1735 he never had less than a lakh [100,000] of rupees on the books in Indian brokers’ names, and thus defrauded the Company of more than £120,000 until he was found out.44 It is an interest ing fact that nowhere in the extensive papers that Braddyll collected and printed concerning Lowther and his associates does the name of James Fraser appear, though we know that he was a part of the Surat establishment at the time. Was he simply considered too lowly to be noticed? This is possible, but another more pressing explanation also presents itself, namely Fraser’s friendship from this time on with John Cleland, whom he surely knew already from 1733. Hence, whatever his earlier connections with Lowther, he clearly made it a point to align himself with the dominant elements in 1736. Much later, in 1760, Cleland was to recall how Fraser at this time gave him a “book, containing a set of miniature-portraits of the successive sovereigns of Indostan for several ages back,” which he in turn claimed to have received from the mutasaddī of Surat, Tegh Beg Khan. But Cleland also suggested the chain extended further, for Tegh Beg Khan had apparently received the portrait album from “one of the Mogul’s generals [who] was with an army incamped before the town of Surat,” and to whom he had sent a large present in cash. Cleland then adds, “Mr. Frazer having parted with this set of portraits to me, I sent it to Mr. [Alexander] Pope, with whom I was then in correspondence, and who wrote me that, judging it too great a curiosity for his private study, he had done it the honor of presenting it to the Bodleian Library.”45 This must have occurred between 1736 and 1737, for the album has a note on its flyleaf in Pope’s own hand, stating that the gift to the Bodleian was made in 1737. Although both Cleland and Pope greatly overestimated the value of this album, which modern art historians tend to see as being a rather poor version from Rajasthan of Mughal (and earlier) portraits rather than “a great rarity,” this object points us in an interest ing

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Portrait of Emperor Muhammad Shah, engraving by James Hulett, frontispiece from James Fraser, History of Nadir Shah (1742).

Seated portrait of Timur, from the Bodleian Libraries, the University of Oxford, MS. Ind. Misc. d.3, fl. 157.

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direction, for clearly by 1736, James Fraser had begun to collect textual and related materials in India.46 Very few of the texts he collected were in fact illustrated. But they showed that unlike many of his contemporaries in Company ser vice, Fraser had a genuine taste for the Indo-Persian culture of Surat and its neighborhood. In this he differed, for example, from Cleland, who had immersed himself in the Luso-Asian milieu of Bombay and learned to speak fluent Portuguese. In his altercation with Lowther in Bombay, one of the Lowther’s partisans had even accused Cleland of being “caught in attempting to make his escape in disguise, with his face black’d over, to the Portugueze territories (and with an intention, as it has been publickly talk’d) there to have renounced, at once his religion and country.”47 In fact, on his return from Surat to Bombay (after the Lowther investigation had been conducted), Cleland would be named “Secretary for the Portugeze Affairs” in view of the fact that he had already been found “well versed in the Portugeze Language & otherwise well qualified for the Employ.”48 From there, he was quickly promoted to ju nior merchant and then to secretary of the Bombay Council, and his star seemed to be distinctly on the rise. However, in September 1740, Cleland abruptly left for home, probably summoned back by his ailing father. In August  1741, he was back in London and would never return to India, although he continued to take an interest in Indian matters, writing a short secret memoir soon after to the Portuguese government to help found a new Portuguese East India Company.49 Fraser too returned to Europe at much the same time, in 1740 or 1741. A letter written by him to Cleland from about this time survives, in which he asks for Cleland’s help in selling some of the manuscripts he has collected in India to the latter’s friends.50 We know that on February 21, 1742, he married Mary Satchwell while in London. But it would seem that by this time, he had already begun to contemplate returning to India. His petition to the court of directors of the company (undated, but from mid-1742) runs as follows. That your petitioner having resided above eleven years in Your Honours’ settlements abroad, particularly at Surat, Cambay and

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Mocha, and having in that time acquir’d a thorough knowledge of the Trade & Customs of those places, & perfected himself in the several languages that are current there: he is desirous of serving Your Honours abroad, and therefore humbly prays you will be pleased to entertain him in such a station as Your Honours shall judge he can be most ser viceable to the Honourable Company. In which, or any other he may afterward acquire in your ser vice, he will be careful to behave with the utmost Dilligence, Fidelity & Obedience: And is ready to give such security as Your Honours shall require.51 The Company responded positively by early November the same year. It was agreed that “Mr. James Fraser be Entertained a Factor on the Bombay Establishment, that he be stationed next under Mr. Lambe and Reside at Surrat, that as he understands the Language he attends on all Impor tant Affairs at the Durbar with the Vackeel in order to see that he makes a Faithful Report.” Further, in view of his special qualifications, Fraser was to receive a payment of Rs. 500 a year over the normal salary and allowances. And finally, while on his way out to Surat on the ship Montague, Fraser was instructed to stop at Mokha (where he had already been on his first stint), in order to negotiate a coffee purchase, on which he was allowed a 2.5 percent commission.52 In contrast to his lowly status as writer in 1730, the Fraser who returned to Surat in 1743 was thus a man of some importance, and he owed this largely to his claims to “understand the Language,” which in this instance meant less Hindustani than Persian, the official language used by agents (or wakīls) in the Surat darbār. In December 1739, before his departure from Surat, Fraser— described as being “well versed in the Persian language”—was being asked to produce a translation of a Mughal imperial farmān (or decree) for the Surat factory.53 In order to understand how such a claim was not merely made but sustained for a time to build a career, we must also turn to Fraser’s activities in England during his brief return there. As noted, he married in early 1742, and indeed his wife would accompany him to Surat on his second stint. He also made a number of useful contacts in London society, in part through John Cleland and his network.

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The most significant of these was the powerful physician Richard Mead (1673–1754), who attended on kings and aristocracy, but also on men like Alexander Pope. Mead was himself a collector and had a large set of objects of antiquarian interest as well as a sizeable library, which—though not on the same scale as that of his friend, the Irish physician Hans Sloane—was still remarked by most of his contemporaries, and considered in some respects superior to that of Sloane.54 Mead was also the author of a number of treatises such as A Discourse on the Plague (1744), and De variolis et morbillis liber (1747), and in these writings he makes reference both to older Arabo-Persian knowledge and occasionally to ethnographic observations on the current habits and hygiene of Arabs, Indians, and Iranians. For his 1747 treatise, for example, he commissioned the orientalist Thomas Hunt to prepare a translation of the Kitāb fī al- jadarī wa al-hasaba of Muhammad ibn Zakariya Razi (or “Rhazes,” ca. 865–925). It is to Mead—“as a grateful Acknowledg ment of the Favours received”—that James Fraser dedicates his only published work, History of Nadir Shah, which appeared in London in 1742. It was an opportune work, since curiosity in Europe concerning Nadir Shah Afshar (or Tahmasp Quli Khan) and his conquests was very high indeed at the time.55 The French mercenary Joseph de Voulton had sent a work to Rome, that was eventually translated into Portuguese and published in Lisbon in 1740 under the title Verdadeira, e exacta notícia dos progressos de Thamas Kouli Khan Schach da Persia no Império do Gram Mogôr; a Spanish translation of the same work appeared later in the same year.56 De Voulton claimed an intimate knowledge of the inner workings of the Mughal court on account of frequenting it, something that Fraser clearly could not do. However, Fraser could and did claim an extensive knowledge of the relevant background texts in Persian, which he termed “Eastern Histories.” To this were added the following elements: an unnamed Persian manuscript text with an “Account of the State of Affairs in the Moghol Empire before the Persian Invasion,” that Richard Mead had received from Humphrey Cole, head of the English factory at Patna; an account of Nadir Shah’s origins and early years, received by Fraser from an Englishman—probably a certain William Cockell—who had lived in Iran and known Nadir Shah well, having been “frequently in

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Company with that Conqueror”; and various letters and accounts sent from Delhi to Ahmedabad by the secretary of Sarbuland Khan to a certain Mirza Mughal, son of the dīwān ‘Ali Muhammad Khan (author of the Mirāt-i Ahmadī). Since Nadir Shah’s itinerary had only brought him into northern India and not to Gujarat, Fraser thus was not about to claim authority as an eyewitness to his actions. Rather, it was as a scholar and connoisseur of textual materials that he chose to present himself. He began by noting that he had in his personal possession many “Oriental Manuscripts, of which I have annexed a Catalogue at the End of these Sheets, have been collected from the Year 1730 to 1740, and purchased with no small Labour and Expence, at Surat, Cambay, and Ahmedabad in the East-Indies; excepting a few which I bought at Mocha in Arabia, from some Persians who passed that Way on their Pilgrimage to Mecca.” But the simple possession of such textual materials was clearly not enough; one had to read and interpret them. This then is how Fraser describes his education during nearly ten years spent at Surat and Khambayat, which qualify him uniquely to be the historian of Nadir Shah: The fi rst Master under whom I studied the Persic, was a Parsi (or one of the Race of the ancient Persians) now at Surat. The second was a Mullah of one of the Mosques there, whose name is Fakhr o’dîn. When I was at Cambay, I studied under Shekh Mahommed Morad, a Man famous in those Parts for his Knowledge of the Mahommedan Civil and Ecclesiastical Laws. During my Stay in that Place, I employed three Hours each Day with one Srî Nât Veaz, a learned Brahmin, whom I allowed a Sallary on that Account; it was by his Means I procured my Sanskerrit Manuscripts, which (I believe) is the first Collection of that Kind ever brought into Europe.57 The Parsi master thus remains unnamed, and it is difficult to gather a clear understanding of who Mulla Fakhr-ud-Din in fact was. The two other teachers are more accessible to us, the Brahmin Srinath Vyas, and particularly Shaikh Muhammad Murad of Khambayat. In the latter case, this is because Fraser’s collection of manuscripts

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included a text written precisely by one Shaikh Muhammad Murad ibn Shaikh Shihab-ud-Din, who traced his genealogy back several generations (and in several ways) to the well-known saintly figure of Shaikh Muhammad Chishti Gujarati (1549–1630).58 This was not a text on fiqh, as Fraser’s reference to “Mahommedan Civil and Ecclesiastical Laws” might have led us to believe; rather it was a history of Aurangzeb and his successors up to 1738/1151 H., and written at the request of the “Englishman Master James Fraser” (Mastar Jīms Frīzar Angrīz). Extending to some two hundred folios, and written in the Shaikh’s own hand, this text was undoubtedly significant in helping Fraser with the historical introduction to his work on Nadir Shah. Fraser would also claim in the preface to his history that he used a few other Persian texts intensively: namely the sixth volume of Mir Khwand’s famous late fi fteenth- century history Rauzat al- Safā’; the Wāqi‘āt-i Bāburī or the Persian translation of Babur’s memoirs by ‘Abdur Rahim Khan-i Khanan; the Ma’āsir-i Jahāngīrī by Kamgar Husaini; ‘Abdul Hamid Lahori’s Pādshāh nāma; and Muhammad Kazim’s Tārīkh-i ‘Ālamgīrī. But these formed a mere fraction of his large collection of manuscripts, to which we may now turn our attention.

The Matter of Collection For obvious reasons, Britain was somewhat late in the business of collecting Persian manuscripts, just as she was relatively late in coming to Asian trade. So far as we are aware, nothing of any significance was collected in either England or Scotland in the course of the sixteenth century, when the Portuguese and other southern Europeans (such as the Italians) largely dominated knowledge production concerning India and the Indo-Persian world. None of George Strachan’s quite elaborate collections of Persian and Arabic materials in the early seventeenth century seem to have been brought to Britain during his lifetime; indeed, they largely came to be deposited instead in Italy.59 One of the earliest collections of Persian (and Indo-Persian) manuscripts to be constituted in Britain was therefore that of William Laud (1573–1645), archbishop of Canterbury and chancellor of

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Oxford under Charles I. Laud, a controversial and polarizing figure even in a century when Britain did not lack in them, was described rather acerbically by his modern biographer Hugh Trevor-Roper as possessing “a crude, narrow mind,” which regularly “oversimplified the problems of humanity.”60 It is, however, generally noted that despite this, he did have a particular interest in “matters oriental,” perhaps influenced by Sir Thomas Roe, who had been ambassador to the Mughal and Ottoman courts, and in the latter context had collected some significant Greek manuscripts that he had gifted to Laud in the 1620s. At any rate, probably on account of the idea that Biblical-related materials could be found in them, the archbishop had begun by the early 1630s at least to collect texts in Arabic and Persian, besides supporting the creation of a permanent position to teach Arabic in Oxford, held by one Edward Pococke from 1636. Pococke had learned Arabic with Matthias Pasor and William Bedwell, who had intermittently taught the language from the mid-1620s in Oxford. In 1630 Pococke took up employment for a time with the Levant Company, as chaplain in Aleppo. It was partly through Pococke, and then more significantly via the geometrician and linguist John Greaves, who between attempts at measuring such ancient monuments as the pyramids, procured texts for Laud in the bazaars and elite households of the eastern Mediterranean, that one part of Laud’s collection was thus constituted and then gifted by the archbishop to the Bodleian Library.61 Seemingly under Laud’s influence, even Charles I began to exert himself somewhat in this direction. In late February 1634, he wrote to the court of directors of the East India Company asking for a supply of Arabic and Persian manuscripts; the Company’s factors in Iran responded in late November of the same year: “Our Soveraignes requiries of your worships to furnish him with some varyties of Persian and Arabian manuscripts we shall have regard to.”62 The head of the Company’s Surat establishment, William Methwold, was also apprised of the matter, and he and his council responded at some length regarding the problems in such an enterprise: Wee are exceedingly greived that we cannot in all points accomplish His Majesties royall pleasure. Heere is no want of Persian

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bookes of all sorts, most men of quality in this citty and kingdome being either Persians borne, discended from them, or educated in the knowledge of that language; so that Persian bookes are plentifully to be had, and we have sent 10 such, of severall subjects, although we doe beleive that there are few in England that will understand them; for howsoever the character resembles the Arabique (every letter carryeing the same denomination and pronunciation) yet for want of those pricks, both above and below, which point out the vowells, and are alwaies used in the Arabian character, the Persian is very difficultly read and understood but by them which are conversant therein. But we will hope that some industrious young man will make use of the opportunity he may injoy, and attayne to so much perfection as to give some light at least to direct more able linguists.63 We can certainly trace some of the manuscripts that were sent by the Company’s servants to England in this period. The most celebrated of these, now in the Bodleian Library, is an illustrated one, the so-called Laud Rāgamālā, containing some eighteen rāga paintings and a dozen other miniatures, as well as examples of calligraphy. This album was certainly in Laud’s possession by the 1630s, and it is now clear that its paintings were produced in the Deccan atelier of the great Mughal aristocrat, general, and patron ‘Abdur Rahim Khani-Khanan (1556–1627), who resided for an extended period of time in the town of Burhanpur.64 Another significant manuscript from Laud’s collection is the Dīwān-i Anwarī of the great twelfth-century poet, which had once been in the library of the sixteenth-century ruler of Ahmadnagar, Burhan Nizam Shah I (r. 1510–1553). This once again suggests that the Company’s agents procured manuscripts in at least two Indian locations, namely Gujarat and the Deccan. A striking feature of the relatively small collection of Persian manuscripts that Laud gifted to the Bodleian was its haphazard nature; not only are they an odd bunch, but there are as many as three copies of a single text, ‘Abdullah Hatifi’s sixteenth-century verse account, the Tīmūr nāma. While this work, produced by the nephew of the great poet Jami, was certainly respectable enough to be found in many manuscript copies (and also to be illustrated in at least some

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instances), there was little reason for it to occupy such a prominent place in Laud’s collection, unless those who procured materials for him were doing so in a more-or-less disorganized manner. Other Persian materials that came into Laud’s possession in the same period included the Dīwān-i Mukhtarī of a fairly prominent Ghaznavid poet, a paraphrase of Qazwini’s ‘Ajā’ib al- makhlūqāt, and—more predictably perhaps—the Dāstān-i Ahwāl-i Hawāriyān, a Christian-themed text of the lives of saints produced by the Jesuit Jerónimo Xavier and ‘Abdus Sattar ibn Qasim Lahauri at Jahangir’s court. What this meant in effect was that the archbishop came to possess a mix of poetry and diverse prose, some of it with a religious or cosmological content. But his agents did not lay their hands on any of the great Indo-Persian chronicles of the close of the sixteenth and the dawn of the seventeenth centuries, the works of Shaikh Abu’l Fazl, Nizam-ud-Din Ahmad Bakhshi or Muhammad Qasim “Firishta,” for example, nor great classics of Timurid historiography from the fifteenth century like Mir Khwand’s Rauzat al-Safā’. As regards Charles I, we are aware of only one significant Persian manuscript that came into his direct possession; this was a copy of the Gulistān of Shaikh Sa‘di, sent to him directly as a gift by Shahjahan with an autograph inscription stating that “on the 17th of the month of Safar of the [regnal] year 11, corresponding to the year 1048 of the Hijra, this exquisite Gulistān, resembling the Garden of Eden, and in the writing of the master of the time, Maulana Hakim Rukna, I have sent as a gift to the seat of the emperor of the kingdom of England ( jā’igāh-i pādshāh-i mamālik-i Inglistān). Written by Shihabud-Din Muhammad Shahjahan Padshah ibn Nur-ud-Din Jahangir Padshah ibn Jalal-ud-Din Akbar Padshah.”65 The choice of the Gulistān was obviously no accident, as few Persian texts elicited as much interest as this one in seventeenth-century Europe.66 In 1634, André du Ryer, who had spent a fair amount of time in the Ottoman Empire, had published an adaptation of it into French under the title Gulistan, ou l’empire des roses. In his preface to the work, he explained his choice as follows: The long period that I have served my King and my patria in foreign lands has given me the means to learn their mores and

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customs, along with the language of the Turks, Persians and Arabs. On going through the libraries of the most curious among them in Egypt, in Great Cairo and in Constantinople, I found that the book entitled Gulistan, which is to say the Empire of the Roses, is greatly prized amongst them on account of the subtlety of its responses, for the solidity of its discourse, the sweetness of its poetry, and the gravity of its sentences. It is that which led me on my return to employ some of my hours of leisure towards this version, dressing it in the French manner [à la françoise].67 Du Ryer’s version formed the basis for subsequent translations that followed soon after, until the early 1650s, when the Lutheran Orientalist Georg Gentze, or Gentius (1618–1657) went on to produce a full bilingual edition, with the Persian text facing a Latin translation. This text, now significantly entitled Rosarium politicum, was published in Amsterdam in 1651 and dedicated to the Elector of Saxony, Johann Georg. Gentze was, if anything, even clearer than Du Ryer in asserting that the work was a speculum regum et principum, “a mirror for kings and princes,” and as such could be treated as a common patrimony, transcending religiopolitical boundaries, not an insignificant matter at a time when the Thirty Years’ War had just drawn to a close. A tension may thus be seen to exist in regard to the motives of those who collected Persian (and Indo-Persian) materials, and this had an impact on the nature of the manuscripts collected as well. If, on the one hand, an impulse came from those, such as Laud, concerned with Biblical studies, others were far more interested in the “secular” content of Persian literature, from an aesthetic as well as from a political viewpoint. We may see this in the constitution of the rival collection to that of the Bodleian, namely that of the Cambridge library. The initial kernel of the Cambridge Persian collection appears to have come when the family of the Duke of Buckingham gifted the library with a part of the extensive collection of the Dutch orientalist Thomas van Erpe, or Erpenius (1584–1624).68 The gift, made in 1632, was far stronger in Arabic than in Persian materials, reflecting Erpenius’s own inclinations, and to the extent that we can

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discern none of its materials were acquired in the Indian subcontinent. Of the Persian materials, most relate to religious matters, in this instance Qur’anic studies. The one major exception is a copy of Mir Khwand’s Rauzat al- Safā’, of which Erpenius possessed a copy in two parts, one of great value possibly produced under the author’s own supervision and the other copied by a scribe in Tabriz in 980 H / 1572. Other Persian manuscript materials then accumulated gradually in Cambridge over the next century, again largely relating to the study of the Bible, the Qur’an, or grammar and vocabulary. A major intervention in the Cambridge Persian collection came from the important but somewhat obscure figure of George Lewis, who ended his life as archdeacon of Meath. Three years before his death in 1729, Lewis gave over his monumental cabinet made up of a mixture of coins, objects, and some seventy-six manuscripts to Cambridge, where he had completed a degree at Queen’s College in 1689 before spending the years from 1692 to 1714 at Fort Saint George in Madras as chaplain and librarian.69 Profiting from the recent Mughal conquest of the Coromandel region, which until 1686– 1687 had mostly been under the sultanates of Golkonda and Bijapur, Lewis went about collecting a mixture of manuscripts, most in Persian. Fifteen years into his stay in India, Lewis’s knowledge of Persian was thought sufficient for him to be used to translate secret correspondence in Madras, and in early 1709 Governor Thomas Pitt even considered sending him as envoy to the Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah, noting that he was “a very worthy, sober, Ingeneous man, and understands the Persian language very well, as also the Customs of the Country.”70 Some of Lewis’s manuscript acquisitions are predictable for a clergyman, such as a Persian translation of the Qur’an, or Persian versions of the four Gospels (Kitāb-i Injīl). But we may also note an interest ing mixture of other texts. Among historical works, we find several extensive sections (rather inevitably) of Mir Khwand’s Rauzat al- Safā’ in several manuscript volumes, a part of Khwandmir’s Habīb al-Siyār, but also other texts ranging from a part of ‘Abdur Razzaq Samarqandi’s Matla‘ al- Sa‘dain to Sayyid ‘Ali Tabataba’i’s late sixteenth-century chronicle of the Deccan, Burhān-i Ma’āsir, to parts of the great Mughal and Safavid official chronicles of Shaikh Abu’l Fazl and Iskandar Beg Munshi. Other impor tant

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works include some of the great titles in lexicography like the Farhang-i Jahāngīrī and the Burhān-i Qāti‘, the letters (inshā’) of Abu’l Fazl, and works of many of the classic poets of the Persian tradition: Nizami, Rumi, Sa‘di, Shaikh ‘Attar, Hafiz, Jami, Hatifi and ‘Urfi Shirazi. Further, we fi nd such popu lar and exemplary works of “practical wisdom” as the Tūtī Nāma, Anwār-i Suhailī, and the ‘Iyār-i Dānish. Finally, of particular interest is the fact that Lewis was able to acquire an illustrated copy from the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century of Nizami’s Khusrau wa Shīrīn, no easy matter in view of the relative inaccessibility of such materials at the time on the “market.”71 Lewis’s collection, constituted some thirty years before that of Fraser, thus sets a useful baseline for comparison. The constraints facing the two were surely somewhat similar, namely the limited availability of manuscripts for purchase by a European, the tastes of the collector, and his knowledge of the tradition in which he was collecting. As regards the first of these, it may be that Fraser had a slight advantage over Lewis in view of their relative locations. It was only since the 1640s that Persian had been present on a regular basis in the Madras region as an administrative language, and it would seem that Lewis would have had to depend for his purchases largely on the personal libraries of Mughal notables and scribes who had been part of the empire’s expansion into the region after the late 1680s. Fraser, on the other hand, could count on the continued existence in Surat and Khambayat of Persian-speaking literati and their collections for several centuries. Further, our knowledge of how the two entered into the world of Indo-Persian is not the same: in the case of Lewis, we have no sense of his teachers and interlocutors in the Madras region, whereas Fraser leaves us with a far clearer notion of who his were. It is clearly as a reflection of these dealings with the intellectual conception of men like Mulla Fakhr-ud-Din and Shaikh Muhammad Murad that he goes about presenting his collection of manuscripts to his readers. The seven rubrics he chooses are as follows, and seem largely to derive from traditional categories: (1) history, (2) poetry, (3) ethics, politics, and novels, (4) the arts, sciences, and so on, (5) dictionaries, vocabularies, and so forth, (6) letters, forms of writing, and the like, and (7) divinity. These appear to

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correspond to the received categories of classification: tārīkh; nazm; akhlāq wa dāstān; ‘ulūm-o-funūn; lughat; inshā’; and ‘aqā’id. A very high proportion of the manuscripts listed in Fraser’s 1742 catalogue may still be found in the Bodleian Library’s collections under his name, and this is an invaluable help, for it allows us to compare his summary descriptions with the actual contents of these works.72 We may thus follow him through the list of his first section on “history,” made up of twenty-six items. In his order of listing, this is how they appear, with the current manuscript references in brackets. Pride of place is taken as usual by Mir Khwand’s voluminous history Tārīkh-i Rauzat al- Safā’ (corresponding to Fraser 126, 127; and also Fraser 128, 129), which we have encountered in Lewis’s collection, as well as that of Erpenius.73 It is then followed by a summary Persian version of the classic Arabic history, the Tārīkh-i Tabarī (Persian summary: Fraser 165; Fraser 131). Fraser then continues his list with a text he terms Tārīkh-i Pādshāhān-i Hind, which he claims dates to the reign of Akbar; this would appear to correspond to something like ‘Abdul Haqq Muhaddis Dehlawi’s Tārīkh-i Haqqī (Fraser 132, 133), rather than the great chronicle of Firishta which Fraser’s collection does not include.74 Out of proper chronological order, we then find Abu Sulaiman Da’ud Banakati’s Rauzat al-albāb or Tārīkh-i Banākatī (Fraser 119). This is followed by a sequence of major Mughal histories: Shaikh Abu’l Fazl’s Akbar nāma (Fraser 135); Khwaja Nizam-ud-Din Ahmad’s Tabaqāt-i Akbar Shāhī (Fraser 136); ‘Abdul Hamid Lahori’s Pādshāh nāma (Fraser 137, 138); Kamgar Husaini’s Ma’āsir-i Jahāngīrī (Fraser 139); the Persian version of Babur’s memoir entitled Wāqi‘āt-i Bāburī (Fraser 140); his great-grandson Jahangir’s memoir, here given the title of Wāqi‘āt-i Jahāngīrī (Fraser 141); and Munshi Muhammad Kazim’s ‘Ālamgīr nāma (Fraser 142), covering the first part of Aurangzeb’s reign. Many of these texts, we may note, were appearing for the first time in a European collection, as they had escaped not only Lewis’s attention but that of other contemporary collectors of Persian materials in the Netherlands and elsewhere in Europe. The catalogue then presents a more heterogeneous set of materials, some regional histories, some relating to Iran, and still others to the distant past. They include Hasan ibn ‘Ali Kashmiri’s Tārīkh-i

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Kashmīr (Fraser 160); Sikandar ibn Manjhu’s chronicle of Gujarat, the Mirāt-i Sikandarī (Fraser 161); Iskandar Beg Munshi’s great work on the Safavids, the Tārīkh-i ‘Ālamārā-yi ‘Abbāsī (Fraser 144, 145, 147); and a work that Fraser patently misidentifies as Tārīkh-i Shāh Isma‘īl by Sharaf-ud-Din ‘Ali Yazdi, but which appears in fact to have been that author’s rather famous text the Zafar nāma (Fraser 121). Here, as elsewhere, Fraser shows occasional signs of carelessness or haste, an aspect of his approach to these materials evidenced on a few more occasions. Continuing to the end of his listings of histories then, we encounter a text that he simply terms Tārīkh-i Mukhtasar, “containing a short History of the Great Moghols, from Auringzebe’s Death, to the third Year of the present Emperor Mahommed Shah’s Reign,” and which perhaps corresponds to the text prepared for him by Shaikh Muhammad Murad (Fraser 122);75 it is followed by two well-known works, namely Qazwini’s Athar al-bilād wa akhbār al-‘ibād (Fraser 149) and Yahya Sirhindi’s Tārīkh-i Mubārak Shāhī (Fraser 150). At this point in the list, we find a rather odd inclusion, in the form of the seventeenth-century Sufi ‘Abdur Rahman Chishti’s work Mirāt al-Makhlūqāt (Fraser 179), a text that would normally not have been classified under history, as it purports to reconcile the Indic and Islamic traditions with regard to cosmogony through a complex narrative; Fraser’s own notation states that it “is an Explanation of a small Book, in the Brahmin’s Language; composed, at first, in the Time of the Genii, which he [‘Abdur Rahman], by great Chance found; containing a Prediction in regard to the Creation of Adam and Eve, peopling the Earth with Mankind, and foretelling Mahommed’s Mission.”76 This is then followed by the late fifteenth-century life of the Prophet by Mu‘in-ud-Din Miskin Herawi, entitled Ma’arij al-Nubuwwa (Fraser 151, 152, 153, 164); Juwaini’s Tārīkh-i Jahāngushā (Fraser 154); and a text that seems to be a partial version of Natanzi’s Muntakhab al-Tawārīkh (Fraser 155). In closing this list, Fraser once more shows some signs of carelessness. He lists Badayuni’s Muntakhab al-Tawārīkh (Fraser 159), but summarizes its contents by stating that it was “composed by Abdulcadr Muloukshah Bedauvni, in the Year 999, at the Command of the Great Moghol Jilal o’din Mahommed Akbar,” thus transforming

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this sharply critical and unofficial work into an official history. The last three works listed in this section are, respectively, Qazwini’s Tārīkh-i Guzīda (Fraser 156), the collection of Aurangzeb’s letters and orders entitled Kalimāt-i Tayyibāt (Fraser 157; another fragment in Fraser 158), and finally Shaikh Abu’l Fazl’s celebrated Ā’īn-i Akbarī (Fraser 163). While this may not be an overwhelming list from the perspective of 1800, it is certainly a striking one viewed from the vantage point of 1740. Charles Stewart’s cata logue of Tipu Sultan’s library published in 1809 manages only by taking an extremely broad view of what constitutes “history” to identify fifty-two works, roughly half of which have to do with India.77 Tipu’s library, for rather obvious reasons, contained a greater number of works on the Deccan, while these were rather poorly represented in Fraser’s selection; further, the Mysore ruler had, by dint of raiding the libraries of neighboring potentates who were linked to the Mughals, managed to acquire a formidable selection of Mughal chronicles of the sixteenth century, including the multi-authored Tārīkh-i Alfī and Tahir Muhammad Sabzwari’s encyclopedic Rauzat- ul-Tāhirīn. Yet, what sense can it possibly make to compare the capacities of a ruler with that of a merchant in the matter of constituting a library? Bearing in mind Fraser’s limited resources and uncertain education, it is certainly revealing to see where the tastes of his teachers guided him; in the matter of poetry, they took him inevitably to authors such as Firdausi, Rumi, Sa‘di, Shaikh ‘Attar, Nizami, Anwari, and Jami, whose works are still extant in the Bodleian’s Fraser manuscripts. Other works of poetry that he lists in his 1742 catalogue have disappeared; these include four volumes of a dīwān of Amir Khusrau (which he notes are “generally sung to Musick”), as well as a dīwān of Hafiz. But Fraser’s collection also departs in some respects from those of others that we have listed so far; it contains extensive parts of the works of the twelfth-century poet Khaqani, including his kulliyāt, a commentary (sharh), and a separate and well-decorated manuscript of the Tuhfat al-‘Irāqain (Fraser 62). If Fraser’s tastes are reflected in his purchase of Maulana Zuhuri’s Sāqī nāma (Fraser 84), and several works of Ghazali Mashhadi, his collection at times seems directly to reflect the milieu of his western Indian teachers, since it also contains such

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lesser-known works such as those of the sixteenth-century poet Miram Siyah (Fraser 70), or the mid seventeenth-century poet Maulana Hafiz Muhammad Fazil Surati’s Natījat-i altaba‘ (Fraser 83).78 A full discussion of the seven sections of the catalogue and their contents would be excessive here. But some remarks are certainly in order with regard to a few of the other texts, including those under the heading of what Fraser terms “Ethics, Politics, Novels,” since they may in turn relate to his conception of politics as practiced in the “East.” Though he lists them in his catalogue, Fraser’s manuscripts of the Akhlāq-i Nāsirī and Khwandamir’s Dastūr al- wuzarā’ are no longer extant, unless he confused the latter title with the extant Āsār al- wuzarā’ (Fraser 115). But we do find a copy of the late fifteenth-century Akhlāq-i Muhsinī (Fraser 252), as well as two copies of another well-known text of Nasirean ethics from the same period by Jalal-ud-Din Dawwani entitled Lawāmi‘ al-ishrāq fī makārim alakhlāq or Akhlāq-i Jalālī (Fraser 251, 251bis). In addition, we also note the marked presence in the collection of narrative texts featuring the use of exempla from the Arabo-Persian moral and ethical tradition, such as Abu’l Fazl’s ‘Iyār-i Dānish (Fraser 98), Anwār-i Suhailī (Fraser 99), Kalīla wa Dimna (Fraser 100), Tūtī nāma (Fraser 102), and the Qissa-yi Duzd-o- Qāzī (Fraser 103). Also of considerable significance is the Inshā’-yi Abu’l Fazl or Mukātabāt-i ‘Allāmī, of which Fraser remarks that “they are reckoned the best writ of any Thing in that Language” (Fraser 117). In the same genre, we note that by 1742, Fraser had copies of the Inshā’-yi Yūsufī or Badā’i‘ al-inshā’ (Fraser 56), of the notable inshā’ collections by Harkaran Das Kamboh and Chandrabhan “Brahman” (Fraser 52, 53), as well as of the earlier Wa‘iz-i Kashifi’s Sahīfa-i Shāhī (Fraser 50). All these materials taken together are quite helpful in indicating the sort of education that Fraser sought and received in Surat and Khambayat. It is the familiar one made available to the emerging munshī class of the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, stressing a vision of politics and ethics that had been refined since the late sixteenth century, and willing to be inclusive toward nonMuslim elements such as Brahmins, Kayasthas, and Khattris.79 It is not surprising, then, to find that Fraser possessed a copy of both the Mu’nis al-arwāh, princess Jahanara’s work on Khwaja Mu‘in-ud-Din

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Chishti (Fraser 229), and of Dara Shikoh’s Majma‘ al- bahrain (Fraser 260). We have already remarked his acquisition of an important work by ‘Abdur Rahman Chishti, and to this we may also add a short treatise by the celebrated Chishti Sufi Sayyid Muhammad alHusaini “Gesudaraz” (Fraser 176), as well as two copies of an early seventeenth-century work by Sharif Qutbjahani purporting to effect a reconciliation between Indic and Islamic mystical traditions, entitled Atwār dar hall-i asrār (Fraser 247, 263). In other words, the effects of closely frequenting a Chishti Sufi milieu in Gujarat on James Fraser are quite visible on his collection, even if he also ranged far and wide over other subjects ranging from medicine, astronomy, and measurement, to lexicography and jurisprudence ( fiqh).80

The Bitter Return Fraser’s short visit to England in the early 1740s must be counted a success using any one of several measures. He had returned from India a relative unknown, but in 1743 he was on his way back to India with a reputation as a savant, a collector, and a published author on a subject of pressing public interest, and in possession of a very good set of financial terms offered to him by the Company. He had contracted an advantageous marriage and had the means to bring his wife to India with him. In late October 1743, the Surat Council wrote to the directors, noting: “Mr James Fraser is entertain’d here in the station to which Your Honours have been pleas’d to appoint him; and in which we hope he will exert himself so as to answer your expectations.”81 By December that year, Fraser was in the thick of dealings with the darbār, and both Tegh Beg Khan and his younger brother Safdar Muhammad Khan seem to have treated him with a certain familiarity. His name appears on the consultations of the factory, along with its chief James Hope and three others: George Hamilton, James Lambe, and William Johnson.82 Because of his ability with regard to Persian Fraser was called on to translate documents from the court, especially since some of the documents were deemed to be forgeries. Equally, he seems to have reestablished close contact with the merchant milieu at Surat that he already knew quite well.

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But four years later, every thing had turned to vinegar. We gather this from a long letter of complaint from Fraser in Surat, to the Court of Directors of the Company, dated November 1747. In this, Fraser begins by noting that “the uncommon Resentment with which I have been persecuted of late by the Governour of Bombay, for opposing the Measures he pursued contrary to the Interest of the Hon’ble Company, and the Unjust Censure laid on me by him and some of his Council for persisting in my Duty; obliges me now to trouble Your Honours with this address.”83 The governor in question was William Wake, who remained in that office for almost eight years beginning in November 1742. Wake was undoubtedly a rather slippery character. He had come out to India in the early 1720s, and then spent several years as a free merchant and country captain around Bombay before being appointed chief of the Anjengo factory in 1732. After that, his rise through the Company hierarchy was rapid, culminating in his promotion to governor at the end of ten years. But he simply could not let go of his heavy investment in private trade. Even as governor, Wake continued to have secret private dealings with the Dutch Company official Jacob Mossel, and eventually came to be entangled in a complex and murky affair involving the Portuguese and French in 1747–1748, when one of his ships, named Fakhr al- marākib, was seized by the French.84 In this affair, it also turned out that Wake had close dealings with one of the prominent merchants of Surat, Mulla Fakhr-ud-Din, son of the deceased Mulla Muhammad ‘Ali. However, if Fraser may be believed, Wake’s Surat affairs were for the most part carried out through a favored agent, a baniyā named Jagannathdas Laldas Parekh, himself from the third generation of a family that had long had connections with the English Company. Ashin Das Gupta notes that Jagannathdas’s father, Laldas Vitthaldas “had managed the personal trade of Robert Cowan, the governor of Bombay, and Henry Lowther, Chief of Surat, more or less as a partner, till his death in 1732.”85 Laldas was the nephew of Bhimji Parekh, the fi rst of his family to be appointed officially as the Company’s broker (or wakīl) in 1662. On his death in 1686, first his brothers and then his sons took over the broker’s post, until one of them— a certain Vanmalidas (or Banwalidas)— entered into disputes

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with the Company and was ruined. Laldas had then managed to revive the relationship with the Company in the late 1710s, wresting the post of broker from the great Parsi merchant family of Rustamji Manakji, which had meanwhile come to occupy it. From this time, a bitter rivalry had existed, to the point that one English observer in 1742 termed it “the long implacable enmity subsisting between the Rustom and Parrack families, which may have prompted them to very extraordinary steps of malice.”86 The fall of Henry Lowther in 1736, and John Lambton’s assumption of the post of head of the Surat factory, had been disastrous for the Parekhs. In March 1737, they again lost the brokerage, and Jagannathdas was arrested not long after, while visiting Bombay. However, he fled by squeezing himself through the porthole of an English ship near Surat and was given Maratha protection; he then gradually rehabilitated himself in the early 1740s, when John Horne was succeeded as governor in Bombay by William Wake.87 In this ongoing dispute, it is clear that Fraser saw himself as on the side of the Parsis—who he perceived as being unfairly persecuted—while presenting Jagannathdas as little more than a vile creature of Governor Wake. He writes: [ Jagannathdas is] a Person quite uncapable [sic] of any Business; Extremely Slothfull and Idle, and possessed with an inveterate antipathy to all the substantiall & creditable Merchants who used to frequent the Factory; he professes himself openly a Bankrupt, has constantly a number of Dunns about him, and neither his Word or his Bond will pass in the Bazaar or with any Merchant even for Ten Rupees— and Yet this is the Person who is to manage the English affairs at the Durbar. If this was done to repay any obligation the Governour might have been under formerly to Laldass, it was very unreasonable the Hon’ble Company or the Private Traders should pay that Debt of Gratitude, for as everybody ought (according to an old saying) to be just before he is generous, neither that nor any Private Recommendations whatsoever can justify such a step. It is well known what pains Jaggernaut took the years 1737 and 1738 to hurt the Company’s Business at this place, to get their goods seized and if possible to drive them entirely out of their settlements on

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this side; and Governour Wake himself knows that he is no well-wisher to their interest.88 It soon becomes clear however that Fraser has a personal axe to grind as well. He resentfully notes that “none but Jaggernaut is now permitted to go to the Durbar, and tho’ in the general letter it is said that he is only to be employed on such occasions as do not require my going, yet I am convinced the chief’s private Instructions are in another strain.” Thus, whereas in late 1743, Fraser’s dealings at the darbār suggest close contact with Tegh Beg Khan and his brother, by late 1747—when the disputes on the death of that mutasaddī in the previous year had played themselves out—Fraser was no longer in a position to mediate between the English factory and the Mughal administration. It is not impossible that Fraser’s hostility to Jagannathdas stemmed from his first stint at Surat in the 1730s, but what is clear is that by the mid-1740s, it had reached unprecedented heights. His contempt for the baniyā merchant is patent in passages like the following one. Notwithstanding Governor Wake has dignified him [ Jagannathdas] with a Colonell’s Commission having made him Commander in Chief over all the Turks, Arabs and Moors that had been levied here last season for the Bombay Ser vice, a Ridicu lous Mistake that could be committed by none but a Person who had never known the Customs of India, or who had lived so long in it that he had forgot them all. These people would never have fought (had an occasioned [sic] offered) under the Command of a Paultry Banian whom they are always accustomed and bred up to look on with contempt and pity.89 Here, Fraser effectively takes on the posture and attitudes of a well-born Surati Muslim himself, clearly sharing in their disdain for the “Paultry Banian.” To him, the attitude of Wake and his council is thus additionally an insult to his own status relative to Jagannathdas: “The Governour and some of his Council say I have no Business to interfere in those Affairs, and seem to hint as if I was only intended to be a Lacquey to his new Vackeel, who had hardly

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sense enough to deliver a common message in proper terms. The Mogol Governor despises him and seldom or ever will speak to him.” Here, the critique seems to extend to Jagannathdas’s lack of etiquette and command of courtly Persian, in contrast not only to Fraser himself but to the Parsi entrepreneurs Naushirvanji Bomanji and Manuchihrji (or Mancherji) Khurshedji, “the most creditable and substantial merchants who dealt with the English.” 90 Further, in contrast to his awkward relations with the Mughal officials, it is suggested— quite plausibly—that Jagannathdas has close relations with the Maratha warlords (or “ganeems,” meaning ghanīm or plunderer) in the area, to the point that Fraser accuses him of having had a rival “contractor” called Lacchmidas Nagar seized by the Marathas while on his way from Surat to Bombay.91 By the close of his letter, Fraser thus expressly states that he has come to the end of his tether, and he has therefore “requested of the Governour that he would give me leave to go home overland with Mr Munro and some other Gentlemen, who only wait for a conveyance to Bussorah.” But Fraser’s stay in Surat would end, in reality, in far more ignominious circumstances. The Bombay Council held extensive deliberations on how to deal with him in January 1748, accusing him in no uncertain terms of “arrogant Behaviour on many occasions to the late chief of Surat [Hope] his superior,” as well as “contemptuous Behaviour and injurious Reflections on us, the President and Council.” The view that the council put forward was that Fraser had a number of personal prejudices, as well as private interests that impeded his proper functioning as a Company employee. As regards the former, the council claimed his actions showed a consistent bias against Jagannathdas, as well as two other baniyā merchants, Shambhudas and Vitthal; in contrast, he always tended to favor the Parsi merchants, Mancherji Khurshedji and Manakji Nauroji. The document continues to set out what were seen as Fraser’s deeper motivations: And here it may not be improper to observe that Mr Fraser instead of answering the good intention of the Honourable Company in sending him out for conducting their affairs at the Durbar, has on the contrary (as it appears to us by undoubted Information) made an ill use of that very employ to carry on

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with Munchur, an unwarrantable intimacy with Manackchund Duan (or the Person who transacts all public Business for the Governor) who for his cruel oppressions in Surat has been thrice stoned by the People of that City. And we are well assured that those three, viz. Mr Fraser, Munchur and Monack Chund have bought in partnership together goods belonging to the English Merchants at such low prices as they could not possibly have been sold at, had not other Town Merchants been intimidated by said Duan to bid for the same.92 The conclusion of these and related reflections was that Fraser was nothing short of a “manifest obstruction to the currency of the Honourable Company’s affairs at Surat,” since every thing he did was “notoriously calculated to serve his own private purposes without regard to Truth or the true Interest of his Employers.” It was therefore decided that Fraser would be suspended from his post at Surat and ordered to Bombay “by the first opportunity.” This version of secret motivations and private commercial coteries is entirely at odds with Fraser’s own view of the matter. We learn the details of his perspective from a “humble memorial” that he submitted to the Court of Directors of the Company after his return to London, and which was eventually read and discussed by that body in January 1749.93 In it, his attack widens from Wake—whom he continues to characterize as the central author of his troubles—to include Thomas Marsh, who had succeeded James Hope as head of the Surat factory in August 1747, and who held that position until his sudden death in early October 1748. Marsh, in Fraser’s version, was nothing more than a “sordidly avaricious” man, whose chief concern was that Fraser himself was making far too much money, albeit legitimately, through commissions on the private trade of other Company servants. In other words, two sets of private trading networks had come into collision, the one headed by Wake with Marsh as its Surat-based agent, the other that of Fraser and his friends. “I was scarcely two years settled at Surat,” writes Fraser boastfully, “when I had the commissions from Bengall, Bombay & Madras almost solely in my own hands.” 94 This was too much for Marsh, a man “whose character is too infamous to be noticed here,” the more

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so since he and Wake had intended to establish a monopoly in certain goods like raw silk. Their response was to draw the net ever closer around Fraser, until they eventually managed to have him suspended from his position in Surat, a procedure made easy since Wake had meanwhile managed to substitute all independently minded men with “such as entirely depended on him.” Fraser plays upon the pathos of his situation, claiming that after he was suspended, “the Governor’s Resentment ran so high against him that he could not obtain the least time for settling his accounts and Transactions (which were very considerable) with the Natives, tho’ the concerns entrusted to him by other gentlemen, and his own effects lay scattered in different hands.” In the picture painted by Fraser in his memorial, the situation in Surat was chaotic enough in these years; he speaks of it as “a Period the most Perillous, being at a time of War and Confusion.” The reference is to the aftermath of the death of Tegh Beg Khan in September 1746, and the consequent struggle for the post of mutasaddī between his brother Safdar Muhammad Khan and the bakhshī Sayyid Mu‘in-ud-Din (or Miyan Achhan) referred to above. Miyan Achhan had married one of the daughters of Tegh Beg Khan, and thus had a certain degree of support from within the family; to this, he could add the distant but significant encouragement of Nizam-ul-Mulk Asaf Jah, and the more proximate help of Damaji Gaikwad, to whom he agreed to give a portion of the revenues of Surat. By early 1748, when Fraser was preparing to leave Surat in a hurry, Miyan Achhan had thus managed with a show of force to expel Safdar Muhammad Khan and his son Waqar Muhammad Khan, who held the qil‘adārī, and thus gained control of the city and fort, which he was to retain for the space of three years. His success was partly predicated, however— and here we return to Fraser and his troubles—on the maritime support of the chief of the English Surat factory, and beyond him of Governor Wake. Here is how Fraser describes matters in his “memorial” of 1748–1749. As to the affairs of Surat, the Memorialist begs leave to represent that Mr Wake’s officiously engaging Your Honour’s Forces in behalf of an usurper against the King of Indostan’s lawful

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governour, by whom the English were always well and kindly treated, has subjected the Hon’ble Company’s dear bought priviledges to the Danger of Forfeiture which will require a good deal of Skill and Prudence to prevent. And not satisfied with the dangerous experiment in Politicks, his Emissarys have also endeavoured to instigate the Natives to destroy the Dutch who were prudent enough to keep entirely neuter standing only upon their own Defence during the Troubles at Surat.95 Fraser’s political language is loaded here: for him, Mughal power and sovereignty are entirely legitimate, and therefore only Safdar Muhammad Khan can be considered to be “lawful” in his functions. Miyan Achhan, on the other hand, is nothing but a “usurper,” who was moreover engaged in the most sinister sort of dealings with Wake and Marsh. These included actions directed at Fraser himself, since his “principal Broker who transacted all his affairs, was by means of the Governour’s Emissaries taken up and clapt into Prison by the Usurper whom Mr Wake had assisted with the Hon’ble Company’s Forces to turn out the Lawful Governour of Surat.” Since Fraser and his wife—both of whom were “very ill of an Epidemic Fever that raged in Surat”—were ejected from their residence and sent on board a Company ship to Bombay, all of this had allegedly cost him a minor fortune, “upwards of Four Thousand Pounds.” To this sum, Fraser would later add a claim of £800, for “the Extraordinary Expence I was put to in removing from Surat, living at Bombay for above eight months without any allowance.” He would also imply more than once in his writings that Wake’s government in Bombay was, if anything, more tyrannical than that of any Indian ruler, citing the examples of some Khatri merchants who had preferred to settle in Bassein under the Marathas rather than go to Bombay, or that of a certain Surat merchant called Muhammad Ja‘farbhai, who had decided to avoid dealings in Bombay on account of the governor’s absolute and arbitrary powers. Wake, Fraser concludes, has ruined “the Island of Bombay by oppressing the Traders settled there, insomuch that several wealthy merchants who wanted a place of security chose rather to put themselves and their effects under the protection of the Marattas, than that of the English at Bombay.”96

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So far as we can gather, however, this was a battle that Fraser eventually could not win. Wake was simply too power ful and well- connected, and so he continued as governor of Bombay until November 1750; it does not seem that the Court of Directors acceded to Fraser’s request to “appoint a Committee to examine into [Wake’s] affairs,” and their tentative conclusion by March 1749 was that the twelve charges laid by Fraser against Wake were not proven.97 Wake eventually appears to have died on his return voyage from India, but his daughter Margaret inherited considerable wealth from him and made a successful society marriage.98 Again, it is unclear whether Fraser was able to obtain any real “Relief and Redress for having suffered so considerably in his Fortune & Character,” as he requested. In early 1750, he met Samuel Smalbroke in London, and showed him several items from his collection of manuscripts; he also expressed his intention to return to Scotland, and to send his goods and manuscripts separately there by sea. He clearly carried out his intention shortly thereafter, settling at Easter Moniack and constructing a “very pretty box” on his family lands there. So far as we know, embroiled as he came to be in quarrels on the Lovat estate, he was never able to complete the remaining intellectual projects he outlined to Smalbroke: the compilation of “an Antient-Persick Lexicon,” “to Translate the Zund of Zerdusht from ye original,” and “likewise to Translate the Væd of the Brahmans.”99 To bibliographers, he would simply remain the author of The History of Nadir Shah.

Fraser and Nadir Shah So what, finally, did James Fraser know of Mughal India, and its political culture, and more importantly what did he make of it? A key element in providing an answer to this question is undoubtedly his published text of 1742, The History of Nadir Shah. It is a hybrid work by its author’s own admission, and includes substantial materials provided to him by other contemporaries, as well as extensive translations and copies of contemporary documents. Fraser at times just contents himself with providing explanatory footnotes to these materials rather than intervening directly in the text, though there are other moments when his authorial opinions appear clearly enough.

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The work can be divided into the following sections, excluding the appendix listing Fraser’s manuscript collection, which appears at the end with a separate pagination. 1. “A Short History of the Hindostan Emperors of the Moghol Race, beginning with Temur” (pages 1–62), a digest apparently produced by Fraser himself. 2. “The State of Affairs in India before the Persian Invasion, with the Motives that induced Nadir Shah to undertake that Expedition” (pages 63–70); this short section was based on a Persian text that came to Fraser from Humphrey Cole, chief of the English factory at Patna, through the mediation of Richard Mead. 3. “The History of Nadir Shah” (pages 71–151); this long section apparently derives from William Cockell, not named as such in the text but described by Fraser in his preface as “a Gentleman now in England, who resided several Years in Persia, [and] speaks that Language.”100 4. “A Journal of Nadir Shah’s Transactions in India, translated from the Original Copy, wrote at Dehli [sic], by Mirza Zuman, Secretary to Sirbullind Khan” (pages 152–226). 5. “A Personal Description and Character of Nadir Shah, which I had from the Gentleman [Cockell] who favoured me with the Account of his Exploits before his Expedition to India” (pages 227–34). Each one of these sections has a certain interest attached to it, and taken as a whole they can also fruitfully be read together with the sizeable body of materials regarding Nadir Shah’s career and expedition to India. These materials included several more-or-less “official” Persian chronicles written in the eighteenth century, such as Mirza Muhammad Mahdi Astarabadi’s Tārīkh-i Jahāngushā-yi Nādirī (or Tārīkh-i Nādirī) and Muhammad Kazim’s Nāma-yi ‘Ālam-ārā-yi Nādirī, or the works of a number of other contemporary authors who were far more critical of Nadir Shah, such as the Delhi-based Khwaja ‘Abdul Karim Kashmiri’s Bayān-i Wāqi‘. Partial translations of at least two of these works had appeared already in the eighteenth century; William Jones produced a version of Mirza Mahdi’s text in

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French in 1770, and Francis Gladwin partially rendered Khwaja ‘Abdul Karim’s work into English in 1798.101 These translations reflect an ongoing fascination with the figure of Nadir Shah and his meteor-like career even in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, several decades after his death. However, when Fraser published his work in 1742, this was not what constituted the field of competition for him. Rather, only a handful of works existed in print, available to European readers. Among these was Joseph de Voulton’s Notícia, which had appeared in a Portuguese version of its French original in 1740; in the same year, there appeared an anonymous text in two volumes from Amsterdam, entitled Histoire de Thamas Kouli-Kan Sophi de Perse. The first volume of this Histoire was immediately translated into English as well as Italian (both translations appeared in London), and more complete translations appeared in both English and Spanish in 1742.102 In 1741, the printing fi rm of J. Watts near Lincoln’s Inn Fields produced a work entitled A Genuine History of Nadir- Cha, Present Shah or Emperor of Persia, formerly called Thamas Kouli-Kan. The work was dedicated to Sir Matthew Decker by its editor, a certain “JM.” Decker (1679–1749) was a director of the East India Company, a successful merchant in his own right, as well as a writer of tracts in defense of a form of free trade, and it would seem that the initiative for the publication of the Genuine History came from him. The editor thus notes in his preface that “the following curious Piece of History was entrusted to my Care through Your Recommendation.”103 It was divided into two sections. The first part, for which the editor was apparently largely responsible, was made up of a set of introductory remarks regarding the geography of Persia and India, and genealogies of the Persian and Indian (Mughal) royal families. The second part, which dealt directly with Nadir Shah and more particularly with his invasion of India, was derived from a Dutch account produced for Jan Albert Sichterman, the head of the Dutch East India Company’s Bengal establishment between 1734 and 1744, and entitled Verhaal wegens den Inval van den Persiaanschen Schach Nadir (which had appeared in Amsterdam in 1740). Sichterman was an influential man with a large network, which linked him in private trade to men like Joseph-François Dupleix of the French Company.104 At the same

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time, Decker had his own connections with the Netherlands, which may be how he came by Genuine History, which he passed on to be prepared for publication in English. Its broad narrative was a straightforward one, suggesting that the Mughal court had become enfeebled and thus vulnerable to attack on account of “a general Luxury and Effeminacy,” as well as a certain laxity in the military arts. Symptomatic of it all was the character of the Mughal ruler Muhammad Shah, concerning whom the Genuine History has this to say: Mamet-Cha ascended the Throne in his Infancy; upon the Decease of his Predecessor King Reffi-Ulkedder [sic]: The Women in the Seraglio, among whom he was brought up, had greatly debauched his Youth, and made him effeminate and slothful: he was nevertheless Master of many Virtues, and his good Nature carried him so far, that he condemned even the Guilty with Reluctance. He was no great Proficient in Politicks, being one of too weak a Mind to manage the Reins of so vast a Monarchy; accordingly every Thing ran into Confusion, and the several Princes of the Empire acted tyranically, and without the least Controul.105 The text of the Genuine History also contains several documents that it claims were translations from Persian originals: letters from Nadir Shah to two of his sons, letters exchanged between Muhammad Shah and Nadir Shah, and so on. These were based on Dutch translations prepared for Sichterman in Bengal, but the editor made it a point to insist that they were “genuine Letters . . . between the great Personages, who are the Subject of the History,” and “rendered almost Word for Word” while retaining the “Peculiarity of the Stile” (in Persian). The strategy was thus the familiar one of combining the “objective” voice of the external (European) observer with the “subjective” authenticity of the indigenous voice, namely of materials in Persian. At the same time, at least some of the readers of the Genuine History would have been aware of the multiple levels of mediation between the Persian original and the English rendering, which would have included the production of a Dutch draft at Hughli or Patna,

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its polishing, and its subsequent rendering into English. As a recent analyst of the Verhaal notes, a close reading of its text suggests that the explicitly translated Persian letters merely serve as a “prop,” whereas the “primary source to the Verhaal is instead to be found in the archives of the VOC in a stream of correspondence that the Dutch factory in Hoogly received between October 1738 and September 1739”; this correspondence, it is argued, was “written by miscellaneous authors residing in various parts of Mughal India,” notably a certain Sampat Ram in Delhi, as well as the rather wellknown Raja Jugal Kishor.106 The Genuine History, like the Dutch Verhaal, is not particularly sympathetic to the Mughals, but it is not positive toward Nadir Shah either. If the Mughals are weak and incapable, Nadir Shah for his part is shown to be rapacious and murderous. The text proper ends with the following passage, wherein Nadir Shah is shown departing India for Iran (what then follows are a series of translated Persian raqams, or letters, mostly dating from the month of Zi-Qa‘da 1151 H., or February 1739): Every thing being thus made ready for his March, the triumphant Monarch took the Road to Persia, by the way of the Province of Lahor, leaving everywhere sad Monuments of his Cruelty and Rapine, and giving fatal Cause to the poor pillaged Inhabitants of that Country to think of his Name with Terror and Abhorrence. The last News, concerning his Return, informs us that he was actually employed in building Bridges over the Indus, and would soon pass that River, and that thus this Scourge of the Mogul’s Monarchy was at last to take leave of the Indostan Empire.107 It is of some significance that Fraser’s own narrative departs from this received wisdom in at least some notable respects. His chronicle of the Mughals begins, as does that in the Genuine History, with Timur, but Fraser makes it a point to note pedantically that the great conqueror was born in Shahr-i sabz and not Samarqand. Using his access to the Persian histories that he has mentioned— such as Mir Khwand’s Rauzat al- Safā’, the Wāqi‘āt-i Bāburī, the Ma’āsir-i

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Jahāngīrī, and so on—he then proceeds to take us soberly and rapidly through the successive Mughal rulers, refraining from the gossipy versions that the Genuine History often seems to prefer. Arriving at Akbar, he pauses to state the following: “He was reckon’d a great and good Prince, and was very fortunate, having in his Reign made several Conquests, and reduced almost all India to Obedience. The Particulars of which are to be seen in Akbarnama, a History compos’d by his secretary and Vizir Abul Fazl, and in the Tebcat Akbar Shahi, and Montekheb Tuarikh Bedauvni. As he was professedly fixed to no Religion himself, so he was persecutor of none.”108 In contrast, the Genuine History, after having made an initial error on the date of Akbar’s accession (which it states was 1552), contents itself by noting that he “bears a very high Character in History.” It goes on to mention his conquests in Gujarat and the Deccan, as well as his building projects, but concludes in its usual gossipy manner that “this Prince was killed by some poisonous Drugs he had taken by mistake.”109 Fraser for his part makes a point to add a note on the question of Shaikh Abu’l Fazl, whom he had obviously been taught to venerate by his masters in Gujarat: “Abul Fazl was the Title given to this Great Man, and signifies the Father of Excellence. His Writings testify him to be the most learned, and the best Writer then in the East. He was murdered by Order of Sultan Selim, on Suspicion of being the Occasion of a Misunderstanding that was betwixt him and the Emperor his Father. Akbar greatly lamented his Death, and so did all who had any Regard for Letters; he having left several Things unfinish’d. His History of the Moghol Emperors, he carried on to the 38th Year of Akbar’s Reign.” But Fraser was not quite done with Abu’l Fazl and Akbar. Instead, he enters into a long detour in his text, regarding the letter drafted by Abu’l Fazl on behalf of Akbar in 1582, and addressed either to the “ruler of the Franks” (Farmānrawā-yi Firang) as Fraser would have it, or to the “Frankish scholars” (dānāyān-i Firang), as some other versions of the text have it. “As I thought the Letter would not be disagreeable to some of the Readers,” writes Fraser, “I have inserted a Translation of it, in which I have kept as close to the Original as possible.” Taken, as he further notes, from “Abul Fazl’s Collection of Letters,” this early translation of a celebrated text has passed largely

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unnoticed by later scholars. It is a particularly polished example not only of Abu’l Fazl’s formidable rhetorical skills, but also of a certain type of universalistic discourse that Akbar’s court was capable of producing in order to paper over the potentially damaging differences between Muslims and Christians. The Hungarian orientalist Edward Rehatsek, who published what is usually regarded as the standard translation of this text into English in the 1880s, remarked that it was permeated with “that spirit of enlightenment and philanthropy, with permeated every document issued by the great and good Akbar,” but here he was surely making the characteristic mistake of confounding Akbar’s somewhat malleable political stances with the more stable intellectual position of Abu’l Fazl.110 In the course of the seventeenth century, the stature of the mīr munshī, as Abu’l Fazl was often called, grew enormously in certain circles. The group of Kayastha and Khatri scribes in Mughal service— men like Sujan Rai Bhandari or Nek Rai— looked up to him not only as the ideal stylist to be followed, but as the paragon in matters of religious balance. The early eighteenth-century chronicler of the Arcot regime in southern India, Jaswant Rai “Munshi,” lavished praise on Abu’l Fazl as “the unparalleled mole on the face of the word and poetry, the fragrance of amber on the brow of meanings new and old, the sugar-crunching parrot of the Garden of Revelation, [and] the singing nightingale of the Garden of Wisdom.”111 There was equally an attempt on the part of certain sections of the Chishti order of Sufis to appropriate him, and it is more than likely that Fraser’s own Persian masters in Khambayat and Surat in the 1730s nudged him in this direction, suggesting a convergence between Shaikh Abu’l Fazl’s own brand of ecumenical universalism and their preferred mode of wahdat al- wujūd, or “Unity of Being.” We may compare two passages here on Fraser’s translation of the 1582 letter to that produced by Rehatsek a century and a half after Fraser.112 This will allow us to gain a better sense of Fraser’s capacity to master and render the higher-flown end of Indo-Persian rhetoric. It turns out that while some of the complex nuances are rendered better by Rehatsek, Fraser does not acquit himself all that poorly.

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Fraser

Rehatsek

It is well known that (with those who have stored themselves with Knowledge and studied Nature) nothing in this lower World, which is a Mirror of the spiritual one, is preferable to Love, or more sacred than Friendship. In that they ascribe the Oeconomy and right Disposition of the World to Affection and Harmony. For whatever Heart the Sun of Love shines on, it clears the whole Soul from the Darkness of Mortality; and how much more is this requisite in Princes, the good Correspondence of whom is the Cause of Happiness to the World and the People therein.

It is not concealed and veiled from the minds of intelligent people, who have received the light of divine aid and are illuminated by the rays of wisdom and knowledge, that in this terrestrial world, which is the mirror of the celestial, there is nothing that excels love and no propensity so worthy of cultivation as philanthropy, because the peace of the world and the harmony of existence are based upon friendship and association, and in each heart illuminated by the rays of the sun of love, the world of the soul, or the faculties of the mind are by them purged of human darkness; and much more is this case, when they subsist between monarchs, peace among whom implies the peace of the world and of the denizens thereof.

And as most People being enchained by the Bonds of Constraint and Fashion, and regarding the Customs of their Ancestors, Relations and Acquaintances, without examining the Arguments or Reasons for it, give an implicit Faith to that Religion, in which they have been bred up, and remain deprived of the Excellency of Truth, the finding of which is the proper End of Reason; therefore at Times, I converse with the Learned of all Religions, and Profit by the Discourses of each.

As most men are fettered by the bonds of tradition, and by imitating the ways followed by their fathers, ancestors, relatives and acquaintances, every one continues, without investigating the arguments and reasons, to follow the religion in which he was born and educated, thus excluding himself from the possibility of ascertaining the truth, which is the noblest aim of the human intellect. Therefore we associate at convenient seasons with learned men of all religions, and thus derive profit from their exquisite discourses and exalted aspirations.

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The next two reigns after that of Akbar, those of Jahangir and Shahjahan, are given relatively short shrift by Fraser. He concedes that until his imprisonment late in his period of rule, Shahjahan had had a “successful and, till then, happy Reign,” and that “the Empire flourished exceedingly in his Time.” In contrast, Fraser remains consistently hostile to Jahangir, whom he sees as “a weak Prince, and too much over-ruled by the beautiful Nour Jehan (or Nour Mahl),” who had “persuaded the Emperor to break thro’ all Rules, in Order to advance her Father, Brother, and other Relatives to the highest Employments.” He also recounts in a footnote the underhanded manner in which Jahangir disposed of her fi rst husband, “who was esteemed the bravest Man in the Ser vice.”113 The rule of Aurangzeb, on the other hand, is presented in a quite neutral manner, with the comment that “during his Reign, which was about 50 Lunar Years, he was constantly in the Field,” and that “the Revenues of the Empire were greatly increased in his Time.” Fraser also reproduces a translation of “Auringzebe’s last Will” or wasīyyat nāma, and merely mentions in a note that “this Prince was very zealous, or at least pretended to be so, for Mahommedanism.”114 In contrast, the editor of the Genuine History presents Aurangzeb as an inveterate schemer and hypocrite, who first pretended to be “so entirely devoted to Religion, as to look down with Contempt on all secular Grandeur,” but then got rid of his rivals in the most violent manner. He then concludes rather oddly that “by such Bloodshed, Fraud and enormous Practices, did Aurangzebe obtain the Throne of Indostan; when some time after, reflecting on the Methods he had practised for the compassing his Ends, he voluntarily imposed on himself a rigorous Abstinence, upon which he ceased to be as bloody as before, and became mild and merciful to an excess.”115 There is thus some reason to conjecture that the roots of the common colonial and postcolonial portrayal of Aurangzeb as part fanatic and part hypocrite can be found in such texts as the Genuine History, which in turn derive from Eu ropean accounts of the War of Succession of the 1650s. Fraser, on the other hand, remains faithful to the dominant trend in the received Mughal chronicling tradition, and sees the period of Aurangzeb as the continuation of a period of expansion and prosperity, when the revenues of the empire went

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from £27,500,000 at their height under Shahjahan to 12,071,876,840 dāms or £37,724,615, with the addition of Bijapur and Hyderabad more than compensating for the loss of Balkh, Qandahar, and Badakhshan.116 Does Fraser’s text have a view or theory then of “Mughal decline”? To the extent that we can discern, the fi rst elements of this can be found in his account of the reign of Jahandar Shah in the early 1710s. To begin with, there was the matter of the monarch’s excessive dependence on the Ira nian powerbroker Zu’lfiqar Khan, whose support had brought him to the throne against his brothers. But Fraser’s condemnation of Jahandar Shah in fact again follows a well-defined strand in Mughal historiography. Thus, he writes: “He was a weak Prince, and so foolishly fond of one of his Wives, called Lal Koar, who was of an obscure mean Parentage, and a Singer by profession, that he endeavoured to fill the Places of the greatest Trust and Honour in the Empire with her base Relations.” This then led the Barha Sayyid brothers to rise up against him, and to place Farrukhsiyar instead on the throne. Muzaffar Alam has shown how the episode of Jahandar Shah’s relationship with La‘l Kunwari (or Imtiyaz Mahal) was one that was seized upon by a certain type of Mughal chronicler, such as Mubarakullah “Wazih” in the early eighteenth century, in order to argue that a new— and highly undesirable—form of social mobility had begun to manifest itself in the empire.117 In this view, the decline of the empire was both a social and political phenomenon, for as the newly emergent élites attempted to assert themselves, some of the older groups— such as the Barha Sayyids, or Turani and Iranian families that had a long tradition of ser vice for the Mughals— saw the occasion as a chance to define a far looser structure of governance, where the provinces would mark out their autonomy from the imperial center. In Fraser’s own conception, the reign of Jahandar Shah in 1712–1713 thus marks a turning point, for thereafter no Mughal ruler could be strong and assertive. Farrukhsiyar is described as being emperor “only . . . by name,” with all effective power in the hands of the Sayyids; Fraser points out that after a reign of seven (in fact, six) years, Farrukhsiyar was not merely blinded but killed (in late April 1719) after suffering

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“a Thousand Indignities and Insults.” As for the Mughal ruler at the time of Nadir Shah’s invasion, Muhammad Shah, he too “had nothing, except the Name of Emperor.” Among Fraser’s other interests was the collection of Mughal documents having to do with the East India Company. It is from one of these that he extracts and translates the celebrated farmān granted by Farrukhsiyar to the Company, as represented by John Surman and Khoja Sarhad, in January 1717.118 Did he mean to link the extensive concessions given to the Company in this text with the weakness of Mughal rule by this time? This may be forcing the interpretation too far. Rather, Fraser’s main preoccupation is to show how the decline of the Mughal center led to the rise of the principal nefarious actor in the scenario of the 1730s and early 1740s, namely Nizamul-Mulk Asaf Jah. In his account of Farrukhsiyar’s reign, he points out that this was in fact the elevated title given to a noble earlier called Chin Qilij Khan, the son of the old Turani amīr Ghazi-ud-Din Khan. In the late 1710s, Nizam-ul-Mulk had had great difficulties with the ascendant power of the Barha Sayyids, but had then managed by the early years of the reign of Muhammad Shah to outmaneuver them. Further, though he had been offered the post of wazīr, he had refused it, claiming—according to Fraser—that he was “a Derveish, and not ambitious of so high a Station,” and preferring instead to remain in the Deccan. Fraser adds: Nizam continued at Deccan, as Soubadar of Vijapore, Hyderabad, Auringabad, &c. and tho’ he acknowledged himself a Subject, yet made no Remittances to Court, but appropriated the Revenues to the maintaining of an Army, which he said was to keep in aw the Mahrattas or Ganims, the Sahou Rajah’s Subjects in Deccan; whom notwithstanding he permitted to plunder and lay waste several of the King’s Provinces. They imposed a Tribute of one quarter Part of the Revenues, which they call Chot, in many Places, and some Parts they have taken entirely to themselves. He well knew, that with the Mahrattas Assistance, he could defy any Attempts that could be made against him from Court.119

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Fraser’s marked antipathy to Nizam-ul-Mulk possibly had more than one source. We have already noted the great Turani amīr’s proclivity to interfere in the affairs of Gujarat, and Surat more particularly, which was possibly the cause of resentment in the Mughal elite circles of Surat to which Fraser was attached. But it is also clear that a number of the other texts that he used in his History of Nadir Shah equally shared the same perspective. Thus the anonymous Persian text that he acquired from Humphrey Cole notes the great rivalry between Nizam-ul-Mulk and the court favorite Samsam-ud-Daula Khan-i Dauran in the 1720s and 1730s, as well as the growing contempt with which the former saw the court at Delhi, as a place where the emperor and his chief courtiers for the most part “employed their Time in the Company of loose Women and Buffoons.” The accusation is repeated that he frequently “entered into a Concert with Rajah Sahou,” and encouraged the Marathas to attack and plunder Malwa, Gujarat, and Gwalior.120 By the late 1730s, it is claimed, Nizam-ul-Mulk’s sentiment against the Mughal center had reached such a pitch that “he was resolved to revenge himself by distressing the Empire, and destroying Khandoran and his Creatures.” He is thus alleged to have first promoted a “plot” with Qamar-ud-Din Khan, the wazīr, and when that failed with Sa‘adat Khan Burhanul-Mulk, the sūbadār of Awadh. The purpose of this plot was, so it is claimed by Fraser, to enter into a “treacherous Correspondence” with Nadir Shah, the relatively new and im mensely powerful Afsharid ruler of Iran, to persuade him to become “the Instrument to distress the [Mughal] Emperor, and remove Khandoran from amongst them.”121 Despite the portrait in profile of a seated Muhammad Shah that adorns the frontispiece of Fraser’s History of Nadir Shah, the two central personages in the text are Nadir Shah and Nizam-ul-Mulk. To the former is given the role of a sort of deux ex machina; to the latter that of inveterate schemer and fomenter of troubles for his own sinister ends. The partisans of Khan-i Dauran certainly propagated this view, as we see in texts like Muhammad Muhsin’s Jauhar-i Samsām.122 But the Persian sources used by Fraser were not entirely coherent, nor did they emerge from a single group or faction in the Mughal court. Fraser’s view of Nadir Shah was actually rather positive,

Portrait of Shahjahan, from the Bodleian Libraries, the University of Oxford, MS. Ind. Misc. d.3, fl. 177.

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derived in good measure from the judgment of William Cockell. No bloodthirsty tyrant or marauder, Fraser’s Nadir Shah only resorts to great violence when he is himself under extreme provocation. Further, at least one of the narrative accounts that Fraser uses emanated from the household of a former sūbadār of Gujarat in the 1720s, Mubariz-ul-Mulk Sarbuland Khan. Here was a disaffected Iranian amīr at the end of his career, who had held posts of great importance across the empire—including several major governorships— since the time of Farrukhsiyar, but in the early 1730s had fallen out with Khan-i Dauran and been disgraced for a time.123 The “Journal of Nadir Shah’s Transactions in India,” which occupies a good part of Fraser’s text, is thus anxious to contrast the disinterested wisdom of Sarbuland Khan with the petty machinations of all other umarā’ at the Mughal court. The narrative of Nadir Shah’s advance into northern India and his conquest of Delhi begins in 1738 when the Ira nian ruler was besieging the fortress of Qandahar, which had put up considerable resistance for over a year. As this affair was being concluded, “letters came [for Nadir Shah] from Nizam al Muluck and Saadit Khan, inviting him to march towards Hindostan.” Nadir Shah expressed reluctance, because of the difficult terrain and river crossings, and the considerable opposition to be expected, first from the Afghans, then from the provincial armies at Kabul and Lahore, and finally from the “power ful Imperial Army” itself. The conspirators managed, however, to reassure him, and he set out with an army made up essentially of 125,000 horsemen. As it turned out, only the Kabul garrison and its commander offered him substantial resistance, which he was able to overcome, marching on to Peshawar, which he took after a battle with the regional governor. The Mughal court finally showed some signs of alarm at this, but was unable to formulate a coherent policy. An initial plan to send an army as far as Lahore was abandoned, and instead, in early 1739 a sizeable force left the court for “the Plains of Karnal,” where it was apparently joined by the emperor Muhammad Shah in the beginning of February 1739. Fraser’s narrative includes translations of diplomatic correspondence, as well as letters and reports sent by Sarbuland Khan to correspondents in Gujarat. A letter addressed by Nadir Shah to the Mughal emperor,

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and received in August 1738 (or Jumada I 1151 H.), states for example that he may send an army to help the Mughals against the Marathas, “the Wretches of Deccan”; but later letters demand a substantial tribute as well as the cession of frontier provinces.124 The battle at Karnal itself, which Fraser wrongly dates to February 15 (instead of February 24) 1739, is presented in two versions, one considerably shorter than the other.125 The longer narrative has it that the engagement began with a skirmish between some of the Iranian vanguard and Burhan-ul-Mulk’s men. Nadir Shah is said to have held back the bulk of his forces, only sending out a small contingent of 4,000 horsemen (of whom a thousand were “harquebusers”), and then joining them himself with another thousand elite horsemen “to encourage and direct these Men.” In this version, then, a mere four or five thousand horsemen inflicted considerable damage on the massive Mughal forces, bringing them to total panic and causing a general rout. Of the major Mughal actors, Khan-i Dauran is said to have received “several mortal Wounds [and] was carried back to his Quarters,” only to die a couple of days later. A second version in Fraser’s work, based on a letter sent from the Mughal camp (and included by Fraser in a footnote), claimed that Nadir Shah had used as many as 50,000 horsemen, of which 2,500 were killed and twice that number wounded. At any rate, the Mughals were forced very quickly to sue for peace, and emissaries were sent out to deal with Nadir Shah before Muhammad Shah himself went to see him some days after the battle. The complex negotiations, often shrouded in secrecy, are laid out at some length by Fraser; eventually on March 20 (Fraser has March 8), the two rulers entered Delhi, where Nadir Shah was formally received by the Mughal ruler in the fort. Fraser stresses that Nadir Shah had “issued out Orders in the most peremptory Manner to prevent the Soldiers wronging or insulting any of the Inhabitants”; his main concern seems to have been the expeditious collection of a tribute (or peshkash), to which end Sarbuland Khan was one of those engaged. The text now takes us through the celebrated episode of the “general massacre” (qatl-i ‘āmm) carried out by the Ira nian soldiers at Delhi. The whole business began around noon on the tenth of ZiHijja, if Fraser’s received narrative may be believed, at the grain

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market in Delhi’s Pahar Ganj quarter.126 Here, Nadir Shah’s elite troopers (the so-called nasaqchīs) were attempting to enforce a relatively low price of ten sers of wheat for a rupee. The grain sellers apparently became rather unhappy, to the point that they “assembled the Mob, and a great many disaffected People joining them,” so that a murderous attack was soon mounted in which a number of Iranian soldiers were killed. The Iranians retreated hastily toward the sandy area, or retī, between the fort and the river, but “the Mob and Tumult exceeded all Bounds,” especially on account of wild rumors that Nadir Shah himself had either been killed or taken prisoner. The violence continued all night, and early the next morning Nadir Shah emerged from the fort on horseback, hoping to settle the matter by imposing his presence. Fraser’s narrative still has him in a reasonable mood, instructing his men to proceed with as little violence as possible. He thus arrived at Raushan-ud-Daula’s mosque in the area of the kotwālī (or city warden’s post) where he mounted a terrace to survey the scene. Here, matters literally exploded, when he and his companions were not only stoned, but shot at with muskets, so that one shot “missing him, killed one of his Officers who stood next him.” Fraser recounts that, provoked to the extreme, Nadir Shah now ordered “a general Slaughter to be commenced from that very Place.” Several hours of unremitting bloodshed ensued in which “whomsoever they found in the Wards and Houses, Streets, Allies and Shops, Great and Small, Men and Women, they put to the Sword, even the Brute Creatures did not escape their Fury.” Apparently, Sarbuland Khan was among those rare notables who was able to persuade the Iranians to spare the people in the quarter where he lived, in exchange for a cash indemnity. This “general slaughter,” in Fraser’s account, lasted “from eight in the Morning till three in the Afternoon,” and it is estimated by him that besides 400 dead Iranian soldiers, between 120,000 and 150,000 of the inhabitants of Delhi perished.127 After these hours of intensive killing, “the Soldiers were ordered to desist, and it was proclaimed by Beat of Drum, that none of the Inhabitants should be any longer molested.” While Fraser’s account makes it clear that the violence was on a massive scale, it is significant that he makes out that Nadir Shah only

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acted under considerable duress. The extreme discipline of the Iranian troops, who ceased the killing as soon as they were ordered, is also stressed. Fraser’s text does not deny that “the great Number of dead Bodies that lay about the Castle, and in the Bazars, and other Places, caused a very offensive Stench.” But he suggests that draconian clean-up operations, including mass cremations and the dumping of bodies into the river, had been orga nized by around March 25. Nadir Shah was now in a hurry to leave, and only concerned that the principal Mughal umarā’ were dragging their feet in rendering him the massive amounts of tribute he required. The text suggests that there were vocal disagreements among them, with Sarbuland Khan telling Nizam-ul-Mulk, for example, that all of this could have been avoided if Nadir Shah had simply been paid a proper peshkash (or tribute) at the frontier. As the weeks wore on, and the occupying Iranian troops in Delhi grew surlier in the face of the slow pace at which the tribute accumulated, even Fraser’s text (or that of Mirza Zaman that he paraphrases) suggests that the complexion of affairs turned rather ugly. While festivities were organized to mark the marriage of Nadir Shah’s son, Nasrullah Mirza, to a Mughal princess in early April, including “Illuminations on the Banks of the River, and Fireworks,” anxious notables sought means to pay for the heavy tribute that was being levied on each of their households. Some of them, it is claimed, “left their Effects and Families behind, and made their Escape out of the City in the best Manner they could”; but others, less fortunate, were “very hard pressed for their Quotas of the Peishcush, insomuch that several, to save their Credit and Reputation, killed themselves.” Still others were “violently beat on the Back and Sides,” or beaten till “Blood flowed out about their Faces and other Parts,” or even had their ears cut off in public.128 By these and other means, Nadir Shah and his entourage had managed by their time of their departure from Delhi in the middle of May 1739 to collect a massive tribute in cash and kind. And yet, what had the Mughal court learned from all this? Nadir Shah’s departing advice to Muhammad Shah, if Fraser’s text may be believed, was two-fold: to seize the jāgīrs (or prebendal assignmants) of the umarā’, and instead pay them directly in cash from the central treasury; and further, “to beware of Nizam al Muluck, whom,

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by his Conduct, I find to be full of Cunning, and Self-Interested, and more ambitious than becomes a Subject.” Mirza Zaman, the munshī whose text Fraser uses and paraphrases, naturally twists all this in favor of his own master, Sarbuland Khan. He writes that “the Inhabitants [of Delhi], from the Terror of this Calamity, like People Possess’d, and in Fits, are quite stupified, and not yet come to themselves, and what is still more strange . . . seemed sorry for his [Nadir Shah’s] going away, except Sirbullind Khan, who three Years ago, foresaw this Calamity, and retired from public Business, dreading the Consequence of Affairs being managed by such Omras [umarā’] as then bore sway.”129 The reader of Fraser’s text, and its narrative sequence to the point of Nadir Shah’s departure from Delhi in early May 1739 (a mere three years before the text’s publication in London), might still have entertained some ambivalent feelings about a conqueror whose methods of extracting tribute were clearly far from tender. However, the closing section of The History of Nadir Shah, entitled “a Personal Description and Character of Nadir Shah,” authored by William Cockell, is calculated to lay to rest all the reader’s doubts. For here the author (not named by Fraser, as it happens) describes Nadir Shah as “one of the most comely Men I ever beheld,” who is “upward of six Foot high, well-proportion’d, of a very robust Make and Constitution.” His complexion is manly, and his voice loud and commanding; he drinks wine in moderation, and though excessively fond of women “yet never neglects his Business on their Account.” His numerous other virtues are then set out one after the other. His diet is simple and frugal; he is extremely careful with regard to his accounts, but at the same time very generous to his soldiers; he is “severe and strict in his Discipline,” but also merciful to minor offenders. A gifted commander, he is never so happy as when on the march, being possessed of a notoriously hardy constitution. Nadir Shah, in this account, is all business during the day, but behaves after hours in the “freest and most facetious Manner”; however, his drinking companions are never permitted to assume the same intimacy during the day. Cockell goes on to praise Nadir Shah’s extraordinary memory, and administrative capacities, as well as his capabilities as an intrepid field general, despite which “he never received the

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least Wound or Scar, and yet several Horses have been shot under him.” His text, and The History of Nadir Shah itself, concludes then with the following ringing endorsement: I could relate many other remarkable Things that I have seen and heard of this great Hero, whose Actions already are sufficient to convince the World, that few Ages have produced his Equal. As he has performed such Wonders when he had hardly Money or Men, what may we not expect from him now he is possess’d of so immense a Treasure? ‘Tis probable he may live thirty Years longer; and in that Space of Time, if his Designs are attended with the same Success he has hitherto met with, to what Pitch of Grandeur may not a Man of his unbounded Ambition and Courage arrive at?130 Nadir Shah was assassinated by members of his own entourage in late June 1747 in Khurasan, some five years after this text was published. The news would surely have reached James Fraser while he was still at Surat, embroiled in his dispute with the Bombay government.

Conclusion Some seven years after the death of James Fraser, the up-and-coming French orientalist and traveler Abraham Hyacinthe AnquetilDuperron found himself in Portsmouth in November  1761, while on his return from a long voyage to India, where he had lived since August 1755.131 Arriving on an English vessel, the Bristol, Anquetil was somewhat disagreeably surprised to find himself a prisoner in the context of the Seven Years’ War, despite the fact that he carried letters of accreditation from the English Company’s Bombay Council, which—he now noted sourly—“had no worth in England.” A trunk containing precious books and manuscripts he had acquired in India for the Bibliothèque du Roi was seized at Portsmouth customs, but Anquetil eventually was able to move to Wickham under a rather loose form of arrest. Within some weeks, after he had exerted influence through his connections, an order arrived ordering

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his release. But Anquetil was determined, he states, “not to quit England without having seen Oxford.” Arriving there via Winchester on January 17, 1762, he made his way to the Bodleian Library, where he was keen to consult the celebrated Zoroastrian manuscript, the Vendidad Sadé. Once he had done so, he communicated to John Swinton, one of his hosts, his desire “to see the manuscripts of Mr Hyde and Mr Fraser.” He had apparently not mentioned to his hosts that he had long followed the activities of James Fraser as a collector in Surat. Anquetil writes that he had come to know that “a councillor at Bombay [sic], Mr Frazer, a Scotsman, known for the life that he produced of Tamaskoulikhan, had in Surat gone in search of what he believed he could recover of works attributed to Zoroaster. His project succeeded in so far as he purchased two zend books, the Izeschné [Yasna] and the Ieschts [Yasht], and several other Indian and Persian manuscripts. But he could not get the priests to teach him either zend or pehlvi, or to give him the key to the Zend-Avesta, so that, dissatisfied with his voyage, he returned to England where he died thereafter.”132 Anquetil for his part had been in Surat twice on his own voyage, between mid-1758 and early 1761. In late 1758, he was apparently told by some of the Zoroastrian dastūrs (or priests) in the port “of the considerable sums that Mr Fraser had offered them to get hold of pehlvi manuscripts.” He notes, however, that “the destour Sapour [Shapur] informed me of these particularities in Surat, while assuring me that this Englishman knew neither zend nor pehlvi, and that he could only speak a little modern Persian.” His hosts in Oxford seem to have brought out the worst in Anquetil-Duperron’s competitive instincts. Introduced to Thomas Hunt, a well-known Arabist and the Regius Professor of Hebrew, the French orientalist seems to have made considerable efforts to show the other how “his science was defective,” by asking him to read some manuscript pages he had in his possession. Nevertheless, Hunt agreed to allow him to examine a certain number of Fraser’s manuscripts at his leisure. Anquetil writes: The tea that we were served interrupted our conversation briefly, and after that I went to see the manuscripts of Mr Fraser that Doctor Hunt had placed in a large room. Even if it was light, it

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was getting late, and I could not examine them all in detail. Doctor Hunt showed me the principal ones, which were five parts of the Rozot eussafa, the Schah namah with its dictionary, the Tarikh Ttabari, the Tarikh Kaschmiri (from the most ancient times to the conquest of that kingdom by Akbar), written by Hossein Ben Aali of Kaschmire, the Akbar namah, the Mirat Sekanderi containing the history of Gujarat until the conquest of the kingdom by Akbar, a short version of the Barsour namah, some Divans, the Zitch of Oulough Beigue, some Indian Poranas, a small Nammala, and three incomplete volumes of the Mahabharat, but I saw no pehlvi book in this collection, which might amount in all to two hundred and fifty volumes.133 Though Anquetil does not admit it, Fraser’s manuscript collection compares quite favorably with most others that had been constituted until that date—including Anquetil’s own. It was only on account of the vastly transformed political conditions in India of the last third of the eighteenth century that men like Antoine Polier and Richard Johnson would be able to produce still more sizeable and diverse collections of materials that would be lodged in the great libraries of Britain and France.134 The framework within which they would go on to interpret these collected materials, as well as the history of India in general, would equally undergo substantial modifications. A long and contentious debate has gone on now on how to evaluate the Enlightenment as an intellectual trend, and what it brought to the Eu ropean comprehension of the world beyond Eu rope.135 Though a man of modest education, and imperfectly connected into the world of high intellectual discourse of his lifetime, James Fraser can certainly be brought into conversation with this debate. As a collector, he sought out materials with which to study both ancient cultures and more recent (but still geographically distant) ones; as a writer, he attempted to portray the clash between political regimes in the Muslim world, but without resorting—to the extent that we can discern—to formulations such as “oriental despotism”; as an actor in Surat, he even sought to argue for the legitimacy of Mughal government against the illegitimate nature of the East India Company’s ambitions. If he was connected to “great men” like Alexander

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Pope and Richard Mead, in an effort to further his fortunes and consolidate his estate, he also swam against the stream to an extent. A fuller examination of the spectrum of such “minor” figures, and not merely the somewhat inflated personages of a Montesquieu, an Anquetil-Duperron, or a William Jones, may take us closer to a sense of how, and in what terms precisely, Europeans experienced and comprehended India and the “Orient” before the age of their empire.

4 THE TRANSITION TO COLONIAL KNOWLEDGE And they [the Indians] mock us, and it seems to me that they are superior in an infi nite number of things, except with arms in hand, to which they cannot offer resistance; nor will they have any commerce with us, except through force. —Florentine merchant Piero Strozzi, in Goa, to his father, December 1510

Introduction The world of James Fraser was one where the English East India Company was certainly a presence, but scarcely a real power yet in South Asia. His comportment, it may be argued, was perfectly consonant with that situation, and reflected an openness to other epistemologies that was eminently possible when relations were not those between conquerors and conquered. The half century after Fraser’s death in 1754, on the other hand, witnessed a series of dramatic changes, so that by 1800, the Company had seized control of major territories in eastern and southern India, and was poised to make inroads into northern and western India as well. This chapter focuses on the transition to colonial rule in India between the mid-eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries through an examination of four contrasting European figures who were present in those times. The method used is a variant of that in Chapter 3, and it swims against the currents both of the fashionable distaste for “biography” as a pursuit of the historian, as well as the idea that the colonial (or wouldbe colonial) elites are not really worthy of the historian’s attention.1 There is also some novelty to recommend the choice of figures, a French entrepreneur and military commander, a Portuguese ecclesiastic and inveterate maker of unfinished projects, a Franco-Swiss 211

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adventurer who was also an avid collector of things South Asian, and finally a Scotsman who eventually participated as an East India Company administrator in South India and Gujarat. It is not only the career trajectories of the personages that interests us but also their opinions, as expressed in some of these cases through quite voluminous writings. Yet, none of the men concerned was a “thinker” or theoretician of empire in the proper sense of the term; rather, all of them were political actors and men of action, who wrote and reflected on their actions as well as on what they saw around them. None are quite the equivalent of an Anquetil-Duperron, an Edmund Burke, or a James Mill, but they represent points of view that are much more constructed in the thick of action, often somewhat incoherent, but nonetheless interest ing. These examples return us to the question, set out in the introduction, of whether there was any common “European” basis for understanding South Asian society in this time, or whether national or personal understandings were sufficiently different so that it is impossible to speak in such terms. In other words, is it at all justified to lump together a Scotsman, a Frenchman, a Portuguese, and a FrancoSwiss under the common category of a “European” understanding, or is it necessary to speak of a varied and fragmented view, mediated by personal experience and trajectory and a whole host of other more specific factors, whether cultural or not? What renders each of our actors and writers the more complex is the fact that they all conceived India not in some purely predetermined terms, but through their dealings with local interlocutors, who were at least “native informants” but frequently far more significant than that somewhat dismissive category. The balance between empirical experience and schematic conceptualization in determining such views has been much debated, with the canonical view having gone through some rather violent oscillations in the process. The view that had come to be accepted in the 1960s and 1970s, thanks to such works as Donald Lach’s massive and encyclopedic, but rather naïve, opus, Asia in the Making of Europe, was that Europeans were relatively ignorant about India in about 1500, or at any rate that they possessed forms of knowledge that were wrapped in layers of medieval mystification. The centuries of

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intensive empirical contact that followed 1500 were supposed, in this view, not only to have peeled away the mystification and obfuscation (thus, the inaccurate map of India presented in about 1500 in say, the Cantino planisphere, being replaced successively by more and more accurate representations, to take but one example), but also to have led to the accumulation of reliable data.2 Lach (and his collaborator Edwin Van Kley) thus end the first part of their third volume (significantly subtitled “A Century of Advance”) with a claim (noted in Chapter 2) that European activities overseas and their scholarly production “enabled seventeenth-century European readers to obtain a better-informed idea than previously of the real ity of Asia.”3 If this were true of armchair thinkers in Eu rope, we must imagine that it could only have been even truer for Eu ropeans who actually ventured as far as India: they too must have had ever “better-informed ideas” and “clearer images” with the passage of time, as the mists of disinformation and misinformation cleared. Such a Whiggish view of the articulation between information and knowledge came under severe attack, as is well-known, in the course of the late 1970s and 1980s, in a number of works of both a general and specific nature. One can sense the first hesitant stirrings as early as 1950 in the writings of Raymond Schwab, followed by such works of the late 1970s as Mitter’s Much Maligned Monsters, with its wish “not only to trace misrepresentations of Hindu art throughout history but, more importantly, to challenge the validity of applying Western classical norms for appreciating Indian art.”4 Though the best-known of such critiques is undoubtedly Edward Said’s highly polemical work, the context of the debate can only be understood if one absorbs the critiques that were simulta neously produced of studies of comparative religion, ethnography, and cartography. These critiques demonstrated that the notion that Eu ropeans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were innocent gatherers of information in the world at large could simply not be sustained. Still, in more recent times, the pendulum has swung back, as shown by a stream of influential publications seeking, as it were, to remake the virginity of the early modern European observer abroad, a concession that is at times extended as far as the early colonial administration.5 These newer writings represent the alliance of two

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quite distinct tendencies. On the one hand, historians of colonial India wish to defend the validity of their stock-in-trade, which is to say the colonial archives and their contents, and hence are desirous of pointing to the excesses of views that focus solely on the processes by which such archives were produced. On the other hand, historians of European ideas have over the years become naturally somewhat anxious concerning the status of their heroes, the omniscient Eu ropean subjects who master the world through a series of ever more refined tools over the early modern and modern periods. This has naturally led to situations in which these historians argue that the works of the second historiographical phase have led to an unnecessary and unjustifiable denigration of positive Eu ropean knowledge. In order to advance in this direction, three dif ferent rhetorical strategies have been employed in combination. The first is that of exaggeration, and suggests that opponents of the positive view of European knowledge of the world at large represent a defense of “radical incommensurability,” that is, the view that cultures are fundamentally untranslatable. Thus, any historical evidence of processes of translation and mutual intelligibility must automatically be taken as dealing a mortal blow to the skeptical view. A second strategy is that of banalization, namely to argue that the relation between any observer and social object can be thought to raise the same set of problems of perception—why then single out the Eu ropeans and India, if the account of a Portuguese traveler to Italy, or an Arab traveler to Iran suffers from the same notional set of problem? This view is taken to its logical conclusion in the Indian case, for example, by arguing that even if a critique can be mounted of “European standards of historical coherence” in the sixteenth century, “Muslim historians of India” were at least as guilty of the sins of “orientalism” (and probably even more so) than their European counterparts. In the view of a recent analyst of travel literature within a tradition of a European history of ideas, whose familiarity with “Muslim” texts is ironically entirely mediated by somewhat dated translations produced by western Orientalists, “it has . . . become obvious that there were equally ideological biases in ‘Oriental’ Muslim views of other

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oriental peoples,” with the necessary corollary being that an uncalled-for fuss has been made regarding European views of India.6 A third strategy, somewhat dif ferent in nature, consists of using the affective argument. Many Europeans, it is argued, had an affective relationship to non-European cultures, and even to individuals (whether within a sexual relationship or outside of it). This affective bond must be treated as dissolving (or at least rendering secondary) the problem of perception mediated by, or even related to, the exercise of power in all its complexity. It is clear that a limpid explication of the relationship between perception (and knowledge) and power is a difficult task, whether in the South Asian case or elsewhere. In its simplest versions, the theorists of a relationship between knowledge and power would posit a causal relationship in one or the other direction: either a change in the form and manner in which power was exercised would cause a corresponding shift in the nature of the knowledge thereby produced, or the shift in forms of knowledge would precede and somehow facilitate the exercise of power. Where the colonial relationship is concerned, historians have tended to favor the former version, seeing colonial conquest as producing a series of institutions (surveys, censuses, the colonial police, and so on) that determine the nature of colonial knowledge. This knowledge might in turn have an impact on the changing nature of the institutions, but the assumption is largely of a prior shift in the forms of the exercise of power that sets the whole process in motion. It is of course possible to argue, and a minority of authors have done so, that a long-term stability exists in the terms of the production of European knowledge on India, going back at least to the medieval period; this would be a sort of “European essence” in terms of the will-to-knowledge, which suffers only minor modifications with the move from a situation of relative political parity in, say, 1700, to one of a rather unequal relationship a  century later. In this highly contested historiography, the four careers at hand thus help us to unravel some of threads in the larger argument, while at the same time permitting a closer look at the historical processes of the translation itself.

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A Bishop “In Partibus Infidelium” The first of the characters consider here is a Dom António José de Noronha, whose career has hitherto remained rather obscure, despite some attention devoted to it by historians of Portuguese India.7 Noronha was of Portuguese descent, born in July 1720 (probably in Goa) to D. Francisco de Noronha and Dona Cecília Ana de Meneses, both sides of the family having considerable histories of ser vice in Portuguese India. With the early death of his father in a shipwreck, followed shortly thereafter by the death of his mother, Noronha was placed in charge of his paternal grandmother, who entrusted him to the Franciscans for his education. At the age of sixteen, he received religious orders, and under the name of Frei António da Purificação was sent to the Portuguese settlement of Mylapore (or São Tomé), today a part of Chennai (Madras), but at that time still independent of English control. During the next decade and a half, Noronha was able to display his considerable political and diplomatic skills. Though initially no more than the vicar of the church of Nossa Senhora da Luz in Mylapore, he began gradually to build links with the French in Pondicherry, using the mediation of the Luso-Indian wife of the French governor Dupleix, Dona Joana de Castro. His activities in the Dupleix household made him the object of considerable suspicion, both from secular Europeans and other Catholic priests, who repeatedly demanded that his affairs be looked into. His rise in the hierarchy, as “Visitor to the Catholic Missions of Coromandel and Pegu” in 1747, combined with a growing personal fortune, eventually reached an apogee in 1748. In the context of the succession crisis in the Arcot nawwābī in the 1740s, Noronha managed to obtain an extensive parwāna (or decree) from Chanda Sahib (one of the contestants for succession to the title of nawwāb of Arcot) for the territories around Mylapore, and was even named by the Portuguese Estado da Índia to the position of governor of the city of Mylapore and its dependent villages, as well as “director and agent of the Portuguese nation on the coast of Coromandel.” This change in the status of both Noronha and Mylapore in the latter half of 1749 called for a swift response on the part of the English East India Company. Mylapore was attacked by an En-

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glish force on the night of October 14, 1749, and after some brief resistance, Noronha was seized and transferred as a prisoner to Madras. Despite Portuguese official protests, he was then transferred (still a prisoner) on an English vessel to Portsmouth, and eventually made his way to London, after being freed. Noronha refused some offers of compensation made to him by the English, and proceeded instead to Paris, where he was received in the court of Louis XV and given a number of honors. Eventually named in 1751 to the post of bishop of Halicarnassus (a notional bishopric that did not a fact require a residence on the part of its holder), Noronha returned to Pondicherry in 1751 through the intercession of the French Company, and on one of its vessels.8 But a taste for the military life had left a mark on him after the unsuccessful defense of Mylapore, in which he had in fact been wounded. We thus find him not only in the role of a diplomat but an active if minor commander allied to the French, and episodically to the Marathas as well as Haidar ‘Ali Khan in Mysore, in the course of the late 1750s. Indeed, after the fall of Pondicherry in January 1761, Noronha even spent a certain period in the company of Haidar as an auxiliary commander, receiving from him the title of Shamsher Dilawar Jang Bahadur. But after a brief period as a free-wheeling captain, Noronha eventually decided to return to the Portuguese territories, where he engaged in various guerrilla campaigns in the Ponda region against the Marathas in 1763, during the viceroyalty of D. Manuel de Saldanha, Conde da Ega. Here is how we fi nd him described by the viceroy himself in a letter of the period, in the context of a military campaign: The bishop-elect of Halicarnassus was the first who passed to those lands of Ponda, commanding the body of Sipais of the State in order to effect the operations as I had decided from the start, without the Estado itself being revealed in its true colours, an action that he carried out with great freedom. His character is more that of a soldier than of an ecclesiastic: he has a pretty good knowledge of Asian customs and habits, he speaks the Moorish and Maratha languages, and with the title of Nababo added to his well-known valour, he is feared and respected all over the Concão.9

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Map of the settlement of São Tomé de Meliapor (1749), by António José de Noronha, Biblioteca Pública de Évora, Coleção Manizola, Codex 408b, 174–75.

In 1765, Noronha was named chief brigadier of the Legion of Royal Volunteers of Ponda and general intendant of the provinces of Ponda, Zambaulim, and Canacona. But this second hour of glory was not destined to last much longer than that in Mylapore. Matters took a turn for the worse with the imprisonment of the viceroy Conde da Ega on his return to Lisbon in December 1766. A number of strident voices began to be heard in the Portuguese colony against the strange figure of Noronha, as we see from a letter of February 1770 written to Lisbon by D. João José de Melo, member of the governing council of Goa at that time, justifying the fact that Noronha had been held prisoner in Fort Aguada from December 1769, in order to prevent him from disappearing into the “most remote regions of India.” Melo wrote: “This man is an ecclesiastic in appearance and in his customs he is slipshod [relaxado]. His religion did not prevent him from becoming a Nababo, in which form or disguise he has gone

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about with the title of Dilavargenga, and his qualities are those of a great lack of truthfulness and those of an incomparable aptitude for every thing that is an intrigue, and with such qualities one usually has a great following in this land.”10 By 1770, it had hence been decided to send Noronha back to Portugal as a prisoner; on his return there, he remained some eighteen months in prison, before being freed in April 1772. But Noronha was not about to suffer such treatment without an adequate response. Thus, he organized a series of petitions to the all-powerful Marquis of Pombal while in prison, and was restored to grace and en route to India in 1773. On his arrival in Goa in January 1774, he recovered a good part of the lands and territories that he had disposed of before his imprisonment, as well as his earlier position in the Legion of Royal Volunteers. His sudden death in Goa in February 1776 brought an end to this eighteenth-century career, of a man who it was claimed “could manage to understand and speak seven Asian languages and six from Eu rope, and on thirty-seven occasions had been Ambassador to various Asian courts.”11 But Noronha was not merely an ecclesiastic turned man-of-action or a mercenary captain. He was also a prolific writer, with an almost fanatical attachment to the written word that can be seen, for example, in such minor texts as the “Diary of the events on the voyage that Dom António José de Noronha, Bishop of Halicarnassus, made from the Kingdom of Portugal to the City of Goa, begun on 21st April 1773.”12 The central part of his written work must, however, be taken to be political, and concerns the situation in the Deccan and southern India in the middle decades of the eighteenth century, particularly in relation to the strategic interests of the Portuguese Estado da Índia. The three principal entities with which Noronha is concerned are the Marathas, Mysore under Haidar ‘Ali, and the English East India Company, even if a number of other actors also feature periodically in his vision of things, notably the French Company. Now, the position of the Estado between the 1730s and the 1760s was undoubtedly a difficult one. After substantial losses during the years from 1610 to 1660, the Portuguese had managed in the last decades of the seventeenth century to consolidate their territories on the west coast of India, thanks to the complex relationship between

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the Mughals and the Marathas, which afforded them some room to maneuver.13 However, the 1730s saw a resurgence of Maratha attacks, culminating in the major loss of a good part of the Província do Norte in the closing years of the decade. The response of the Estado was somewhat slow, but consisted in building a contiguous territory around the core of Goa between 1746 and 1784, replacing the dispersed and rather more strategically fragile disposition that had existed earlier. This was what eventually led to the creation of the so-called New Conquests, which were gained largely at the expense of a number of Maratha chieftains in the immediate neighborhood of Goa, and which more than trebled the area of the territory.14 Noronha’s own actions in the 1760s formed a part of this process of consolidation, but he—like a number of other contemporaries— undoubtedly believed that the key to containing the Maratha threat lay in the Mysore state of Haidar ‘Ali. This is why he penned a memorial on Haidar ‘Ali in 1764, which he then submitted to the Conde da Ega, entitling it a “Historical Memoir of the life of the Prince called Aydar Aly Naique, his birth, his maxims and policies, and the forts that he has captured, their names, of the rivers and lands that he has conquered, of their chiefs, their customs and the reasons for their disgrace.”15 The strategic character and information contained in this succinct text need not detain us, since it has already been studied in some detail by the late Narendra Krishna Sinha;16 rather, what is of interest is the perspective that Noronha brings to bear on a subject such as this. The text is a dense one, full of the names of princes and warlords of the epoch, as well as the characteristic politico-administrative terminology which was by then shared by Mughals, Marathas, and the rulers of Mysore. It informs us that Haidar’s parents were of humble birth and migrant stock, but born in Kolar (just east of Bengaluru), and that his father died fighting for the sūbadār of Sira against the forces of Mysore. Noronha then briefly reviews Haidar’s early military career in Mysore, before plunging directly into a series of details concerning the siege of Tiruchirappalli, in which Noronha himself appears in the third person, as an actor who was at the time very close to the Marquis of Dupleix. In the rest of the text, Noronha makes a number of further appearances, always in the third person,

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and the text consistently prefers the objective tone of the chronicler to the seductive voice of the eyewitness. A series of descriptions of campaigns eventually leads to a brief physical description of Haidar (“of a good stature and full bodied, with a proud air, and a brown complexion, thick lips, large and sparkling eyes, he does not laugh easily, and walks with slow and affected steps, he does not trust anyone”). We also learn that Haidar does not know to read or write but that he has a good memory, that he has no other major vices than wine, and that he is an enemy of the Brahmins even though he employs them in large numbers as accountants and scribes. The text concludes that “he is very untrustworthy in regard to promises, as has been seen, [and] he is most lascivious, for the complete satisfaction of which he can become a tyrant, for which God will make him pay.” Here, as on some other occasions, Noronha’s religious inclinations emerge to the fore, but what is of interest are the absences in the text, especially in comparison to the title. Little that is systematic in terms of political geography or even the fiscal resources at Haidar’s disposal may be found here, of a sort that can easily be found in Robert Orme’s papers under such heads as “An Account of the Revenues which Hyder Ally received in 1767 from the different parts of his Dominions into his Treasury clear of all charges of collecting.”17 It would seem that Noronha was caught here between his natural indiscretion and his political cunning,. Obviously he knew a great deal more about Haidar ‘Ali than he could reveal in the text, on account of the close proximity that he had enjoyed over an extended period, but he may have felt that to say more would be to compromise his own position. Thus having chosen the relatively dry third-person narrative, he was forced into a form that he was not in fact equipped to deal with, not possessing access to the “objective” data, whether ethnographic, geographical, or statistical, that one would expect in such a memoir. It may be unfair to judge Noronha’s capacities from this minor text alone. Rather, we must grapple with what is in many respects his magnum opus, the work entitled Sistema Marcial Asiático (The Asiatic Martial System), dated to 1772 (when Noronha was in Lisbon), and dedicated to the governor who had just been named to the

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Estado da Índia, Dom José Pedro da Câmara. This work is divided into two books and preceded by an erudite and rather obscure dedication, as well as a prologue, in which Noronha refers to the need to attend to the “ills of a moribund and suffering Mother, who is the sweet Pátria [Portugal],” thus suggesting that his book is a reform tract of a sort. “Here,” he tells the reader, “you will see the system of the Asiatics as well as the progress of arms, as much those of the Portuguese, as of the Agarenes [those from Agra?], Maratas, and all the other nations who inhabit that extensive Empire. In the Second Book, I hope to invite you to continue with the same matter, where I will show you the more modern progress that has been practised by the same nations.” The first book then embarks on the first of its seven chapters, a “Brief Notice of East India, and a particular relation of the capital of Goa, its situation, forts and fortifications,” accompanied by a set of sketches in color showing Goa as well as some of its neighboring fortresses. A second chapter is an account of the decline of Goa, and a third an account of the military forces there. The fourth and fifth chapters deal respectively with the Marathas, both the rulers of Satara and the Peshwas, and the so-called “Prince of the Deccan,” which is to say the Nizam. The sixth chapter deals with a line of the Bhonsles (“Dessay Guem Saunt Bounsuló”) who rule over the area immediately north of Goa, while the last chapter returns to deal with Haidar ‘Ali Khan Bahadur, a veritable obsession with Noronha, as we shall see. The second book, which is of roughly the same length, is divided into a mere three chapters, of which the first recounts a series of successful campaigns that the Portuguese have carried out in India in recent times. It is followed by a description of some of the more impor tant ports in Asia (including Manila, but excluding Macao), where the Portuguese currently trade. A closing section takes the form of a synopsis, pointing to the major campaigns that have taken place in the 1760s between the British, Marathas, Mughals, and Haidar ‘Ali Khan, concluding in 1769, the year Noronha was arrested prior to being sent to Portugal. The text concludes: “These were the progress of Asiatic and English arms until the year 1769. If God gives me life and health, I will continue the third volume for the better

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instruction of the curious, which will treat of the same progress along with the revolutions that have taken place amongst the Potentates of Asia, which may be favourable to the State of Goa and to the establishment of its commerce.” From this passage and others, we can see that despite its rather curious title, the book was in fact principally intended to be a chronicle, with some elements of geographical description thrown in to illustrate the places where the Portuguese resided, or where some of the principal actions described in the text took place. The claims to offer more information on the state of the military balance are for the most part misleading. The fourth chapter of the first book claims in its title to describe (among other things) “the terrestrial forces of the Maratas, [and] the naval forces of the Maratas,” but on the latter we hear practically nothing and, on the former, a mix of odd anecdotes and a description of three types of cavalry, followed by an extended excursus on the Pindaris. Noronha also insists that it was only in the last twenty years—that is after about 1750—that some of the Marathas had begun to carry firearms; besides “they fight without form, and the greater part of the shots they fire are useless because the arms are pointed in the air.” All in all, then, most of the military forces to be found in the Deccan can hardly be taken seriously if one is to follow Noronha’s account, and one scarcely knows whether their military practices or their idolatries and superstitions are more ridiculous. To the latter he returns time and again, but most notably in a section that forms the closing part of the chapter on the Marathas, which is entitled “Origins of their Brahmins and some of their superstitions.” Noronha writes: All idolaters and principally the Brahmins observe superstitious rites, so irrefragable are they in their inveterate customs and ludicrous sect in which they live engulfed that, in order not to deviate an iota from the law that they profess, they often lose the chance to gain great victories and greater felicities. One of their superstitions, and in truth the most ridiculous of all, is that if on coming out of one of their houses or tents, someone who is in the entourage happens to sneeze, at once, without a

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moment’s hesitation, they turn back fearing the augury of the misfortune that they believe will infallibly occur if they go on with the task for which they had set out.18 Other such superstitions are noted, relating to birds or animals of ill omen, and Noronha concludes that in general the Brahmins are characterized by a lack of courage, which can be seen by their conduct “in the field of battle or in the escalade of a fortress.” However, they are cunning and unprincipled negotiators and it is by this means, rather than through their courage or military tactics, that they have managed to advance in their political enterprises. Noronha claims to know these political Brahmins very well, so much so that “if I were to relate all that I have seen and heard of this nation, it would make a substantial volume.” As for their origins, he assures us on the basis of textual authority that they are of Jewish descent (in fact, “many believe that they descend from the tribe of Levi”), and that they had long resided in the Caucasus Mountains, where they had been exiled.19 Initially prevented from attaining India by Alexander the Great, they managed on the death of that monarch to arrive there, and took up the pen in order to emerge as scribes and accountants. If Noronha’s views of the Brahmins are negative, his notion of Islam is even blacker, as evidenced by the curious and garbled history he presents of Vijayanagara. The central figure in his account is Ramraza, “the most powerful Emperor who has ever been seen in that part of the world, so it is affirmed by Pedro Barreto de Resende and Damião de Goes, in the Chrónica de El-Rey Dom Manuel.” Noronha’s invocations of great authors are to be taken no more literally here than elsewhere, but it is interest ing to note that his library consists largely of Portuguese authors from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Now, it turns out that this Ramraza (based loosely on the figure of the Vijayanagara regent Aravidu Ramaraya) is actually descended from Indó, a descendant in the eighth generation of Adam, who had been sent to India by Noah and who remained there as the fi rst settler; Ramraza was his direct descendant, and ruled over the city of “Vizapur” until he was defeated by the people of the “damned sect of Mahomed” in a battle in 1563 (or perhaps

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1566, a point on which Noronha hesitates). As for Islam itself, it was founded in the year 676, writes Noronha, at the time of the empire of Heraclitus in a place called Sarato in Arabia, and was brought to India by a heretical Nestorian monk called Sergio and two of his Jewish companions, all disguised as merchants. Since they arrived in Gujarat, “the first to be infected by this abominable and contagious plague were the Gujaratis, people of Cambay.” The first great Muslim conqueror, Giat Nosorandy, went on to found the city of Delhi, while Ramraza was busy in his other wars. In the course of time, Ramraza was captured by his former vassal, Nizamxa, who went on to cut off the head of the 96-year-old monarch “without paying attention to the reverence and respect he owed him, and forgetting the esteem with which he had always been treated.”20 Noronha’s attempts at providing a coherent history of peninsular India in the eighteenth century, as well as in the centuries leading up to the establishment of the power of the Mughals and the Marathas, must be counted, all in all, as of limited interest. If his purpose in putting all this down on paper was to influence Portuguese policies with respect to India (as has sometimes been suggested), one can only wonder what readers in Lisbon made of these texts, with their mixture of exotic place names, Old Testament references, and garbled chronology. Thus, we have the fairly long account of the first Nizam of Hyderabad, where it is claimed he died in 1743 at the age of 107 years, and that he was an illegitimate son of one of the Mughal princes. This section of the text is one of the few where Noronha explicitly claims to have had access to written materials in India; his account of the battle for succession after the death of Aurangzeb (“o Imperador Alemguir Gassy”), is, he states, based on the “chronicles of the Mogor emperors in the Hindustani language [lingoa industana] that I read,” among which he counts one by a certain “Saed Efandy.”21 It is thus tempting to treat Noronha as a throwback, as it were, to an earlier epoch, an impression that is reinforced when one examines his collection of maps and plans (he has a number of these, including several of Mylapore alone), which do not diverge in their conception from what had been executed in the 1630s by Pedro Barreto de Resende, one of his textual references. In his use of the chronicle form too, his real references seem to be to authors of the sixteenth

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and seventeenth centuries such as Diogo do Couto or João de Barros, to whom he refers time and again. As for his limited excursions into the “ethnography” of India or into dimensions of religion, he seems to come up constantly against his own religious training, his desire to bring every thing back into a framework rather strictly defi ned by the Old Testament, and his fervent and clearly expressed dislike for both Muslims and Brahmins. In this respect, it also easy enough to develop a contrast between Noronha and a slightly younger writer in Portuguese, the Turin-born Carlos Julião (1740– 1811), who spent some six years in India as part of an elaborate mission on behalf of the Portuguese secretary of state, Martinho de Melo, which took him to Brazil and China.22 Julião produced a text entitled “Summary notice of the Gentilism in Asia,” in 107 short chapters, containing some Sanskrit shlokas in transliteration and with a translation, a summary of the Mahābhārata and of the ten avatāras of Vishnu (each with an accompanying colored illustration), thus continuing a tradition of religious ethnography that can be traced back at least to the sixteenth century, and in which the Jesuits and other religious orders played a role of some significance. But Julião did not pertain to this religious context, and was instead an artillery captain, with some interest in military engineering. Returning to Noronha, it is evident that be took himself fairly seriously as an historian, attempting to engage in a polemic with two of the best-known historians of the English Company in the eighteenth century, Richard Owen Cambridge and Robert Orme. In two texts, the “Chronological Deduction” (dedicated to the Marquis of Pombal) and the “Apologetic and Critical Manifesto,” Noronha attempts to demonstrate how the two historians have defamed him, and have produced a distorted view of history that is essentially designed to defend English interests.23 Much of the debate centers on the incidents in Mylapore in 1749, and the events that transpired thereafter, and Noronha presents himself both as actor and eyewitness, and as an objective historian. Neither Cambridge nor Orme seem to have responded, and Pombal does not seem to have been overly concerned with the anti-English views of Noronha. Certainly by 1770, it would have been foolhardy for the Portuguese to attempt

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any open opposition to the English Company in India, and Noronha’s articulation of history with its moral condemnation of English hypocrisy has had to wait over two centuries before seeing print. Nevertheless, the case of Noronha is interest ing one for two reasons. First, as distinct from the traveler or the armchair analyst, a military and political actor such as Noronha, who was close to the centers of power in and outside Goa, had a view of India that combined a sense of realpolitik and of alliances, with a set of strongly articulated prejudices with respect to almost all the Indian actors with whom he was in contact. These prejudices included the notion that most Indian armies were fundamentally incompetent, that Indians gained ground through devious negotiations rather than on the battlefield, and that most treaties were not worth the paper they were signed on. Yet, all this also comes inserted in a moral discourse, for Noronha is outraged when the English behave in this fashion, suggesting that he holds them to a higher standard than he does the peshwā (Maratha prime minister) or Haidar ‘Ali. A second aspect is Noronha’s clear desire to link the state of southern India in the eighteenth century to a set of religious and Biblical themes of degeneration, the terms in which he analyses Muslims and gentiles. Here, his training as a Franciscan may have had a role to play, but as has been remarked, some of these views were also shared by other Europeans in eighteenth-century India. All of this, we must recall, was written from the perspective of restoring some degree of respectability to the Estado da Índia, which by the mid- eighteenth century had been reduced to a second- or even third-rate power in the politics of southern India.

The Vision of Monsieur Bussy One of the concrete projects dealt with in the second part of Noronha’s Sistema Marcial is a plan to bring together a strike force of 1,500 Europeans in Goa, with the ultimate aim of recovering the Northern Province, particularly Chaul and Bassein (Vasai). With the possibility of an alliance with the one or the other side in a confl ict between the Marathas and Haidar ‘Ali, Noronha expresses his

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confidence that major gains can be made. His argument is pushed along by way of analogies with other notable successes of the eighteenth century, namely those of the English and French. He thus writes: What power does Industão have to resist 1500 Europeans in the Portuguese camp, commanded by a perfectly experienced chief, when with only 400 French [Charles de] Bussy laid down the law in Deccan, and with as many Englishmen we saw Clives [Robert Clive] conquer all Arcot and Bengal? And I do not even have to speak of the ancient prowess that was shown by the Portuguese Nation in the Orient, for it is so well-known that one can do without narrating it again.24 Noronha was of course no particular admirer of Clive, in view of his generalized Anglophobia, but Bussy is mentioned admiringly several times in his diverse works. Thus, earlier in the same chapter of the Sistema Marcial, he informs us that Bussy possesses two indispensable qualities, “prudence and knowledge of the lands,” and that these qualities were in evidence “during a period of nine years when he held a command in the Deccan, at a month’s distance from Pondicherry.” Now the name of Bussy, together with that of Dupleix, is all-toofamiliar in the annals of French imperial historiography, where the two represent a lost occasion when all of India might have fallen under the tricolor rather than the Union Jack. But what concerns us here are not Bussy’s exploits but his attitudes. How did this mid- eighteenth century adventurer see the part of the world where he acted on behalf of the French Company? A brief summary of the principal stages of Bussy’s career may not be entirely out of place here to set the stage.25 Born in February  1720, and thus some five months before Noronha, in the village of Bucy-le-Long (not far from Compiègne), Charles de Bussy also belonged to a family with a military tradition, his father having been a lieutenant-colonel in the infantry. At the age of thirteen, Bussy entered the military and served briefly under the command of his father, until the latter’s death in 1735. Through the intercession of a powerful patron, the ComptrollerGeneral Philibert Orry, Bussy was enrolled in the army of the

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French East India Company and departed soon after for the Indian Ocean islands under French control. In 1741, he arrived in India itself, first (so it would appear) at the French factory in Mahé, and the next year in Pondicherry. Later in the same decade, he appears to have taken part in the Anglo-French hostilities, and he is mentioned among those who defended Pondicherry against the English forces in 1748. In August 1749, at the Battle of Ambur, in which the French supported Chanda Sahib against Anwar-ud-Din Khan, the newly nominated nawwāb of Arcot, Bussy played a role of some significance, leading to the retreat of the Arcot forces and the eventual death of the nawwāb. This battle, and the successful attack a year later on the massive fort of Senji (captured by the French in September 1750), seem to have made Bussy’s reputation and led to his nomination as head of a French expeditionary force to the Deccan in January 1751. The complexities of the politics of the Hyderabad state in these years have been dealt with by a number of historians, and need not detain us too long here. After the death of the celebrated Nizam-ulMulk Asaf Jah in 1748, his successor Nasir Jang managed to reign for only two years before being assassinated in December  1750. Bussy’s task was thus initially to accompany a rival claimant to the Nizamat, a certain Muzaffar Jang, with whom the French Company had formed an alliance in 1749, in order to protect him and assure the stability of his rule in Hyderabad. But shortly after their departure from Pondicherry for Hyderabad, Muzaffar Jang was killed in a rebellion; Bussy then seized the occasion to nominate one of the dead man’s brothers—Salabat Jang—sūbadār of Hyderabad. This was undoubtedly a bold and unprecedented move, since it was normal to await a sign from the imperial court at Delhi before making such a claim. But emboldened by the lack of a clear reaction, Bussy went even further, entering first Hyderabad and then Aurangabad, where he and his entourage began to see themselves in the role of veritable conquistadores. A series of complex negotiations, battles and campaigns followed over the next few years, with Bussy at times advising that the French “pull out of this labyrinth,” but at other moments presenting strong arguments for the need to maintain a presence in the Deccan. At times allied with the Marathas, but at times equally engaged in

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struggle with the peshwā, Bussy continued his actions in the Deccan and the so-called Northern Circars (or coastal Andhra north of Masulipatnam) even after the replacement of his superior and protector, Dupleix, who was recalled to France in 1754. By 1758, however, Bussy’s hour of glory was clearly over. Confl icts with the new head of French military operations in India, the Franco-Irish Count of Lally-Tollendal, made his situation ever more fragile.26 Eventually, in January 1760, in a disastrous battle at Vandavasi, Bussy was captured by the English, who treated him, however, with much respect. Once the rose-colored spectacles of French imperial historiography are taken off, it is clear that Bussy in these years was a formidable warlord, but one who only tenuously felt the control of his superiors in Pondicherry through the fi rst half of the 1750s.27 His fi nances were assured by links to local fi nanciers or sāhukārs (as he asserts on more than one occasion in his letters), and by the extensive fi nancial network of Dupleix, who was himself no mean private trader and entrepreneur.28 Bussy’s fi nancial shrewdness extended to revenue farming and political negotiation, where his loyalty in one situation or another was often available to the highest bidder. Most remarkable is the fact that after his repatriation to France, he managed to defend himself against the fi nancial charges that sullied Dupleix’s reputation, as well as to protect himself from the more serious charges of treason that cost Lally his life in 1766.29 This was no easy affair, as we see from a number of pamphlets that Bussy had published in the 1760s;30 but in the same period, his social ascension came to be assured through his marriage (with the aristocratic and politically well- connected Artémise de Choiseul in May 1761), and his acquisition of a title, that of the Marquis of Bussy- Castelnau. After an absence of two decades, in the early 1780s, Bussy decided to return to active ser vice, and was hence sent to India in order to look to the situation there, by now reduced to far more modest dimensions where the French Company was concerned. Arriving in Porto Novo in March 1783, Bussy was unable to make much of an impression on the state of military affairs. Between 1783, and his death in Pondicherry in early January  1785, his papers are largely

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concerned with opinions on diverse projects that were proposed for alliances with a number of powers (including—as was natural in the epoch—the ruler of Mysore, Tipu Sultan); in terms of concrete action, only the expedition to Trincomalee in Sri Lanka stands out. Like Noronha, Bussy was fundamentally a political actor, and like the bishop he could manipulate the pen as well as the sword. Also like his Portuguese contemporary, he held views that were not simply the theories of a political thinker or the reflections of a traveler at the end of a voyage; they were the concrete notions of an actor, who also lived to a large extent by his theories. It is necessary in this context to set aside a somewhat romantic construct that opposes a positive French conception of eighteenth-century India to a negative British view;31 this opposition, which is sometimes symbolically centered on that between Anquetil-Duperron and William Jones, is in reality hard to sustain. French travelers in seventeenth-century India, and most notably François Bernier, could write with subtlety and conviction of Mughal politics and social organ ization, and one is tempted to generalize from these examples. But the world of Bussy derived in the first place from that of Dupleix, and secondly from his own negotiations in the Deccan; and as such these views were as brutal as they were frank. Some months after Bussy’s departure from Pondicherry to the Deccan, Dupleix advised him in no uncertain terms: “You know perfectly what sort of race it is that you are dealing with. A well-managed firmness mixed with some affability will get you where you want.”32 But what sort of “race” was it indeed? One of Dupleix’s preferred words to characterize his Asian interlocutors was fourbe, meaning a perfidious or untrustworthy sort. But his views can be found in a number of other passages. To take but one example, in a letter to Bussy of August 22, 1752, Dupleix wrote: The Asiatic once he has been seized by an idea, acts without the slightest provision, but he is also dissuaded with the greatest facility and does not know how to take care of those things which his limited intelligence has not allowed him to foresee. You know this rabble [canaille] better than I, and you have seen how frightened they were faced with these Marathas vagabonds. How wonderful it will be, my dear Bussy, when you will have

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been joined by reinforcements, and you can lay down the law to all these races who are damned by God.33 Bussy for his part was of much the same opinion, as we see from a letter he wrote to Dupleix, comparing the Mughals and the Marathas. Written in late November 1751, when Bussy had somewhat recovered from the astonishment that his own success had produced, he asserted in this missive: The long commerce that I have had with the people of the country has taught me to know them; I could protest to you that nothing can be based on them [viz. their trust]; perfidy and duplicity come naturally to them, and we shall always be the dupes in the dealings we have with them. I believe that I have still remarked some vestiges of probity and good faith amongst the Marates, and if one had to choose, I would trust them a little more than the Mogols; but the surest way of all is not to trust either the one or the other, and not get mixed up in their affairs; these nations have no control, they are always willing to sacrifice the most inviolable engagements at the altar of their interests.34 This view, that it was best to “not get mixed up in their affairs,” was temporary; Bussy had shifted by the next year. But while in this mood, Bussy could declare self-righteously that “these people . . . have no idea of the admirable subordination that reigns in the States of Europe,” comparing this with the lack of discipline he claimed was the rule in the political formations with which he was confronted in the Deccan. Despite having left France at a relatively tender age, then, Bussy believed himself to be a patriot to the hilt, and—what is impor tant—not merely a Frenchman but a Eu ropean, as distinct from his counterpart, the perfidious Asiatic. Thus, writing once more to Dupleix, this time in an extensive memoir on the situation in the Deccan in July 1753: [To be] a man of the patria and the nation, all these words that are so sacred amongst all other peoples, mean nothing to the

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Moors compared to their private interest and the hope of personal advantage. Also all these great ideas of the honour of the nation, of public interest, which link all the members of a state to their sovereign and bring them together for a common cause, all are chimeras in this land, where each individual thinks only of himself, and only strives to extract something from the troubles and revolutions that take place.35 Or again, here is what he writes in a letter dated May 20, 1754: The intrigues that follow one another without interruption are, so to speak, the very alimentation of the Asiatic; those which have occupied me in these last times being no more than bagatelles compared to the labyrinth of cabals and secret dealings which had to be sorted out and discussed in order to establish Salabat Jang [on the throne] and to keep him in the place that he occupies. In this respect, the term “Asiatic,” which also appears in the title of Noronha’s major work, has become more significant than it had been before, but also somewhat reduced in its coverage. Its advantage is that it covers both “Moors” and “Gentiles” that one finds in India, even though the former may in fact be Turkoman or Persian in origin; but it is clearly not meant to extend to peoples elsewhere in Asia, say in China or Japan. Once identified, the diagnostic features of the Asiatic can be developed and dilated on, and most importantly can form the basis of a style of politics, which is particular to India, and certainly not that which one would use in a European context. Thus Bussy elaborates on his notions of la politique à l’asiatique in a letter of June 20, 1754: Experience shows sufficiently that the Asiatic does not search an alliance save to the extent that he sees his own advantage in it or when he fears that this ally will become an enemy; it is through this double viewpoint that I envisage our own [alliance], being certain that so long as we are considered in this way, nothing can break or even shake it. The alliance with the Raja

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of Maïssour, who is of a rank that is clearly inferior to that of the governor [soubab] of the Deccan, should be considered purely on account of the interest of the sums that we claim. We are thus pushed along by this logic into the next series of claims, namely that this style of politics is determining, and the European actor can do nothing other than simply adapt to it. For Bussy, this is in the first place a matter of survival, for he considers himself to be under constant threat, both on the political plane and on a more concrete day-to-day level. This is thus a sort of “Survival Guide to India,” rather than a sanitized artifact to read before the academies or in the salons of Europe. A letter from Bussy in the same year, 1754, while still in the Deccan, hence declares: I find myself in the midst of traitors of assassins, all of whom affect the most sincere friendship on the outside; one should always be on guard against intrigues and cabals, without letting it be known however that one is not trusting, which would indispose their spirits and render difficult any opening up on their part. The traps that the Asiatic holds out are all the more difficult to perceive and to avoid, since they are covered by a veil, and he claims ardently to uphold your interest when in fact he seeks your ruin; not having anything in common, each one looks to his own interest, and tries to rise up through struggles, through factions, and through treason.36 A certain number of such political assassinations did work in Bussy’s own favor of course, notably that of Salabat Jang’s inconvenient brother and rival, Ghazi-ud-Din, in October 1752. But what is of interest is that Bussy’s view has neither much ethnographic depth nor much by way of detail in terms of political economy. The view of India is thus largely pragmatic, and the most one learns from looking into the letters and their enclosures are the details of the revenue capacity and resources of this or that area, of a sort that Léon Moracin was able to produce, for example, for the Masulipatnam area.37 But of the usual topoi that characterize the traveler’s account, Bussy—as much as Noronha—has nothing to say. No scenes of satī

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punctuate his letters, and the word “caste” scarcely appears. Instead, the letters repeat a simple opposition, that between Europeans and Asiatics, each group with its own characteristics and its own ways of conducting itself in the political sphere. Bussy also has another idea, this one rather fundamental, which is simply expressed and sums up much not only of his own world but that of the servants of the English East India Company who, a few years later, would be engaged in amassing fortunes in Bengal and elsewhere. In a letter to Moracin, soon after the latter had taken stock of the situation in Masulipatnam and its environs, he expounded his viewpoint as follows (the letter is dated November 28, 1753): It is not to the Director and Commandant of the French colony that I address myself but to Monsieur Moracin, an old friend, with whom I deal in all frankness and cordiality; I pray him [you] in both capacities to follow what I say exactly; he will see as well as I do that I am guided by good intentions. . . . We must set aside European usages in order to conform to those of this land. . . . As to the surplus that good government might produce, as well as all the presents or nazers that will be made to you, both after and during the moment when you take possession, as well as all that will be offered to you for the positions that you can grant, and which you should not hesitate even one instant to receive, we will divide them half and half, you and I. I have similarly agreed with Ibrahim Khan that all that he receives by way of nazer, as well as all that exceeds the current revenue of the province in which you will place him, will be divided in three, a third for you, a third for me, and a third for him. You should not hesitate to consider these provinces as pertaining to me. I have explained it all to Monsieur le Marquis Dupleix. They have been given to me, and if we do other wise, how could I recover the considerable sums for which I am debt, as well as those that M. Dupleix has given me? The letter concludes “Once again, my dear friend, follow the usages of the land, caress some, threaten occasionally, and allow everyone to entertain hopes.”38

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In a sense, this was the development of an earlier letter, also addressed to Moracin, in which Bussy had stated: “In the midst of as perfidious [ fourbe] a nation as this one with which we have to deal, if one always behaves with honesty and probity, I think one will be duped as we will inevitably be by this race, unless we conform a little to the usage of the country.”39 To this he had added, quoting a verse attributed to Hanno of Carthage: “Parmi ce peuple faux, à qui garder ma foi? C’est aux événements à disposer de moi. [Among this false people, for whom shall I keep my faith? I’m but a victim of events.]”40 So once again we see a curious tension—the European, while keeping his own identity intact, must nevertheless be prepared to do in India as the Indians do. The letter to Moracin of November 1753 was to embarrass Bussy somewhat when it was produced in Paris in the 1760s when he was embroiled in litigation with other parties, for it suggested a blurring of the distinctions between the public and the private which—at least in principle—were upheld in France in the period. But Bussy did manage to survive unscathed, a fact that is not devoid of significance, suggesting that the idea of ethnopolitics (where one adapted to local circumstances, while knowing all the while who one really was) did manage to find its partisans. As for Bussy, the European, he also insisted time and again on this aspect of his identity, as much as on the fact that he had no intention whatsoever of “dissolving” into the place where he resided. Thus, a particularly telling example is a letter he wrote in December 1753, while already considerably embroiled in the affairs of the Deccan, to his friend Marion du Mersan: As for me, if I were to follow my own inclinations and the natural penchant that draws me towards my patria and my family, I would be very glad to have orders from the Company to withdraw all the troops to their factories. Even if I am decorated with all the titles and marks of honour that the [Mughal] Emperor can grant to the grandees of his empire, generalissimo of the armies of the Deccan, referee between the Mogols and the Marates, and even the title of ‘Maymarath’,41 all this means very little to me. How much I would prefer a promenade in the Palais Royal or the Tuileries, and a supper with two or three friends

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like you, to all the vain pomp of Asiatic grandeur, of which I have had too much, and the grave and magnificent person that I am obliged to play and concerning which we have laughed on occasions when we were tête-à-tête. The honour of the nation and the interests of the Company have so far been, opposed to my being able to enjoy such happiness, which I have so far only been able to do in my own mind. Had I so far been less concerned with the gains of the Company, I would be less sensitive to their loss. I would only see it with the pain of a citizen who sees his patria blind to her own interests, and willing to abandon to others, treasures that she refuses only because she does not know them.42 Reading Bussy then, it is clear that he is hardly the image of the Eu ropean savant, reflecting on the difference between “Self” and “Other”; yet he is not the pragmatic administrator either, for the few years he spent in the Deccan were not enough for any stable form of administration to emerge. Taking his letter together with reports such as that of Moracin, one emerges with the impression that the degree of French control over the areas that they had notionally been granted by first Muzaffar Jang (after the Battle of Ambur) and then Salabat Jang, was in fact highly superficial, no more than a sort of glorified revenue farm. Nevertheless, the revenues were substantial, as the figures for the early 1750s show, and the possibilities of skimming money off the top were equally so.43 In 1752, for example, French revenues in coastal Andhra amounted to Rs. 378,425, with the Masulipatnam area accounting for the lion’s share; the next year, 1753, the total had expanded to Rs. 994,896, largely because the district of Kondavidu had also been brought under their control. In any event, the limited knowledge that Bussy had was enough for him to participate in such a system, and we imagine this must have been the case for some of his contemporaries, such as Paul Benfield and Robert Clive, as well.44 Certainly Bussy may have had a smattering of spoken Persian but little else by way of textual knowledge on India; the debates that so animated “intellectuals” such as Desvaulx, Coeurdoux, or Duperron seem not to have interested him in the least.45 To conquer India in the eighteenth century was in any

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event no epistemological feat; but holding together the conquest was another matter. An interest ing summing up of Bussy, his conduct, and his projects, comes to us from a curious contemporary source: the Istanbulborn Haji Mustafa, who arrived in India in French Company ser vice as Dominique Lhomaca, but then converted to Islam and immersed himself to a fair extent in Mughal culture.46 Reflecting in a comparative vein on Bussy and Clive as actors, he wrote that “Mr. de Bussy came to India, like so many others, with no fortune at all, no employment determined, no other scheme, but an undetermined desire of raising a fortune some way or other.” He then traced Bussy’s military career, describing him as a “superior genius” in strategic affairs, who “penetrated into the latent weakness of the military and political Government of the Moghols.” This allowed Bussy to create nothing short of an “éclatant revolution,” as a consequence of which “he reaped far beyond his expectation.” Bussy can moreover be effectively contrasted in his qualities to Clive, often but not always to the advantage of the latter: “there is more nimbleness in the Frenchman, more firmness in the Englishman, or even some stiffness.” This following extended passage then more or less sums up Mustafa’s understanding of Bussy in India, noting in passing that he “was ever involved in a cloud of continual intrigues.” Mr. de Bussy is a handsome tall man, looking amiable and above the common, his whole habit bespeaks good-will and consideration. The public, jealous of his prodigious prosperity, hath taken a full revenge on him, by denying him any valor, a fundamental qualification in a military [man], which they expressly omitted, in the enumeration of so many others, to which they acknowledged his right; the private soldier, impartial judge on that matter, and a competent observer also, his mind never offusqued [offended, from the French offusqué] by that preoccupation, which men of higher ranks are liable to, renders him justice as to the valor; for my part I admire Mr. de Bussy’s person, without being fond of his conduct. He is possessed of great qualities, but these are not to be confounded with great

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virtues. A handsome man, a great man, and an extraordinary genius, he is, but a very equivocal citizen.47 In short, the very qualities that Bussy usually liked to attribute to the Indian political system, were precisely those that others attributed to him.

The Vicissitudes of Colonel Polier We now turn to the third of our figures, Colonel Antoine-LouisHenri Polier, who is somewhat known to afi cionados of the early Eu ropean manuscript collections in the West, as well as to diligent intellectual historians of the more obscure aspects of the relationship between the Enlightenment and Indology on the Continent.48 The extensive Persian letter-book entitled I‘jāz-i-Arsalānī (preserved in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris), which Polier (together with his amanuensis, or munshī, Kishan Sahay) produced during his long stay in India, has been published in an abridged translation by Muzaffar Alam and Seema Alavi.49 More deeply embedded within a South Asian social and intellectual context than either Noronha or Bussy, Polier had a rather extraordinary career, in a fascinating milieu, which opens up a distinct set of lines of inquiry.50 The Polier family records suggest a lineage with origins dating back to medieval times. In the twelfth century, for example, they may be found in military engagements against the English, and a Polier was associated with King Louis IX (St. Louis). The establishment of one part of the Polier family in Switzerland dates, however, to the mid-sixteenth century, and we find traces of a Jehan (Jean) Polier, “from Ville Franche” (Rouergue) among the list of supplicants before the Syndics and Council of Geneva, on December 5, 1553.51 The next year, 1554, Jean Polier married Catherine de la Boutière, from Cluny-en-Maconnais. There are two versions of Polier’s arrival in Switzerland. The one, less probable, has it that he left France to escape religious persecution during the last decades of the Valois monarchy. Another version, generally deemed more probable, would have it that Polier arrived

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Mihr Chand, “Colonel Polier watching a nautch” (1773–74), Collection of Prince and Princess Sadruddin Aga Khan, Geneva (M160).

in Switzerland as interpreter and secretary of a French embassy to the Swiss League.52 Soon after his marriage (and perhaps his conversion to Protestantism), Polier left Geneva to offer his ser vices to the Elector of the Palatinate, where in 1557 he rose to be state councilor. He seems later to have returned to Geneva, while remaining on good terms with the French monarchy (which would clearly not have been the case had he fled France from persecution). However, the aftermath of the celebrated St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre of August 24, 1572 in Paris, when many Huguenots (and most prominently Admiral Gaspard de Coligny) were killed with the connivance of Charles IX, seems to have changed the nature of Polier’s relations with France. We find “Monsieur Polier, secrétaire du Roy,” listed on May 3, 1574, among the French and foreigners who had asked for refuge in Lausanne “on account of the massacres and persecutions for the Christian religion,” and in April of the following year he was granted the status of burgher (bourgeois) in that city, where he remained until his death in 1602.53

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Jean Polier had five children, of whom the second, Jacques Polier (d. 1623), in turn founded a branch of the family that is usually called the “Bottens branch.” His son, Jean-Pierre Polier (d. 1677) held a number of significant offices, such as lieutenant-colonel of the militia in the Vaud region, and rose in 1655 to the position of burgomaster of Lausanne. He equally displayed a certain literary talent, which when combined with a mystical inclination helps to explain the nature of his principal works on such subjects as the Apocalypse, the Jewish notion of the imminent arrival of the Messiah, and the fall of Babylon. Of the children of Jean-Pierre Polier, it was the older son, also Jean-Pierre Polier (1670–1747), who continued the line at Bottens. He served at Vaud, and in Prussia, and played a role in the Swiss cantonal wars of 1712 at Villmergen, fighting for the evangelical cantons against the Catholic ones. From his single marriage with Salomé Quisard, he is reputed to have had as many as twenty-five children, of whom some twelve are known to posterity. Besides these children, he also left behind an unfinished set of memoirs, preserved in manuscript at the Lausanne Library. His oldest son, Jacques-Henri-Étienne Polier (b. 1700), succeeded him, and from Jacques’s marriage with Françoise Moreau (solemnized in 1721) was born Antoine-Louis-Henri Polier (1741–1795), who is our primary concern here. The family of Antoine-Louis-Henri Polier may thus be characterized by two tendencies. A number of members served in wars in Eu rope, fighting in Switzerland, Germany, Spain, and the Low Countries. There was thus a fairly lively military and mercenary heritage, even before his paternal uncle, Paul-Philippe Polier (1711– 1759), went off to serve the English East India Company in India. At the same time, however, there was equally an intellectual heritage, as we see from the case of the grandfather, and the great-grandfather; a particularly noted intellectual was a great-uncle, Georges Polier (1675–1759), who was a professor of Greek and moral philosophy at the Lausanne Academy, later a professor of Hebrew, and the author of a number of works of a religious nature. Of still greater significance is a paternal uncle, Jean-Antoine-Noé Polier (1713–1783), the brother of Paul-Philippe, who was noted as a Protestant pastor, but equally as a correspondent of Voltaire and of the

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Encyclopaedists.54 Educated at Leiden, where he defended a thesis in 1739 comparing the purity of Arabic and Hebrew, Antoine-Noé Polier (as he is usually known) displayed the same sustained interest in Hebrew that had characterized earlier generations of his family. While his relations with Voltaire were at times uncertain (Voltaire treated him with ostensible respect, mixed with a secret contempt), Polier’s essay on the Messiah did find a place in Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary, with the following quite complimentary introductory remark (in which we may nevertheless discern a sarcastic undertone): “This article is by Monsieur Polier of Bottens. He is the principal pastor at Lausanne. His science equals his piety. He composed this article for the great Encyclopaedic Dictionary, in which it was inserted. Only a few portions were suppressed, where the examiners believed that Catholics who were less knowledgeable and less pious than the author could misuse them. It was received with the applause of all wise men.”55 The most important single document that has come down to us from Antoine-Louis-Henri Polier, of a comprehensive biographical nature, is the personal notice that he dictated to his cousin, and which he is said himself to have revised and corrected.56 This text was then published by the same cousin, Marie-Élisabeth Polier (or the Chanoinesse de Polier, as she is usually known), in the preface to the posthumously published text by Polier entitled Mythologie des Indous, containing paraphrases of the Mahābhārata and the Bhāgavata Purāna, among other texts.57 A brief introduction is needed to the life and work of the Chanoinesse in this context. Born in 1742 (and thus a mere year younger than Polier himself), she was the daughter of his paternal uncle Georges Polier, a colonel in the ser vice of Hanover. Marie-Élisabeth, like her sister Jeanne-Louise-Antoinette (or Eléonore) had literary ambitions, despite the fact that she had a religious vocation as well, as the Chanoinesse of the Reformed Order of the Holy Sepulchre in Prussia. Bilingual in German and French, she is noted for having published a number of translations from the former to the latter, besides participating in a number of literary reviews, most notably the Journal littéraire de Lausanne, which she edited from 1793 to 1800. Named Dame of Honour at the court of Saxe-Meiningen, she eventually died in Roudolstadt in 1817.

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We are thus dealing with more than a mere scribe here, and the suspicion may remain that Marie-Élisabeth Polier put her own literary talents to use in “improving” Polier’s text. This may explain some of the curious inconsistencies that we find there from the very start, where Paul-Philippe Polier is described not as commander of the garrison at Fort St. David in Cuddalore, but of Fort William in Calcutta.58 Thus, to take the text from its very beginning, Antoine Polier writes: Born at Lausanne in the Vaud country, of a family of French origin but established and naturalised in Switzerland, I had from my infancy conceived the desire to see Asia, and there rejoin my uncle, who in English ser vice, was commandant of Calcutta. Though my education had been rather neglected, I was at the age of fifteen years quite advanced in mathematics, and besides, I had my head full of a prodigious reading that I had undertaken, without direction, choice, or sequence; for I had emptied shelf after shelf from the reading cabinets established at Lausanne and at Neufchatel, where I had been sent on a pension to the institute of Professor de Montmollin. I left it, in the year 1756, in order to profit from an opportunity that presented itself to go to England, from where I embarked in the year 1757 for India, and I arrived in this land [India] in the month of June 1758, aged seventeen years. It was in the peninsula below the Ganges, theatre of the war which at that time was going on between the two rival European nations that I disembarked. Calcutta had been besieged by the French, and the uncle whom I had the intention of joining had been killed shortly before my arrival, while defending that place.59 This seems a rather curious view of events, for Calcutta in 1758, after the Battle of Plassey, was not being besieged by the French; on the other hand, Fort St. George in Madras was at this time the center of a protracted confl ict. It appears that Marie-Élisabeth Polier has introduced her own notions of India’s geography into the text here. The memoir then continues, rather more accurately:

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Absolutely isolated by this event, I entered as a simple cadet in the ser vice of the English Company, and I began my career against the French on the coast of Orissa [Orixa], from where we marched into Bengal to combat the Indians. These diverse campaigns having come to a close, we returned to Patna at the end of 1760. But the English being at war with the Schasada [Shahzada], I was appointed as engineer in the body of the army that was marching against the Nabab. On our return from the campaign, I was employed as inspector of the works in which the inactive troops were engaged, and soon after I was called to Calcutta to fi ll the post there of assistant engineer [ingénieur en second]. On arriving in that town, I was given the general charge of all the works of fortification and, in September  1762, I was named Chief Engineer with the rank of Captain. An advancement as considerable as this at the age of twenty-one years augmented my zeal for ser vice, and filled me with hope concerning my military career. However, at the end of two years, a newly-arrived English officer was named to the post that I occupied; but my superiors, while informing me of the orders that they had received, gave such positive testimonies of their satisfaction with my conduct, and the prospects that the campaign which was about to begin against Shuja‘-udDaula and the Marathas gave me such pleasure, that I little regretted the post that was being taken away from me, all the more so for I was allowed to keep my title and my rank of Engineer and Captain. I thus joined the army in these two capacities. When the campaign was over, I returned to Calcutta, where I found Milord Cleves [Lord Clive] who was preparing his famous expedition. Promoted to the rank of Major, I joined his army, and he gave me the command of the Cypayes, the body of Indian troops who were a part of the second brigade; and as he had particularly attached me to his own person and since he honoured me with his confidence, he gave me the charge of looking to those of the officers of his army who, unhappy with his operations, conceived of dangerous plots to undermine them.60

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The reference is presumably to the Buxar campaign of 1764 and the celebrated “White Mutiny” of that time; and here Polier makes a clear reference to the first of his English patrons (of whom there were to be a succession), namely Robert Clive. He then continues: I had the happiness of unmaking their intrigues. The brilliant success that this expedition had is known in Europe. In my own case, I was so content with my position that without an express order from the Government, I would not have changed it. But the government, unhappy with the Chief Engineer who had replaced me in Calcutta, recalled me to that town and, besides handing me back the post that I had occupied, added to it that of the commander of the troops who formed the garrison of that place. Being sensitive to this flattering mark of the contentment that the military administration manifested with regard to my ser vices, I quit the army and settled down in Calcutta, where I awaited with confidence the brevet of Lieutenant- Colonel, which I knew that London was ready to send me, when—instead of receiving it—there arrived an order from the Directors of the East India Company which held back my advancement on the pretext that I was not born English [que je n’étais pas né anglais]. Despite the slight softening that was brought to this injustice in allowing me to retain the posts that I was occupying, I felt it deeply; and once the Bengal Council had unsuccessfully made the strongest representations in my favour in order to obtain for me the redressal of this wrong, I hesitated no more to profit from the goodwill of Mr. Hastings, and from the credit that he had with the Nababs, who had become the allies of the English. Polier’s view of his own situation is thus somewhat ambiguous. He insists that a form of xenophobia reigned at the time, not in Bengal, but among the directors in London, who denied him his due because “I was not born English [que je n’étais pas né anglais].” It is of minor significance that he prefers the term “English” to “British” (britannique), the latter allowing the explicit possibility of including the Scots as well among the privileged. It seems, however, that Polier

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does not insist overmuch here on his French origins as the reason for his exclusion, merely his foreign birth. In the 1760s and 1770s, a number of battles and intrigues were carried on within the English Company over similar questions. A prominent case is that of William Bolts, author of the celebrated Considerations on India Affairs, who was born in Amsterdam of mixed English and German parentage.61 Ironically, at least some of Bolts’s opponents, men who accused him with of a lack of “patriotism,” were themselves of Dutch descent, as was the case with his archenemy Harry Verelst, as also Henry Vansittart. In the case of Polier, while being a Huguenot of French origin, we have seen that his family was very closely involved with German courtly life in the period, not least of all in Hanover, the place of origin of the ruling monarchs of England at the time. Nevertheless, the “pretext,” as he himself puts it, of foreign origins was available to be used against him. Polier’s situation may also have been rather more complex in this regard than he lets on in his autobiographical narrative. The Comte du Modave, in his account of this period, does mention him in the context of a curious episode, about a French Company official, JeanBaptiste Chevalier, who managed to get hold of confidential plans detailing the defenses of Fort William in Calcutta. As Modave notes: Here is the manner in which Monsieur Chevalier procured an exact plan of this place [Calcutta]. There was in the ser vice of the English Company a Swiss officer called Major Polier. He is a man of merit, full of honour and probity, and who has some knowledge of geometry and fortifications. He was at that time at the fort of Calcuta, with the charge of making up its plans and elevations. Major Polier likes good company and all honest men are well-received at his home. Monsieur Chevalier availed, or rather abused, of this facility and, by means of a Frenchman who frequented the house of Major Polier, he corrupted a mestizo who was copying these plans and these elevations under the direction of the Major. A small sum of money was enough to settle the matter. The wretch betrayed his master and his duty, and handed over all the papers that were in his charge to Monsieur Chevalier. The governor of Chandernagore applauded this

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action like a victory, without thinking that those who engage others to commit a perfidious act share the shame that is attached to such a dishonest act, in the view of honest men.62 Chevalier’s path was to cross that of Polier on more than one occasion. Somewhat earlier, between April and November 1763, the French Company official (and future governor of Chandernagore) had found himself in contact with the same personages who were to play a major role in Polier’s life in north India, while paying a visit to Faizabad, Agra, and Allahabad. Chevalier has left behind a brief account of these dealings in his memoirs, though he unfortunately does not mention Polier.63 Other Frenchmen, notably René Madec and Jean-Baptiste Gentil, were present in Hindustan in these years, and were engaged in complex dealings with the successors to the Mughals, as well as the Mughal court itself.64 All these men have left behind more or less elaborate accounts, and in a number of cases we are aware of contacts, and rivalries between them, as well as that between Polier and his French contemporaries. Perhaps the most celebrated of those who visited India in these years, and who left behind an account thereof, was a personage of a rather dif ferent order, a voyager and intellectual, rather than an administrator, a mercenary, or a practical man (as were Gentil, Madec, and Chevalier). This was the famous Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron (1731–1805), born the son of a grocer in Paris, but then able to become a student of Paris University, and a sometime disciple of the Jansenists. In February  1755 (shortly before Polier), Anquetil departed Europe for India, with the express intention of mounting an antiquarian expedition in search of ancient manuscripts, which he hoped to translate by learning the relevant languages in India. In early August 1755, he arrived at Pondicherry, and the following year made his way to Bengal. Forced to leave Chandernagore when the place was taken by the English Company on March 23, 1757, he then returned south, making his way first to Mahé, then to Goa, and eventually to Surat, in early May 1758. Here he remained until March 1761, in close contact with the Parsis there, during a period of some political turmoil for the French, with Pondicherry itself falling to the English Company on January 18, 1761. He was then

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taken back to England with a number of French prisoners, and after a brief visit to Oxford (where he made it a point to challenge the professors on their knowledge of ancient and modern Persian), Anquetil returned to Paris in March 1762.65 Anquetil is, curiously enough, the key to at least some aspects of how Polier’s late career as an Orientalist must be read, precisely because he is so largely absent from Polier’s narrative. Unlike Gentil, who maintained very close contacts with Anquetil (and to an extent with the Comte de Buffon), Polier preferred— despite the fact of his having been, in his own view, unjustly treated by the directors of the East India Company—to work through a series of English patrons, among them Clive and then Hastings. Gentil (1726–1799) had left France in 1752, to serve as an infantry ensign in Pondicherry, and returned to his motherland only in August 1777. When he did so, he at once addressed Anquetil, asking him to intervene in order to obtain a pension to allow himself and his family to subsist. Earlier, while spending twelve years at Faizabad (under the patronage of Nawwab Shuja‘-ud-Daula), he had been encouraged by Anquetil to search out manuscripts of Indian texts, including the Upanishads, of which Anquetil was to publish a Latin translation at Strasbourg in 1801.66 In fact, Gentil had sought out the Persian translation (entitled Sirr-i-Akbar) made of the Upanishad by the Mughal prince Dara Shukoh in the seventeenth century, for his patron’s use. Until his departure for Chandernagore on February  27, 1775, Gentil represented French interests in Faizabad, and at the Mughal court, and was, from 1770 to 1771, a captain in the French ser vice as well as a holder of the Cross of St. Louis. Like Polier, he had a title from Shuja‘-ud-Daula, namely that of Mudabbir- ul- mulk Rafi‘- udDaula Gentil Bahādur Nāzim-i-Jang, as well as revenues amounting to 50,000 livres in the form of a jāgīr (or revenue assignment). The complicity between men like Gentil and Polier (and somewhat later, Polier and Claude Martin), ostensibly representing rival powers, but held together by networks of sociability and the transmission of knowledge is altogether fascinating. Both were substantially interested not only in manuscript and miniature collection, but equally in cartography and in accumulating gazetteer-like information on the Gangetic plain that had a strategic significance in the epoch. As

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early as 1770, Gentil had supervised the production of a manuscript atlas of the chief provinces of the Mughal empire in north India, using information drawn in part from Abu’l Fazl’s Ā’īn-i-Akbarī.67 On his return to France, he wrote his Mémoires sur l’Indoustan, which were published much later (in 1822) after having been reworked by his son. But, far earlier, in 1778, on the occasion of his audience with Louis XVI at Versailles, Gentil presented to the monarch a summary history of India (the Abrégé historique des souverains de l’Indoustan), based in large measure on the early seventeenth-century Persian chronicle of Muhammad Qasim Hindushah, called “Firishta.” At the level of their life-styles, however, some apparent differences existed between the two. The Catholic Gentil, born at Bagnols-sur-Cèze, married a Luso-Indian named Teresa Velho (the great-niece of the celebrated Dona Juliana Dias de Castro), and returned with her, his brother-in-law, and his mother-in-law, Lucia Mendes Velho to France. Polier, as we know, chose a rather dif ferent route. We have left his narrative while he was still in Calcutta; he now goes on to detail his arrival in Awadh, and his growing closeness to the nawwābs there, as well as his dealings with the powerful figure of the warlord, Najaf Khan. Here is how he describes his entry into Awadh: Thus, I accepted a post of architect and engineer that he [Hastings] procured for me with Soujah Aldowla [Shuja‘-ud-Daula], who was looking for an Eu ropean who was capable of taking charge of the buildings and fortifications that he was proposing to make in his states. I thus quit Calcutta, to go to Feizabad, residence of this Nabab and, on establishing myself there, I took on the customs and the usages of the Indians with whom I lived.68 Having ostensibly “gone native” then, Polier found himself employed in the wars and skirmishes that occupied North India at that time, in which the Jats, the Sikhs, the Afghans, as well as the Mughals were all involved. These were troubles that considerably interested the English in Calcutta as well, and we know that they were supplied considerable information on these questions by the Jesuit

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Page from a Polier album, showing an unknown Mughal dignitary. Musée National des Arts Asiatiques, 13-510863 / MA 12498. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée Guimet, Paris) / Thierry Ollivier.

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François-Xavier Wendel, who in the late 1760s wrote a series of confidential memoirs on the Jats, the Sikhs, and the Pathans for Brigadier- General Richard Smith in Calcutta.69 But, once more, Polier rather simplifies a complex situation. In fact, Hastings sent Polier to Awadh in 1773 (in the former’s own words) notionally “to direct the construction of some Buildings and compleat the works of his [Shuja‘-ud-Daula’s] new Town of Fyzabad,” but also to act as surveyor there, within the ambit of the project that the SurveyorGeneral James Rennell had begun in Awadh that year.70 It is another matter, as a recent historian puts it, that “Polier disappointed both Hastings and Rennell” in this matter, and that two years after his arrival in Awadh he had still not sent the reports he had promised, nor done much more than help prepare the “Skeleton” of a map of the area.71 We know that Rennell had finished his map of Bihar and Bengal by 1776, and extended it up to Delhi by the following year. The extent to which Polier contributed to the published map of India that Rennell produced in 1782, on his return to London, remains open to question at present.72

Polier, Adventurer, and Collector It may be suspected that Polier had lost enthusiasm in these years for Company ser vice and was more interested in building his own fortune. As he put it in a statement to the Bengal Council (of February 1775), “I set off [for Awadh] with the pleasing conceit . . . that the few years I had to spend in this Country would pass in Tranquillity of mind and that I had at last a Chance of revisiting Eu rope with a Competent Mediocrity [of money].”73 But one of the other reasons for Polier’s inability to be as active a collaborator as Rennell might have wanted was his activity as military commander. Here then is how Polier describes his own involvement in the events that followed: The warrior temper of the prince in whose ser vice I had entered did not permit him to remain tranquil for any length of time in his own country. He thus took me along with him on an expedition that he was conducting against other Indian princes.

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A short while afterwards, since Najafs Kan [Najaf Khan], his ally, to whom he had given troops in order to conquer the city of Agra, sent him word that the siege was being dragged out for lack of officers of genius, he ordered me to go there. When I arrived on the spot, Najafs Kan handed me the command of the besieging troops, and I pressed on the works with such vigour that at the end of twenty days the town surrendered; after which, I rejoined my Nabab and continued the campaign with him.74 The lack of modesty aside, this passage is significant as the first instance of Polier’s participation in the up-country wars, for a party other than the European Companies. But he then goes on to note his divided loyalties at this time: Even though I was in his [Shuja‘-ud-Daula’s] ser vice, I still was in that of the Company too, and the confidence that Soujah Aldowla reposed in me excited the jealousy of an English commander who, believing that I had more credit with that prince than I in fact did, intrigued in such a fashion with the GovernorGeneral of India that he sent me an order to quit the army of the Nabab and to return to Feizabad.75 I obeyed. Once the campaign was over, the Nabab returned as well to his residence, attained by the malady that was to claim his life two months later [ January 1775]. However, that event brought no change in my fortunes, for his son and successor Azeph Aldowla [Asaf-udDaula] confirmed me in my employment. I was enjoying my position with security and tranquillity when the renewal of the General Council of Administration once more brought changes to it. The greater part of the new members were strongly against Mr. Hasting, I owed him the posts that I held, and since they believed that I was entirely devoted to his interests, they took such umbrage at the position that I occupied that, by a majority of votes, they recalled me to Calcutta without even according me the time that was needed for the arrangement of my affairs in such a move. It was necessary to obey, but on arriving in Calcutta and seeing that after ten years of ser vice I could obtain neither favour nor justice from these Gentlemen, I re-

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signed from the ser vice of the Company in the month of November  1775. Free from my responsibilities, I returned to my home in Feizabad, where I was now solely concerned with my own affairs, for the Nabab Azeph Aldowla, under the influence of the agents of the General Council, had deprived me of my posts; and soon after the said Council, abusing its power, went on to force him to send me an order asking me to quit his Estates.76 This brings us to the period when Polier quits Awadh for Delhi and the direct ser vice of the Mughal court, which is not the central concern of the Persian letters in the I‘jāz-i-Arsalānī. Nevertheless, it may be worthwhile to pursue his account to its close, in order to render his career and its multiple phases rather more coherent. We have seen the young military engineer in the English Company’s campaigns in Orissa, Bihar, and Bengal at the side of Clive; we have seen the “Indianized Polier,” acting in part at the behest of Hastings and Rennell, but also on his own account, in Awadh and Agra. The next phase of his career takes him to seek the patronage of General Sir Eyre Coote (1726–1783), for whom he puts together a form of “military ethnography,” relating to the major powers in north India in the very end of the 1770s.77 Then, at last, after the arrival of William Jones in Calcutta in 1783, he would turn his talents to becoming an “Orientalist,” before returning to Europe. His account of his transition to direct Mughal ser vice thus resumes as follows: Pursued thus by the majority of this iniquitous administration [at Calcutta], several reasons that it would be pointless to detail caused me to seek refuge in Delhi. I was already known to the Emperor since the year 1761. I offered him my ser vices, and I not only received the most flattering welcome from His Majesty, but he placed me at the head of a corps of 7,000 men with the rank and title of Omrah, adding to this favour the gift and property of the district of Khair, a considerable fief which, compensating for the losses that I had incurred on account of my precipitate departure from Faizabad, even allowed me to establish myself at Dehly in an agreeable fashion. Since my

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employment attached me to the court, and to the suite of the Emperor, I accompanied him on several expeditions that he conducted against his rebel subjects; they had happy outcomes, and His Majesty on his return to Dehly wishing to recognise my ser vices and compensate me for the expenses that had been occasioned on these diverse campaigns, granted me a second jaghuir, or fief, belonging to the Crown and very considerable both by the extent of its territories and the number of vassals therein; but since they did not wish to recognise my authority, I was obliged to make war on them on my own account and I sent a large detachment of the troops under my orders on this expedition. Either on account of his incapacity or his illluck, the officer who commanded them—far from having the success of which he had been certain—was forced back, his body of troops defeated, and he himself lost his life in this unhappy affair. I still made some attempts to force the insurgents to submit, but I came up against so many obstacles, and each new enterprise brought forth such expense, that finding such a precarious possession not worthwhile, I abandoned it, and content with those that I already had, I continued in my ser vice with the Emperor.78 Polier’s transition from Awadh to Delhi is confirmed by the Comte du Modave, at that time present in northern India. In any entry for the months of March to April 1776, Modave notes the passage of Major Polier through Agra, en route to Delhi, and adds a brief, rather complimentary biographical sketch: He is an officer of merit, and a truly sound man [ fort homme de bien]. He comes from a family that originates from Poitou, but that has been long settled at Lausanne. He had been sent to Fezabad to reside with Sujah-daulat, whose affection and confidence he had gained. The changes that occurred in the English administration of Bengal were not favourable to Major Polier. General Claverings sent him an order to return to Calcutta. It was only with infinite pains that he was able to obtain permission to return to Fez-abad to put his affairs in order. He was

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obliged to pass so many travails and unpleasantness that he decided to enter into Indoustan [il prit le parti de passer dans l’Indoustan], having decided to remain there until the representations that had been made in England concerning the conduct of General Claverings had re-established the old order in the administration of Bengal. This officer had acquired a considerable fortune from the advantages that Sujah-daulat had afforded him; but he had equally gone on spending it, so that he was in some difficulties to survive. He was very well received by the Emperor, to whom he was known from long date. All the caresses that were possible were made to him, but he could push matters no further, and was obliged to sell the jewels and rarities that he had gathered together in the times of his good fortune at Fez-abad one after the other. The Padcha [at last] sent him a paravana for the possession of a jaguir that he ceded to him.79 Modave goes on to note that Najaf Khan had then impeded Polier from acceding to his jāgīr, mainly because he was piqued at the fact that Polier had approached the emperor without passing first through him. He also lavishes further compliments on Polier, who he claims helped him a good deal while he was at Delhi (unlike René Madec, to whom Modave is largely hostile in his account). Polier’s presence in these years at the court of Shah ‘Alam II would permit him to act as a precious source of information in the years that were to follow. His remarks on the Mughal emperor in this memoir are short, and predictably dismissive: This prince, good[-hearted] to the point of weakness, had a Prime Minister so avid for authority and riches, and who used his influence on the spirit of Scha Alow for the sole purpose of distancing him from the servants who were truly attached to him, and instead surrounded him with his own creatures. The irritation that this conduct inspired in all the Nababs who were to be found at the court, and particularly in Najafs Kan, the most important from amongst them, occasioned so many cabals and intrigues that it was easy to predict the events that were to result from it.

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Meanwhile, Polier had not forgotten his earlier attachment to the Company, and obviously kept his ear to the ground for news from Calcutta and London. It was with some relief that he heard that the star of Hastings was once more on the ascendant, after the gloomy phase that he described earlier: I had learnt that the General Council of Administration, in its latest renewal, was now composed in the majority of its members of individuals who were as well disposed to Mr. Hasting as those of the preceding Council had been against him; a circumstance that made me hope that I could, on entering once more into the dependence of the Company, manage to terminate those private affairs that I had left at Faizabad. I occupied myself with the requisite steps towards my intention, when the arrival in India of General Cootes facilitated it. This worthy officer had known me for a long time, and I had communicated several historical memoirs concerning the diverse provinces of North-West India to him. He honoured me with his concern, occupied himself with my interests, and the English Company could not refuse him my recall. I obtained permission from the Emperor to accompany this general to Benares, where I stayed with him during the entire period of his sojourn in those provinces, and by his intercession, I found myself reintegrated with the Nabab Azeph Aldowla in the posts that the mistrust of the Company had caused me to lose.80 We thus have the third in the series of patrons that Polier chooses to reveal to us, all of them prominent men in the administration and military hierarchy of the Company in northern India. Polier is again a little disingenuous here, for he does not tell us that he had hedged his bets and maintained contacts (possibly through his friend Claude Martin) with Sir Philip Francis, the chief rival of Warren Hastings in the Bengal Council between 1774 and 1780. It was thus Francis who, before his departure from India in 1780 (the year when he fought his celebrated duel with Hastings), arranged for permission to be given for Polier to return to Awadh as architect and engineer

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to the nawwāb; and Polier, for his part, purchased miniatures of the Mughal rulers for Francis’s personal collection.81 But since Warren Hastings remained governor general until 1785, Polier continued to entertain close contacts with him as well, the more so since Hastings became the inadvertent cause of a new set of problems that Polier came to face. This resulted in part from changes at the Mughal court, related in part to the growing dominance of Najaf Khan there. As Polier puts it: While I was felicitating myself for this reversal in fortune, there was an insurrection at Dehly, occasioned by the false and dangerous counsels that Sha-Allow had been receiving from his perfidious minister, and this crisis allowed Najafs Kan to open the eyes of the Emperor, who had begun to suspect treason. This prince ordered the arrest and imprisonment of the guilty one, and placed the authority in the hands of Najafs Kan. But this Nabab, despite the essential ser vice that I had rendered him at the siege of Agra and on a number of other occasions, profited from the power that the fall of the Prime Minister had given him, to take over by naked force the fief that I had received from the Emperor. I had just received this unhappy news when, on account of the new arrangements that were put into place between Mr. Hasting and the Nabab Azaph Aldowla, the posts that I occupied with this [latter] prince were abolished, which meant that from the most brilliant heights of fortune I was reduced to nearly nothing. For not only was all that I had acquired during my stay in India now in the hands of this Nabab, but he owed me considerable arrears besides, for which I could not obtain the payment. The reference to “new arragements” is to the General Order for the  expulsion of Eu ropeans from Awadh, issued by Hastings on November 8, 1781, against which both Polier and Martin duly protested, Polier because he was reputedly owed as much as Rs. 2.7 million by Asaf-ud-Daula. The pendulum swung back once more, though, this time because Hastings intervened again in the matter, granting Polier his exemption in February 1782:

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As the innocent cause of this last disgrace, Mr. Hasting felt that justice required some compensation. He obtained the brevet of Lieutenant-Colonel for me from the Bengal Council, as well as exemption from ser vice and the right to reside at Laknau [Lucknow], in order to work there towards the arrangement of my affairs and the recovery of my funds. I formed a third establishment there, and it was there that I used my leisure to write down and augment the historical memoirs that I had composed for the benefit of General Cootes, and above all those relating to the history of the Sikhs.82 We now move to the last phase of Polier’s Indian career, a phase which is notable for its changed orientation, possibly as a consequence of the new intellectual currents that were beginning to establish themselves in Calcutta, through the intervention of such men as William Jones. Jones, born in 1746, already enjoyed a considerable intellectual reputation on his arrival in India in 1783 as ju nior judge of the Calcutta supreme court. This reputation was owing, after his Oxford education, to such enterprises as his translation of the Persian history of Nadir Shah by Mirza Muhammad Mahdi, Tārīkh-iJahāngushā-yi-Nādirī, into French and then English in the early 1770s, as well as his fiery denunciation of Anquetil-Duperron, whose own disdain for Oxford scholarship we have already noted.83 The JonesAnquetil debate has been read and reread in the decades and centuries that have followed, with the pendulum of scholarly approval swinging from the one to the other, but this is scarcely the point at issue. A study by Lucette Valensi points to the fact that a certain romanticism prevails in the heroic construction of Anquetil, as the man who opposed the notion of Oriental despotism in Montesquieu’s De l’esprit des lois (1748) with his own construction of a “rational” East in Législation orientale (1778).84 Despite the praise lavished on him by Raymond Schwab (as well as Edward Said), it turns out that Anquetil is no particular defender of the oppressed and downtrodden, no great theorist of universal human rights. Instead, as late as 1798 his hostility for England led Anquetil to propose a French project for the conquest of India, to be conducted by the merchant, the soldier, and the linguist. Soft India, inhabited by a lazy and torpid people, who

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are condemned to despotism by their climate, is a theme in Anquetil as much as in those who are often considered to be his ideological opponents. There is thus little point to seeing the couple Jones-Anquetil in Manichaean terms, yet there is some sense to noting differences in their methods and intellectual standpoints. In this context, it is worth noting that when Polier decided to reinvent himself in his last years in India as an Orientalist, it was in part the Jonesian model that he chose. This required him, as is apparent in his Persian letters, to invert many of his earlier priorities, and to see India through new eyes and categories. Here then is Polier, speaking of himself, but also of all other European savants in India: As the course of my researches on this matter [viz. on the Sikhs, etc.] brought me in due time to the Indous [Hindus], and to the religion of this people that is indigenous to India, I found myself embarrassed on a great number of points, and greatly astonished that after such a long stay in India (where I had spent more time with the natives of the land than with the Europeans), I still knew so little, and so poorly, the basis of their primitive my thology. However, nothing is as common as this ignorance. First, because on arriving in India, we bring to it ideas that are taken from travellers’ accounts which, with a few exceptions, merit little faith for, since most of them have neither the time nor the desire to make a profound study of this system, the little that they have seized upon is so muddled, and a mix of the true and the false, that one can hardly find the thread. Second, because the Indians who are educated and in a position clearly to set out the prodigious chaos of this my thology are such rare beings, that one is easily discouraged. When one begins such a study without the advantage of possessing the Samscrite [Sanskrit], or sacred, tongue of the Indous, which the Pundits or savants so constantly draw upon in their usual discourse that it is difficult for me to follow them in their conversation, even though I have a deep knowledge [ je possède à fond] of the common tongue of India, called Moors by the English, and Ourdouzebain by the natives of the land.

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Polier now continues, pointing to the importance of finding the appropriate “native” interlocutor: A happy chance presented me with a man who brought together in himself the qualities necessary to make up for my ignorance of Samscrit, and to meet the desire I had to be instructed in depth on the mythological, primitive and fundamental opinions on the Indous. This man, called Ramtchund, had been the instructor of the celebrated Sir [William] Jones, my friend. He lived in Sultanpour, near Lahore, he had voyaged a good deal and had traversed all the provinces of northern and western India. He was Sikh by religion and from the noble tribe of the Kattris; and even if, unlike the Bramines, he did not have the exclusive access to public instruction, he had like all Kattris the right to hear the sacred books read out. Being gifted besides with a prodigious memory, with a great deal of intelligence, of order, of clarity of mind, and being well-versed in the poetic texts and the Pouram [purānas] that contain the mythological system, Ramtchund also had two Bramines who were constantly attached to his entourage, whom he consulted on difficult points and who, through their explanations, allowed him to respond to all my questions and to instruct me in depth, not only on the religion and the history of the Sikhs, but even on the my thology of the Indous, who are linked to this people [the Sikhs] by so many ties.85 Here then is an essential part of the strategy of authority invoked by Polier. He has a Sikh instructor, but at the same time has access to the deep knowledge of two Brahmins. Besides, Ramchand Khattri is not just any Sikh, but someone who basks in the reflected glory of the celebrated Sir William Jones, no less. To conclude the account then: Satisfied by the idea of having an instructor who was capable of aiding me in the diverse researches on which I was embarked, I had Ramtchund stay at my home. He never left me, and I began to work, and I wrote down under his dictation the historical

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précis of three epic poems, the Marconday, the Ramein Purby, the Mahabarat and that of the avatars or incarnations of Vichnou, the history of Chrisnen, and all the fables and legends concerning the Deiotas or intermediate beings, the Bhagts or saints, and the famous personages from their my thology, in a word the entire system such as it was at its origin, such as it was in its variants, and which when seen from its true vantage point, differs greatly from that by which I had considered it before having an in-depth knowledge thereof, and [also differs] from the ideas that have been formed thereof in Europe. Once our work was done, I submitted it to the revision of the Bramines and doctors of my acquaintance, or to my friends. They unanimously confirmed the exactitude and the fidelity of the teachings of Ramtchund, from whom I was never separated until the moment when, having managed to recover a great part of the money that was due to me in India, I embarked on the vessel that brought me back to Europe, where I arrived in July 1788, after thirty-two years of absence, of which I had passed thirty in India. The neophyte Sanskritist Polier had still one more card to play though, this in his capacity as tireless procurer of manuscripts.86 It turned out that he had managed to obtain a series of valuable Sanskrit manuscripts in Jaipur, through the mediation of his friend Pedro da Silva Leitão (titled Khiradmand Khan), physician at the court of Raja Pratap Singh; he had sent at least one to Sir William Jones, and another to Sir Joseph Banks at the British Museum, while visiting London in May 1789.87 Polier’s submission before Jones, and British knowledge, appears total at this point. He writes: “Since the English by their conquests and situation have become better acquainted with India, and its aborigines—the Hindous—the men of science throughout Europe have been very anxious of learning something certain, of those Sacred books, which are the basis of the Hindou religion, and are known in India and elsewhere, under the name of the Baids [Vedas].” Various earlier attempts, on the Coromandel coast, Bengal, and Benares, to obtain these works had failed. Polier himself, while resident in “the upper provinces of Hindostan” had

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himself made repeated enquiries after them, only to fail. Finally, he thought of making enquiries in Jaipur, because it was (in his view) one of the few areas that had “escaped, if not entirely, at least a great part of the persecution which levelled to the ground all the Hindou places of worship in the upper provinces, and caused the destruction of all the religious books which could be found belonging to the Hindous”; this destruction had apparently begun “in the twelfth year of the reign of Aurangzeb.” It is interest ing to see Polier, the erstwhile Indo-Persian gentleman, now trimming his sails to the British wind. He notes that in order to be permitted a copy of the Vedas in Jaipur, he needed the explicit permission of the Maharaja Sawai Pratap Singh (r. 1778–1803): “having a small knowledge of the Rajah whom I had seen a few years before, when he paid his court to Sha Alum, then encamped in the neighbourhood of Jaypour, I hesitated not in applying to him by letter.” The passage that follows is worth quoting at some length: [M]y friend Don Pedro da Silva, a worthy Portuguese Physician in the ser vice of the Rajah, undertook to deliver it [the letter], and to forward the application with his solicitations if necessary. Pertabsing on reading the letter, smiling, asked Don Pedro— what use we Eu ropeans could make of their holy books; on which he represented that it was usual with us to collect and consult all kinds of valuable books, of which we formed in Europe public Libraries; and that the Baids, tho’ much sought after, could not be met with anywhere else, and that without his permission the Brehmans refused to give a Copy. On this, the Rajah immediately issued an order, such as we wanted— and in the course of a Year, paying the Brehman transcribers at a certain rate per every hundred Ashtok or Stanza, I obtained the Books which form the subject of this address, and which I had so long wished to possess.88 The work then had to be authenticated, and organized into separate volumes, which Polier managed to get done through the offices of a certain Raja Anandram in Lucknow. He declares therefore that he is handing a copy of the books over to the British Museum as “a

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small token and tribute of respect and admiration from one, who though not born a natural Subject, yet having spent the best part of his life in the ser vice of this Country, is really unacquainted with any other.” As for William Jones, Polier commends Banks to address himself directly to him for any further information on the matter, and notes: “I soon after sent them to Sir William Jones, the only European then in India, I believe, who could read and expound any part of them. From that learned Gentleman whose knowledge and merits are far far above my praise, we may expect to learn in the future Memoirs of the Asiatic Society what are his opinion relative to them,” particularly in relation to the Atharva Veda, reputedly of doubtful authenticity. Much work remains to be done on the history of Eu ropean Orientalism before the nineteenth century, particularly in relation to India. This is particularly true of the Continental tradition, the English and Scottish tradition being better known in this respect thanks to a series of works by Peter J. Marshall and Thomas R. Trautmann, among others.89 We may trace some elements of the European image of India back to early medieval times, or even earlier in some cases, to the contacts between Greece and Rome and ancient India. It is nevertheless clear that from the late fifteenth century onward, some fundamentally new processes begin, which are linked both to changing material conditions and intellectual trajectories in Eu rope and India, and to the considerably intensified human contacts between the two. By the latter half of the sixteenth century, a growing corpus of materials on India circulated in Eu rope, whether in the form of manuscripts or, more rarely, as printed books. These were accompanied from at least the mid-sixteenth century by visual images, watercolors as well as woodcuts, which helped define the Indian landscape for a European audience.90 One of the key groups that defi ned the form and content of this early proto- Orientalism were the Fathers of the Society of Jesus, founded in Europe as part of the Counter-Reformation in the middle decades of the sixteenth century.91 The Jesuits continued to play an impor tant role until the last quarter of the eighteenth century and were the target of major attacks from, for example, the Jansenists, who had a formative influence on Anquetil-Duperron. Though the

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Jesuit presence in India was never monolithic (as the debates around the missionary methods of Roberto de Nobili show), the Jesuits were perceived their rivals as such.92 This did not prevent these rivals, who in the case of eighteenth-century France included the Academicians and the Encyclopaedists, from making use of the “raw materials” provided by the Jesuits for their own ends. This is the case, for example, with Voltaire, who displayed a quite keen interest in India, without ever having been there.93 Voltaire, like Diderot, joined William Jones in pouring derision on Anquetil, and even denied the existence of Zoroaster, besides casting doubt on the age and authenticity of the Zend-Avesta. If the chief protagonists of the French Enlightenment had a periodic tendency to use India and its customs to proffer a critique of Old Régime Europe (in a time-honored tactic, dating back to Montaigne’s essay on the cannibals), it has been noted equally that certain Jesuits of the same period turned the critique around and used the anticlerical rhetoric of the Philosophers to build an argument against the Brahmins of India.94 The bulk of the French Jesuits, as much as those who turned their arguments against them, remained in general heavily oriented toward Sanskrit and the southern Indian languages, creating important collections even in the first half of the eighteenth century.95 Much of this debate centered, it is clear, on the content of the socio-religious complex that would be identified little by little under the name of “Hinduism.” Indian Islam was of little interest in this context, and even if Anquetil (who learned Persian) produced a Vie de Mahomet, it is among the most obscure of his works, suggesting a certain indifference to this matter on the part of his readers. In general, those who were interested in Islam sought their information elsewhere than in India, and the epistemological status of the IndoPersian tradition remained problematic in this regard, viewed from the perspective of the “High Orientalism” of the European salons and academies. In northern India, matters were somewhat dif ferent. Even the Jesuits who were present there at the time of Anquetil, such as J. Tieffenthaler in Agra, or F.-X. Wendel (d. 1803) at Bharatpur, Agra, and Lucknow, were open to the possibilities presented by Indo-Persian culture in the domain of knowledge. Indeed, the

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German-born Jesuit Wendel, though an agent of the English, also supplied Anquetil with information in the mid-1760s. We have already noted the efforts of Gentil in this direction, both in respect to the collection of manuscripts and the attempt to transform Mughal administrative information into a form (and a type of cartographic representation) that would render it more accessible to the Eu ropean audience of the epoch. It is just in this trajectory that it seems best to pose the evolving activities of Polier in north India. Coming as he did from a Protestant family with a marked penchant for Hebrew (and later Arabic), Polier in the years before his departure for India may well have imbibed some of this Mosaic conception, as well as reflections of the ferment that had emerged around the Encyclopaedists. Once in India, he appears to have passed from a fi rst phase of military activity (in which he no doubt learned the fi rst rudiments of zabān-i- urdū) to a form of cohabitation with a particular stratum of Indian society, namely that which was particularly influenced by Perso-Islamic culture. He kept company not only with high-born Iranians and Afghans, but Indian converts, Kayasthas, Khattris, and others, all of whom had been formed in the crucible first of Sultanate and then of Mughal-period acculturation. Into this world, Polier slipped without too much difficulty, accepting its idiom, and thus espousing an entirely dif ferent view of India than that of, say, the Jesuits of Pondicherry. He conspicuously patronized Indian painting, music, and dance, and was willing, for example, to traffic in young Indian women without any scruples.96 Matters seem to have changed somewhat in the early 1780s, after Polier’s return to Awadh. These were the years, it is well-known, of the last serious attempt by the French to reflect in terms of an Indian project, and it all came to naught in the years 1782–1784. With the Jesuits in disarray from the 1760s on, a major conduit through which information on India had passed into France, and Europe more generally, was no longer open. The expulsion of the Jesuits from Portugal, then France, then Spain, and eventually the temporary suppression of the society by the Papal Bulls of 1773 and 1774, meant that by the late 1770s no more than a handful of former Jesuits remained in India.

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“Gardens in a river landscape,” 1785. Museum für Islamische Kunst, Berlin (SMB), 16-523630 / 15005 fol. 10. Photo © BPK, Berlin, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Image BPK.

Between this process, and the growing political domination of the English in Bengal and southern India, the stage was set for a change in the overall Eu ropean perception of India in the 1780s. One of the key agents in this matter was William Jones, but the entire apparatus set up around the Asiatic Society in Calcutta was aimed at reordering the relative status of the Sanskrit and IndoPersian traditions, which had earlier coexisted (the latter dominating Eu ropean views of northern India, and the former those of southern India).97 Jones himself, a belated convert to the joys of Sanskrit from his initial training in Arabic and Persian, led the charge. Polier followed, abandoning in the process the implicit and explicit vision that he had expressed through Kishan Sahay in the letters of the I‘jāz-i-Arsalānī. The India that he now proposed was to a new audience, a Eu ropean one, and it was in the vocabulary that was being refi ned in those years in the memoirs of the Asiatic Society at Calcutta. Polier’s last years in Europe saw the consolidation of his fortune by his marriage to Anne-Rose-Louise Berthoud, the daughter of Jacob, Baron van Berchem, in January 1791. He also began selling

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Page from a Polier album, showing the notable ‘Imad-ul-Mulk in the mansion of Samsam-ud-Daula. Musée National des Arts Asiatiques, 14-534390 / MA 12553. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée Guimet, Paris) / Thierry Ollivier.

off his vast collections of albums, many of them to William Thomas Beckford (1760–1844), heir to a great sugar and slave fortune from the Caribbean.98 Eventually, reassured that the French Revolution promised a new era of tolerance toward Protestants, Polier moved with his in-laws to France, where he set up the last of his establishments near Avignon, at which he was eventually killed by brigands in 1795. His death, linked by some to his alleged pro-Robespierre leanings, perhaps had a more complex set of causes, though the fanciful account of it by the Chanoinesse de Polier must be taken with a large grain of salt.99 In his last years, at first in Lausanne and then in Avignon, Polier consolidated the change he had been undergoing in the last years of his stay in India. He abandoned his Indian wives, Zinat and Jugnu, as part of his turning away from Indo-Persian culture; he shaved off his moustache, and appears much more as the

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quintessential European savant than the Conradesque “adventurer” in the portraits of the last years (even though he never managed to shake off the nickname the “Rajah”). His return to France, motivated no doubt in some part by the Revolution, also seems to be an attempt to relocate himself in the intellectual map of Eu rope. In the new French Orientalism of the closing decades of the eighteenth century, the ascendancy of the English and Scottish tradition would be briefly guaranteed, and it was only in 1833 that the efforts of Eugène Burnouf (1801–1852) eventually restored some respectability to AnquetilDuperron and those who had supported him against William Jones. The posthumous publication in 1809 of Mythologie des Indous thus presents not the Polier of the I‘jāz-i Arsalānī, but another far more Anglophile Polier. In turn, in later decades, Mythologie too would fall into discredit, as exaggerated rumors began to abound that the text had been tampered with in the process of publication by the Chanoinesse de Polier.100

Walker, and “Corrupting the Native Ardour” This takes us to the fourth and final of the transitional personages that this chapter considers, namely the Scotsman Alexander Walker (1764–1831). Walker was a clear generation younger than Noronha, Bussy, or even Polier, but figures of such “adventurers” were still familiar in his time. Walker’s own close friend and contemporary, Edward Moor, in a work devoted to a completely unrelated subject, reflected in a curious passage on the phenomenon of mulkgirī, “meaning plundering or levying contribution,” and mentioned in this context not only a certain Neapolitan called Colonel Giambattista Filosa (“in the ser vice of Dowlat Rao Sindea”), but a personage of his own acquaintance, “Mr. Boyd, an American gentleman, now a Colonel of militia, and a member of Congress in the United States,” who had at one time been in the pay of Tukkoji Holkar, and very nearly obliged to resort to this form of generalized plunder when “out of employment at Poona.”101 Unfortunately, John Parker Boyd has left behind no major collection of papers, though we do have a letter from the late 1790s describing his ser vices in India, but even if he had done so, it is not necessarily the case that his own portrayal of how matters

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functioned between the Peshwa, Holkar, and Sindhia would have gone much beyond a concern for strategic and military affairs.102 But Alexander Walker is quite another matter. Despite his rather distinguished career, which took him at its end, in the 1820s, to the post of governor of St. Helena, Alexander Walker is today rescued from obscurity largely by the extraordinary collection of papers that he put together, some of which (those in Indian languages) are held in the Bodleian Library, with the vast majority being in the National Library of Scotland at Edinburgh. The oldest of five children, Walker lost his father when he was seven, and somewhat like our other three figures he had to find his career in Asia from an early age. But before joining the East India Company in 1780 as a cadet, he did have the time to obtain an education at St. Andrew’s Grammar School and St.  Andrew’s University. His career until his nomination to St. Helena was largely Indian, with the exception of an expedition he made to the northwest coast of America (the region of Vancouver Island) along with James Charles Stuart Strange in 1785.103 Strange, while returning from Britain to India (where he had served earlier from about 1773 to 1780), decided to explore the Pacific as a consequence of reading the account of Cook’s third voyage and Walker was among those who accompanied him, producing a quite elaborate account of the expedition. But leaving aside this interlude, Walker’s Indian career can be divided in two broad phases, a first largely concerned with southern India, and especially Kerala in the late eighteenth century, and a second phase in the first decade of the nineteenth century, when he was deputed to Gujarat, in particular to Baroda where he was political resident in the court of the Gaikwads. It is in this latter phase that Walker can claim a moment of glory in the colonial annals, as having helped “suppress” the practice of female infanticide, especially among the Jadeja Rajputs in Kathiawad.104 This is what led his friend Edward Moor to dedicate his work Hindu Infanticide (dated 1811, and including a report from Walker himself written at Baroda in March 1808) to him, noting that the two were drawn together by “a congeniality of disposition in the promotion of public and private good, that so cordially subsists between our common and highly respected friend Mr. [ Jonathan] Duncan and you.”105

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In the course of his three-decade Indian career, Walker accompanied a major transformation in the fortunes of the East India Company. In 1780, the Company still faced a number of formidable adversaries, notably the state of Mysore, with which Walker himself had an uncomfortably intimate relationship. Three decades later, Mysore had been crushed, British dominance over Malabar had been assured, and the Company’s ascendancy over western India too had become clearer even if the coup de grâce had yet to be delivered to the Marathas. As for eastern India, the “bridgehead” of the Company (in the phrase of Peter Marshall), the introduction of the Permanent Settlement had helped bring an end to a long period of fiscal experimentation. It is thus natural enough that the historiography, on the few occasions that it refers to Walker, does see him as an in-between personage. As one of the most recent discussions puts it, “Alexander Walker was a transitional figure between the men under Lord Cornwallis, who had reformed the administration of the East India Company during the late 1780s and early 1790s, and the succeeding generation of ‘Romantics’ associated with Marquis Wellesley.”106 While this was perhaps true, Walker was also a part of a long Scottish tradition of engagement with India, of which more prominent examples are his contemporary administrators Thomas Munro and Colin Mackenzie, as well as Sanskritists such as Alexander Hamilton.107 We have already dealt extensively with figures such as James Fraser, author of a history of Nadir Shah, who—like Walker—was an inveterate collector of manuscripts in Persian, Arabic, and Sanskrit, which he largely purchased in Surat and Cambay in the 1730s.108 Walker’s own collection of “Oriental” manuscripts, presented to the Bodleian Library by his son Sir William Walker in 1845, run to some 265 works (from an original collection in 1810, on Walker’s return to Britain, which may have had as many as 650 pieces), with about 120 in Persian, a few in Arabic, and the rest in Sanskrit, Hindi, and Gujarati.109 These manuscripts are deserving of a full study in their own right, which must await another occasion. The materials of more direct concern for the purposes of the present consideration are Walker’s own manuscripts in English, held today in the Walker of Bowland Collection of the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh. There are nearly six hundred of these, which touch on a vast

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diversity of subjects, mostly Indian. They also shed considerable light on Walker himself. A number of the volumes were reworked or reorganized by Walker in his years at St. Helena, when he was manifestly underemployed. Here is how he presents his own motivation and circumstances in the preface to one of these works, the two-volume Arbores et Herbae Malabaricae. In the remote regions of India I was frequently in situations where the Natives were my only society. I found their conversation amusing and interest ing. I was instructed in their manners and habits. In the progress of communication they threw off that reserve which they commonly shew in their intercourse with Europeans, and with strangers in general: it was no difficult matter to acquire their confidence. It was only necessary to convince them that I had their good at heart. They were good humoured and easy to please. It was this disposition under these circumstances doubtless that made them do many things that were agreeable to me, and which they perceived I was desirous of. I speak of men of rank, of Education, or of Property, whose temper and minds were not yet corrupted from their native ardour by the humiliation of long subjection.110 This last sentence may seem an odd reflection on the part of a colonial official, who was thus himself part of the process of “subjection” that is being criticized. But such ambiguities run through Walker’s volumes, where the language of affective relations helps sustain the tension. Even in the brief passage cited above we can note several features that relate to this: the idea that by demonstrating that he had “their good at heart,” he could gain the confidence of the natives, linked at the same time to the insistence that he did not consort with untrustworthy riff-raff in India, but with men of rank, education, and property. This is the idea of creating a colonial civility (to borrow and modify the terms of Steven Shapin) which would underpin the process of translation that Walker had mind.111 For only in conditions of trust could the individual Walker envisage this process; the more institutionalized process by which Mackenzie would

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collect the mass of materials that today bears his name (“The Mackenzie Manuscripts”) sought to resolve the problem by other, but still closely related, means. It is clear that we have moved a step from the world of Bussy, where such “trust” was virtually impossible, because the relationship was fundamentally an adversarial one, where each side donned one disguise after another in order never to let the other side know what their true view really was. To return to Walker, there is no doubt that the process of conquest of which he was a part did leave him troubled. In a volume of notes for an account of the castes in Malabar, he thus reflects: The influence of the English in changing the sentiments of the Hindus has been considerable but the changes we have effected are cold and philosophical. They are however honourable. We have taught the natives useful arts and improved them in others. We have instilled into them a more rational use of money by enabling them to spend it in security and by making them better acquainted with the elegancies and conveniences of life.112 But then again, a note of doubt is sounded (in what appears to be a somewhat Burkean mode): “There is reason to suspect that the form of the Company’s government is unfavourable to the preservation of their Dominion. It has never been found that a free Government was adapted to maintain Conquered Territories. The free-est (sic) nations have therefore been obliged to invest their Generals and Governors abroad with much despotic power.”113 To these doubts and equivocations, one can add another theme which (as we shall see presently) is very dear to Walker, namely the fact that by the Company’s intervention “Hindoos” have at least been freed from the yoke of Muslim tyranny, of which the archetype is Tipu Sultan. But Walker remains uncertain as to whether colonial rule (which he terms “English” rather than “British”) will in the long run produce any positive results. He writes: In short man is everywhere an animal of imitation. This imitation as far as it relates to India will extend only to objects of

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necessity, of obvious utility and conveniency. The English govern without forming any part of the society of Hindostan. It is impossible that the natives can learn what we neglect or disdain to teach, and if taught would be of no use, because we have no other intercourse with them than that which subsists between a master and a servant.114 It is very easy to idealize such remarks, and rush to claim that this forms part of a history of “anti-Orientalism,” of untrammeled European sympathy for Asian cultures, even for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.115 Such claims make sense in any event, only within the framework in which they are posed, in which on the one hand “Orientalism” is to be identified with “ethnocentrism and prejudice,” while “anti-Orientalism” is associated with “European sympathy for Asian cultures.” Rather, the problem is precisely that for the most part colonial Orientalism (unlike the views of Bussy or Noronha) came framed within an overall construct of sympathy, affection, and having “their good at heart.” Indeed, for Walker, the business of collecting the materials that he amassed in his hundreds of volumes is presented above all as pleasurable, as he writes in another of his prefaces, this one to the vast and eccentric six-volume series entitled “Miscellaneous Notices of Various Customs, Manners and Practices of India,” and which includes relatively short notices on various subjects that strike his fancy, from “Gunputtee Chatoorthee” to “Sackcloth and Ashes,” “Ashwamed,” “Concealed treasure,” “Names of Tippoo,” and “Topee,” to “Sir Thomas Rowe.” The following Notices of Hindoo Institutions and ceremonies were chiefly collected in the course of my official transactions with the People. The subjects were often connected with my public duties, and I had occasion to observe that by uniting them together discussions on business became more palatable, and were made much more agreeable. I fell into the habit of making Memorandums of such circumstances as appeared to me to be in any way remarkable, or to relate to the manner and religion of the Inhabitants.116

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To this he adds, again stressing the ludic and pleasurable aspect of the whole enterprise (which one can fi nd again in neither Bussy nor Noronha), It may be idle to add that these enquiries were intended originally solely for my private amusement and information. But this I may say with safety, that had it not been for some leisure in the decline of life, they would never have been disengaged from the chaotic state in which they were at first written. The composition and language has undergone little alternation. I shall only further premise that I do not hold myself answerable for the absurdity and nonsense which many of the following memoranda will be found to contain.117 So, on the one hand, we find the claim to being a faithful translator of native thought, but on the other a disclaimer with respect to the contents. But it is clear that if at times the notices closely follow an infor mant or a text—the description of the relations between the Rajas of Jaipur and the Minas being taken, for example, from “a paper from Navab Nizam ul dein Khan”—on other occasions, they represent Walker’s own views and comparative considerations. This is obviously the case with the notice entitled “The Natives of India, and the Southern Nations of Europe,” which runs as follows: In many respect the habits of the Natives of India are similar to those of the Southern Nations of Europe. Whether this is the effect of similarity of climate, or a remnant of Asiatic manners left by the Arabs, who formerly held those parts of Europe in subjection, or of both these causes combined, may be a subject of enquiry, but their food, the use of spices, their dress, treatment of their women, and siestas or afternoon naps, are circumstances of common resemblance.118 The influence of climate on habits, customs, and character, is of course a common enough reflection in the epoch, to which Walker was certainly not immune, though he brought his own nuances to it. We can see this from a remark of his, in which he notes that “the

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Parsees of India afford a remarkable example of a People preserving unimpaired their primitive powers, mental and physical, for Ages. By abstaining from intermarriages, the climate does not appear to have had any operation either on their Minds, or Bodies.”119 These miscellaneous notices apart, it is clear that several threads run through the rest of the collection, rendering it coherent. Walker thus clearly has well-defined if vast interests, and in the recent past it has been claimed that “the surviving Walker papers offer voluminous testimony to his eclectic approach to scholarship, including collected materials on history, ethnohistory, anthropology, linguistics, art and religion.”120 These were certainly not the categories that Walker himself would have used; rather his own classification prefers such headings as “deities,” “manners, practices and customs,” and “castes and professions,” at times accompanied by drawings and figures, either made by Walker or commissioned by him from Indian artists. Some of these drawings certainly reflect a highly ethnographic bent of mind, for instance those that depict the “Manner of executing criminals on the karoo, or impaling,” or “gestures and salutations to superiors,” or a series of representations of board games and square games, including Indian chess and “the game of fifteen dogs and three tigers.” Again, we have drawings of the act of plowing, of a ceremony of exorcism, of rope dancing, of juggling, and of different types of forehead marks.121 These drawings would clearly bear comparison with those which Colin Mackenzie had prepared, and which Nicholas Dirks has noted derived “from several sources, including both his own drawings and those sketched by his surveyors while on tour.”122 But the differences between the two enterprises are also worth noting: Mackenzie’s was a relatively large and systematic affair which formed a part of the operations of the early colonial state, while Walker’s was an individual initiative, though framed within the functioning of the same state system. Paradoxically, on occasion, it was Walker whose legacy in this sphere was better assured; this is the case of the drawings that he brought together in the volume entitled “An Account of various Hindoo Deities,” in which thirty-six of the eighty-eight listed “deities” come accompanied by illustrations obviously made by an Indian artist (the notations on the drawings are in Nagari and

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English).123 These drawings seem to have served as an inspiration for the work of Edward Moor, Walker’s close friend, when he compiled his much larger work called The Hindu Pantheon in 1810.124 Many of Walker’s other foci of interest are predictable. There is an extensive discussion of satī, for example, drawing on materials from Rajasthan and Gujarat, which together with female infanticide obviously represents an aspect of the “Hindoo religion” that Walker found less than palatable. In general, however, he is very positive toward it, and this contrasts with a more or less consistent hostility to Islam. His introductory chapter, claiming to provide “a general view of the Hindoo Religion,” thus states: The Hindoo Religion is distinguished by its antiquity and long continuance. It has withstood every change of Government. It has remained unshaken either by violence or argument. Whether we ascribe this to the obstinacy or constancy of its followers, the effect is equally surprising. In a long series of ages those who have been converted to the Christian and Mohammedan religions, or those who have withdrawn from its Doctrines and have adopted any other system, will be found to be extremely few, and inconsiderable, when compared to the great mass who have adhered to the original superstition. It is another remarkable feature of this Religion, that so far from seeking for converts, it will not receive them. They never disturb those of a dif ferent religion. They think every religion should be protected. They have neither hatred nor jealousy for those who profess a different faith from themselves. They imagine that the divine Being cannot be displeased with various modes of worship, other wise he would not suffer them, and that the exercise of piety in whatever shape it is manifested, is acceptable to him. They believe indeed that God for his own purposes has not only tolerated, but has revealed a mode of worship suited to the People, and the climate they inhabit.125 Walker makes it clear that this information was brought together by him while at Baroda in 1806, on the basis of conversations with “a learned Braman,” as well as “notes extracted from their sacred books.”

Drawing of Brahma. Reproduced by permission of the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh, Walker of Bowlands Papers, Ms. 13903, “An Account of various Hindoo Deities,” 471.

Drawing of Devi. Reproduced by permission of the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh, Walker of Bowlands Papers, Ms. 13903, “An Account of various Hindoo Deities,” 371.

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How these notes were extracted is not clear, for like Moor, Walker too does not seem to have known Sanskrit; his knowledge of other Indian languages too is not entirely certain. It is likely that the Brahmin in question was Gangadhar Patwardhan Sastri, to whom one finds scattered references in Walker’s papers. Other themes that Walker deals with, and which have an air of the inevitable about them, include caste, though again he is capable here too of resisting the most facile generalizations of the period. Thus, he remarks in regard to caste that “it is a mistaken notion that these establishments in India are perpetual and immutable. The minute divisions and subdivisions and distinctions of casts it is evident have followed the progress of society”; and adds, “They are plainly civil or religious institutions to answer the wants of man in a collective state and to administer to his necessities as he advanced in civilization.” The general nature of caste is stressed too in two passages, one of which (the longer of two) runs: After all are we not more surprised at the distinction of casts in  India than the circumstances warrants? In every society advanced a step beyond the state of nature there exists an inequality. The Jewish tribes, the division of the citizens into classes in Greece and at Rome, resemble the sacred or religious part of the Indian institution of cast. A last mischievous remark closes his discussion: “May we not apply some of these observations to the state of professions in England?” But then, the detailed content of the account itself is scarcely of a piece with these remarks. Sixty-five castes are enumerated and described. And the method that is used is stated clearly, namely a compilation fundamentally deriving from a series of textual authorities. The following account of the Casts in Malabar has been obtained from several authentic sources. The Sasters called Astah disha Pooranum [asta- dasa-purāna] a work of 18 volumes have been consulted for their origin. This work contains a History of all created things; it treats of the Heavens, of the Earth, of man and animals, of trees and vegetables, of insects and every

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living creature. It is a History of Nature. This work was composed in the Kreda Yogum [krta yuga]. It was the joint labour of Gods and Sages. From the Astah disha Pooranum what relates to the origin of each tribe is extracted and translated but not literally as that required an acquaintance with the original language which this writer is not possessed of the Kerala Olputty Moolum [Keralolpatti mūlam], a more modern Malabar work contains the origin of several of the casts and that has been occasionally referred to.126 In contrast, the text on plants and trees is based on a rather different method, namely a substantial dependence on “long and frequent conversation” with the natives, supplemented by “written notes which were generally brought to my House daily.” Textual authority is invoked sparingly, for example “the Grandum Saster called Astangumarudayam or Ashtangardewum,” with the “medical uses of dif ferent trees,” written by a “Brahman named Vayadaacharian” or the “Amarasirnhum or Ahmavasum composed by a person of the Chitty Cast called Amavasemuen.”127 But Walker does let his sense of unease show in respect of this method, and concludes that “it would be endless and of no use to relate all the legends and fictions which these people credit on almost every subject. But in the midst of credulity and ignorance we may discover sound knowledge and the sources of genuine science.” It may seem then that we have moved a good distance from the world of Noronha and Bussy, to one where “science,” and even the “progress of society” is invoked. But this would be to ignore a vast part of Walker’s collection, centering on what obviously constituted a veritable obsession for him: namely, Tipu Sultan.128 The sources for this are not hard to find, and may relate to the early part of Walker’s own career, and his links to the ill-fated expedition of General Richard Mathews to Mangalore in 1782–1783, which ended with Tipu’s capture of that fortress.129 Mathews’s death in captivity rankled with Walker, and he may also have harbored some personal animosity against the army of Mysore. As he wrote in 1800, a year after Tipu’s death, “the cruelty of Tippoo is a more serious stain on his memory. The fate of the English Prisoners in 1783 is now well-known. It is ascertained that General

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Mathews was strangled in a small House opposite to the Place of Seringapatam. His body was afterwards thrown into the River close to the Laul Baug.” The broader theme that is developed can vary, but some consistent features can still be found. One of these is Walker’s tendency to contrast the tyrannous Tipu with a rather more positive portrayal of his father Haidar, as when he says Tipu “wants both the liberality and the open manly appearance and address which distinguished Hyder.”130 A second feature was to insist on the image of Tipu as a religious fanatic, both with regard to Hindus and Christians. The latter aspect, it is interest ing to note, grew more pronounced in Walker’s views in the 1790s. As late as 1789, he could write that “he [Tipu] is in general disliked by the Moormen of Rank in his ser vice, not being sufficiently liberal in his encouragement to them and appears himself to have more confidence in Bramins and Rajpoots, who hold the places of first trust in his court.” But, by 1800, and the death of Tipu, the image has considerably changed. Walker writes by then not only of “his restless mind, his continual projects, his vindictive temper, and his system of cruelty,” but also of “his childish superstition and a blind zeal for the faith of Mahomed.” True, he noted, he still depended on Brahmins, but this was because he thought “they had the means of deriving knowledge from the Devil, and it was as demoniacs that he consulted them.”131 The same drive to measure the havoc wreaked by Tipu on life in South India also led Walker to propose a population estimate of the Tanjavur region in the 1780s, in order to demonstrate the enormous fall in the number of houses and habitants that had accompanied the invasion by the Mysore forces.132 All in all, Walker’s obituary of Tipu is thus severe. It is impossible to speak of the conduct of this Man without being convinced that he laboured under a species of Madness. At one period he announced himself a person commissioned by Mahomet to convert mankind, and that he was invested with a prophetical mission. He had read, or he had been told, of an Arabian Prince, who by his eloquence or by his example, had brought over to the faith some unbelieving Tribes. In Emulation of this achievement Tippoo collected a multitude of Hindoos

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and Christians from all parts of his dominions. In one day, he caused the assembly to be circumcised and boastingly compared himself among his officers to the Arabian Prince. This religious frenzy discovered itself in the early period to Tippoo’s life, but it was remarked that it had considerably abated in his later years. It had yielded to political passions.133 But even this reduced religious frenzy was a matter of major concern, if Walker may be credited. In contrast to the earlier vision, where it is the well-born Muslims who are resentful because the Brahmins and Rajputs rule the roost at the court, here is how relations between the communities now appear: The Hindoos were the daily objects of Tippoo’s persecuting spirit and his conduct to them a constant source of uneasiness of Hyder. Tippoo was perpetually playing them when a youth mischievous tricks. He apprehended some Brahmans privately and circumcised them as he did the Englishmen. It was his chief delight to defi le the Pagodas and he thought it a meritorious deed to sprinkle them with Bullocks blood. Tippoo was an excellent Horseman and an adept at the exercise of the spear. It was his favourite amusement to hunt the sightly and fat Bulls belonging to the Swamy Temples. This behaviour brought a thousand complaints to Hyder who frequently expressed the deepest regret and resentment. But neither the force of reason, nor of punishment, could correct these symptoms of vice and folly in his successor. The admonition of his Father Tippoo turned into ridicule, and spoke in public contumaciously of his Government. This same hostility is carried over by Walker into descriptions of other groups of Muslims, equally considered by him to be fanatical, such as the Mappilas in Malabar. In the part of his papers relating to that region, we find mention of Tipu’s agents there, such as Kutti Husain Mappila (allegedly a Tiyya convert to Islam), who is reported to have risen in Tipu’s esteem (and the fiscal hierarchy) on account

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of the large number of Nayars he had circumcised.134 It also tinges his description of Muharram festivities in western India, in which he notes “from the tolerating principles of the Hindoos, and their love for processions, this Festival is celebrated in many places by the followers of Brama in common with those of Mahomet.” However, the Muslims in these processions are marked by their “infuriated zeal” and “dangerous excesses,” which is in marked contrast to the “complimentary and practical attention of the Hindoos to the Musselman ceremonies.”135 At such moments, one senses that one is not that distant after all from the world of the bishop of Halicarnassus.

Conclusion The vast and rapidly growing literature on “encounters” within a colonial or near-colonial context has implicitly or explicitly formed the backdrop to the problem discussed here. This literature has focused largely on the linked issues of communication, translation, knowledge, and power, and in this process a series of convenient straw men have emerged. If it can be demonstrated that besides being ethnocentric, Europeans in India also periodically “used the Other to criticize their own culture,” the facile conclusion is that the issue of power relations in the formation of colonial knowledge systems has been banished. Again, the fact that the categories and prejudices of their “native informants” informed colonial census takers or ethnographers is easily assumed to be evidence of a “dialogue” between all parties in the operation. We have noted recent attempts to rehabilitate the image of the omniscient European traveler of the early modern period without adequately investigating the concrete procedures by which such knowledge was made, and how they reflect similar constructions, as if demonstrating the very possibility of “translation” itself is a triumph.136 Now the examination of the pragmatics of functioning in a foreign society in any context, even a colonial one, makes it evident that some form of translation is always possible, and to demonstrate it time and again is trivial. But what does one translate? To what end, and using what means? The examination of the four careers at hand suggests clearly that no matter

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what the national or regional differences between Europeans in India might have been, by the middle years of the eighteenth century a sense of commonness as well as a clear sense of distinctness from the “Asiatics” existed. This sense of a common identity is articulated by the actors too, but above all is demonstrated in action by the webs of sociability that held them together— and not only in moments of crisis. Perhaps most clearly articulated by Noronha, the same sense certainly informed most other actors in the enterprise of colonial conquest, and formed part of their undoubted will to power. That such an identity existed in earlier centuries is not quite so clear, though the issue would bear further investigation. If the colonial wars of the eighteenth century divided European nations, and strengthened national identities, it does not necessarily follow that at the same time a collective Eu ropean identity could not have emerged.137 In a sense, therefore, the argument in the present chapter has centered on the development of a paradox. We have seen that in the middle decades of the eighteenth century, in a situation where the relations of power between Indians and various Europeans in South India were highly contested, the actors who were at the center of the contest were often severely constrained. Their accumulation of knowledge was rather limited, and their bias was largely geared to the hoarding of pragmatic information, which was located in a system of stereotypes and underpinned by a theory of “disguise.” But once the question of power had been more or less resolved, once the conquest by the Company had been placed on a fi rm and defi nitive footing, a real “colonial civility” could be established, within which new forms of knowledge would be produced by Europeans about India and even by Indians about Eu rope.138 For Eu ropeans, even the luxury of self-doubt was increasingly possible, and self-criticism too became an acknowledged (if necessarily minority) form of expression. This is what the transition we have observed represents, and this is why the colonial archives of the nineteenth century are undoubtedly quantitatively richer— and perhaps qualitatively simpler—than the dispersed archives of the preceding one, at least so far as the social and cultural historian is concerned. This is also why Alexander

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Walker’s papers— a brilliant if rather eccentric exercise in what we may term “colonial translation”—probably could not have been put together in, say, 1700. Between the time of two Scotsmen— Fraser and Walker— much water had indeed flowed under the bridge of history.

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BY WAY OF CONCLUSION On India’s Europe

In truth, the Franks would be a great people but for their having three most evil characteristics: first, they are Cafares (that is, an infidel people); secondly, they eat pork; and thirdly, they do not wash those parts from which replete Nature expels the superfluous from the belly of the body. — Attributed to the Emperor Shahjahan (r. 1628–1657)

The Problem The year 1632 marked a watershed of sorts in European relations with India. In late June of that year, Mughal forces under the overall command of the provincial governor of Bengal, Qasim Khan, began the siege of the Portuguese settlement of Hughli (or Porto Pequeno). Proceeding with some difficulty on account of the onset of the monsoon, they eventually managed some three months later to blow a substantial hole in one of the city’s fortified walls and entered it, carry ing a good number of Portuguese residents and their slaves off to Agra. Even if the Portuguese eventually returned to western Bengal and resumed some form of trade there later in the seventeenth century, the form and intensity of the hostilities were quite unprecedented. The Mughal campaign in Bengal preceded by nearly seven decades another significant Euro-Indian conflict, namely the siege of the English settlement of Bombay in 1689–1690 by the Mughal auxiliary Sidi Ya‘qut Khan.1 But whereas that siege ended with somewhat ambiguous results, and (in the words of recent historians) may even have “steeled the Company’s resolve,” and thus set it on the path

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to emerging as a regional power, the winners and losers in 1632 were far clearer. However, contemporaries did not entirely agree as to why the conflict over Hughli occurred. The official Mughal chronicler ‘Abdul Hamid Lahori devotes some pages of his chronicle, Pādshāh Nāma, to the affair, and presents it as a fairly typical case of Frankish chicanery.2 To begin with, he states, before the Mughal conquest of the region and when the Bengal sultans ruled (dar ‘ahd-i bangāliyān), the Portuguese traders (bāzargānān-i firang) coming from Sandwip had merely occupied some land in order to carry out their commerce; but over time they began to build sizeable edifices, and fortify them with cannon, muskets, and other war-materials (tūp- o-tufang wa dīgar adwāt-i jang). This had negative consequences at various levels. The other ports under Mughal control in the region suffered, as trade was diverted away from them. Moreover, the Portuguese took increasingly to the slave trade and to converting local people forcibly to Christianity. Since Shahjahan, as a prince-in-exile, had visited Bengal in the 1620s, Lahori claims that he was already well aware of these nefarious activities. This was why, within a short period of ascending the throne, he sent forces against Hughli, “to set about the extermination of the pernicious intruders.” The outcome of the operation was, for him, never in doubt, even though “sometimes the infidels fought, sometimes they made overtures of peace, protracting the time in hope of succour from their countrymen.” Eventually, however, the wall was breached, and a large number of fatalities ensued, besides the many Christians who were carried off by the Mughals to Shahjahan’s court. The eventual arrival of these prisoners in Agra in July 1633 is again described by Lahori in his chronicle, as it is by some Catholic missionary sources. He recounts the arrival in court of Qasim Khan with suitable gifts and tributes. Of the Frankish prisoners, four hundred men and women, young and old, along with the idols [asnām] of those erroneous infidels, were brought before the Islam-nourishing Padshah. The Khaqan, who supports the faith [dīn nawāz] and destroys infidelity [kufr

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The Capture of Port Hoogly in 1632, illustration from the Pādshāhnāma, c. 1630–57 / The Royal Collection Trust © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2016 / Bridgeman Images.

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gudāz], then ordered the masters of the legal tradition [arbāb-i sharī‘at] to first invite that miserable group on to the straight path of the community of Muhammadans [millat-i Muhammadī] and the highway of the faith of Ahmad [dīn-i Ahmadī], and inculcate in them the precepts of Islam. Some who found it worthwhile to be thus ennobled by accepting the correct faith were shown imperial favor. Most of them, out of implacable ignorance and erroneousness, turned their heads away from attaining this good fortune. They were divided among the amīrs, and it was ordered that this miserable group be held in prison and tortured. Any who inclined to Islam were to be reported to the Emperor, and any who failed to accept the honour were to be kept in prison. Most of them perished in prison.3 Interestingly enough, the Portuguese viceroy at Goa, the Count of Linhares, while regretting the loss of Hughli, tended to blame the settlers there for what had happened. In his view, when Shahjahan was a prince, he had rebelled and fled to Bengal, where he asked the Hughli residents for their aid. Not only did they refuse this, they then “took some of his women who it is said were mistreated. With this sentiment which he carried away concealed in his breast, he took revenge, ordering that all those who were living in that port where they had insulted him should be killed or captured.”4 Others, notably the Augustinians, who had a conspicuous presence in Bengal by the 1630s, tended to view the loss of Hughli in far more cataclysmic terms. The friar Sebastião Manrique, a native of Oporto, is one of those who produced the most dramatic accounts of the “Babylonian” captivity of the Portuguese at the hands of the Mughals, a narrative of defeat that inverted the more common and triumphal tales of “discovery and conquest” to which the chroniclers had accustomed readers.5 Yet, as the seventeenth century wore on, even the defeat at Hughli became the foundation narrative for a series of other intriguing legends concerning men and women of more-or-less Iberian origin, claiming a foothold both in Portuguese India and in Mughal court culture.6 Every encounter obviously requires at least two parties. Yet, there can be no assurance that the two will be equally present at the

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meetings, or that their voices can be equally heard or recovered by later investigators. This is a central issue in dealing with the European presence in the early modern period in the extra-European world, whether it be in Australia, the Amer icas, Africa, or Asia.7 Still, it remains essential for us not to imagine as a simple matter of habit that the encounters on a global scale that occurred in the early modern period between Europeans and non-Europeans were those between a people with history on the one hand, and peoples without a historical consciousness on the other.8 To bring our analysis to a close, it may be time briefly to turn the looking glass as it were, to ask what the notions of Europe were that circulated in India between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, and to ask in turn how they emerged. The problem is by no means amenable to easy resolution, largely on account of a variety of regnant prejudices. For example, a European scholar studying Safavid Iran has argued that during the greater part of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, “the available evidence for the Safavid perception of Westerners derives for the most part from sources written by the same Westerners.” There was an underlying fascination, he argues, for things Western, but it was “as yet unable to break through the carapace of formulaic religious dogma, ingrained and as yet untested notions of cultural and even military superiority, and the sheer physical distance from Europe.”9 The same scholar, in another essay, draws a bald contrast between Persian sources themselves, which he sees as clichéd, repetitive, and hidebound, “annalistic rather than analytic,” and European accounts from the seventeenth century, which he depicts as “alternatively engaged and dispassionate, [and which] paint a vibrant, dynamic society for us, a society filled with color, movement, and diversity.”10 Predictably preoccupied with what he sees as the unjustifiable delegitimization of early modern European accounts of the non-European world under the influence of Edward Said and the Saïdians, he argues that with regard to Iran, “to observe and analyze it without prejudice became the self-appointed task of the best of these travelers.” To be sure, in the sixteenth century, religious prejudices among Catholics might have produced a certain distortion, but this could no longer be the case once there had been a transition from an “essen-

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tially theological language towards a fully secular understanding of nature and history.”11 As already noted, the first part of these claims can be set aside, and in the Indian case at least, we do not in fact need to derive our picture of how Indians thought about the West “for the most part” from Western sources. Rather, a far richer body of materials on the question existed in South Asian languages, including Persian, than has often been suspected. These textual materials could of course be expanded using a variety of other means, including bodies of oral narratives, songs, and so on, which are concerned with the deeds (or misdeeds) of Europeans in a variety of contexts, whether in the islands of the Ganges delta, or the coastal plain and backwaters of Kerala. Now, we cannot say with any degree of certainty when the first Indian went to Europe. But we are certain that in 1499, when Vasco da Gama’s fleet returned to Portugal, there were at least some Indians on it. Some of these were probably simple seamen from Kerala who had been more or less “shanghaied” by the Portuguese, as is suggested by the appendix to the anonymous account of the voyage, which includes a glossary of basic Malayalam words that its author had gleaned, including words for “rope,” “ship,” “boat,” “mast,” “fish,” and so on, but also “cap” or “hat” (which appears as tupy).12 But it would also seem that other more elite infor mants returned with them, including the Jewish trader and spy who was later known as Gaspar da Gama, as well as a Muslim pilot (probably from Gujarat), who has long been misidentified as the Arab navigator Ahmad ibn Majid. Some of these men may have eventually returned to India, and it is also certain that almost every returning Portuguese ship in the years that followed brought back men to Europe, some like the celebrated Joseph of Cranganore, others more obscure and even sometimes totally unknown in terms of their name and social origins. The problem is that none of these Indian visitors to Europe in the first decades of the sixteenth century left behind any usable account of their experiences. Joseph’s is an interest ing case, but a somewhat frustrating one. He had already visited Mesopotamia in 1490, where he was ordained as a priest by the Catholicos of the Eastern Church in Gazarta Bet Zabdai. In 1501, he and another priest decided to embark with the

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returning Portuguese fleet from Kerala with the intention of visiting Europe. The other priest died, but Joseph went on not only to Portugal (where he arrived in June 1501), but to Rome, Venice, and Palestine, before returning to India, where he continued to serve as a priest in Cranganore until at least 1518. But, as it happens, the only materials we have from Joseph are those in which he recounts the situation in India (and Asia more generally) to his European interlocutors. This was the text that was eventually published by Motalboddo in his Paesi novamente retrovati. In it, Joseph is described as “forty years old, slim, of a brownish colour, and of common stature,” but also as “an intelligent man, veracious and of the greatest integrity.”13 Yet, this man of “an exemplary life” and “of very great faith” did not choose to pick up the pen to inform others in Kerala at large, or even in his own Syrian Christian community, of what he had experienced while in Europe and Palestine, even though this could have been of great strategic importance to the Syrian Church in its dealings with Rome during the sixteenth century. As the sixteenth century wore on, awareness of Europe certainly increased in India.14 But this Europe is not a physical place for the most part; instead it is a vague site from which the Franks ( firangīs) or Hat-Wearers (kulah- poshān) come. As early as 1502–1503, the Hadrami chronicles from South Arabia explicitly mention the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean, and their nefarious activities in attacking shipping between the Red Sea and the Indian west coast.15 But they were never seriously concerned to explain to their readers where these Franks actually came from, or how they were organized. The same was true of early Syrian Christian authors resident in Kerala. The celebrated letter written by bishops Mar Jaballaha, Mar Thomas, Mar Denha, and Mar Jacob to the Catholicos Mar Simeon in 1504, announcing the arrival of the Portuguese in India, has only the vaguest geographical indications. It states that “from the Occident powerful ships have been sent to these countries of India by the king of the Christians, who are our brethren the Franks. Their voyage took them a whole year, and they sailed fi rst towards the South and circumnavigated Kush, which is called Habesh. From there they came to this country of India, purchased pepper and other merchandises and returned to their land” Toward the close of the

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letter, they add that “the country of these Franks is called Portkal, one of the countries of the Franks, and their king is called Emmanuel.”16 What this country looks like, or what context it is embedded in, is however of no apparent concern or interest to the four bishops.

On Europeans without Europe The reader may hope for more from a later sixteenth-century text that announces in its title that it will deal with the Portuguese, namely Shaikh Zain-ud-Din Ma‘bari’s Tuhfat al-Mujāhidīn fī ba‘z Ahwāl al-Burtukāliyyin (“Gift to the Holy Warriors in [the form of] some tales of the Portuguese”). The work was part of a larger corpus of works in Arabic, some authored by members of the same family, as well as others that expressed a quite distinct political viewpoint.17 The Tuhfat is divided in four parts: the first deals with some precepts regarding the conduct of jihād, the second with the establishment of Islam in Kerala, the third with some “strange customs of the infidels of Malabar” (‘adat kufrat malībār al-gharībat), and the fourth with “the arrival of the Franks in Malabar, and some of their violent acts against the Muslims.” Yet, on turning to the fourth section (which is also the most extensive one), we in fact learn almost nothing about the Portuguese as a group, or Portugal as a country. Rather, the text commences abruptly, stating that “the first time that the Franks appeared in Malabar was in 903 H [1498], and they came to Pantalayini in three ships at the end of the Indian monsoon, and from there they went to the port of Calicut, where they stayed for some months, gathering information regarding Malabar, and its current situation, after which they returned to Portugal, without having dealt with issues of trade.” The Tuhfat then goes on to chronicle with a fair degree of accuracy the wars and peaces, engagements, and skirmishes that took place on the west coast of India in the decades that followed, with the account petering out essentially in the late 1570s (though some last remarks, added as an afterthought, do concern the 1580s). Zain-ud-Din’s text came to form one of the sources used by Muhammad Qasim Hindushah “Firishta” in his Gulshan-i Ibrāhīmī, written in the early seventeenth century, where once again the

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Portuguese appear—as it were— out of the blue. In Firishta’s work, we learn that in 1495, when “weakness and anarchy had invaded the kingdoms of the Deccan, the Portuguese Christians received orders from their king to build up fortresses on the shores of the Indian seas.” We can thus legitimately speak of a first moment of perception, when in Indian eyes there are “Eu ropeans without Europe.” The beliefs and above all the practices of these Europeans are clear enough. They are seen, especially in the Persian and Arabic chronicles, as a violent lot, who are also given to devious acts and chicanery in order to advance their interests. For example, here is how Zain-ud-Din presents matters: The Muslims of Malabar lived in a state of well-being and with an ease of life thanks to the generosity of the princes of the land, concerning their established usages and the conditions of their trade. But they [the Muslims] forgot about these benefits, sinned, and revolted against God. It was hence on account of this that God sent the Portuguese to lord it over them, these Christian Franks—May God abandon them!—who tyrannized them, corrupted them, and practiced ignoble and infamous acts against them. The acts of violence were numberless, the disdain and the jeers when they obliged them to work; they would drag their vessels onto dry land; they would throw sludge on their faces and the rest of their bodies, and spit on them; they despoiled them of their trade, and above all they impeded them in their pilgrimage [to Mecca], robbing them, and burning their cities and mosques, and seizing their ships, mistreating their Holy Book and other books by trampling them and burning them. They would profane the sacred sanctuaries of the mosques, incite Muslims to apostasy and to adore the cross, bribing them to this end; they decorated their own women with the jewels and the rich dresses that they had torn from the women of the Muslims, and assassinated pilgrims and other Muslims with all sorts of violence. They would insult God’s Prophet publicly, capture Muslims and put heavy chains on them, and then drag them to the market-place to sell them as slaves.18

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He continues at length in this vein, dilating on the mistreatment of Muslim women and learned men, forcible conversions and public humiliations, only to conclude that “the enmity of the Franks is only with the Muslims and their faith, and not with the Nayars and the other Infidels.” These Christians from the West have, so it would appear, managed to drive a wedge between the “infidel” (Hindu) populations and the Muslims, with the latter seeing themselves as their real victims.19 How “Hindus” in Kerala felt about the matter is rather difficult to discern. It is certainly the case that the bulk of the South Asian writings on the Europeans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries come from writers in the Persian or Arabo-Persian tradition.20 References to them may be found to be sure in Sri Lankan materials such as Rājāvaliya from the latter half of the sixteenth or seventeenth century, or the still later Mandāram pura puvata. As Chandra De Silva has convincingly shown, these Sinhala texts do not quite embody a single perspective.21 Some, like the Mandāram pura puvata are what he terms “unabashedly partisan,” portraying the Portuguese in terms that are really rather close to their depiction by Zain-ud-Din, although it is rather unlikely that the two texts were actually contaminated by each other. Thus, a passage in the Sinhala text runs: [The Portuguese] having seized and destroyed temple lands, temples, libraries and sacred Bo-Trees in Lanka, established false doctrines by imposing heavy punishments and created unrest by oppressing many people in a number of areas. The many low-country folk who refused to accept Christianity were imprisoned with their wives and children and burnt to death. This was the perspective offered from the central highlands of Sri Lanka, a zone that was never actually conquered by the Portuguese, even at the height of their power. A very similar attitude may be found in other texts like the Rajasiha Hatana, composed in about 1640, but a rather softer side is shown to the Portuguese in certain sections of the Rājāvaliya chronicle. Here, we are told that the Portuguese arrived in the port of Kolontota (Colombo) in Lanka from India, and that the local people were struck by their appearance. For

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these were “a kind [ jāti] of people very white in colour and of great beauty; they wear jackets and hats of iron and pace up and down without resting for a moment.” This report went on to say that they paid excellent prices for the simplest goods, and that they had powerful cannon that were “louder than thunder at the end of the world.” The text suggests that the king of Kotte, Dharma Parakramabahu, was sufficiently impressed by this report to send a prince in disguise to look into the Portuguese. He came back with a positive report, whereupon the Portuguese were received at court, granted “innumerable tokens of esteem,” and became fast friends with the ruler. This portion of the text is sufficiently dif ferent in tone from all others to have provoked a good deal of discussion. One suggestion has been that its author must have been a Christian convert, who was hence inclined to portray the Portuguese in suspiciously favorable terms. Another reading emphasizes what are seen as parodic or mocking elements even in this portrayal, an interpretation that appears to stretch the possible meaning of the text beyond plausible limits.22 Whatever the case may be, it is certainly true that this is one of the very few portrayals of the Portuguese in South Asian materials that does not insist on their deceitful and violent side. The idea of Frankish deceit actually comes to be enshrined in a wellknown topos, deriving oddly enough from the story of the foundation of Carthage by Dido (in the Aeneid), of which versions can be found in Gujarat, Sri Lanka, Melaka, and even Cambodia. The version of the story having to do with the Gujarati port of Diu and Sultan Bahadur (d. 1537) runs as follows: One day they [the Franks] came to him [Sultan Bahadur] and stated that the merchants of their ports who came to the island of Diu were obliged to leave their goods and merchandise lying about; but if the Sultan would give them as much land in the island as a cow’s hide, they would build four walls round it, and then they would store their property in it, and would feel at their ease about it. The Sultan granted their request. When Bahadur was called away from Diu to oppose his enemies, the Firangis took advantage of the opportunity. They cut up a hide into

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strips, and enclosed as much ground as they could measure with them. Then they built up a strong stone fort, and armed it with guards and muskets, and took up their residence in it.23 An almost exact reproduction of this schema may be found in the Mahā Hatana, a Sinhala text of the late seventeenth century that recounts the foundation of the Portuguese fort of Colombo, and in a Malay text concerning events in Melaka in 1511.24 Mughal chronicles pursue this idea of Portuguese deceit by pointing to the manner in which they allegedly killed Sultan Bahadur shortly afterward, when he went to visit the governor Nuno da Cunha on board his ship in the port of Diu. Here then is a fi rst, and indeed, rather persistent image of the “Franks” as an untrustworthy and slippery lot, but one that must be treated side by side with another view of them, namely as purveyors of the strange and wonderful (‘ajā’ib-o-gharā’ib). A typical set of examples of this comes from the Mughal court, which we know sent representatives to Goa in the late 1570s to bring back some of these strange objects. These included musical instruments, but also birds and creatures from the New World, and such things as tobacco. The unofficial chronicler ‘Abdul Qadir Badayuni’s description of a musical instrument, the arghanūn, has often been remarked upon: It was like a great box the size of a man. A European sits inside it and plays the strings thereof, and two others outside keep putting their fingers on the five peacock-wings, and all sorts of sounds come forth. And because the Emperor [Akbar] was so pleased, the Europeans kept coming at every moment in red and yellow colours, and went from one extravagance to another. The people at the meeting were astounded at this wonder, and indeed it is impossible for language to do justice to the description of it.25 A similar notion of wonder ( here, mixed with suspicion) pervades the reception of another item that appeared in the Mughal court thanks to the mediation of the Portuguese, namely tobacco. The best description we have in this instance comes from the account of the

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Mughal courtier Asad Beg Qazwini, who returned to Agra from the court of Bijapur in the early seventeenth century with some tobacco in his possession.26 We gather that on his return, Asad Beg had decided to present the emperor Akbar with a variety of tribute-goods, including several elephants. But the high point of the presentation in fact centered on tobacco, which though quite common in Bijapur was apparently new to northern India. Knowing this, Asad Beg had procured a golden pipe (chilam) from the Deccan, studded with precious stones; this pipe was three yards long, and was originally made in Aceh, in Sumatra. It was decorated at both ends, and the mouthpiece was fitted with a good-quality Yemeni ruby to make it all the more attractive. Taking a gilded torch stand typical of the Deccan with him, he placed on it a golden betel-leaf box filled with goodquality tobacco, of a sort that when one leaf was set afire, the rest would catch easily. All this, and the pipe, was then put in a silver container, itself covered with velvet. When he was presented with the whole apparatus, Akbar apparently exhibited considerable curiosity. One of the chief nobles present, Khan-i A‘zam Mirza ‘Aziz Koka (who had been governor of Gujarat) then explained that the substance was called tobacco (tambāku), and that it was already in use in Mecca and Medina. He also said that earlier the physician, Hakim Dawa’i, had brought it to the court, but that Akbar had paid it no attention. But this time, the emperor asked that the pipe be prepared so that he could smoke it. As this was being done, the physician appeared and strongly advised against it. Despite this advice, Akbar placed the pipe in his mouth and drew on it two or three times, and then passed it on to the Khan-i A‘zam, who also pulled on it a few times. The physician was then asked to explain its properties, and he replied that in the traditional books, there was no mention of it, as it had only been recently discovered; as for the pipes, they generally came to the ports (banādir) of India from Aceh. The Frankish physicians (hukamā’-i firang) had however attributed many positive properties to it. A debate now ensued, with another physician, Hakim ‘Ali, adding that it was an untried medicine, and hence risky; he, for his part, could simply not recommend it without further investigation. At this Asad Beg intervened with a rather interest ing argument. His point was effectively that the Franks were not so naive that they

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would not themselves have reflected on this. For, he stated, they too had wise men in their midst, who rarely made wrong assessments in such matters. Without having experimented with it, and ascertained its properties, essence and true character, they would not recommend it either for their own doctors, kings, and people both high and low. No doubt it had both good and bad effects, but it could not simply be termed a vice. To this Frankophile argument, Hakim ‘Ali apparently replied that it was not necessary that the Mughals follow the Franks in such matters blindly. In turn, Asad Beg again had a retort. After all, he said, new things were constantly being found out in the world, and since the time of Adam to that date, things had been discovered step by step. If one nation (qaum) found something new out and it then spread out into the world at large, the task of philosophers and wise men was to find out its benefits and ill effects. It might be that one group of people did not know of its benefits as was the case with radix China (chūb-i chīnī), which was not much used in ancient times but had been found more recently to be useful in curing several diseases. This argument apparently met Akbar’s approbation, and he added that in truth, it was not simply because something was not mentioned in the ancient books that it should be stopped. What had become current in the world should be observed. But Hakim ‘Ali and others still insisted on their position, and asked the emperor to prohibit tobacco in his realm. The emperor now sent for a Jesuit resident at the court (perhaps Jerónimo Xavier), who then came forward and explained the benefits of tobacco, without however managing to convince Hakim ‘Ali. In the end, it would seem that Asad Beg—who had brought back many pipes and much tobacco from the Deccan—had his way, and was allowed to distribute them among various courtiers, some of whom even asked him expressly for the new product. Soon enough, he claims, almost everyone expressed a desire for tobacco, to the point that traders imported it from the Deccan and began to sell it at whatever price they wished, and the use of it became current everywhere. Paradoxically, though, the emperor Akbar did not ever take it again. We could add further materials to these from the seventeenth century, all dealing with the Franks in India, but not at all with Firangistān or Bilād-i Afranj. Even a casual reading of a text such as

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the Mughal emperor Jahangir’s memoirs confirms this impression. In March 1612, we are told of the arrival in court from Gujarat of the noble Muqarrab Khan, whom Jahangir had “ordered to go the port of Goa on several items of business and [to] see the vice-rei, the governor of Goa, and to purchase any rarities he could get hold of there for the royal treasury.” These rarities included “every sort of thing and object,” including several “strange and unusual animals” such as a turkey and a rare type of monkey; another passage similarly mentions the curious “pineapple, which is a fruit that comes from the Franks’ port.”27 This is usual presentation of the Franks in an exotic register, and it is soon followed by a reference to their more sinister and quarrelsome aspect. For example, in November 1613 “news was received that the Franks of Goa had broken their word and plundered in the vicinity of the port of Surat four foreign ships that frequented that port. They had also taken many Muslims captive and seized possession of goods and chattels that were on the ships. This was very disagreeable to me.”28 Yet, even in December 1617, when Jahangir briefly visited the port of Cambay, “got into a grab [ship] and sailed about a kos in the water,” he did not use the occasion to speak of anything beyond Goa, as if the larger political structure within which the Goan viceroyalty was located was of no concern to him. Yet, at some level, this rings false. After all, a globe had been presented to Jahangir, and he even appears in some portraits (such as one by Bichitr) holding a globe in one hand, in which the names of Russia and Portugal appear. From the time of the first Jesuit mission to the Mughal court, European materials had been available to the Mughal elite, including illustrations and woodcuts depicting towns and peoples, and even maps of one or the other sort. The usual view though has been that such materials were received with indifference as regards their empirical content. Typical of this is the account by Sir Thomas Roe, the English East India Company’s ambassador to Jahangir. He states that in early September  1617, he handed the Mughal emperor “Mercators last edition of the maps of the world; which I presented him with an excuse that I had nothing worthy, but to a great king I offered the world, in which he had so great and rich a part.” A week later, Jahangir apparently questioned

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him about these maps. But by late September, the Mercator had been rejected. Roe writes of how “he [ Jahangir] sent for the map-booke, and told me he had shewed it his mulaies [Mullas], and no man could reade nor understand it; therefore, if I would, I should have it againe.”29 The same incident is transformed into a far more polemical episode by Edward Terry, Roe’s chaplain. In this version, on receiving “Mercators great book of Cosmography . . . [which] described the four parts of the world, and all several countreys in them contained,” Jahangir at first showed interest, but was really only concerned with where his own territories were. “Then causing the book to be turn’d all over, and finding no more to fall to his share but what he first saw, and he calling himself the Conqueror of the World and having no greater share in it, seemed to be a little troubled, yet civily told the Ambassadour, that neither himself nor any of his people did understand the language in which that book was written.”30 Here, the book is returned because the Mughals find their territories rather too small for their own tastes. In his discussion of Jahangir’s alleged response to Mercator, Ahsan Jan Qaisar has shown some skepticism with regard to such narratives. In his view, it is implausible that European maps would have failed to excite curiosity among Indians, and he notes that soon after, the Dutch East India Company factor Francisco Pelsaert was asked by Mughal nobles for maps to be imported from Europe, including a world map. An atlas prepared in about 1647 by Sadiq Isfahani appears to show certain signs of European influence, even if the basic cartographic tradition remains the Arabian one (with the south above and the north below, and meridians being determined without taking into account the curvature of the Earth).31 There is thus some evidence already assembled that goes against the late Simon Digby’s view that the residents of Mughal India had practically no empirical interest in the “overseas.”32

A Notion of Europe Emerges However, it would be less than just to dismiss Digby’s point of view summarily in this manner. It may be helpful to rehearse the major elements in his argument to begin with. He argues that mentions of

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Europeans in Indo-Persian literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries “represent a diversity of experience, intimacy of contact and levels of sophistication.” One broad distinction is between what he terms “informed accounts” and “popular beliefs,” but even within the first category, he argues that nothing of much empirical worth can be found before the late eighteenth century, when Indo-Persian literati entered into close contact with the British. Rather, he suggests, “among the literate classes of the Mughal empire a lack of curiosity about geographical matters outside their immediate ken appears to have been the prevailing response through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.” Typical of this is the case of the great savant Shaikh Abu’l Fazl (1551–1602), who referred vaguely to the “islands of the Franks” ( jazā’ir-i Firang) as if continental Eu rope were unknown to him; and in order to explain this, Digby attempts to resuscitate the older stereotype that on account of “deep cleavages, horizontal and vertical, in Indian society,” the empirical knowledge of sailors and traders did not penetrate the world of “authors of works in Arabic and Persian [who] were associated with the administrative class.”33 In sum, the typical Mughal view—if we are to follow Digby— would have been of an author such as Amin-ud-Din Khan in the late seventeenth century, who in his Ma‘lumāt-ul-āfāq (Knowledge of the Horizons) informs his readers of horse-headed ogres in the land of Firang, and who was “apparently unaware that, for two centuries, Eu ropean vessels had been sailing around Africa.” Or again, he retails in some detail an account taken from a “false” (semiapocryphal) version of the memoirs of Jahangir, perhaps produced in the Deccan in the first quarter of the seventeenth century. In this narrative, entitled “The Killing and Bringing to Life Again of a Man in the Land of the Franks,” Jahangir is told a story by a visiting Iraqi in his court of the latter’s encounters with the land of the Franks. While on a sea voyage many years before, this man was apparently blown off course by a severe storm, which took him to an island infested with Frankish pirates from Portugal. The entire crew of the ship was taken off, examined by a physician, and some of them were then confi ned and fattened up. Further episodes occur involving blood-letting and sorcery, the killing and revival of the narrator’s

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brother, and other incidents in the course of which the Iraqi’s arm own is chopped off. He meets the emperor of the Franks (Bādshāh-i Firang), and eventually is allowed to leave.34 Thus, it would appear that the Franks are still presented in a sort of Arabian Nights context, in stories not all that dif ferent from those of Sindbad. These valuable and intriguing materials presented by Digby can be read quite differently, if one is willing to acknowledge that mirabilia and monsters were also a part of the European imagination until far later than 1500.35 Indeed, monsters abounded in European descriptions of non-European spaces, and even in descriptions of areas as close as the Ottoman Empire in the 1720s.36 But just as is the case with the Europeans, the presence of a register of “wonders” (‘ajā’ib- o-gharā’ib) in the Indo-Persian textual corpus does not in fact preclude the simultaneous accumulation of political, economic and other materials in a far more matter-of-fact tone. An example of this may be found in an important Mughal text of the early seventeenth century, which continued to be read for the next two centuries and more. This is the work, entitled Rauzat-ulTāhirīn (The Garden of the Immaculate), written by Tahir Muhammad Sabzwari.37 The author came from an Iranian family and had already been a Mughal official in Gujarat, while one of his brothers was a poet at the court. Begun before 1602, and completed some five years later, this vast text is made up of five books (qism), of which Book 5 deals inter alia with “the wonders and curiosities of the ports and islands” (‘ajā’ib- o-gharā’ib ki dar banādir- o- jazā’ir wa atrāf- o-aknāf-i ān bilādast) near Bengal, including an “account of Ceylon, Pegu, Arakan, Kuch Bihar, and Portugal,” which the author had ascertained in large measure from the writings of a certain Khwaja Baqir Ansari, who had apparently long served as a Mughal official in the province of Bengal. These xenological materials follow a previous chapter (apparently written in 1014 H / 1605–1606) that deals with how Bengal had fallen under the control of the Mughals, from the earlier rule of the Karrani Afghans. Tahir Muhammad’s text contains brief mentions of Sri Lanka and the Moluccas, as well as a quite elaborate description of the kingdom of Pegu in Burma, which was in fact only a few days sailing from Bengal. He is clearly fascinated by the fact that the king there

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possesses five white elephants, and that their way of life is dif ferent from both Muslim and Hindu (az tarīqa-i Musalmānān-o-Hindū’ān alahida ast); one special feature is that they worship the camel (ushtūr), so that anyone who brings camels there can make a great deal of profit, as the local inhabitants are willing to pay a high price for them. Some comments are also made on the nature of the social organization and the odd customs and usages. In Pegu, Tahir notes, when the king or ruler (hākim) comes to the court, the grandees, viziers, and people great and small touch their heads to his feet, and present the affairs of the country to him while bowed down, with their two hands over their heads. No one dares raise their voice or speak loudly in his presence. Their main celebration is also characterized by silence and calm; anyone who speaks out is immediately locked up. Yet, not every thing is unfamiliar, for Friday is their special day too, and a priest called the rāwali preaches on that day, usually exhorting the people not to harm any living creature. There are extensive dances in their idol houses (but-khāna) in which some girls enter into a trance, foam at the mouth, and become intoxicated. They have two special holy days in a year, when they welcome the devil (shaitān) in their idol houses, and celebrate with the generous consumption of alcohol. So even a neighboring kingdom can be treated with a mix of “wonder” and accurate empirical detail, which is not reserved only for distant places like Europe. Thus, in the case of Pegu, it is all apparently a seamless mix of marvels and horrors. If the chief city is unmatched in the whole world, the social customs really leave a lot to be desired. For instance, these are people who eat all kinds of creatures without regard to ideas of harām; brothers and sisters commonly marry one another, and when they are reproached for this, they say that they descend from Adam and follow him in this regard. Tahir is also fascinated by the shamelessness (bi-ghairatī) of the Peguan women, and adds that if any trader goes to that country and desires the daughter of a notable, she at once is offered to him. But when he wishes to leave the country, if the girl has become pregnant meanwhile or had a child, the trader is obliged to stay.38 This section closes with a strategic appraisal that the army of Pegu is not very impressive, the horses are far smaller than those of India, and though

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the army is large it is mostly made up of foot soldiers. There have also been a number of debilitating wars there, as in 1002 H (1593– 1594, when there was a huge general massacre), followed by a famine.39 The main produce there is rice, and there are also lots of fruits such as mango and bananas, that are imported into Bengal. But this all is only a brief diversion before turning to his next major object, namely the sultanate of Aceh in northern Sumatra. Unlike Pegu, which is treated as largely autonomous of the question of the Franks, Aceh in Tahir’s account is intimately linked to the problem of the Portuguese presence in the waters around India. To be sure, he begins with a reference to some of the chief products of the place, such as frankincense, pepper, and especially camphor, and also notes that the area where camphor is to be found is inhabited by cannibals (ādam-khor), who bring it to the ruler of Aceh as a tribute each year. Various theories of the origin of camphor are discussed, and it is noted that the ruler of Aceh had in fact sent some of the wood from which camphor is made (along with other gifts) with his agents (wukalā’-i khwud) to the emperor Akbar, an interesting reference to what must have been an Acehnese embassy to the Mughal court. The social customs and usages of the “cannibals” are then noted: the fact that they live in scattered villages, but are all related to one another; how, when someone falls seriously ill, they kill him and distribute the body parts among different families, with the chief (kalāntar) getting the head; how, when they gamble, they offer their own hands and feet as wagers, and so on. The description then quickly moves to the city of Aceh, which is to a large extent under the thumb of a powerful warden (kotwāl), who keeps a close track of every thing that happens there. A par tic u lar concern is sexual morality, and the practice of stoning wayward lovers is known. In a similar vein, they are also very strict with thieves, and cut off their limbs— a punishment that shocks Tahir Muhammad. There is also a rather severe use of exile in the polity, which again strikes our author as rather harsh. Yet, at the same time, he is quite positively struck by their determination to fight the Franks, and he notes that even while performing the most simple, everyday acts, such as drinking water or wearing clothes, they say they do so in this determination. Faced with such a determined lot, the Franks have

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achieved no control over their country, though admittedly this is partly because they are protected by a mountain range. But the warlike temperament of the Acehnese too has a part to play. When a ship is seen to approach from the sea, or when the sound of cannon is heard, the people ready themselves, and spread a secret oil (which was a royal monopoly) on the water, which they then set afire as a form of defense. The fact that they also possess saltpeter in quantity in this country is equally an aid in warfare. Tahir Muhammad had taken some trouble to ascertain the origins of the rulers (hākim) of Aceh, and he declares that initially the place was ruled over by a lineage of Sayyids from Najaf. He recounts a rather elaborate story—manifestly derived from local Acehnese folk traditions—of how one of these Sayyids had captured and married a supernatural creature or fairy, and thus derived extensive powers from her.40 Tahir goes on to describe the political transition between Sultan ‘Alauddin Mansur Syah (r. 1577–1589) and the “usurper” Sultan ‘Alauddin Riayat Syah al-Mukammil (the latter being the grandfather of the celebrated Sultan Iskandar Muda, r. 1607–1636). Other contemporary sources report that Al-Mukammil had fi rst killed Mansur Syah, and then ruled as regent for a time, before eventually seizing direct power in around 1596.41 Tahir for his part notes that in 999 H (or 1590–1591), a dispute had broken out between the ruler and one of his courtiers. The courtier hence decided to enter the palace with his clan, assassinate the Sultan, and seize power. Since that time, rulership had fallen to him and his family. But since this kingdom depended largely on trade (āmad-o-raft-i tijārat), even the new ruler remained deeply concerned with it. Yet, in spite of this, when he wished to, he seized the goods of merchants he did not like, claiming that they had died or disappeared. This had even happened with Sa‘id Khan, who at the time of Akbar was the governor of Bengal and used to send his ships to trade in Aceh. Since the ruler of Aceh did not get along with the governor’s trading agents, when his ship reached the port, he accepted false reports that Sa‘id Khan was dead, and simply seized his ship and its goods. When Sa‘id Khan and other important nobles (buzurgān) in Bengal heard this, they sent a protest, but their petitions (mahzar) had no effect. In Tahir’s overall view then, admiration for the courage of the Acehnese and their stout re-

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sistance to the Portuguese must be tempered with a recognition of the rather tyrannical temperament (and innate “bad nature”) of their rulers. Indeed, he notes, in about 1606–1607, matters were made even worse by the fact that the ruler of Aceh had seized two or three more ports and become still more powerful. One section of Tahir Muhammad’s account, entitled “A brief description of the kingdom of Portugal which is under the rule of the Emperor of Firang,”42 begins by noting that “Portugal” is a very large city, which is the capital (pā-i takht) of the Badshah of Firang, who is the emperor of the Franks. On the one side, the frontier of his lands touches the land of the Maghrib, and at some twenty leagues from there are other towns such as “Kasmalta” (perhaps Casablanca). He then enters directly into a register where the “wonders” of the area dominate. For he recounts that there was a large cave (ghār) in the Maghrib where sorts of djinns lived; several people had been lost there, of whom some had returned, but one person had stayed on and himself become the master of magical arts. The emperor of Franks had then cut off access to this cave. This story is then set aside, as Tahir moves into a far more matter-of-fact political mode of narration. He informs his readers that he will describe how the emperor of Portugal (meaning Dom Sebastião) had entered into a confl ict with the ruler of Maghrib in 987 H (1579), in which the former was defeated and many of his followers killed.43 In fact, after this battle, no one really knew whether the emperor was dead or alive, and some Franks claimed he was simply imprisoned. His uncle (meaning the former cardinal, Dom Henrique) had then become ruler, and had asked that the magical cave be opened up. Some clairvoyant people who had been enclosed inside there for seven years now emerged, and said that the emperor of Portugal had in fact died in the battle, thus laying all doubts to rest. We may note, incidentally, that the figure of Dom Henrique was one that had already piqued the interest of the Mughal court, if the account of the Jesuit António Monserrate may be credited.44 It turns out that in 1579–1580, Tahir Muhammad had himself been sent on the orders of Emperor Akbar as part of a mission (hijābat) to the port of Goa. This port was, he notes, under the control of the governors (hukkām) of the emperor of Portugal, and Tahir had in the

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course of his mission gathered a fair amount of information from the Franks themselves. He had thus come to know that for a long time the king of Portugal had wished to conquer the kingdom of Maghrib, until in that particular year one of the brothers of the king of Maghrib deserted him and came over to the ruler of Portugal, offering him a plan for the conquest. The ruler of Portugal had accepted his proposal, made ready his fleet, and set off toward the Maghrib. In the meanwhile, the ruler of the Maghrib sent one of his confidants secretly to meet his estranged brother, and sent him a message as follows: “You are a descendant of the Prophet [a Sayyid]. It is improper that you help in the conquest by the Franks of a country that has long been under Islamic rule (tasarruf-i Islām). If they conquer it, the people of the Maghrib would have to become Christians.” He had thus made his wayward brother promise that he would not follow through with his plan of betrayal. Meanwhile, the Muslim army had reached the seashore, and the fleet of the Franks too had arrived there from their lands. The “estranged” brother now deviously told the Franks that the army of the Maghrib was rather weak, and that they could be easily defeated. The overconfident Franks hence disembarked from their boats, and the army of the Maghrib began to retreat, with the Franks chasing them further and further inland. After they had gone far inland, the trap was sprung; the principal force of the Maghrib, mounted on fine Arab horses, attacked the force of the Franks who were slaughtered in great numbers. The emperor of the Franks himself was trampled over and killed, to the point that no one could even recognize his body. What remained of the army of the Franks retreated to their ships and returned to Portugal. Since the emperor of Portugal had no heir, the king of Spain (Ray Aspānya, a term derived from the Portuguese “El-Rei de Espanha”), a powerful king from among the Franks, now entered Portugal and took over the kingdom. When this news reached Goa, the Franks in the ports of Hindustan had without any hesitation accepted his rule. Tahir Muhammad reports that he had to remain in Goa until the arrival of the new governor, who was sent out by the king of Spain, and hence was himself a witness to this transition. It was only after a whole year that he eventually left Goa (probably in 1581) and reached

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the port of Khambayat (Cambay) in Gujarat, where his father at the time held an administrative position (mutasaddī). He then went back to Akbar’s court to pay him his respects, but also presumably to report on what had transpired in distant Portugal. Tahir Muhammad’s account of Dom Sebastião’s disastrous campaign of 1578 is of course not quite accurate in all its details. To begin with, he displaces it by a year to 987 H, which may be explained by the fact that it was in this year that the news arrived in Goa. Secondly, the two rivals in the Maghrib were not really brothers, but uncle and nephew. The Sa‘di ruler in August 1578 was ‘Abdel Malik, who had in fact earlier ousted his nephew Muhammad al-Mutawakkil.45 As for al-Mutawakkil, there is no indication that he deliberately led the Portuguese into a trap, and in point of fact, he was himself killed in the course of the battle. Tahir’s account thus does present a picture of solidarity among Muslims that is a little too smooth. But it is also a narrative that is located in the matter-of-fact register of the political chronicle, rather than in the marvelous register of the ‘ajā’ib that he sometimes employs. He concludes his part of his discussion with a rather more ethnographic assessment of the Franks as whole, as he has observed them at first hand in Goa. In sum, the community of Franks [tā’ifa-i Firang] wear very fine clothes but they are often very slovenly [chirkīn] and pimply. They don’t like to use water [ba āb muqayyad nīst and]. They bathe very rarely. Amongst them, washing after relieving oneself [tihārat-o-istinjā] is considered improper. They are very good at using fi rearms [tufang], and they are particularly brave on ships and in the water. But in contrast to this, they are not so brave on land. The Malabari community, who live near Ceylon, and are Muslims, are about five thousand in the number of their households. Their principal task is to make war [ghazā’] on the Franks. And despite their weaknesses, they do overcome the Franks. Cowards on land but brave in the water, the Franks are not merely untrustworthy and devious, but also dirty, unbathed, and—worst of

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Mughal portrait of unknown Eu ropean (1610–1620), © Victoria and Albert Museum, London, IM.9-1913.

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all—lacking in proper forms of toilet training. Yet, for Tahir, even this devil can be given his due, for he does state that one skill the Franks have mastered is navigation. Among the great terrors of the sea for Muslims are whirlpools that draw ships in, but the Franks have a clever device to control this. When they see clouds that can cause a problem, they simply fire their cannon; and the sound of the cannon fire sends the clouds upward, so that no whirlpool is formed. A second “wonder” of the sea is a kind of special flame that begins to hang over a ship (perhaps St. Elmo’s fire). If this fire comes down, the ship may proceed, but if it persists in hanging over the mast, the ship cannot advance and inevitably sinks. But here too the Franks know how to deal with it. A third problem relating to the sea and Franks concerns a solution to combat sharks (nahang). When they see one, they throw a bag into the sea; the shark swallows it and is made contented, and so does not attack the ship. We can thus see that Tahir Muhammad Sabzwari employed both notions of the wondrous or the marvelous—indeed the closing sentences of the text call it a “wonder-book” (shigarf- nāma)— and a far more empirical tone to deal with Eu rope, as he does in order to describe countries of the Indian Ocean littoral. Indeed, the brief descriptions that conclude the chapter continue to employ both tones. A description of the Maldives (Dīv Mahall), islands that lie to the left on the route from Aceh to Surat, has a basic ethnographic character to it. The inhabitants wear the leaves of trees, and mostly eat fish, while fresh water is lacking; people do not care to wear clothes here; men and women live together indiscriminately in the same house. More exotic is an island lying between Portugal and India (perhaps St. Helena) that had been found a hundred years before. No one lived there, but goats and cows could be found on this island, and there was plenty of rock salt. When some Frank was unhappy (muflis), he just got off their ships and stayed there for a year, hunting and skinning animals, until the returning ship picked him up. Again, the tone is quite matter-of-fact; these are hardly the islands of Sindbad, or populated by monopods (or unijambistes) and amazing talking birds. Wonders may indeed exist, but the whole world is not equally impregnated with them. Europe in this sense is not somehow distinct from the rest of the world in some essential way.

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Europe Is Attained Tahir Muhammad’s account, while it goes much further than any of those surveyed earlier in this chapter, still does not constitute a real first-person account of Europe, but rather a derivative one based on hearsay. Throughout the seventeenth century, we remain largely frustrated in this respect. We know of dozens of Indians who had traveled to Europe by 1700, some of whom remaining there for years and even decades. Princes and princelings of South Asian origin in Portugal alone in the mid-seventeenth century ran into several dozens, from Arakan, the Maldives, Jaffna, Bijapur, Badakhshan, and a host of other places.46 But not a single detailed description of Eu rope emerges from all this. Yet, as the English, Dutch, and eventually the French added their presence in India to that of the Portuguese, it is clear that the complexity of internal divisions in Europe became apparent to courtiers and rulers all over, from Calicut and Golkonda to the Mughal Empire. Thus, by the end of the seventeenth century, when the “new” English Company’s ambassador, Sir William Norris, appeared at Aurangzeb’s court in the Deccan, he was mercilessly quizzed on the precise nature of political arrangements in Eu rope. What was William of Orange’s (William III’s) relationship to the Dutch Company? Was Louis XIV in fact the greatest ruler in Europe at that time? What was particularly galling was that Mughal court officials compared Norris’s answers to those given by the representatives of the “old” Company, and pointed out contradictions where they existed.47 Images of the Europeans also came to be available for the first time in Sanskrit, even if these seventeenth-century references tend to be sparse and rather laconic. An example is Venkatadhvarin’s Viśvagunādarśacampū, where two alternative views of the city of Madras are proposed by two opposing voices in the text.48 One of these voices insists that these Europeans ( here termed “Hunas,” or Huns) are to be associated with unusual products and devices (vastv adbhutam, similar in spirit to the idea of the ‘ajā’ib), besides the fact that “they never take others’ money unjustly, by force,” and observe rules in punishment. The negative view of them, on the other hand, contemptuously terms them “white-faces” (śvetavadanāh), and declares

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in no uncertain terms that “there is no-one worse than Hûnas in this world: they are merciless, they treat Brahmins with contempt, as if they were no better than blades of grass; language cannot express their vices; they care nothing for rules of purity.” This last gibe may be another reference to the lack of bodily cleanliness that Tahir Muhammad expressed in his text, and which Shahjahan too apparently mentioned at a banquet in Lahore. Such reflections fi nd echoes as those of Venkatadhvarin in later Sanskrit texts such as the Sarvadevavilāsa from the late eighteenth century, where too the śvetamukhas (“white faces”) are compared to the evil figure of Ravana.49 It seems, then, that the first Indo-Persian eyewitness accounts of Europe do not appear until 1750. These have received a fair deal of attention, partly because so many of today’s Indian “xenologists” among colonial-period historians remain quite obsessed with the problem of Indian identity as defined in a European looking glass.50 Besides, British writers of the colonial period themselves were particularly interested in how they and their civilization were viewed by Indians, a fact that must explain the early notoriety enjoyed by, say, Mirza Abu Talib Khan Isfahani’s Masīr-i Tālibī fī bilād-i afranjī (“Talib’s travels in the land of the Franks”), translated into English by Charles Stewart as early as 1810.51 The writer, who traveled between 1799 and 1803, provided a view that was often but not always flattering to the English, but it was congenial enough, in that it generally contrasted Albion’s vigor to Indian decadence. Also quite well-known is Mirza Shaikh I‘tisam-ud-Din, Shigarf-nāma-i wilāyat (“Wonder Book of England”), written in 1785, but recounting its author’s travels two decades earlier, in the months from January 1766 to October or November 1769, initially in the company of the devious and unreliable Archibald Swinton.52 In this case, interestingly, the Persian text—which enjoyed wide manuscript circulation—has never been published, but Urdu and English translations (or adaptations) have long existed.53 I‘tisam-ud-Din, it may be noted, had a rather poor opinion of English knowledge of Persian, Arabic, and Turkish, and made it a point to note how both Swinton and William Jones needed his help to read and translate sections of the celebrated Farhang-i Jahāngīrī of Mir Jamal-ud-Din Inju Shirazi.54 Still more

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recently, Simon Digby has drawn our attention to an unpublished manuscript in his possession, Tārīkh-i jadīd (or “New History”) by Munshi Isma‘il, which relates the author’s voyage to England in the early 1770s. From the same decade, Digby also notes the existence of another Indo-Persian text (also unpublished), Risāla-i ahwāl-i mulk-i Firang-o-Hindustān, by Mir Muhammad Husain ibn ‘Abdul Husaini, which recounts travels to Lisbon and London from Calcutta, in around 1774.55 The bulk of these accounts were written by writers who accompanied Englishmen back to their native land, in some capacity or the other, as munshīs, as envoys, but also (as with Abu Talib) more or less as gentlemen of leisure.56 One may imagine (as Juan Cole and others have suggested) that the production of these texts would in part have been encouraged by the British, since they served to stress the persistent theme of the “wonders” of wilāyat, and the superiority of Western culture and technology, even if they may equally have contained disparaging remarks on food, manners, or climate. This admiration for the Europeans, stemming from the crude fact that they were now gaining the upper hand politically, can even be found in the writings of ‘Abdul Karim Kashmiri, author of the Bayān-i Wāqi’, although he did not actually travel to Europe.57 Describing events in Bengal in the mid-eighteenth century, this author mentions different Eu ropean settlements along the river, such as the populous Calcutta and the smaller “Frans Danga” (Chandernagore). He notes too that among the firangīs, there were several groups (qaum or firqa), of which each was known according to the name of the country (mulk), such as Fransis, Angrez, Valandez, and Purtugez. These European nations had extensive and well-kept gardens according to their own countries ( here, wilāyat), in which they snipped even large trees with scissors, giving them a par tic u lar shape. Further, since these Europeans all lived in one area, separate from the Indians, and were self-administering, there was no change in their lifestyles (auza’-oatwār) in relation to their places of origin; they had built churches (kalīsā), where they even read the namāz after their own fashion. According to ‘Abdul Karim, a number of distinguished (mumtāz) Frankish intellectuals and craftsmen had settled in these places, since they could live there securely under the protection of the Frankish

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soldiers (ashāb-i saif-i firangiyān). He concludes that this is all on account of the “perfect unity of the Franks” (bar kamāl-i yak jihātī-i firangiyān), to be contrasted to the lack of coordination to be found in the Mughal court. A hemistich thus concludes the reflection: Wealth grows out of coordinated acts. Its lack comes out of disunity. Such views as these may fruitfully be contrasted therefore to another impor tant but relatively neglected text that comes to us from the 1770s and 1780s, namely the Malayalam travel account entitled Varttamānappustakam, by Paremmakkal Tommakattanar (1736– 1799).58 The author of the text, a Syrian Christian man of the cloth, accompanied the bishop Mar Joseph Kariyattil, and visited Europe (Iberia and Rome), before returning to India, in a journey that has some parallels to that of Joseph of Cranganore in the early sixteenth century, but also to the travel-accounts of other Eastern Christians of the early modern era in western lands.59 This text must be understood in terms of the changing relations between the Catholic Church and the Syrian Christians of Kerala in the early modern centuries. While the Portuguese had initially been seen in very positive terms by the hierarchy of the Syrian church, relations soured over the course of the sixteenth century. The reasons were many, some material (notably disputes over trade), and others having to do with the theological conflicts between the Catholic Church and the Syrian one. As the sixteenth century wore on, Catholic pressure on the Syrian Christians grew apace, eventually culminating in the notorious Synod of Diamper (Udayamperur) in 1599. This synod required the Syrian Christians not merely to change their liturgy and significant aspects of their theology, but also to submit to the authority of the Catholic priesthood.60 However, the “solution,” imposed from above, proved impossible to sustain, and by the mid-seventeenth century, the Syrian community had split (around the so-called Coonan Cross Oath of 1653), with one part of it—the “Malabarians”—remaining loosely loyal to the Catholic Church, and the other part—the “Jacobites”—returning to West Syriac practices, with a separate archbishop, initially Mar Thomas.

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Nevertheless, tensions persisted through the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The expulsion of the Portuguese from their fortresses in Kerala, and the installation of the Dutch, further complicated matters. By the late 1650s the major Catholic missionary presence was Carmelites, whose relations with the so-called “Malabarian” Christians tended to vary considerably. A particularly difficult period was in the 1770s, when frustration with the behav ior of the Carmelite vicar apostolic eventually led to a decision to send a delegation to Rome, headed by Joseph Kariyattil (a former student of the Carmelites, who had already studied in Rome), and Tommakattanar, with the two senior priests being accompanied by a couple of younger boys who were to be admitted to the Propaganda College in Rome. These then were the circumstances of the composition of the Varttamānappustakam. The combination of circumstances, and the identity of the author, render the text rather distinct from other travel writing of the period, such as the work of I‘tisam-ud-Din. Tommakattanar, both individually and as a member of his community, had had long experience of dealing with Europeans. He had been ordained a priest in 1761, at the age of twenty-five, and he was well educated, with some knowledge of Syriac, Latin, and Sanskrit, as well as Italian and Portuguese. It is certain that he had notions of what Eu rope was like before he went there, and besides his traveling companion, Mar Joseph, had spent years in Rome. Further, he did not visit Europe to ask how the British had come to conquer India. His Europe was instead southern and Catholic, and his main concerns were not with technology, military power, or the need to explain Indian “decline.” Fi nally, this was not the view of a non- Christian from an area of the world that was seen as dominated by Christians. Rather, it was about what enabled one set of Christians to claim that they were superior to another group. This “subversive” content of the book was such that, as late as 1862, it was condemned (along with a compendium of Voltaire’s writings) as containing “erroneous and scandalous propositions throwing disgrace not only on the religious orders (it was composed with this purpose), but also on the Sacred Congregations . . . [and] being even less respectful towards the Supreme Pontiff.”61

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The introduction to the narrative, dated September 1785, begins by evoking the Apostle St. Thomas and declares from the outset that its intent is to “let our brethren and friends know . . . what experiences we had in Portugal, in the city of Rome, on the way after our departure for Europe.” It then proceeds to describe the situation in Kerala among the Christians from about 1773; various assemblies, discussions, and controversies that ensued are evoked, and the growing frustration of Syrian priests is mentioned, until the decision was taken by the Malabar General Church Assembly to send a delegation to Rome under Malpan Joseph Kariyattil. Money had to be raised rapidly to pay for this voyage, and eventually a group of twenty-two persons set out in May 1778 to Madras, from where they hoped to gain a passage to Europe. Even before reaching Madras, however, it became clear that only a small group of four could afford the journey. A dispute then broke out between Tommakattanar and a man named Chakkokattanar, but Malpan Joseph eventually supported the claims of the former to make the voyage, since “he could be of help in writing letters and making translations, and since he could easily learn the European languages as he knew Latin.”62 Once in Madras, the party managed to find a Lisbon-based ship called the Esperança, owned by four Portuguese merchants, that had recently returned from Bengal, Bombay, and Goa and that was preparing for a return trip to Europe. Despite initial resistance by the owners, permission was obtained to embark, and the party left Madras in late November 1778. The voyage was extremely unpleasant. The shipboard food did not appeal to the priests, and they came to believe that the food together with the ambient heat caused them all (and especially Malpan Joseph) to come out in “blisters and ulcers” all over their bodies. Eventually, while rounding the Cape of Good Hope, the Malpan even came to believe that he was at death’s door, and began to lament and weep, saying that the others would surely come to a bad end in Europe, since they did not know the languages of the place. However, this did not come to pass, and the ship eventually anchored at the port of Benguela (in Angola) in early February 1779. Tommakattanar’s description of Benguela is short and mostly concerned with the climate. He notes that “the bodies of the Europeans

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who dwell there are pale, like bodies without blood,” and adds that “this ugliness is caused by the air and the heat of the place.” Yet, even in his brief description, he throws in a few hostile remarks concerning the Portuguese, and how they had seized control of the territory. A more elaborate critique along similar lines follows at the next port of call, which is Bahia in Brazil. Here we are told a tale of how the Portuguese by somewhat deceitful means came to control the area by force, and thus also seized hold of untold riches in the form of gold, precious stones, and wood. The place had now become a destination for Portuguese, who were willing to settle there permanently. Brief descriptions of the “natives” follow, as well as of the city and buildings. Mention is also made of how the party from Kerala was received by the resident archbishop, Joaquim Borgia de Figueroa. However, things did not go perfectly smoothly, for the Syrian Christian party insisted on maintaining their Syriac rites, even though they were advised against it by the archbishop. This seems to have made them an object of great curiosity, and Tommakattanar suggests that their social success among the rich merchants of Bahia was quite considerable as a result. By early May, the ship was ready to depart for Portugal. The port of Lisbon was reached after a ten-week voyage, on July 18. The city struck our narrator as noisy, crowded, disorderly, and “without any premeditated plan,” especially after the recent earthquake. The density of churches was no doubt impressive, and these religious establishments also enjoyed rich incomes, second only to those in Rome. But Tommakattanar was also struck by other features of Portugal’s capital city, including its large number of illegitimate children, who were looked after in various charitable establishments. Other aspects of the city also came across to him as problematic, including the presence (and to his mind excessive influence) of Goan Catholic priests, such as a certain Padre Cajetan Vitorino Faria. On Faria’s account, the party from Kerala encountered some difficulties in gaining access to the Queen, although they were eventually able to present a petition to her at Queluz Palace. Eventually, Tommakattanar and the others left for Genoa, en route to Rome, on November 6, 1779. A brief account of Genoa follows, its imposing buildings, winding streets, and rich material and cultural life. The writer comments on

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the mode of government there, which is not a monarchy but a republic, headed by a Doge. But it is clear that his heart is not in it. Rather, his main concerns are with the machinations of the Carmelites, the enemies of the “Malabarians,” who have managed once more to exercise undue influence with Rome. In view of this, they were hurriedly obliged to leave Genoa for Livorno, and thence to Pisa, Florence, and Siena. By January 3, 1780, some thirteen months after leaving Madras, the party thus arrived at last in the seat of the papacy. The pages of the account that follow are full of petitions and counterpetitions, ecclesiastical audiences, and vile machinations, with letters flying back and forth between Lisbon, Genoa, and Rome. Yet, at the end of five and a half months, Malpan Joseph and his party were disappointed at their reception, and the lack of trust shown by the high authorities, who clearly preferred the versions of events and problems set out by the Carmelites to their own. Tommakattanar’s description of Rome too is perfunctory: it is “built in a circle; its ground is leveled; walls and gates are built around it.” St. Peter’s Church is briefly described, as are a few other religious buildings. The rich merchants, gardens of leisure, and even the comic actors on the streets find mention. But the tone is a sour and disappointed one. The church authorities have “disregarded justice and the glory of God,” and instead done things “for reasons of self-interest and pride.”63 It was in this mood that the group from Kerala made its way to Loreto, then to Ancona, and eventually to Genoa, reaching that city on July 3, 1780. This time the return to Lisbon was through Cadiz and Tavira. The second stay in Lisbon seems, if anything, to have been even more miserable than the first. It lasted almost all of five years, yet Tommakattanar reveals almost nothing of the actual events that transpired during that long elapse of time. His main preoccupation is instead with the disputes at the center of which his party found itself. Besides that redoubtable schemer Padre Cajetan from Goa, the party of Malpan Joseph also had to deal with the minister for the Indies, Martim de Melo, described as a “devil, an enemy of peace and concord,” who had seized “our Malabar people [and] had crushed them and had drunk their blood.” This minister, as well as some

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other influential persons, seem to have initiated moves to hold Malpan Joseph back in Portugal, alleging that if he returned to Kerala he would cause “contentions and miserable disorder” there. Besides, the substantial Goan ecclesiastical presence in Lisbon also did not aid the cause of the Kerala Syrians. Violent letters were exchanged, in one of which the Kerala party wrote to their Catholic interlocutors: “Through deceit and tricks you have robbed our community of its dignities, and for a long time you have enslaved it and have until now tried with all your strength to do away with the old rites and practices of our Church.”64 An interest ing form of patriotic reasoning was also used to demonstrate how it was unreasonable for priests from Europe to become bishops and high authorities in Kerala. The Malpan and his party argued that this was no different than putting Portugal under Habsburg rule, and added: “Suppose the Italians govern Portugal, the Portuguese Italy, the French Germany, the Germans France. Tell me if the people of these countries will be pleased with this.” The conclusion was clear. “It is known as a law of nature that the honour, the prestige, and the unity of a community can be kept intact only if that community is governed by those of that community.”65 Whether this rhetorical figure, in which Eu ropeans were compared to the Pharaoh in Egypt, and the “Malabarians” to Moses and the Jews, would have really appealed is not known to us. We are aware, however, that it was only after many negotiations and difficulties that they were eventually able to obtain permission to sail back, after having formally taken leave of the royal family, once more in Queluz. The only major concession they had managed to obtain was the nomination of Malpan Joseph Kariyattil as archbishop of Cranganore. Eventually, gaining the protection of the Marquês de Castel-Melhor, the party was able to embark on a vessel carry ing convicts (some three hundred in number) which left Lisbon on April 20, 1785. Yet, the Kerala group’s troubles were not over. In late June, they had to weather a terrible storm to enter the port of Bahia, where the party (and Malpan Joseph in par tic u lar) were for once treated with exemplary respect: “On both sides of the road, from the shore to the residence of the governor, there stood spectators whose number is difficult to be estimated.” Another incident fol-

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lowed, in which the ship again almost capsized. Eventually, they left Bahia on August  30, 1785; the island of Sri Lanka was sighted on March 18, 1786 after a hard journey, with great shortages of food and water. The Syrian party was able to reach Goa only on May 1, 1786, and a bare four months later, Malpan Joseph Kariyattil died under uncertain circumstances. As for Paremmakkal Tommakattanar, he returned to Kerala as administrator of the vacant See of Cranganore. His text, as his modern translator writes, took on a life of its own and “appeared more subversive than its author.” It also marked the inauguration of two new forms in Malayalam, the prose narrative and the travel account. Whether its author knew it or not, there was thus something distinctly modern about the expression he gave birth to.

Toward a Conclusion The preceding pages have carried us over some three hundred years in terms of the history of Europe and its relations with India, and in this concluding chapter to a consideration of Indian perceptions of Europe and Europeans. Our chief focus in this chapter has been with a number of texts and narratives, deliberately organized in a somewhat schematic form. First, we have a phase wherein Eu ropeans as a people (the “Franks”) are perceived by Indians without a clear notion of a geographical entity called Europe. Then the first descriptions of Europe appear, but not in the form of first-person narratives. Finally, in the latter half of the eighteenth century— surprisingly late, it could be said—the first personal narratives of travel to Europe can be found in Persian and Malayalam. Seen in a comparative framework, the South Asian corpus of xenological materials regarding Europe is, up to 1800, undoubtedly far less rich than that from the Ottoman Empire or the Arab-speaking lands.66 For the Ottoman Empire alone, we can speak of a fairly rich corpus before 1800. Thus, we have the account of Osman Agha ibn Ahmed Temeshvarlï, who was imprisoned in Hungary and Austria for eleven years (1688–1699) and who appears to have written his memoirs (which are thus above all an account of captivity, but sharing significant aspects with the travel account) in the early 1720s.67 First

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published in a German translation in the 1950s, the text has subsequently been edited, and other translations in European languages have appeared. Better understood, and belonging also to a par ticu lar subgenre, are the accounts of Ottoman ambassadors to foreign courts, of which a number of well-known examples exist, in particular from the eighteenth century.68 Evliya Çelebi’s account of his visit to Vienna in 1665 is at times counted as one of the earliest among these; a significant example, which at times served as a model to other later writers, is the embassy account of Yirmisekiz Çelebi Mehmed Efendi to the court of the young Louis XV in 1720–1721.69 Along the same line are the reports from Revolutionary and Napoleonic France of Morali Seyyid Ali Efendi and Seyyid Abdürrahim Muhibb Efendi, the fi rst dating from the years 1797 to 1802, and the second from 1806 to 1811.70 This may not be all that surprising in view of  the greater proximity, as well as the greater strategic significance of Eu rope for the Ottomans, which meant that by the late sixteenth century, Ottoman writers were even producing chronicles of the kings of France and the conquest of the New World by the Spaniards.71 The contention has been that these materials are characterized by several distinct, and at times even contradictory, sentiments. There is the picture of the deceitful European, the religious bigot, who is willing to stop at nothing to achieve his ends. This was already a powerful image in the sixteenth century, and it persisted into later times. Then, we have a second set of perceptions, focusing on the Eu ropean as a maker of wondrous objects and curiosities (adbhuta and ‘ajā’ib), of which we have seen a number of examples. Third, we have the idea of Eu rope itself, which emerges gradually and hesitatingly from materials in the seventeenth century into a full-blown picture, with a high degree of complexity in the last years of the eighteenth century. It is this that Partha Chatterjee has characterized as a mixture of “fear and love,” which he sees as somehow impregnating the entirety of the Euro-Indian relationship between 1498 and our own time.72 Both those emotions were undoubtedly present in varying measure at dif ferent moments, though rather few examples of love can in fact be found before 1750. But if we are to be more complete, we must

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include in the gamut of emotions not simply fear and love, but suspicion and disgust, wonder and reticence at a people who may have worn “very fi ne clothes,” but did not yet quite know how to wash their bottoms. We must also track the subtle changes in these perceptions, as political circumstances and settings for interaction evolved. Much separated the perceptions of 1500 from those of 1800. There is little doubt that Europeans of the early modern period dealt with and understood India in a variety of ways, as a function of their social locations, religious beliefs, and intellectual inclinations. But it can equally be said that there was no monolithic view of the “Franks” held in India over these centuries either. To be sure, for many, indifference was also an option, since it was only in the latter half of the eighteenth century—with the British conquest of fi rst Bengal, and then southern and western India— that Eu ropeans emerged as a force to be reckoned with in the quotidian realities of the subcontinent. The central argument of this book has been to suggest, however, that even in the absence of an apparatus of political and military domination, European relations with and understandings of India in the centuries from 1500 to 1800 were the product of layered and intermittent conversations and distinct asymmetries in perception. Cultural translation was never a transparent matter in these contexts, because the translators themselves were such complex and fraught actors, caught in webs both of their own making and produced by others. The strategies used by them also varied a great deal over time. The sixteenth century already witnessed a two-pronged approach, between a hesitant employment of a form of philology, and the use of ethnography to produce bold and slapdash generalizations, which somehow proved enduring. These concerned both the invention by the end of the sixteenth century of an idea of Mughal “despotism,” and a preoccupation with giving a radically schematic and systemic character to the society and the “religion” of the “Gentiles” of India. The seventeenth century saw some impor tant contestations, as Eu ropean writers and observers of India grew in their numbers; yet, through all this, certain topoi seem to have remained, and the dominance of casual and indeed prejudiced ethnography as an approach continues to be noticeable, even if some Europeans gradually

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came—like the Dutch priest Rogerius—to enter into a closer and more intimate reading of Indian materials. Further complicating matters was the idea of using “adroit dissimulation,” which seems to have been a regular feature of Europeans representing themselves to their Indian interlocutors, as we see even when reading François Bernier.73 This is all the more curious, because in the eighteenth century, the boot would be on the other foot, as it would be the Indians who would be consistently accused by Europeans of being untrustworthy and duplicitous ( fourbes). And yet, in the midst of all this maneuvering, and wearing and doffing of masks, there are interest ing and quite pregnant moments, when certain European observers tried to apprentice themselves to Indian knowledge-systems, engaging in the hard work of assimilating at least some protocols of reading before rushing to judgment or glib generalization. Engaging with personages such as James Fraser in an extended fashion may help us understand where their attitudes came from, and under what institutional and political circumstances they were even possible. Yet, as the eighteenth century wore on, and the conquest of the subcontinent by the Company proceeded apace, one sees more and more of a dif ferent combination of attitudes: an ill-disguised contempt, a growing impatience and an urge to infantilize the Other, and a tendency to generalize from Olympian heights in new institutions such as Calcutta’s Asiatic Society. Mirza Abu Talib Khan would thus write (interestingly echoing I‘tisam-ud-Din) of how among the English, “as soon as one of them acquires the smallest insight of the principles of any science, or the rudiments of any foreign language, he immediately sits down and composes a work on the subject, and, by means of the Press, circulates books which have no more intrinsic worth than the toys bestowed on children, which serve to amuse the ignorant, but are of no use to the learned.” This was even true, he added with exquisite sarcasm, of someone of the “transcendent abilities and angelic character of Sir William Jones.”74 The old constraints that had been set by a balance of force and forms of institutional equilibrium between cultures had now begun to give way. In the end, this is a cultural history of Eu rope’s India that has not been able to set aside a political and institutional history. It has

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not been my concern here whether something like a perfect understanding between cultures is possible, under any historical circumstances. Only those who have never really experienced life across and between cultures can afford the illusion, after all, that it is a simple affair. Nor is it a question of blithely apportioning blame, or claiming that this or that group deliberately set out to distort what should have been limpid and obvious. Nor is it my intention to participate in a project of cultural exorcism, whereby the expulsion of some alien European virus from the body of India will help the “recovery” of some pristine self. What is undeniable, however, is that even five centuries after Vasco da Gama, the consequences of how India was represented in and by Europe in the centuries between 1500 and 1800 still weigh heavily on us. We must live with these consequences, but perhaps we can do so somewhat better in a fuller knowledge of their nuances and complexities.

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ANOM ANTT BL BnF CC FRP HAG IESHR NLS OIOC

Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer, Aix-enProvence Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, Lisbon British Library, London Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris Corpo Cronológico Fraser of Reelig Papers, Kirkhill, Scotland Historical Archives, Panaji, Goa Indian Economic and Social History Review National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh Oriental and India Office Collections

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Preface 1. I should also note that among the scholars present in Berlin that year with whom I, along with Muzaffar Alam, Partha Chatterjee, Velcheru Narayana Rao, and David Shulman, enjoyed extended discussions, was Suzanne L. Marchand, then preparing her well-known work, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race and Scholarship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 2. Catherine Weinberger-Thomas, ed., L’Inde et l’imaginaire, Collection Purusârtha, 11 (Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS, 1988); Denys Lombard, Catherine Champion, and Henri Chambert-Loir, eds., Rêver l’Asie: Exotisme et littérature coloniale aux Indes, en Indochine et en Insulinde, Recherches d’histoire et de sciences sociales 56 (Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS, 1993). 3. Partha Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters: A History of European Reactions to Indian Art, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 4. Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India, ed. Nicholas B. Dirks (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); Ronald B. Inden, “Orientalist Constructions of India,” Modern Asian Studies 20, no. 3 (1986): 401–46; and Ronald B. Inden, Imagining India (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990). 5. For a Marxist defense of Goldziher, and of “orientalism” more generally, see the remarks in Irfan Habib, “In Defence of Orientalism: Critical Notes on Edward Said,” Social Scientist 33, nos. 1–2 (2005): 40–46. For a far more balanced view, see John M. Efron, “Orientalism and the Jewish Historical Gaze,” in Orientalism and the Jews, ed. Ivan Davidson Kalmar and Derek Jonathan Penslar (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2005), 87–93. 6. See Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies (London: Allen Lane, 2006), a work that was met by a well-orchestrated round of applause by interested parties. An equally disappointing and unbalanced tirade is that of Michael Curtis, Orientalism and Islam: European Thinkers on Oriental Despotism in the Middle East and India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

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7. For an example, see François Pouillon and Jean- Claude Vatin, eds., After Orientalism: Critical Perspectives on Western Agency and Eastern Reappropriations (Leiden: Brill, 2015). Far more reasonable is Sophie Basch, Nora Seni, Pierre Chuvin, Michel Espagne, Jean Leclant, and Huguette MeunierChuvin, eds., L’orientalisme, les orientalistes et l’empire ottoman: De la fin du XVIIIe à la fin du XXe siècle (Paris: Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 2011). 8. Luce Giard, ed., Michel Foucault: Lire l’œuvre (Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 1992); compare Robert J. C. Young, “Foucault on Race and Colonialism,” New Formations 25 (1995): 57–65.

Introduction Epigraph: My translation from the text in Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer, Aix-en-Provence (henceforth ANOM), Colonies C2 62, fls. 13–22, “Mémoire de M. Bernier,” citation on fl. 22. An edition of this text may be found in Henri Castonnet des Fossés, “François Bernier: Documents inédits sur son séjour dans l’Inde,” Mémoires de la Société nationale d’agriculture, sciences et arts d’Angers 26 (1884–1885): 215–34, but it is practically unusable. For an earlier English translation, see Theodore Morison, “Minute by M. Bernier upon the Establishment of Trade in the Indies, dated 10th March 1668,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 1 (1933): 21, but the passage cited here is unfortunately mistranslated, including the odd Portuguese pidgin phrase. 1. For an evaluation of Gassendi’s networks and influence, see the essays collected in Sylvia Murr, ed., Gassendi et l’Europe (1592–1792) (Paris: J. Vrin, 1997). 2. For more on Danishmand Khan’s career, see Samsam ud-Daula Shahnawaz Khan and ‘Abdul Hayy, Ma’asir al-Umarā’, trans. Henry Beveridge and Baini Prashad, 2 vols. (Calcutta: Asiatic Society, 1941–1952), 1:446–48. The double rank cited above is the personal (zāt) and cavalry (sawār) rank. 3. Frédéric Tinguely, ed., Un Libertin dans l’Inde Moghole: Les Voyages de François Bernier (1656–1669) (Paris: Chandeigne, 2008), 369. I have restituted the spellings of the original text, for Tinguely’s modernized versions. 4. See the discussion in Jonardon Ganeri, The Lost Age of Reason: Philosophy in Early Modern India 1450–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 13–21. 5. For a favorable evaluation of Bernier as a cross-cultural intermediary, see Faith E. Beasley, “Versailles meets the Taj Mahal,” in French Global: A New Approach to Literary History, ed. Christie McDonald and Susan Rubin Suleiman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 207–22. In somewhat the same vein, also see Nicholas Dew, Orientalism in Louis XIV’s France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 131–67. 6. The best modern account of the emergence of this Company is Glenn J. Ames, Colbert, Mercantilism and the French Quest for Asian Trade (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1996). Still useful is Paul Kaeppelin, La Compagnie des Indes Orientales et François Martin: Étude sur l’Histoire du Commerce de des Établissements Français dans l’Inde sous Louis XIV (1664–1719) (Paris: Augustin Challamel, 1908).

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7. For more on Caron, see Jacques and Marianne Proust, eds., Le puissant royaume du Japon: La description de François Caron (1636) (Paris: Chandeigne, 2003). The work by Gabriel Andriamiarintsoa Rantoandro, Un homme d’affaires franco-hollandais en mer de Chine et dans l’Océan indien au XVIIeme siècle: François Caron, 1600–1673, Thèse de 3ème cycle en histoire (Paris: EHESS, 1978), unfortunately remains unpublished. 8. Shahnawaz Khan and ‘Abdul Hayy, Ma’asir al-Umarā’, 1:484–85 (for Diyanat Khan) and 722–23 (for Ja‘far Khan). 9. For more about this case, see Virginia W. Lunsford, Piracy and Privateering in the Golden Age Netherlands (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2005), 170–76; also the classic account in F. W. Stapel, “Hubert Hugo: Een zeerover in dienst van de Oostindische Compagnie,” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde van Nederlandsch-Indië 86, nos. 3–4 (1930): 615–35. For Hugo’s continued links with the French Company, also see Charles Grandjean, “Mémoire présenté à Louis XIV en 1664 par le Hollandais Hubert Hugo pour la fondation d’une Compagnie des Indes orientales,” Bulletin de la société d’études coloniales et maritimes (1893): 5–25. 10. Michel Mollat, “Passages français dans l’Océan Indien au temps de François Ier,” Studia 11 (1963): 239–48, reprinted in Mollat, Études d’histoire maritime (1938–1975) (Turin: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1977), 241–50; and Philippe Haudrère, “Jalons pour une histoire des Compagnies des Indes,” in Compagnies et comptoirs: L’Inde des Français, XVIIe-XXe siècle, ed. Jacques Weber (Paris: Société française d’Histoire d’Outre-Mer, 1991), 9–27. 11. Archives des Missions Étrangères, Paris, vol. 114, 132–35, transcribed in Anne Lombard-Jourdan, “À propos d’Augustin de Beaulieu: Quelques documents inédits,” Archipel 56 (1998): 145–56. 12. Denys Lombard, Mémoires d’un voyage aux Indes Orientales, 1619–1622: Augustin de Beaulieu, un marchand normand à Sumatra (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1996); for further details on Beaulieu, his career and his projects, see Anne Lombard-Jourdan, “Augustin de Beaulieu et son Dessein touchant les Indes orientales (1631–1632),” Archipel 54 (1997): 13–26. 13. See “A Journall of the Journey of Richard Steel, and John Crowther, from Azmere in India, the place of the great Mogols residence, to Spahan the Royall Seat of the King of Persia, in the affaires of the East Indian Societie. Anno 1615, 1616,” in Hakluytus Posthumus or, Purchas his Pilgrimes: Contayning a History of the World in Sea Voyages and Lande Travells by Englishmen and Others, ed. Samuel Purchas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 4:266–80. 14. William Foster, ed., The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to the Court of the Great Mogul, 1615–1619, as Narrated in His Journal and Correspondence, 2 vols. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1926). 15. Joan Mickelson Gaughan, The ‘Incumberances’: British Women in India, 1615–1856 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 18–22. 16. See the letters written by Steele from Batavia and Banten, dated October 19, 1626, October 28, 1627, and June 20, 1628, in The English Factories in India, 1624–1629, ed. William Foster (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909), 148, 182, 278.

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17. William Foster, “Austin of Bordeaux,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland (1910): 494–95; William Foster, ed., Letters Received by the East India Company from Its Servants in the East, vol. 2 (1613–1615) (London: St. Dunstan’s House, 1897), 98, 105–6, passim. 18. Letter from Herryard (or Hiriart) to Sir Robert Cecil, 1604 (before August 20) in Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Most Hon. the Marquess of Salisbury, preserved at Hatfi eld House, Hertfordshire, ed. M.  S. Giuseppi (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1933), 16:253. 19. Edward D. Maclagan, “Four Letters of Austin of Bordeaux,” Journal of the Panjab Historical Society 4, no. 1 (1916): 3–17 (letter on pp. 8–9). I have slightly corrected Maclagan’s translation. Three of these letters were published, sometimes with better readings, in Charles de la Roncière, “Un artiste français à la cour du Grand Mogol,” Revue hebdomadaire 14, no. 15 (1905): 181–97. Roncière used the versions in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris (henceforth BnF), Collection Cinq- Cents Colbert, Vol. 483, fls. 436, 439, whereas Maclagan used the version from the Bibliothèque Inguimbertine, Carpentras. 20. Wheeler M. Thackston, ed. and trans., The Jahangirnama: Memoirs of Jahangir, Emperor of India (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 298– 99. Herryard’s status at the Mughal court is also confi rmed by the German traveler Heinrich von Poser, who visited Lahore in 1621–1622; compare with William Irvine, “Austin of Bordeaux,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland (1910): 1343–45. 21. See the intriguing reference to a letter from “Hiriart (Augustin), naturel de Bordeaux, établi à Hispahan, capitale de la Perse,” in Catalogue de Lettres Autographes provenant du Cabinet de feu M. J. J. de Bure, ancien libraire du Roi et de la Bibliothèque Royale (Paris: Laverdet, 1853), Item 116. The undated letter, written on highly decorated paper, was addressed to Louis XIII and stated that Herryard intended to return to France via Spain, in order to enter the king’s ser vice, with two elephants for the royal menagerie. The current location of this letter is unknown. 22. Nicholas Withington at Agra to Thomas Aldworthe in Surat, October 29, 1614, in Letters Received, 2:141. 23. See Kornelis Sneyders de Vogel, “Une lettre de Herryard, joaillier du Grand Mogol,” Neophilologus 39 (1955): 1–8. For more on Peiresc and his interest in India, also see Jean-Marie Lafont, “L’Inde et l’Extrême- Orient dans la correspondance de Fabri de Peiresc, 1580–1637: Mémoire pour les Indes, 1630,” Topoi 7, no. 2 (1997): 693–732. 24. See Peter N. Miller, Peiresc’s Mediterranean World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 370–87. 25. Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, on the other hand, had some knowledge of Herryard; see Travels in India by Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Baron of Aubonne, trans. Vincent Ball (London: Macmillan, 1889), 1:108. 26. See, for example, Pierre Briant, The First European: A History of Alexander in the Age of Empire, trans. Nicholas Elliott (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017). 27. For an encyclopedic overview of these questions, see Donald F. Lach and Edwin J. Van Kley, Asia in the Making of Europe, 3 vols. (Chicago: Univer-

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sity of Chicago Press, 1965–1993), especially vol. 1. For a more interpretative essay, see Joan-Pau Rubiés, Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance: South India through European Eyes, 1250–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 28. For trading contacts across the western Indian Ocean before 1500, see Éric Vallet, L’Arabie marchande: État et commerce sous les Sultans Rasūlides du Yémen (626–858/1229–1454) (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2010), and John L. Meloy, Imperial Power and Maritime Trade: Mecca and Cairo in the Later Middle Ages (Chicago: Center for Middle Eastern Studies, 2010). 29. See Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “The Birth-Pangs of Portuguese Asia: Revisiting the Fateful ‘Long Decade’ 1498–1509,” Journal of Global History 2, no. 3 (2007): 261–80. 30. Dejanirah Couto, “The Role of Interpreters, or Linguas, in the Portuguese Empire during the 16th Century,” e-Journal of Portuguese History 1, no. 2 (2003). 31. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Intertwined Histories: Crónica and Tārīkh in the Sixteenth- Century Indian Ocean World,” History and Theory 49, no.  4 (2010): 118–45; Zoltán Biedermann, “Nos primórdios da antropologia moderna: A Ásia de João de Barros,” Anais de História de Além-Mar 4 (2003): 29–61. 32. Garcia da Orta, Colóquios dos Simples e Drogas da Índia, ed. Francisco Manuel de Melo Breyner, Conde de Ficalho, 2 vols. (Lisbon: Imprensa NacionalCasa da Moeda, 1987). For an interest ing, but rather uneven, reconsideration of this figure, see Palmira Fontes da Costa, ed., Medicine, Trade and Empire: Garcia de Orta’s “Colloquies on the Simples and Drugs of India (1563)” in Context (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2015). 33. António Borges Coelho, O vice-rei Dom João de Castro (Lisbon: Caminho, 2003); Luís Filipe Barreto, Descobrimentos e renascimento: Formas de ser e pensar nos séculos XV e XVI, 2nd ed. (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional, 1983). 34. Armando Cortesão, History of Portuguese Cartography, 2 vols. (Lisbon: Junta de Investigações do Ultramar, 1969–1971). 35. Primor e honra da vida soldadesca no Estado da Índia, ed. Laura Monteiro Pereira, rev. Maria Augusta Lima Cruz, and Maria do Rosário Laureano Santos (Ericeira, Portugal: Mar de Letras, 2003). 36. For early Eu ropean manuscripts of the Qur’an, see François Déroche, La voix et le calame: Les chemins de la canonisation du Coran (Paris: Fayard, 2016). 37. Francis Richard, “Les manuscrits persans rapportés par les frères Vecchietti et conservés aujourd’hui à la Bibliothèque Nationale,” Studia Iranica 9, no. 2 (1980): 291–300. 38. António Bocarro, O Livro das Plantas de todas as fortalezas, cidades e povoçaões do Estado da Índia Oriental, ed. Isabel Cid (Lisbon: Imprensa NacionalCasa da Moeda, 1992), 2:249. 39. For a fuller discussion, see Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “An Eastern ElDorado: The Tirumala-Tirupati Temple- Complex in Early Eu ropean Views and Ambitions, 1540–1660,” in David Shulman, ed., Syllables of Sky: Studies in South Indian Civilization in Honour of Velcheru Narayana Rao (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), 338–90.

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40. Even Herryard could not resist this temptation; thus, he claims that “my wife’s mother and her sister when their husbands died, burnt themselves alive, embracing the bodies of their dead husbands, but that was before I was connected with the household.” See Maclagan, “Four Letters,” 11. 41. Partha Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters: A History of European Reactions to Indian Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977). 42. Jerónimo Corte-Real, Sucesso do segundo cerco de Diu: Códice Cadaval 31: ANTT, ed. Martim de Albuquerque (Lisbon: Edições INAPA, 1991). For the text, itself, in twenty- one lengthy cantos (but without the illustrations), see Jerónimo Corte-Real, Sucesso do segundo cerco de Diu: estando Dom Ioham Mazcarenhas por capitam da fortaleza, ano de 1546 (Lisbon: António Gonçalvez, 1574). 43. C. Guadalupi, C. R. Boxer, and R. Barchiesi, Oltremare: Codice Casanatense 1889 con il Libro dell’Oriente di Duarte Barbosa (Milan: Franco Maria Ricci, 1984); Luís de Matos, ed., Imagens do Oriente no século XVI: Reprodução do códice português da Biblioteca Casanatense (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional, 1985). The most sophisticated recent discussion of this work is that of Jeremiah P. Losty, “Identifying the Artist of Codex Casanatense 1889,” Anais de História de Além-Mar13 (2012): 13–40. This entire volume of the journal is devoted to an examination of aspects of the codex. 44. Losty, “Identifying the Artist of Codex Casanatense,” 38. 45. C. Lethbridge Kingsford, “The Taking of the Madre de Dios,” in The Naval Miscellany, ed. J. K. Laughton (London: Naval Records Society, 1912), 2:85–121. For a fuller discussion, see Anthony Pagden and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Roots and Branches: Ibero-British Threads across Overseas Empires,” in Per Adriano Prosperi, vol. 2, L’Europa divisa e i Nuovi Mondi, ed. Massimo Donattini, Giuseppe Marcocci, and Stefania Pastore (Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 2011), 279–301. 46. J. Ph. Berjeau, ed., Calcoen: A Dutch Narrative of the Second Voyage of Vasco da Gama to Calicut, Printed at Antwerp circa 1504 (London: B. M. Pickering, 1874). 47. Jacques de Coutre, Andanzas asiáticas, ed. Eddy Stols, B. Teensma, and J. Werberckmoes (Madrid: Historia 16, 1991). 48. Willem Caland, ed., De Remonstrantie van W. Geleynssen de Jongh (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1929), 9–10; and for a useful biographical study, H. W. van Santen, VOC-dienaar in India: Geleynssen de Jongh in het land van de Groot-Mogol (Franeker, Netherlands: Van Wijnen, 2001). 49. Caland, De Remonstrantie, 59–60. 50. Markus Vink, ed., Mission to Madurai: Dutch Embassies to the Nayaka Court of Madurai in the Seventeenth Century (Delhi: Manohar, 2012), 317–30 (translation), 358–61 (Dutch text). I have occasionally modified the translation against the original. For the larger context of the production of such texts, also see Markus P. M. Vink, Encounters on the Opposite Coast: The Dutch East India Company and the Nayaka State of Madurai in the Seventeenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2016). 51. J. T. P. de Bruijn, “Ira nian Studies in the Netherlands,” Iranian Studies 20, nos. 2–4 (1987): 161–77.

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52. See Alastair Hamilton and Francis Richard, André du Ryer and Oriental Studies in Seventeenth- Century France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 53. D. H. A. Kolff and H. W. van Santen, eds., De Geschriften van Francisco Pelsaert over Mughal Indië 1627: Kroniek en Remonstrantie (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979); compare with J. S. Hoyland and S. N. Banerjee, The Empire of the Great Mogol: A Translation of De Laet’s Description of India and Fragment of Indian History (Delhi: Idarah-i Adabiyat-i Delli, 1975). 54. British Library, London (henceforth BL), Ms. I.O. 94 (Ethé 445), Bhimsen Saksena, “Dilkushā,” fol. 26b. 55. For more on Elstrack, whose family was originally from Liège, see Antony Griffiths, “Elstrack, Renold (b. 1570, d. in or after 1625),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), accessed June 27, 2013, http://www.oxforddnb.com /view/article/8763. 56. See Hugh Trevor-Roper, Archbishop Laud, 1573–1645, 3rd ed. (Houndmills, UK: Macmillan, 1988). 57. R. W. Ferrier, “Charles I and the Antiquities of Persia: The Mission of Nicholas Wilford,” Iran 8 (1970): 51–56. For Charles’s request, see W. Noel Sainsbury, ed., Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, East Indies and Persia, 1630–1634, preserved in the Public Record Offi ce and the India Offi ce (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1892), 523. 58. BL, Oriental and Indian Office Collections (henceforth OIOC), E / 3/15 / 1543A, Methwold, Mountney, Fremlen, etc. at Swally to the Company, December 29, 1634, in The English Factories in India, 1634–1636, ed. William Foster (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911), 74–75 (the summary of the whole letter occupies 59–85). 59. For a discussion, see John Seyller, Workshop and Patron in Mughal India: The Freer Ramayana and Other Illustrated Manuscripts of ‘Abd al-Rahim (Zu rich: Museum Rietberg, 1999), Artibus Asiae, Supplementum, 42:257–63. The album may be found in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS. Laud Or. 149. 60. J. V. S. Wilkinson, “An Indian Manuscript of the Golestan of the Shah Jahan Period,” Ars Orientalis 2 (1957): 423–25. 61. See G. J. Toomer, Eastern Wisedome and Learning: The Study of Arabic in Seventeenth- century England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996). 62. Andrew Dalby, “A Dictionary of Oriental Collections in Cambridge University Library,” Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 9, no. 3 (1988): 248–80 (entry for Lewis on 266–67); Edward G. Browne, A Catalogue of the Persian Manuscripts in the Library of the University of Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1896), xxvi–xxvii. 63. Henry Davison Love, Vestiges of Old Madras, 1640–1800: Traced from the East India Company’s Records Preserved at Fort St. George and the India Offi ce, and from Other Sources (London: J. Murray, 1913), 2:24. 64. See Browne, Catalogue, 309. 65. Otto Kurz, “A Volume of Mughal Drawings and Miniatures,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 30 (1967): 251–71. 66. For more on Vapoer, see Van Santen, VOC- dienaar in India, 63–68, which includes one of his drawings.

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67. For an overview of Dutch painters in Asia, see Michael North, “Production and Reception of Art through Eu ropean Company Channels in Asia,” in Artistic and Cultural Exchanges between Europe and Asia, 1400–1900: Rethinking Markets, Workshops and Collections (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2010), 89–107. 68. See Carolien M. Stolte, Philip Angel’s Deex-Autaers: Vaisnava Mythology from Manuscript to Book Market in the Context of the Dutch East India Company, c. 1600–1672 (Delhi: Manohar, 2012). 69. I have analyzed these materials in some detail in Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “A Roomful of Mirrors: The Artful Embrace of Mughals and Franks, 1550– 1700,” Ars Orientalis 39 (2010): 39–83. For an earlier analy sis, see Jeannine Auboyer, “Un maître hollandais du XVIIe siècle s’inspirant des miniatures mogholes,” Arts Asiatiques 2, no. 4 (1955): 251–73. 70. For a full discussion, see Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Courtly Encounters: Translating Courtliness and Violence in Early Modern Eurasia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), chapter 3. 71. Kate Teltscher, India Inscribed: European and British Writing on India, 1600–1800 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995). 72. James Fraser, The History of Nadir Shah, Formerly called Thamas Kuli Khan, the Present Emperor of Persia; to which Is Prefi xed a Short History of the Moghal Emperors (London: W. Strahan, 1742). 73. We lack a full study of Richard Johnson. But for his collections, see Toby Falk and Mildred Archer, Indian Miniatures in the India Offi ce Library (London: Sotheby Parke and Oxford University Press, 1981); and for musicological questions, Katherine Butler Schofield, “Reviving the Golden Age Again: ‘Classicization’, Hindustani Music, and the Mughals,” Ethnomusicology 54, no. 3 (2010): 484–517, esp. 505–7. 74. Maya Jasanoff, Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750–1850 (New York: Knopf, 2005). 75. My understanding thus differs from that of Claire Gallien, “British Orientalism, Indo-Persian Historiography and the Politics of Global Knowledge,” in India and Europe in the Global Eighteenth Century, ed. Simon Davies, Daniel Sanjiv Roberts, and Gabriel Sánchez Espinosa (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2014), 29–52. 76. For an old-fashioned, but still rather useful, approach to the question that focuses largely on the eighteenth century, see Urs App, The Birth of Orientalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). 77. Paola von Wyss- Giacosa, Religionsbilder der frühen Aufklärung: Bernard Picarts Tafeln für die ‘Cérémonies et Coutumes religieuses de tous les Peuples du Monde’ (Bern: Benteli, 2006); Lynn Hunt, Margaret Jacob, and Wijnand Mijnhardt, eds., Bernard Picart and the First Global Vision of Religion (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2010). 78. Will Sweetman, A Discovery of the Banian Religion and the Religion of the Persees: A Critical Edition of Two Early English Works on Indian Religions (Lampeter, UK: Edwin Mellen, 1999). 79. Willem Caland, ed., De Open-Deure tot het Verborgen Heydendom door Abraham Rogerius (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1915).

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80. For discussions, see David N. Lorenzen, “Who Invented Hinduism?,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 42, no. 4 (1999): 630–59, and Will Sweetman, Mapping Hinduism: “Hinduism” and the Study of Indian Religions (Halle, Germany: Frankeschen Stiftungen, 2003). 81. For a broad survey of post-1750 developments, see Christine Maillard, L’Inde vue de l’Europe: Histoire d’une rencontre (1750–1950) (Paris: Albin Michel, 2008). One can also consult the broad, but often too-hasty, survey by Massimiliano Vaghi, L’idea dell’India nell’Europa moderna (secoli XVII-XX ) (Milan: Mimesis, 2012). 82. See Nicholas B. Dirks, The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2008). 83. See the wide-ranging discussion in Anne-Julie Etter, “Les antiquités de l’Inde: Monuments, collections et administration colonial (1750–1835),” PhD thesis, Université de Paris Diderot, 2012. 84. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Traces of the Ancients in India: Notes on Two Possible Narratives,” in World Antiquarianism: Comparative Perspectives, ed. Alain Schnapp, Lothar von Falkenhausen, Peter N. Miller, and Tim Murray (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2013), 372–85. 85. See Sayida Surriya Hussain, Garcin de Tassy: Biographie et étude critique de ses œuvres (Pondicherry: Institut français d’Indologie, 1962). 86. Wilhelm Halbfass, India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988), 115–17. 87. Michael  H. Fisher, “Representing ‘His’ Women: Mirza Abu Talib Khan’s 1801 ‘Vindication of the Liberties of Asiatic Women,’ ” Indian Economic and Social History Review 37, no. 2 (2000): 215–37. 88. For commercial questions, see the broad synthesis proposed by Om Prakash, European Commercial Enterprise in Pre- Colonial India: The New Cambridge History of India, Vol. II.5 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); also the broad and multidimensional synthesis in Jean-Louis Margolin and Claude Markovits, Les Indes et l’Europe: Histoires connectées, XVe – XXIe siècles (Paris: Gallimard-Folio, 2015).

chapter 1 . On the Indo-Portuguese Moment Epigraph: The translation from Portuguese is mine. To learn more about Camões and India, see Shankar Raman, Framing “India”: The Colonial Imaginary in Early Modern Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 29–86. 1. This is apparently a play on the Portuguese usage Grão Cão, which could be translated either as “Great Khan” or more literally as “Great Dog.” 2. Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, Lisbon (henceforth ANTT), Colecção de São Lourenço, vol. 1, fl. 407, in Luís de Matos, Les Portugais en France au XVIe siècle: Etudes et documents (Coimbra: Universidade de Coimbra, 1952), 225–28. 3. Michel Mollat du Jourdin and Jacques Habert, eds., Giovanni et Girolamo Verrazano, navigateurs de François Ier: Dossiers de voyages, Voyages et découvertes, 2 (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1982).

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4. See Éric Barré and Philippe Hrodej, “Jean Ango (c. 1480, Dieppe–1551),” in Dictionnaire des corsaires et pirates, ed. Gilbert Buti and Philippe Hrodej (Paris: CNRS Editions, 2013), 14–16. 5. John Nothnagle, “Two Early French Voyages to Sumatra,” Sixteenth Century Journal 19, no. 1 (1988): 97–107. 6. Gayle K. Brunelle, “Dieppe school,” in The Oxford Companion to World Exploration, ed. David Buisseret (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 237–38; Tony Campbell, “Egerton MS 1513: A Remarkable Display of Cartographical Invention,” Imago Mundi 48 (1996): 93–102. 7. Jean Phibert Berjeau, ed. and trans., Calcoen: A Dutch Narrative of the Second Voyage of Vasco da Gama to Calicut (London: Basil Montagu Pickering, 1874). The text is unfortunately not paginated. 8. For more on Sprenger, see Beate Borowka-Clausberg, Balthasar Sprenger und der frühneuzeitliche Reisebericht (Munich: Iudicium, 1999). For overviews of the German materials, see Gita Dharampal-Frick, Indien im Spiegel deutscher Quellen der frühen Neuzeit (1500–1750): Studien zu einer interkulturellen Konstellation (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1994), and Christine R. Johnson, The German Discovery of the World: Re naissance Encounters with the Strange and Marvelous (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008). 9. For a discussion, see Stephanie Leitch, Mapping Ethnography in Early Modern Germany: New Worlds in Print Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Also useful for a broader perspective is Christian Feest, “The People of Calicut: Objects, Texts, and Images in the Age of Proto-Ethnography,” Boletim do Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi: Ciências Humanas 9, no.  2 (2014): 287–303. 10. For more on Varthema, see Jean Aubin, “Deux Chrétiens au Yémen Tāhiride,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 3rd ser., 3, no. 1 (1993): 33–52. See also Joan-Pau Rubiés, Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance: South India through European Eyes, 1250–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 125– 63, who attempts to contest some of Aubin’s readings. 11. Massimo Donattini, “Ombre imperiali: Le Navigationi et viaggi di G. B. Ramusio e l’immagine di Venezia,” in L’Europa divisa e i nuovi mondi: Per Adriano Prosperi, ed. Massimo Donattini, Giuseppe Marcocci, and Stefania Pastore (Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 2011), 33–44; Sylviane Albertan- Coppola and Marie-Christine Gomez-Géraud, “La collection des Navigationi et viaggi (1550– 1559) de G.-B. Ramusio: Mécanismes et projets d’après les para-textes,” Revue des études italiennes 36, nos. 1–4 (1990): 59–70. Still useful in some respects is George B. Parks, “Ramusio’s Literary History,” Studies in Philology 52, no. 2 (1955): 127–48. For the broader context, see Liz Horodowich, “Armchair Travelers and the Venetian Discovery of the New World,” Sixteenth Century Journal 36, no. 4 (2005): 1039–62. 12. For a ringside view of this debate, see Henri Lapeyre, “Deux interprétations de l’histoire d’Espagne: Américo Castro et Claudio Sánchez Albornoz,” Annales ESC 20, no. 5 (1965): 1015–37. 13. See the popu lar (not to say romantic) account in María Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (Boston: Little, Brown, 2002); see also the earlier

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collection of Salma Khadra Jayyusi, ed., The Legacy of Muslim Spain (Leiden: Brill, 1992). 14. A good point of departure, now somewhat dated, is Francisco Pons Boigues, Ensayo bio-bibliográfi co sobre los historiadores y géografos arábigo-españoles (Madrid: S. F. de Sales, 1898). 15. His work has since been continued into later periods with much success; see, for example, David Wasserstein, The Rise and Fall of the Party-Kings: Politics and Society in Islamic Spain 1002–1086 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985). 16. Ambrosio Huici Miranda, ed., Colección de crónicas árabes de la reconquista, 4 vols. (Tetuán: Editora Marroqui, 1952–1955). 17. Pedro Chalmeta Gendrón, “Historiografía medieval hispana: Arabica,” Al-Andalus 37, no. 2 (1972): 353–404. Also see Pedro Chalmeta Gendrón, “Una historia discontinua e intemporal (Jabar),” Hispania: Revista española de historia 33 (1973): 23–75. 18. Rachel Arié, L’Espagne musulmane au temps de Nasrides (1232–1492) (Paris: De Boccard, 1973), 438–45. 19. Engracia Ferré, “Une source nouvelle pour l’histoire de l’Espagne musulmane,” Arabica 14, no. 3 (1967): 320–26. 20. See Maya Shatzmiller, L’historiographie mérinide: Ibn Khaldūn et ses contemporains (Leiden: Brill, 1982). 21. See the useful remarks in Aziz Al-Azmeh, Ibn Khaldūn, an Essay in Reinterpretation (London: Frank Cass, 1982). 22. We still lack a proper study of these relations. But see José Garcia Domingues, Portugal e o Al-Andalus (Lisbon: Hugin, 1997) for a sense of the routes of circulation; and António Borges Coelho, ed., Portugal na Espanha Árabe (Lisbon: Editorial Caminho, 2008). Also useful as an introduction is the general account in Hugh Kennedy, Muslim Spain and Portugal: A Political History of al-Andalus (London: Longman, 1996). 23. Amin Tibi, “Ibn Bassam al-Shantarīnī and His Anthology al-Dhakīra,” Journal of Islamic Studies 10, no. 3 (1999): 313–16. 24. ‘Abd al-Malik ibn Muhammad ibn Sahib al-Salah, Al-Mann bilImāma, ed. Ambrosio Huici Miranda. (Valencia: Anubar, 1969). For a recent and interest ing discussion of this text, see Linda G. Jones, “ ‘The Christian Companion’: A Rhetorical Trope in the Narration of Intra-Muslim Confl ict during the Almohad Epoch,” Anuario de Estudios Medievales 38, no. 2 (2008): 793–829. 25. James T. Monroe, Islam and the Arabs in Spanish Scholarship (Sixteenth Century to the Present) (Leiden: Brill, 1970). 26. See David Lopes, Textos em aljamía portuguesa: Documentos para a história do domínio português em Safi m (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional, 1897). 27. Joseph Klucas, “Nicolaus Clenardus: A Pioneer of the New Learning in Renaissance Portugal,” Luso-Brazilian Review 29, no. 2 (1992): 87–98. 28. Marcel Bataillon, “L’Arabe à Salamanque au temps de la Renaissance,” Hespéris 21 (1935): 1–17. “L’Espagne de la Renaissance était à la fois le pays le mieux désigné pour devenir une pépinière d’arabisants et le pays le moins disposé à jouer ce rôle.”

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29. For a general and comparative view of the Eu ropean situation, see the valuable essay by Karl H. Dannenfeldt, “The Renaissance Humanists and the Knowledge of Arabic,” Studies in the Renaissance 2 (1955): 96–117; and, more recently, G.  J. Toomer, Eastern Wisedome and Learning: The Study of Arabic in Seventeenth- century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). 30. See, for example, Ruurdje Laarhoven, Triumph of Moro diplomacy: The Maguindanao Sultanate in the 17th century (Quezon City: New Day Publishers, 1989). 31. See the study of this chronicler by Teresa Amado, Fernão Lopes, contador de história: Sobre a Crónica de D. João I (Lisbon: Editorial Estampa, 1991). 32. Josiah Blackmore, “Afeiçom and History-Writing: The Prologue of the Crónica de D. João I,” Luso-Brazilian Review 34, no. 2 (1997): 15–24. 33. Fernão Lopes, Chrónica de El- Rei  D. João I, ed. Luciano Cordeiro (Lisbon: Bibliotheca de Clássicos Portuguezes, 1897), 17. 34. The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea, Written by Gomes Eannes de Azurara, trans. Charles Raymond Beazley and Edgar Prestage, 2 vols. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1896–99), 1:10; for the original text, see Gomes Eannes de Azurara, Chrónica do descobrimento e conquisita de Guiné, escrita por mandado de elrei D. Affonso V, ed. Visconde da Carreira and Visconde de Santarem (Paris: J. P. Aillaud, 1841). For an impor tant discussion of this author, see Luís Filipe Barreto, “Gomes Eanes de Zurara e o problema da Crónica da Guiné,” Studia 47 (1989): 311–69. 35. Edgar Prestage, “The Life and Writings of Azurara,” in The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea, 1:xl. 36. In fact, it seems to derive from the Latin, septem. 37. Josiah Blackmore, “Imagining the Moor in Medieval Portugal,” Diacritics 36, nos. 3–4 (2006): 27–43. I have slightly modified the translation from Zurara, who is cited and translated by Blackmore on page 35. 38. Vincent J. Cornell, Realm of the Saint: Power and Authority in Moroccan Sufi sm (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), 79–92. For the text, see Yusuf ibn Yahya ibn al-Zayyat, Al-Tashawwuf ilá rijāl al-tasawwuf wa-akhbār Abī al‘Abbās al- Sabtī, ed. Ahmad al-Taufiq (Rabat: Jami‘at Muhammad al-Khamis, 1984). 39. James B. McKenna, A Spaniard in the Portuguese Indies: The Narrative of Martín Fernández de Figueroa (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967). This edition and translation is the object of a justifiably severe critique by Jean Aubin, “À propos de la relation de Martín Fernández de Figueroa sur les conquêtes portugaises dans l’Océan Indien, 1505–1511,” in Aubin, Le Latin et l’Astrolabe, 3 vols. (Paris: Centre Culturel Calouste Gulbenkian, 1996–2006), 2:493–505. 40. See Joan-Pau Rubiés, “The Oriental Voices of Mendes Pinto, or the Traveller as Ethnologist in Portuguese Asia,” Portuguese Studies 10 (1994): 24–43. 41. However, the general consideration by Manoel Cardozo, “The Idea of History in the Portuguese Chroniclers of the Age of Discovery,” Catholic Historical Review 49, no. 1 (1963): 1–19, is an almost total failure.

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42. For an overview that remains useful, see J. B. Harrison, “Five Portuguese Historians,” in Historians of India, Pakistan and Ceylon, ed. C. H. Philips (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), 155–169. I also draw on the earlier discussion in Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “European Chroniclers and the Mughals,” in Explorations in Connected History: From the Tagus to the Ganges (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004), 138–79. 43. Luís de Albuquerque, ed., Crónica do Descobrimento e primeiras conquistas da Índia pelos Portugueses (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional, 1986). 44. For an interest ing reexamination of this author and his context, see Matthew Racine, “A ‘Pearle for a Prynce’: Jerónimo Osório and Early Elizabethan Catholics,” Catholic Historical Review 87, no. 3 (2001): 401–27. 45. We lack a proper study of Castanheda, but see Ana Paula Menino Avelar, Fernão Lopes de Castanheda: Historiador dos Portugueses na Índia ou cronista do governo de Nuno da Cunha? (Lisbon: Edições Cosmos, 1997). 46. Subrahmanyam, “European Chroniclers and the Mughals,” 141–42. 47. See the earlier discussions in Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Profecias e Feitiços: Gaspar Correia e a Primeira Viagem de Vasco da Gama,” Oceanos 33 (1998): 41–54. 48. Gaspar Correia, Crónicas de D. Manuel e de D. João III (até 1533), ed. José Pereira da Costa (Lisbon: Academia de Ciências de Lisboa, 1992). 49. I am grateful to Luís Filipe Thomaz for this useful example. 50. António Coimbra Martins, “Seis escritores da Ásia Portuguesa,” in Em torno de Diogo do Couto (Coimbra: Biblioteca Geral da Universidade de Coimbra, 1985), 127–37. 51. Maria Augusta Lima Cruz, “A lenda dos dois bons irmãos, Paulo e Vasco da Gama,” in Portos, escalas, e ilhéus no relacionamento entre o Ocidente e o Oriente, ed. Avelino de Freitas de Meneses (Ponta Delgada: Universidade dos Açores, 2001), 2:483–500. 52. On this broad subject, also see Jennifer  R. Goodman, Chivalry and Exploration, 1298–1630 (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 1998), 134–48, passim. 53. Here I draw on the discussion in Maurice Kriegel and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “The Unity of Opposites: Abraham Zacut, Vasco da Gama and the Chronicler Gaspar Correia,” in Vasco da Gama and the Linking of Europe and Asia, ed. Anthony Disney and Emily Booth, (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), 48–71. Also see José Chabás and Bernard R. Goldstein, “Astronomy in the Iberian Peninsula: Abraham Zacut and the Transition from Manuscript to Print,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, n.s., 90, no. 2 (2000): 1–196. 54. See Alain Desoulières, “Mughal Diplomacy in Gujarat (1533–1534) in Correia’s Lendas da Índia,” Modern Asian Studies 22, no. 3 (1988): 433–54; it is clear from this essay that Correia’s account is in fact quite “imaginative.” 55. We have demonstrated this in Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Letters from a Sinking Sultan,” in Aquém e além da Taprobana: Estudos Luso- Orientais à memória de Jean Aubin e Denys Lombard, ed. Luís Filipe F. R. Thomaz (Lisbon: Centro de História de Além-Mar, 2002), 239–69.

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56. António Alberto Banha de Andrade, João de Barros: Historiador do pensamento humanista português de quinhentos (Lisbon: Academia Portuguesa da História, 1980). 57. Stephanie Merrim, “The Castle of Discourse: Fernández de Oviedo’s Don Claribalte (1519) or ‘Los correos andan más que los caballeros,’ ” Modern Language Notes 97, no. 2 (1982): 329–46. 58. As cited in Merrim, “The Castle of Discourse,” 330. 59. An interest ing essay which attempts to reinterpret Barros the chronicler as an early “anthropologist” is Zoltán Biedermann, “Nos primórdios da antropologia moderna: A Ásia de João de Barros,” Anais de História de AlémMar 4 (2003): 29–61. For a general consideration of Portuguese imperial ideology and the place of Barros therein, see Giuseppe Marcocci, A consciência de um império: Portugal e o seu mundo (sécs. XV–XVII) (Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade de Coimbra, 2012). A recent, and highly problematic, reading of Barros from a literary perspective is that of Vincent Barletta, Death in Babylon: Alexander the Great and Iberian Empire in the Muslim Orient (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 117–58, where the author ignores an entire generation of work on the Portuguese empire and mistranslates key passages. 60. For more about Couto, see the brilliant exposition in the long (booklength) introduction that accompanies Diogo do Couto, O Primeiro Soldado Prático, ed. António Coimbra Martins (Lisbon: CNCDP, 2001). 61. João de Barros, Da Ásia: Dos feitos que os Portuguezes fizeram no descobrimento e conquista dos mares e terras do Oriente, 4 vols. Década 1, “Prologo.” (Lisbon: Livraria Sam Carlos, 1973). 62. C. R. Boxer, João de Barros: Portuguese Humanist and Historian of Asia (New Delhi: Concept Publishing, 1980). 63. Boxer, João de Barros, 60; Israël Salvator Révah, “Le colloque Ropicapnefma de João de Barros: Genèse, structure et technique,” in Révah, Études Portugaises, ed. Charles Amiel (Paris: Éditions Jean Touzot, 1975), 99–119. Also see the discussion of this text in Banha de Andrade, João de Barros, 81–114. 64. Barros, Da Ásia, Década 1, bk. 1, chapter 1, 1–3. The passage is extensively mistranslated in Barletta, Death in Babylon, 142–43. 65. For instance, see Juan Villegas, “La brisa emotiva de un romance viejo: ‘Aviso de la Fortuna y Derrota de Don Rodrigo,’ ” Hispania 57, no. 1 (1974): 13– 22; John R. Burt, “The Motif of the Fall of Man in the ‘Romancero del Rey Rodrigo,’ ” Hispania 61, no. 3 (1978): 435–42. 66. Barros, Da Ásia, Década 1, bk. 1, chapter 1, 7 ( here, as elsewhere in this edition, “Larigh” is a misprint for “Tarigh”). 67. See Jean Aubin, “Les documents arabes, persans et turcs de la Torre do Tombo,” in Le Latin et l’Astrolabe, 2:417–52. 68. On this issue, see the abundant materials in Luís Filipe Thomaz, “La présence iranienne autour de l’Océan Indien au XVIe siècle d’après les sources portugaises de l’époque,” Archipel 68 (2004): 59–158. 69. Jean Aubin, “Francisco de Albuquerque: Un juif castillan au ser vice de l’Inde portugaise,” in Aubin, Le Latin et l’Astrolabe, 2:251–73. More generally, see Dejanirah Couto, “The Role of Interpreters, or Línguas, in the Portuguese Empire during the 16th Century,” e-Journal of Portuguese History 1, no. 2 (2003),

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https://www.brown .edu / Departments / Portuguese _ Brazilian _ Studies /ejph / html /issue2/ html /couto_ main.html. 70. Elias Lipiner, Gaspar da Gama: Um converso na frota de Cabral (Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1987); of crucial importance on this figure is the recent essay by Luís Filipe F. Reis Thomaz, “Gaspar da Gama e a génese da estatégia portuguesa no Índico,” in D. Francisco de Almeida, 1o vice- rei português: Actas do IX Simpósio de História Marítima (Lisbon: Academia de Marinha, 2007), 455–92. 71. Barros, Da Ásia, Década 2, bk. 4, chapter 4, 407–14. 72. Ibid., bk. 2, chapter 2, 107–8. 73. Ibid., bk. 5, chapter 2, 442–43. 74. For a helpful discussion, see Sunil Kumar, “Persian Literary Traditions and Narrativizing the Delhi Sultanate,” in Kumar, The Emergence of the Delhi Sultanate, 1192–1286 (Ranikhet, India: Permanent Black, 2007), 362–77; and the earlier, provocative view in Peter Hardy, Historians of Medieval India: Studies in Indo-Muslim Historical Writing (London: Luzac, 1966). 75. Our main source for the “missing” chronicles of the Deccan is the preface to the early seventeenth-century work of Firishta, which lists as many as thirty-five earlier works used by him, several lost to us; see Muhammad Qasim Hindushah Astarabadi Firishta, Tārīkh-i Firishta, vol. 1 (Poona: Dar al-Imarah, 1247 AH / 1832). 76. Barros, Da Ásia, Década 2, bk. 5, chapter 2, 443. 77. See Jorge Flores, Nas Margens do Hindustão: O Estado da Índia e a Expansão Mogol, ca. 1570–1640 (Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade de Coimbra, 2015). 78. Barros, Da Ásia, Década 2, bk. 4, chapter 4, 412–13. 79. Ibid., bk. 10, chapter 5, 447–48. Compare the reference in Barros, Da Ásia, Década 2, bk. 4, chapter 4, 408: “We will undertake a small digression, reciting what we have learnt of the invention [of chess] from the doctrine of a book written in Persian called Tarigh, which we have translated into our language, which is a summary of all the kings that have been in Persia until a certain time when the Arabs with their sect of Mafamede subjugated it.” 80. For the broader context of the Timurid historiographical revolution, see John E. Woods, “The Rise of Tīmūrid Historiography,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 46, no. 2 (1987): 81–108. 81. Muhammad ibn Khawandshah ibn Mahmud, Tārīkh-i rauzat al-safā fī sīrat al-anbiyā’ wa’l- mulūk wa’l-khulafā’, ed. Jamshid Kiyanfar, 10 vols. (Tehran: Asatir, 1380/2001). For partial translations of this massive work, see Mirkhond, History of the Early Kings of Persia: From Kaiomars, the First of the Peshdadian Dynasty, to the Conquest of Iran by Alexander the Great, trans. David Shea (London: Oriental Translation Fund, 1832); Mirkhond, The Rauzat- us-safa, or Garden of Purity: Sacred and Profane History According to the Moslem Belief, trans. E. Rehatsek, ed. F. F. Arbuthnot, 2 parts in 5 vols. (London: The Royal Asiatic Society, 1891–94). 82. Relaciones de Pedro Teixeira del origen, descendencia y successión de los Reyes de Persia, y de Harmuz, y de un viage hecho por el mismo autor dende la India Oriental hasta Italia por tierra, ed. Eduardo Barajas Salas (Madrid: Ediciones Polifemo,

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1994), 3–4. Of far less use is the confusingly reordered English translation, The Travels of Pedro Teixeira, with his “Kings of Harmuz,” and Extracts from His “Kings of Persia,” trans. and ed. William  F. Sinclair and Donald Ferguson (London: Hakluyt Society, 1902). 83. Compare Benjamin Braude, “The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geograph ical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 54, no. 1 (1997): 103–42. 84. Boxer, João de Barros, 119. 85. Thus we may fruitfully compare Barros’s scholarly practices with “Orientalists” a bare generation or two later. For examples, see Francis Richard, “Les frères Vecchietti, diplomats, érudits et aventuriers,” in The Republic of Letters and the Levant, ed. Alastair Hamilton, Maurits van den Boogert, and Bart Westerveel (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 11–26; Alastair Hamilton and Francis Richard, André Du Ryer and Oriental Studies in Seventeenth- Century France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); and G. A. Russell, ed., The “Arabick” Interest of the Natural Philosophers in Seventeenth- Century England (Leiden: Brill, 1994). 86. See Maria Augusta Lima Cruz, Diogo do Couto e a Década 8a da Ásia, 2 vols. (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional, 1994), 2:265–353. 87. Rui Manuel Loureiro, A Biblioteca de Diogo do Couto (Macau: Instituto Cultural de Macau, 1998). 88. Zain al-Din Ma‘bari, Tuhfat al- mujāhidīn fī ba‘z ahwāl al-Burtukāliyyīn: História dos Portugueses no Malavar por Zinadím, ed. and trans. David Lopes (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional, 1899); Shaykh Zainuddin Makhdum, Tuhfat alMujāhidīn: A Historical Epic of the Sixteenth Century, trans. S. Muhammad Husayn Nainar (Kuala Lumpur: Islamic Book Trust, 2006). 89. For selections from this text, see Qutb al-Din al-Nahrawali al-Makki, Lightning over Yemen: A History of the Ottoman Campaign (1569–71), trans. Clive K. Smith (London: I. B. Tauris, 2002); also Richard Blackburn, Journey to the Sublime Porte: The Arabic Memoir of a Sharifi an Agent’s Diplomatic Mission to the Ottoman Imperial Court in the Era of Suleyman the Magnifi cent (Beirut: Ergon, 2005), xi–xvi. 90. For more on Ottoman knowledge of America, see Thomas  D. Goodrich, The Ottoman Turks and the New World: A Study of “Tarih-i Hind-i Garbi” and Sixteenth- Century Ottoman Americana (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1990), and the more general reflection in Serge Gruzinski, Quelle heure est-il là-bas?: Amérique et islam à l’orée des temps modernes (Paris: Seuil, 2008). It is clear that Ottoman intellectuals were familiar with the works of López de  Gómara, Fernández de Oviedo, Agustín de Zarate, and Pietro Martire d’Anghiera. 91. See Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Taking Stock of the Franks: South Asian Views of Eu ropeans and Eu rope, 1500–1800,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 42, no. 1 (2005): 69–100. 92. For more about St. Antoninus, see Peter Howard, “Preaching Magnificence in Renaissance Florence,” Renaissance Quarterly 61, no. 2 (2008): 325–69; and an older work by James Bernard Walker, The “Chronicles” of Saint Antoninus, a Study in Historiography (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America, 1933).

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93. See Audrey Truschke, Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016); and an earlier essay by Carl W. Ernst, “Muslim Studies of Hinduism? A Reconsideration of Arabic and Persian Translations from Indian Languages,” Iranian Studies 36, no. 2 (2003): 173–95. 94. Firishta, Tārīkh-i Firishta, 1:13–14. 95. Ira Robinson, “Isaac de la Peyrère and the Recall of the Jews,” Jewish Social Studies 40, no. 2 (1978) 117–30; David N. Livingstone, “The Preadamite Theory and the Marriage of Science and Religion,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, n.s., 82, no. 3 (1992): 1–78. Also the more general considerations in Giuliano Gliozzi, Adamo e il nuovo mondo: La nascita dell’antropologia come ideologia coloniale; Dalle genealogie bibliche alle teorie razziali (1500–1700) (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1977). 96. Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, “Contested Memories of Pre-Islamic Iran,” Medieval History Journal 2, no. 2 (1999): 245–75; Aditya Behl, “Pages from the Book of Religions: Encountering Difference in Mughal India,” in Forms of Knowledge in Early Modern Asia: Explorations in the Intellectual History of India and Tibet, 1500–1800, ed. Sheldon Pollock (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 210–39. 97. Armando Cortesão, ed. and trans., The Suma Oriental of Tomé Pires and the Book of Francisco Rodrigues, 2 vols. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1944). 98. See the extensive study by Luís Filipe F. R. Thomaz, “ ‘O testamento político’ de Diogo Pereira, o Malabar, e o projecto oriental dos Gamas,” Anais de História de Além-Mar 5 (2004): 61–160. 99. A useful summing up of his career may be found in Rubiés, Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance, 204–5. However, Rubiés’s claim that Barbosa traveled extensively “to the interior and to the eastern coast of the peninsula” still remains doubtful (214n). 100. Albuquerque to the King Dom Manuel, from the ship Santo António, dated 30 October 1512, in ANTT, Gavetas, XV / 14–38, in Cartas de Affonso de Albuquerque, seguidas de documentos que as elucidam, ed. Raymundo António de Bulhão Pato (Lisbon: Academia Real das Sciencias, 1884), 1:97. 101. Historical Archives of Goa, Panaji, Livro 7737, fl s. 14v–28: “Rol da Finta dos Portugueses,” summarized in Rafael Moreira, “Goa em 1535: Uma cidade manuelina,” Revista da Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas 2, no. 8 (1995): 177–221. The purpose of the special tax, or finta, which was levied by the governor Nuno da Cunha on April 21, 1535, was to build the waterworks called the Chafariz do Mandovim with the waters of Nossa Senhora do Monte. 102. For broad accounts of the city, see M. N. Pearson, “Goa during the First Century of Portuguese Rule,” Itinerario 8, no. 1 (1984): 36–57; also Catarina Madeira Santos, “Goa é a chave de toda a Índia”: Perfil político da capital do Estado da Índia (1505–1570) (Lisbon: CNCDP, 1999). 103. ANTT, Corpo Cronológico, I-32–93, letter from the settlers in Melaka to the King of Portugal, 12 August 1525. For a fuller discussion of the tensions between various social groups in this context, see Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “What the Tamils said: A letter from the Kelings of Melaka (1527),” Archipel 82 (2011): 137–58.

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104. See Lima Cruz, Diogo do Couto e a Década 8a da Ásia, vol. 2. 105. Rubiés, Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance, 205, 211. This argument is somewhat in contradiction to the same author’s point (p. 255) that the “extreme emphasis on observed detail” by writers such as Correia “was, of course, another rhetorical trick.” For a very dif ferent understanding of the functioning of the Portuguese in relation to Goa, see Ângela Barreto Xavier, A invenção de Goa: Poder imperial e conversões culturais nos séculos XVI e XVII (Lisbon: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 2008), 25–27, 275–77, passim. 106. For the text, see Augusto Reis Machado, ed., Livro em que dá relação do que viu e ouviu no Oriente Duarte Barbosa (Lisbon: Agência Geral das Colónias, 1946); the standard translation is Mansel Longworth Dames, ed. and trans., The Book of Duarte Barbosa: An Account of the Countries Bordering on the Indian Ocean and Their Inhabitants, 2 vols. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1918–21). For an annotated version of the section on Kerala, see M. Gangadharan, ed., Duarte Barbosa’s “The Land of Malabar” (Kottayam: Mahatma Gandhi University, 2000). 107. Machado, Livro em que dá relação, 63–67; Dames, Book of Duarte Barbosa, 1:108–17. Since Dames’s translation is rather loose, I have not used it, save for some clarifications. For example, he corrects brâmanes in the text to baneanes, which appears reasonable when writing of merchants. 108. Machado, Livro em que dá relação, 107; Dames, Book of Duarte Barbosa, 1:212–13. 109. For a wide-ranging account, see Andrea Major, Pious Flames: European Encounters with Sati (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006). In this work, Major attempts to navigate a middle path between Said and his critics. 110. See, for instance, Georges Duby, The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). 111. Machado, Livro em que dá relação, 120; Dames, Book of Duarte Barbosa, 2:6–7. Dames’s translation here is again loose, and I have returned to the original text. 112. Rubiés, Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance, 209–10. 113. Nicholas B. Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 5. 114. Dirks, Castes of Mind, 19. Interestingly, there is a chapter on “caste” but no mention at all of the Portuguese materials in Ronald B. Inden, Imagining India (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 49–84. 115. See the disappointing discussion in Sumit Guha, Beyond Caste: Identity and Power in South Asia, Past and Present, rev. ed. (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2015), 23–36. 116. In this context, see the very useful comparative remarks on the terms raza, casta, and linaje, in David Nirenberg, “Was There Race before Modernity? The Example of ‘Jewish’ Blood in Late Medieval Spain,” in The Origins of Racism in the West, ed. Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Benjamin Isaac, and Joseph Ziegler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 232–64. 117. Jeremiah P. Losty, “Identifying the Artist of Codex Casanatense 1889,” Anais de História de Além-Mar 13 (2012): 13–40 (citation on 36). Guha, Beyond Caste, 27n, misidentifies this work as “a specimen from early seventeenth-

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century Portuguese India.” For a broader contextualization, also see Ângela Barreto Xavier and Ines G. Županov, Catholic Orientalism: Portuguese Empire, Indian Knowledge (16th–18th Centuries) (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2015), 54–58. 118. Luís de Matos, ed., Imagens do Oriente no século XVI: Reprodução do códice português da Biblioteca Casanatense (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional, 1985). 119. Xavier and Županov, Catholic Orientalism, 119. 120. Agostinho de Azevedo et  al., “Estado da Índia e aonde tem o seu princípio,” in Documentação Ultramarina Portuguesa, ed. António da Silva Rego (Lisbon: Centro de Estudos Históricos Ultramarinos, 1960), 1:197–263 (citation on 249–50); an alternative version appears in Silva Rego, ed., Documentação Ultramarina Portuguesa (Lisbon: Centro de Estudos Históricos Ultramarinos, 1962), 2:40–260 (citation on 133). 121. Xavier and Županov, Catholic Orientalism, 140. There is no evidence to support Rubiés’s claim (Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance, 315) that Azevedo’s was an “original summary of Hindu religion, from Shaiva Sanskrit and Tamil texts.” Nothing suggests that Azevedo was able to read texts in either language, as his poor efforts at transliteration clearly show. 122. Compare the conclusions of Joan-Pau Rubiés, “The Jesuit Discovery of Hinduism: Antonio Rubino’s Account of the History and Religion of Vijayanagara (1608),” Archiv für Religionsgeschichte 3 (2001): 210–56, and the more convincing analysis in Xavier and Županov, Catholic Orientalism, 145–57. 123. Rego, ed., Documentação, 1:260; 2:143. 124. Ibid., 1:260–61; 2:144. 125. Diogo do Couto, Década Quinta da Ásia: Dos feitos que os Portugueses fizerão no descobrimento dos mares & conquista das terras do Oriente (Lisbon: Pedro Crasbeeck, 1612), 124v–31. 126. For example, Padre Raphael Bluteau, Vocabulario Portuguez e Latino . . . autorizado com exemplos dos melhores escritores portuguezes, e latinos (Coimbra: Collegio das Artes da Companhia de Jesu, 1712), 2:183–84. 127. Urs App, The Birth of Orientalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 330–31, 340. 128. Dirks has claimed (Castes of Mind, 5), that “it was under the British that ‘caste’ became a single term capable of expressing, organizing, and above all ‘systematizing’ India’s diverse forms of social identity, community, and organization.” While this may indeed be true, it is unfortunate that his inadequate understanding of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries does not render his proposition particularly well-founded. 129. For a discussion, see Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500–1700: A Political and Economic History, 2nd  ed. (Oxford: WileyBlackwell, 2012), 228–36. 130. See Friedrich Dobel, “Ueber einen Pfefferhandel der Fugger und Welser, 1586–91,” Zeitschrift des historisches Vereins für Schwaben und Neuburg 13 (1886): 125–38; and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “An Augsburger in Ásia Portuguesa: Further light on the commercial world of Ferdinand Cron, 1587–1624,” in Emporia, Commodities and Entrepreneurs in Asian Maritime Trade, c. 1400– 1750, ed. R. Ptak and D. Rothermund (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1991), 401–25.

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131. For an example, see David Lopes’s introduction to Zain al-Din Ma‘bari, Tuhfat al- mujāhidīn, xc–ci. 132. Rubiés, Travel and Ethnology in the Re naissance, 391–93. There is of course an odd paradox in Rubiés’s argument, in that his knowledge of early modern South Asia is almost entirely based on the very Eu ropean accounts he claims to evaluate. 133. Jorge Flores, The Mughal Padshah: A Jesuit Treatise on Emperor Jahangir’s Court and Household (Leiden: Brill 2016), 88 (translation), 131 (text). 134. Flores, The Mughal Padshah, 94–95 (translation), 135 (text).

chapter 2 . The Question of “Indian Religion” Epigraph: My translation. “Quand je leur disais sur cela que dans les pays froids il serait impossible d’observer leur loi pendant l’hiver, ce qui était un signe qu’elle n’était qu’une pure invention des hommes, ils me donnaient cette réponse assez plaisante: qu’ils ne prétendaient pas que leur loi fût universelle; que Dieu ne l’avait faite que pour eux et que c’était pour cela qu’ils ne pouvaient pas recevoir un étranger dans leur religion; qu’au reste ils ne prétendaient point que la nôtre fût fausse; qu’ils se pouvait faire qu’elle fût bonne pour nous et que Dieu pouvait avoir fait plusieurs chemins différents pour aller au ciel, mais ils ne veulent pas entendre que la nôtre, étant générale pour toute la terre, la leur ne peut être que fable et que pure invention.” Frédéric Tinguely, ed., Un libertin dans l’Inde moghole: Les voyages de François Bernier (1656–1669) (Paris: Editions Chandeigne, 2008), 327. 1. Joan-Pau Rubiés, Travel and Ethnology in the Re naissance: South India through European Eyes, 1250–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 165. 2. E.  E. Evans-Pritchard, Nuer Religion (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956). In fact, Nuer Religion was preceded slightly by Joseph Pasquale Crazzolara, Zur Gesellschaft und Religion der Nueer (Wien-Mödling: Missionsdruckerei St. Gabriel, 1953). 3. Clifford Geertz, “Religion as a Cultural System,” in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 87–125. For a particularly (perhaps unjustifiably) sharp critique of this formulation from a philosophical viewpoint, see Nancy  K. Frankenberry and Hans  H. Penner, “Clifford Geertz’s Long-Lasting Moods, Motivations, and Metaphysical Conceptions,” Journal of Religion 79, no. 4 (1999): 617–40. 4. Talal Asad, “The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category,” in Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Chris tianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 53–54. 5. Asad’s position seems to be influenced by but also to differ from the earlier work of Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion: A New Approach to the Religious Traditions of Mankind (New York: New American Library, 1963). See Talal Asad, “Reading a Modern Classic: W. C. Smith’s The Meaning and End of Religion,” History of Religions 40, no. 3 (2001): 205–22. 6. Carmen Bernand and Serge Gruzinski, De l’idolâtrie: Une archéologie des sciences religieuses (Paris: Seuil, 1988). In fact this work is almost never cited in English-language historiography. For a rare exception, see Guy G. Stroumsa,

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“John Spencer and the Roots of Idolatry,” History of Religions 41, no. 1 (2001): 1–23. 7. See David  N. Lorenzen, “Who Invented Hinduism?,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 41, no. 4 (1999): 630–59. Also see the interest ing earlier discussion in Joseph T. O’Connell, “The Word ‘Hindu’ in Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava Texts,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 93, no. 3 (1973): 340– 44; and for a recent overview of the question, Will Sweetman, Mapping Hinduism: “Hinduism” and the Study of Indian Religions (Halle, Germany: Franckeschen Stiftungen, 2003). I have also dealt with some of the major conceptual problems in this discussion in Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “La ‘religion,’ une catégorie déroutante: Perspectives depuis l’Asie du Sud,” Asdiwal: Revue genevoise d’anthropologie et d’histoire des religions 9 (2014): 79–90. 8. Paola von Wyss- Giacosa, Religionsbilder der frühen Aufklärung: Bernard Picarts Tafeln für die ‘Cérémonies et Coutumes religieuses de tous les Peuples du Monde’ (Wabern, Switzerland: Benteli, 2006). 9. For impor tant general reflections on this text, see Margaret C. Jacob, “Bernard Picart and the Turn to Modernity,” De achttiende eeuw 37 (2005): 1–16; and Silvia Berti, “Bernard Picart e Jean Frédéric Bernard dalla religione riformata al deismo: Un incontro con il mondo ebraico nell’Amsterdam del primo settecento,” Rivista Storica Italiana 117 (2005): 974–1001. 10. Donald F. Lach and Edwin J. van Kley, Asia in the Making of Europe, vol. 3, A Century of Advance, bk. 1, Trade, Missions, Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 596–97. This is also the viewpoint of the essay by Joan-Pau Rubiés, “From Christian Apologetics to Deism: Libertine Readings of Hindusim, 1650–1730,” in God in the Enlightenment, ed. William  J. Bulman and Robert  G. Ingram (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 107–35. Rubiés locates the Picart-Bernard work in a simple teleology of the Enlightenment. 11. Partha Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters: A History of European Reactions to Indian Art (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977), 64–68. 12. For more on Hastings and his milieu, see Peter J. Marshall, ed., The British Discovery of Hinduism in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970). 13. Bernard’s remarks of 1741, as cited in Von Wyss-Giacosa, Religionsbilder der frühen Aufklärung, 40. 14. Cited in Von Wyss- Giacosa, Religionsbilder der frühen Aufklärung, 39. 15. La Créquinière, “The Conformity of the Customs of the East Indians with those of the Jews and other Antient nations,” in Bernard Picart, The Ceremonies and Religious Customs of the Various Nations of the Known World: Together with Historical Annotations, and Several Curious Discourses Equally Instructive and Entertaining, Written Originally in French, and Illustrated with a Large Number of Folio Copper Plates, All Beautifully Designed by Bernard Picart, and Curiously Engraved by Most of the Best Hands of Europe; Faithfully Translated into English by a Gentleman Some Time since of St. John’s College in Oxford, 7 vols. (London: William Jackson, 1733–1739), 3:214–99. The original English version appears as Mr De la C***, The Agreement of the Customs of the East-Indians, with Those of the Jews, and Other Ancient People: Being the First Essay of This Kind, Towards the Explaining

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of Several Diffi cult Passages in Scripture, and Some of the Most Ancient Writers (London: W. Davis, 1705). Also see Frank E. Manuel, The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), 17–18, for a brief discussion. 16. La Créquinière, “The Conformity of the Customs of the East Indians,” 216. 17. The most significant recent analy sis of the work is that by Carlo Ginzburg, “Provincializing the World: Eu ropeans, Indians, Jews (1704),” Postcolonial Studies 14, no. 2 (2011): 135–50. 18. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM), Colonies, C2 65, fls. 100– 100v, “Mr La Créquinière à Pondichéry, le 1er octobre 1700, fonction d’aide majeur.” The essay by Rubiés, “From Christian Apologetics to Deism,” also cites a letter mentioning him, written by a contemporary and dated February 1702, in ANOM, Colonies, C2 66, fl. 206v. 19. For more on De Livernan, see Paul Kaeppelin, La compagnie des Indes orientales et François Martin: étude sur l’histoire du commerce de des établissements français dans l’Inde sous Louis XIV (1664–1719) (Paris: Augustin Challamel, 1908), 457, 547. 20. The research of Carlo Ginzburg has brought to light that from around 1706, La Créquinière was in the process of revising his text, toward a second edition, which he never completed; see Ginzburg, “Provincializing the World,” 144. The draft revisions may be found in Bibliothèque nationale de France, Ms occidentaux fr. 9723. 21. La Créquinière, “The Conformity of the Customs of the East Indians,” 218. 22. Ibid., 291–92. 23. Ibid., 216. 24. Ibid., 292, note a. 25. Ibid., 291–94 (notes). 26. Henry Lord, “A Discovery of the Sect of the Banians,” in Picart, Ceremonies and Religious Customs, 3:302–41. For a useful, more recent edition with editorial remarks, see Will Sweetman, A Discovery of the Banian Religion and the Religion of the Persees: A Critical Edition of Two Early English Works on Indian Religions (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1999). For a summary of the contents of Lord’s work, see Donald F. Lach and Edwin J. van Kley, Asia in the Making of Europe, vol. 3, A Century of Advance, bk. 2, South Asia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 645–51. 27. Lord, “A Discovery of the Sect of the Banians,” 341. 28. For the standard modern edition, see Willem Caland, ed., De open-deure tot het verborgen heydendom door Abraham Rogerius (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1915). For an extended summary, see Lach and van Kley, Asia in the Making of Europe, vol. 3, bk. 2, South Asia, 1029–57, as well as the discussion in Sweetman, Mapping Hinduism, 89–103. 29. Bettina Noak, “Glossaries and Knowledge-Transfer: Andreas Wissowatius and Abraham Rogerius,” in Dynamics of Neo-Latin and the Vernacular: Language and Poetics, Translation and Transfer, ed. Tom B. Deneire (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 251–65. The preface is signed “Leiden, 26th December 1650,” with the

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phrase “A.  W. JCtus [ Jurisconsultus].” The author mentions (1651 edition, “Voor-reden,” 4v) that he was given the text by “seker seer gheleert en vermaert Professor in de Universiteyt tot Leyden,” and that the two had put together a brief para-text (eenige korte Aenteyckeningen). 30. Abraham Rogerius, “A Dissertation on the Religion and Manners of the Bramins,” in Picart, Ceremonies and Religious Customs, 3:351. This corresponds to Caland, De open-deure, 13–14. However, the English text omits a crucial phrase: “ghelijck den Bramine Padmanaba ghetuyghde, die oock selfs van dese Secte was.” These changes were apparently made by Antoine-Augustin Bruzen de la Martinière, on whose edited version of La Grue’s translation Picart based his work; see Sweetman, Mapping Hinduism, 90. 31. “A Dissertation on the Religion and Manners of the Bramins,” 349. The Dutch text in Caland, De open-deure, 7–8, has again been considerably shortened here by La Martinière. 32. “A Dissertation on the Religion and Manners of the Bramins,” 352; Caland, De open-deure, 15. 33. “Supplement to the Preceding Dissertations,” in Picart, Ceremonies and Religious Customs, 3:459. 34. “A Dissertation on the Religion and Manners of the Bramins,” 405. 35. Anonymous review of the Voyages de Mr Dellon in the Journal des Sçavans 38 (1709): 598–605. On Dellon more generally, see Charles Amiel and Anne Lima, eds., L’Inquisition de Goa: La relation de Charles Dellon (1687) (Paris: Editions Chandeigne, 1997). 36. “An Historical Dissertation on the Gods of the East-Indians,” in Picart, Ceremonies and Religious Customs, 3:409. 37. Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Venice, Codex Zanetti, It. 44, fls. 366 (b)–(i) in Italian; followed a more extended version in French, fls. 367–406; excerpts may be found in Piero Falchetta, ed., Storia del Mogol di Nicolò Manuzzi veneziano, 2 vols. (Milan: Franco Maria Ricci, 1986), 2:170–210; and an English translation in William Irvine, trans., Mogul India, 1653–1708, or Storia do Mogor by Niccolao Manucci Venetian, 4 vols. (London: J. Murray, 1907–1908), 3:1–71. 38. This copy, which still bears the stamp of the Colegii Paris Societatis Jesu, is to be found today in the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Codex Phillipps 1945, 3 vols.; the relevant section is vol. 3, fls. 48r–69v. 39. The text was published in Willem Caland, ed., Twee oude Fransche verhandelingen over het Hindoeïsme (Amsterdam: Koninklijke Akademie van Wetenschappen, 1923), 3–92. Caland suggested that this text was itself a revised and reworked version of an account fi rst prepared by Roberto de Nobili in about 1644. But it is in fact the same as the “Breve notícia dos erros que tem os Gentios do Concão na Índia,” by João de Brito, in the Biblioteca da Ajuda, Lisbon, Codex 51-II-27, fls. 81v–116r. 40. Irvine, trans., Mogul India, 1653–1708, 3:1. 41. “An Historical Dissertation on the Gods of the East-Indians,” 437, note (a). 42. “A Letter from Father Bouchet, a Jesuit, Missionary to the Maduras, and Superior of the new Mission of Carnate, to Mons. Huet, Bishop of Avranches,” in Picart, Ceremonies and Religious Customs, 3:442–53. For an

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extended commentary on this correspondence, see D. J. A. Clines, “In Search of the Indian Job,” Vetus Testamentum 33, no. 4 (1983): 398–418, and Sweetman, Mapping Hinduism, 135–41. For more on Huet, see Alphonse Dupront, PierreDaniel Huet et l’exégèse comparatiste au XVIIe siècle (Paris: E. Leroux, 1930), and the rather narrowly conceived work by April G. Shelford, Transforming the Republic of Letters: Pierre-Daniel Huet and European Intellectual Life, 1650–1720 (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2007). 43. Bouchet referred in par ticu lar to Huet’s celebrated work Demonstratio evangelica ad serenissimum delphinum (1679). 44. “Supplement to the Preceding Dissertation,” 476. Here, there is also a reference to the Bologna edition of della Valle’s work from 1672. 45. This section derives from Bernier’s letter to Monsieur Chapelain of October 4, 1667, for which see Tinguely, ed., Un libertin dans l’Inde moghole, 331–44. 46. On the first of these texts, see Jarl Charpentier, ed., The Livro da seita dos Indios orientais (Brit. Mus. Ms. Sloane 1820) of Father Jacobo Fenicio, S. J. (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksells, 1953); on the latter, Siegfried Kratzsch, ed., Deex Autaer von Philip Angel: Eine niederländische Handschrift aus dem 17. Jahrhundert über die zehn Avataras des Visnu (Halle: Franckeschen Stiftungen, 2007), and especially Carolien  M. Stolte, Philip Angel’s Deex-Autaers: Vaisnava mythology from manuscript to book market in the context of the Dutch East India Company, c. 1600–1672 (New Delhi: Manohar, 2012). For the standard edition of this section of Baldaeus, see Albert Johannes de Jong, ed., Afgoderye der Oost-Indische heydenen door Philippus Baldaeus (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1917). 47. Jarl Charpentier, “The Brit. Mus. Ms. Sloane 3290, the common source for Baldæus and Dapper,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies 3, no. 3 (1924): 420. 48. On Kircher, see most recently, Paula Findlen, ed., Athanasius Kircher: The last man who knew everything (New York : Routledge, 2004); on Roth, see Arnulf Camps and Jean- Claude Muller, eds., The Sanskrit grammar and manuscripts of Father Heinrich Roth, S. J. (1620–1668): Facsimile edition of Biblioteca Nazionale, Rome, Mss. Or. 171 and 172 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1988), 5–9, and Gita Dharampal-Frick, Indien im Spiegel deutscher Quellen der Frühen Neuzeit (1500– 1750): Studien zu einer interkulturellen Konstellation (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1994), 88–92. We note that various other German writers of the period on India are not given much place; see, for example, Antje Flüchter, “ ‘Aus den fürnembsten indianischen Reisebeschreibungen zusammegezogen’: Knowledge about India in early modern Germany,” in Siegfried Huigen, Jan L. de Jong and Elmer Kolfi n, eds., The Dutch Trading Companies as Knowledge Networks (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 337–59; and A. Flüchter, “Handling of Diversity in Early Modern India?: Perception and Evaluation in German Discourse,” The Medieval History Journal 16, no. 2 (2013): 297–334. 49. For an overview of the main published accounts in French, see Frédéric Tinguely, Le fakir et le Taj Mahal: L’Inde au prisme des voyageurs français du XVIIe siècle (Geneva: La Baconnière, 2011). 50. See Les Voyages et Observations du Sieur de la Boullaye-le- Gouz, gentilhomme angevin (1653 ; Paris: François Clousier, 1657).

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51. See Stroumsa, “John Spencer and the Roots of Idolatry,” 5: “The general preface of Cérémonies et coutumes speaks (already) of the Etre Suprême in whom all peoples, including the most savage ones, believe, although usually under dif ferent names.” 52. See Michele Bernardini, “The Illustrations of a Manuscript of the Travel Account of François de la Boullaye le Gouz in the Library of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei in Rome,” Muqarnas 21 (2004): 55–72. 53. Garcia da Orta, Colóquios dos simples e drogas da Índia, ed. Conde de Ficalho, 2 vols. (Lisbon : Imprensa Nacional, 1891–1895); Cristóvão da Costa, Tratado das drogas e medicinas das Índias Orientais: no qual se verifi ca muito do que escreveu o Doutor Garcia de Orta, ed. Jaime Walter (Lisbon: Junta de Investigações do Ultramar, 1964). 54. For the best recent presentation of this text, see Jean Aubin et al. Le voyage de Ludovico di Varthema en Arabie et aux Indes orientales (1503–1508), trans. Paul Teyssier (Paris: Chandeigne, 2004). 55. Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters, 321–25. Also see Francis Richard, “Les manuscrits persans d’origine indienne à la Bibliothèque nationale,” Revue de la Bibliothèque nationale 19 (1986): 30–46. 56. Otto Kurz, “A Volume of Indian Miniatures and Drawings,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 30 (1967): 251–71. The unfi nished genealogical painting of the Mughals there resembles that in the Aga Khan Collection in Toronto; see Sheila R. Canby, Princes, poètes et paladins: Miniatures islamiques et indiennes de la collection du prince et de la princesse Sadruddin Aga Khan, trans. Claude Ritschard (Geneva: Musée d’art et d’histoire, 1999), 145–47 (M. 177, today AKM151). 57. See the discussion in Pauline Lunsingh Scheurleer, “Het Witsenalbum: Zeventiende-eeuwse Indische portretten op bestelling,” Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 44 (1996): 167–254. 58. See the overview in Ronald  W. Lightbown, “Oriental Art and the Orient in Late Renaissance and Baroque Italy,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 32 (1969): 228–79. 59. See Henri Abraham Châtelain, Atlas historique, ou Nouvelle introduction à l’histoire, à la chronologie & à la géographie ancienne & moderne, vol. 5, L’Asie en général & en particulier (Amsterdam: Z. Châtelain, 1732–1739). 60. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, Smith-Lesouëf 233, described in the volume itself as a collection: “che contiene 47 Ritratti in miniatura di Prencipi del Mogol, raccolti nel viaggio, che nel 1690 fece in Persia e nella India orientali M r Claudio LeBrun Pittore Olandese.” The reference is to Cornelis de Bruyn (c.1652–1727), a Dutch artist and traveler, and author of Travels into Muscovy, Persia, and part of the East-Indies, Containing, an accurate description of whatever is most remarkable in those countries, and embellished with above 320 copper plates, 2 vols. (London: A. Bettesworth and C. Hitch, S. Birt, C. Davis, J. Clarke, S. Harding, 1737). 61. “Cata logo di alcune rarità, che il Sig. Abate Co. Giovannantonio Baldini ha riportate da’ suoi viaggi, venute principalmente dall’Indie e dalla Cina; indiritto al D. Piercaterino Zeno C. R. S. dal Sig. Antonio Vallisnieri, pubblico primario Professore di medicina teorica nello studio di Padova, con

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lettera data di Padova il dì terzo di novembre, 1719,” Giornale de’ Letterati d’Italia 33, no. 2 (1722): 118–48; “Altra Lettera del Signor Antonio Vallisnieri al Padre D. Piercaterino Zeno, C. R. S. con cui mandagli il Catalogo de’ Re del Mogol, i ritratti de’ quali serbansi nel ricco museo del Co. Ab. Giovannantonio Baldini,” Supplementi al Giornale de’ Letterati d’Italia 3 (1726): 337–76. 62. These are reproduced in Lightbown, “Oriental Art and the Orient,” between pages 264 and 265. On the Rajasthan painting, I have benefited a great deal from Dipti Khera, “Copying Contexts: Picturing Places and Histories in Udaipur Court Painting and Picart’s Atlas Historique,” in Books and Print between Cultures, 1500–1900, September 18–19 2015, Amherst College. 63. Bodleian Library, Oxford, Ms. Laud Or. 149; also see the discussion in Herbert J. Stooke and Karl Khandalavala, The Laud Ragamala Miniatures: A Study in Indian Painting and Music (Oxford: B. Cassirer, 1953). 64. For a fuller discussion, see Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Further thoughts on an enigma: The tortuous life of Nicolò Manucci, 1638– c.1720,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 45, no. 1 (2008): 35–76. 65. Also see Siegfried Kratzsch, “Die Darstellung der zehn Avataras Visnus in Athanasius Kirchers ‘China Illustrata,’ ” Altorientalische Forschungen 9 (1982): 133–44. 66. Charpentier, “The Brit. Mus. Ms. Sloane 3290,” 415. This series, from British Library, Additional Manuscript 5254, is reproduced in Von WyssGiacosa, Religionsbilder der frühen Aufklärung, 238–39. 67. This is the conclusion reached in Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters, 298, based on the earlier work of H. Pott, Naar wijder horizon: Kaleidoscoop op ons beeld van de buitenwereld (The Hague: Mouton, 1962). The defi nitive work on the question is now that of Stolte, Philip Angel’s Deex-Autaers. 68. Stroumsa, “John Spencer and the Roots of Idolatry,” 6–7. 69. For a general perspective on this issue, see Michael T. Ryan, “Assimilating New Worlds in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 23, no. 4 (1981): 519–38. 70. For a sampling of such recent works, see Daniel Dubuisson, L’occident et la religion (Brussels: Complexe, 1998); Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005); and Jason Ānanda Josephson, The Invention of Religion in Japan (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012). The most peculiar and confused work in this regard is S. N. Balagangadhara, “The Heathen in his Blindness . . .”: Asia, the West and the Dynamic of Religion (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994), which despite its “cult” status in some circles, in real ity does not advance the discussion an iota. 71. Ines G. Županov, Disputed Mission: Jesuit Experiments and Brahmanical Knowledge in Seventeenth- century India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999). The oft- quoted phrase from the celebrated Italian Jesuit Nobili runs: “quod regulam, qua dignosci debent, quae sint apud hos Indos politica et quae sacra.” See Roberto de’ Nobili, Adaptation: Narratio fundamentorum quibus Madurensis Missionis institutum caeptum est, et hucusque consistit, auctore Illustrissimo, ac Reverendissimo Domino Francisco Rocio Cranganorensi Archiepiscopo, ed. S. Rajaman-

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ickam, trans. J. Pujo (Palayamkottai: De Nobili Research Institute, 1971), 154–55. 72. See Aditya Behl, “Pages from the Book of Religions: Encountering Difference in Mughal India,” in Sheldon Pollock, ed., Forms of Knowledge in Early Modern Asia: Explorations in the Intellectual History of India and Tibet, 1500–1800 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 210–39; also Fath-Allah Mojtaba’i, “Dabestān- e Madāheb,” Encyclopaedia Iranica 6, fasc. 5, (1993): 532–34. The much- debated authorship was correctly established based on a seventeenth- century manuscript by Ahmad Monzavi, Fihrist- i nuskhahā- yi khattī-i kitābkhāna-i Ganj Bakhsh, 4 vols. (Islamabad: Markaz-i Tahqiqat-i Farsi-i Iran wa Pakistan, 1979–1980), 2:471–72 (No. 558). For a modern edition of the text, see Rahim Riza’zadah Malik, ed., Dabistān-i mazāhib, 2 vols. (Tehran: Kitabkhanah-i Tahuri, 1362 Sh. [1983]), though the authorship is incorrectly attributed there to Kaykhusrau Isfandiyar. For a somewhat dated translation, David Shea and Anthony Troyer, trans., The Dabistán: or School of manners, 3 vols. (Paris: Oriental Translation Fund of Great Britain and Ireland, 1843); and for late eighteenth- century readings and misreadings of  this text, also see Bruce Lincoln, “Isaac Newton and Oriental Jones on Myth, Ancient History, and the Relative Prestige of Peoples,” History of Religions 42, no. 1 (2002): 1–18. 73. Jivanji Jamshedji Modi, “A Parsee High Priest (Dastūr Āzar Kaiwān, 1529–1614 A.C.) with his Zoroastrian Disciples in Patna in the 16th and 17th Century A.C.,” Journal of the K. R. Cama Oriental Institute 20 (1932): 1–85. 74. M. Athar Ali, “Pursuing an Elusive Seeker of Universal Truth: The Identity and Environment of the Author of the Dabistān-i Mazāhib,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 3rd ser., 9, no. 3 (1999): 365–73 (citation on 371). I have slightly emended the translation. Compare this to the letter from Spinoza to Alfred Burgh in 1675: “But you, who presume that you have at last found the best religion, or rather, the best men to whom you have pledged your credulity, how do you know that they are the best out of all those who have taught other religions, are teaching them now, or will teach them in the future? Have you examined all those religions, both ancient and modern, which are taught here and in India and throughout the whole world?” See Samuel Shirley, trans., Spinoza: The Letters, introduction and notes by Steven Barbone, Lee Rice and Jacob Adler (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co, 1995), 342. 75. For a fuller discussion, see Muzaffar Alam, The Languages of Political Islam in India, c. 1200–1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 76. Malik, ed., Dabistān-i mazāhib, 1: 367. I am grateful to Carl W. Ernst for providing me with this translation, which corrects that of Ali, “Pursuing an Elusive Seeker of Universal Truth,” 365. 77. Behl, “Pages from the Book of Religions,” 221. 78. Simon Digby, “Some Asian Wanderers in Seventeenth- Century India: An Examination of Sources in Persian,” Studies in History, N.S., 9, no. 2 (1993): 247–64 (citation on 254). 79. Behl, “Pages from the Book of Religions,” 224.

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chapter 3 . Of Coproduction Epigraph: For a discussion of the poem and its “mercantilist” resonances, see Alex Eric Hernandez, “Commodity and Religion in Pope’s ‘The Rape of the Lock,’ ” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 48, no. 3 (2008): 569–84. 1. British Library, London (hereafter BL), Additional MS 35,447, Hardwicke Papers, vol. 99 (Scotch Affairs, 1749–1753), Memoir for Lord Findlater (1752/53), fl. 346. 2. For a discussion of these estates, including that of Lovat, see Annette M. Smith, Jacobite Estates of the Forty-Five (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1982). The Lovat estate was eventually returned to the family in 1774 by an act of Parliament. The Barons of the Exchequer was a common law court, the barons being appointed judges, and the factors being managers appointed by the barons to oversee disputed estates. 3. BL, Additional MS 35,447, fl. 353, Erskine (or, as he signs, “Areskine”) at Edinburgh to Lord Findlater, 30 June 1753. 4. BL, Additional MS 35,447, fls. 366–75, “Copy Mr Fraser of Relicks Proof, 1752”; fls. 376–82, “Copy Mr Fraser of Relicks 2nd proof, 1753”; fls. 384–89, “Copy Mr Grants Proof of Exculpation”; fls. 390–97, “Copy Precognition Taken by James Grant before the Sherriff of Inverness and Mr Ross of Geddes, 1753.” 5. BL, Additional MS 35,447, fl. 360–60v, Copy Letter from James Fraser to Mr. Baron Maule, undated (mid 1752). 6. See the valuable account of Grant and his network in David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735–1785 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 48–59, passim. 7. Alastair J. Durie, The Scottish Linen Industry in the Eighteenth Century (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1979), 65. 8. BL, Additional MS 35,448, fls. 4–11, “Letters wrote to James Frazer of Relig by John Monro of Culcairn, Hugh Rose of Geddes Sherriff Dept of the County of Ross, Sir Harry Munro Baronet, John Forbes of Culloden Esquire, concerning his character, his affection to His Majesty & the present Happy Constitution.” 9. William Irvine, “Note on James Fraser, Author of the ‘History of Nadir Shah’ (1742),” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland 31, no. 1 (1899): 214–20 (quotation on 215). Compare Fraser of Reeling Papers, Kirkhill (Scotland), NRAS No. 2696 (henceforth cited as FRP), Bundle 176, Item 2, “Character Sketch,” which notes that on his death Fraser was “in the 42nd year of his age.” I am grateful to Kathy and Malcolm Fraser for allowing me access to these documents. 10. David Alston, “ ‘Very Rapid and Splendid Fortunes’? Highland Scots in Berbice (Guyana) in the Early Nineteenth Century,” Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness 63 (2002–2004): 208–36. 11. Mildred Archer and Toby Falk, India Revealed: The Art and Adventures of James and William Fraser, 1801–35 (London: Cassell, 1989).

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12. William Dalrymple, White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in EighteenthCentury India (New York: Viking, 2003); the main lines of argument and presentation are already anticipated somewhat in Dalrymple, City of Djinns: A Year of Delhi (Delhi: HarperCollins, 1993). A careful study of a family of Lowland Scots, the Johnstones, may be found in Emma Rothschild, The Inner Life of Empires: An Eighteenth- Century History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). 13. See the nuanced analy sis in Durba Ghosh, Sex and the Family in Colonial India: The Making of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 14. For the initial statement, C. A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen, and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, 1770–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). For the subsequent debate, see Seema Alavi, ed., The Eighteenth Century in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002), and Peter J. Marshall, ed., The Eighteenth Century in Indian History: Evolution or Revolution? (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003). 15. See A. A. Macdonell, “Fraser, James (1712/13–1754),” rev. P. J. Marshall, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), accessed April 2, 2013, http://www.oxforddnb.com /view/article/10107. 16. Arthur H. Williamson, “George Buchanan, Civic Virtue and Commerce: European Imperialism and Its Sixteenth- Century Critics,” The Scottish Historical Review 75, no. 199, part 1 (1996): 20–37. 17. The extent of James’s interest cannot be guessed at; however, for his own letters, see G. P. V. Akrigg, ed., Letters of James VI & I (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 18. See Giorgio Levi Della Vida, George Strachan: Memorials of a Wandering Scottish Scholar of the Seventeenth Century (Aberdeen: Third Spalding Club, 1956). 19. Robert C. Ritchie, Captain Kidd and the War against the Pirates (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986). 20. Robert Markley, “Monsoon Cultures: Climate and Acculturation in Alexander Hamilton’s ‘A New Account of the East Indies,’ ” New Literary History 38, no. 3 (2007): 527–50. 21. George Pratt Insh, The Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies (London: Charles Scribner, 1932); G.  P. Insh, ed., Papers Relating to the Ships and Voyages of the Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies, 1696– 1707 (Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 1924). 22. Holden Furber, Henry Dundas, First Viscount Melville, 1742–1811, Political Man ager of Scotland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1931); more recently, Michael Fry, The Dundas Despotism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992). 23. G.  J. Bryant, “Scots in India in the Eighteenth Century,” Scottish Historical Review 64, no. 177, part 1 (1985): 22–41 (citation on 22). 24. For an example of such post-1760 networks, see B.  R. Tomlinson, “From Campsie to Kedgeree: Scottish Enterprise, Asian Trade and the Company Raj,” Modern Asian Studies 36, no. 4 (2002): 769–91.

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25. Bruce  P. Lenman, Integration and Enlightenment: Scotland, 1746–1832 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981), 82. 26. George K. McGilvary, East India Patronage and the British State: The Scottish Elite and Politics in the Eighteenth Century (London: I. B. Tauris, 2008), x–xi, 55–65. 27. For some details of Macrae’s trade, as well as that of some other clients of Drummond, see Søren Mentz, The English Gentleman Merchant at Work: Madras and the City of London 1660–1740 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2005). By measures of purchasing power comparison, the sum of £100,000 in 1730 would be worth at least $18 million currently. 28. McGilvary, East India Patronage, 57. 29. However, we do fi nd a handful of Latin books in his library, including de Laet’s De Imperio Magni Mogolis, the poems of George Buchanan, some works of Joseph Scaliger, and Martini’s De bello Tartarico historia (1654). See FRP, Bundle 176, Item 1, “Roup Roll of the Books of the deceas’d James Fraser of Rilick” (1755). 30. Ashin Das Gupta, The World of the Indian Ocean Merchant, 1500–1800, ed. Uma Das Gupta (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), 315–68; and Das Gupta, Indian Merchants and the Decline of Surat, c. 1700–1750 (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1979). 31. For details, see ‘Ali Muhammad Khan, Mirat-i-Ahmadi: A Persian History of Gujarat, ed. Syed Nawab Ali, 2 vols. (Baroda: Oriental Institute, 1927– 28), 2:356–57; also Mirat-i-Ahmadi, trans. M. F. Lokhandwala (Baroda: Oriental Institute, 1965), 689–91. According to this text, whose author was also originally from Burhanpur, Sayyid Mu‘in-ud-Din Khan (or Miyan Achhan) belonged to a prominent family of Burhanpur-based Sufis, who were close to Nizam-ul-Mulk Asaf Jah. His older brother, a respected pīr (of the Naqshbandi silsila) known as Miyan Mitthan, also played a brief role in Surat politics in the late 1740s, but died before the major conflict broke out between his brother and Safdar Muhammad Khan. ‘Ali Muhammad Khan describes Miyan Mitthan as belonging to the “circle of turban-wearing masters [dar zumra-i ashāb-i ‘amāyim],” though he also somewhat mocks him in his text. The brothers were apparently descendants of Shah Makhan, a Juybari Shaikh of Bukharan origins who settled in Burhanpur. 32. Yusuf Husain, The First Nizām: The Life and Times of Nizāmu’l-Mulk Āsaf Jāh I (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1963), 245. The most comprehensive attempt to disentangle the high politics of Surat in the years 1740 to 1760 may be found in Jos Gommans and Jitske Kuiper, “The Surat Castle Revolutions: Myths of an Anglo-Bania Order and Dutch Neutrality, c. 1740–1760,” Journal of Early Modern History 10, no. 4 (2006): 361–89. 33. For a discussion of these attempts to impose order on factory life, see Miles Ogborn, Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the English East India Company (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 83–103 (quotation on 87). 34. Quoted in Ashin Das Gupta, “Pieter Phoonsen of Surat, c. 1730–1740,” in The World of the Indian Ocean Merchant, 411. 35. Das Gupta, Decline of Surat, 30.

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36. Ibid., 31. Schreuder concluded that the 175 wealthiest merchants at Surat in about 1750 had a total capital of about Rs. 8.74 million; see Holden Furber, Bombay Presidency in the Mid-Eighteenth Century (New York: Asia Publishing House, 1965), 64–66. 37. H. W. van Santen, VOC-dienaar in India: Geleynssen de Jongh in het land van de Groot-Mogol (Franeker: Van Wijnen, 2001). 38. For the most recent reexamination of Cleland, including his Indian career, see Hal Gladfelder, Fanny Hill in Bombay: The Making and Unmaking of John Cleland (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012). 39. William H. Epstein, John Cleland: Images of a Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), 9–11. 40. Ibid., 35–37. 41. John Braddyll, The Vindication of Mr. John Braddyll, against Mr. Henry Lowther. In a Letter Humbly Address’d to the Honourable the Court of Directors for Affairs of the United Company of Merchants of England Trading to the East Indies. With a Proper Appendix (London: n.p., 1746). 42. The authoritative historian of mercantile activity in Surat in the period, Ashin Das Gupta (Decline of Surat, 298), remarks: “Thus the reports made by Henry Lowther about the situation in Surat in the early 1730s were in an impor tant sense mendacious. The version carefully concealed his own role, his private interests and some of his activities.” 43. For a discussion see Ibid., 275–76. Lowther eventually appears to have returned to England and France, and died in 1758 (rather than the usual date, 1743, which is clearly incorrect). For some details of this member of the Cumberland family (albeit viewed through a heroic lens), see Arnold Wright, Annesley of Surat and His Times: The True Story of the Mythical Wesley Fortune (London: Andrew Melrose, 1918), 338–43. 44. Furber, Bombay Presidency, 29. 45. William Dunn Macray, Annals of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, with a Notice of the Earlier Library of the University, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1890), 215–17. The album in question is today listed by the Bodleian Library as MS. Ind. Misc. d.3. Also see the brief discussion in Henry Beveridge, “An Indian Album,” Imperial and Asiatic Quarterly Review and Oriental and Colonial Record, 3rd ser., 26, nos. 51–52 (1908): 327–34. 46. Besides the Bodleian album, Fraser’s effects at his death included some “five India paintings on looking glass,” about 108 “curious India Drawings,” and another 73 “India Pictures,” which were sold in various lots. He is also known to have collected Indian swords and coins. See FRP, Bundle 293, Item 4, “Goods belonging to James Fraser Esquire,” sold on 3rd April 1759, and Bundle 651, Item 6, “Roup Roll of Household Furniture etc belonging to the deceas’d James Fraser of Rilick” (1755). 47. “Mr. Draper’s Arguments to support His Dissent,” in The Vindication of Mr. John Braddyll, 72. 48. Epstein, John Cleland, 48. 49. This short memoir (in French) is published in Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, Escritos económicos de Londres (1741–1742), ed. José Barreto (Lisbon: Biblioteca Nacional, 1986), 158–61. It is accompanied by a longer letter to

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Cardinal da Mota by Carvalho ( later to be famous as the Marquês de Pombal). For a discussion, see Gladfelder, Fanny Hill in Bombay, 39–45. 50. Epstein, John Cleland, 212. 51. BL, Oriental and India Office Collections (hereafter OIOC), E / 1/31, doc. 90, “The Humble Petition of James Fraser” (1742). 52. BL, OIOC, D / 20, fol. 59, Meeting of the Committee of Correspondence, 4th November 1742. Fraser’s bondsmen on his second Indian voyage were Hugh Ross and George Fryer, both London-based merchants, for £1,000 each; see Irvine, “Note on James Fraser,” 218–19. 53. Beveridge, “An Indian Album,” 333. 54. G. Fielding Blandford, “Nova et Vetera: The Collections of Dr. Richard Mead,” British Medical Journal 2, no. 2082 (1900): 1508–09. However, since Sloane’s collections remained largely intact and were bequeathed to the British Library, they have naturally attracted far more scholarly attention; see Arthur MacGregor, ed., Sir Hans Sloane: Collector, Scientist, Antiquary, Founding Father of the British Museum (London: British Museum, 1994). 55. For this larger context, see Manjusha Kuruppath, “Casting Despots in Dutch Drama: The Case of Nadir Shah in Van Steenwyk’s Thamas Koelikan,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 48, no. 2 (2011): 241–86. 56. Laurence Lockhart, “De Voulton’s Noticia,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies 4, no. 2 (1926): 223–45. 57. James Fraser, The History of Nadir Shah, Formerly Called Thamas Kuli Khan, the Present Emperor of Persia: To which is prefi x’d a Short History of the Moghol Emperors, at the End is inserted a Catalogue of about Two Hundred Manuscripts in the Persic and other Oriental Languages, collected in the East, 2nd ed. (London: A. Millar, 1742), vi. The first edition appeared in the same year from W. Strahan, but at Fraser’s own expense. 58. See the pilgrimage manual by Shaikh Muhammad Chishti Gujarati, Ādāb al-tālibīn ma‘a rafīq al-tullāb, wa albāb salāsa, Urdu trans. Muhammad Bashir Husain, ed. Muhammad Aslam Rana (Lahore: Progressive Books, 1984). Shaikh Muhammad traced his own genealogy back to the grand figure of Nasirud-Din Chiragh-i Dihli (d. 1356). One of his grandsons, Shaikh Yahya Madani (d. 1689) migrated for a time to Medina; he was the great-grandfather of our Shaikh Muhammad Murad. 59. Levi Della Vida, George Strachan, 73–108. 60. Hugh Trevor-Roper, Archbishop Laud, 1573–1645, 3rd ed. (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1988), x. 61. Zur Shalev, “Measurer of All Things: John Greaves (1602–1652), the Great Pyramid, and Early Modern Metrology,” Journal of the History of Ideas 63, no. 4 (2002): 555–75. 62. R. W. Ferrier, “Charles I and the Antiquities of Persia: The Mission of Nicholas Wilford,” Iran 8 (1970): 51–56. For Charles’s request, see W. Noel Sainsbury, ed., Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, East Indies and Persia, 1630–1634, preserved in the Public Record Offi ce and the India Offi ce (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1892), 523. 63. BL, London, OIOC, E / 3/15 / 1543A, Methwold, Mountney, Fremlen, etc at Swally to the Company, December 29th 1634, in William Foster, ed.,

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The English Factories in India, 1634–1636 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1911), 74–75 (the summary of the entire document occupies 59–85). 64. For an analysis, see John Seyller, Workshop and Patron in Mughal India: The Freer Rāmāyana and Other Illustrated Manuscripts of ‘Abd al- Rahīm (Zurich: Museum Rietberg, 1999), Artibus Asiae, Supplementum, 42:257–63. The manuscript may be found in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, Ms. Laud Or. 149. 65. J. V. S. Wilkinson, “An Indian Manuscript of the Golestān of the Shāh Jahān Period,” Ars Orientalis 2 (1957): 423–25. 66. One of the earliest examples seems to be that in Leiden University Library, Cod. Or. 242, which was seized by an Austrian soldier from the Ottomans in 1566. See J. T. P. de Bruijn, “Iranian Studies in the Netherlands,” Iranian Studies 20, nos. 2–4 (1987): 161–77 (on 167). 67. See Alastair Hamilton and Francis Richard, André du Ryer and Oriental Studies in Seventeenth- Century France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 72–89. 68. Edward G. Browne, A Catalogue of the Persian Manuscripts in the Library of the University of Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1896), xii–xxii. 69. Andrew Dalby, “A Dictionary of Oriental Collections in Cambridge University Library,” Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 9, no. 3 (1988): 248–80 (entry for Lewis on 266–67); Browne, Catalogue, xxvi–xxvii. 70. Henry Davison Love, Vestiges of Old Madras, 1640–1800; traced from the East India Company’s records preserved at Fort St. Goerge and the India Offi ce, and from other sources, 4 vols. (London: John Murray, 1913), 2:24. 71. This manuscript is listed as Cambridge University Library, Add. 207. It has eleven illustrations, and E. G. Browne notes that they are “very curious, executed with considerable skill”; Browne, Catalogue, 309. 72. James Fraser, A Catalogue of Manuscripts in the Persic, Arabic, and Sanskerrit Languages collected in the East (London: A. Millar, 1742), and appended to The History of Nadir Shah. For the few Prakrit manuscripts (Fraser 16 and Fraser 38), compare with Arthur Berriedale Keith, Catalogue of the Prākrit Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library (Oxford: Clarendon, 1911); and for the forty-one-odd Sanskrit manuscripts, see Theodor Aufrecht, Catalogi Codicum Manuscriptorum Bibliothecae Bodleianae: Codices Sanscriticos Complectens (Oxford: Clarendon, 1864), 343–58, 403–44. The Sanskrit manuscripts were inspected by Friedrich von Schlegel in November 1823; see FRP, Bundle 293, Item 3, and he particularly remarked a manuscript of the Bhāgavata Purāna. 73. The Fraser Persian manuscripts are listed and extensively described in Eduard Sachau and Hermann Ethé, Catalogue of the Persian, Turkish, Hindûstânî, and Pushtû Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library (Oxford: Clarendon, 1889), Part 1. I have used the Sachau-Ethé cata logue extensively in the discussion that follows. 74. The same title, Tārīkh-i Pādshāhān-i Hind, appears in Charles Stewart, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Oriental Library of the Late Tippoo Sultan of Mysore, to which are prefi xed, memoirs of Hyder Aly Khan, and his son Tippoo Sultan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1809), 17 (Item XLII) with the following

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summary description: “An abridged History of the Mohammedan Kings of Hindustan, till the Accession of the Emperor Akbar.” 75. A text with the same title (which is, however, rather generic) appears in Stewart, Catalogue, 6 (Item VIII) with the following description: “An Abridged History of Asia, from Adam down to Shah Tahmasp of Persia, A.D. 1525. It also contains Memoirs of the Mohammedan Kings of Spain, from A.D. 755, to 1036. Author, Ahmed Ben Mohammed Guffari. Dedicated to Shah Tahmasp.” The contents of the two texts clearly do not tally. 76. For a full discussion of this work, see Muzaffar Alam, “Strategy and Imagination in a Mughal Sufi Story of Creation,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 49, no. 2 (2012): 151–95. 77. Stewart, Catalogue, 3–20. 78. Fraser also had a part of the same author’s inshā’ text entitled Majmū‘a-yi faiz-o-fazl, copied into a larger compendium on that subject (Fraser 56, fls. 1–32). Still another text, on astronomy and astrology, also by Muhammad Fazil, is the Majma‘ al-fazā’il dedicated to Shahjahan (Fraser 167), but I am unable at present to determine whether it is by the same author or a homonym. 79. We have discussed the nature of the seventeenth- century Mughal munshī’s education in Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “The Making of a Munshi,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 24, no. 2 (2004): 61–72. 80. It is also interest ing to compare these materials to his library in Eu ropean languages, for which see FRP, Bundle 176, Item 1, “Roup Roll of the Books of the deceas’d James Fraser of Rilick.” This library includes books on travel (Tavernier, Mendes Pinto, Pyrard de Laval, etc.), accounts of Ottoman and Islamic history such as Samuel Clarke’s The Life of Tamerlane (1653) and Thomas Smith’s Remarks upon the Manners, Religion and Government of the Turks (1678), as well as works by Pufendorf and Picart. 81. BL, OIOC, E / 4/461, 67–68, letter from the Surat Council to the Court of Directors, dated October 31, 1743. 82. George W. Forrest, Selections from the Letters, Despatches, and Other State Papers Preserved in the Bombay Secretariat: Home Series (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1887), 1:273–74. 83. BL, OIOC, E / 4/461, 95, Fraser’s letter to the Court of Directors, November 10, 1747. 84. Furber, Bombay Presidency in the Mid-Eighteenth Century, 54–61. 85. Ashin Das Gupta, “The Broker in Mughal Surat, c. 1740,” in The World of the Indian Ocean Merchant, 401. 86. Stephen Law, quoted in Das Gupta, “The Broker in Mughal Surat,” 407. 87. See the letter from Jaggernath Laldass dated January 21, 1741, BL, OIOC, E / 1/31, doc. 7a. For a discussion of the vicissitudes of the Parekhs in the late 1730s, see Das Gupta, Decline of Surat, 275–79. 88. BL, OIOC, E / 4/461, 95–96, Fraser’s letter to the Court of Directors, November 10, 1747. 89. Ibid., 98.

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90. On the latter’s subsequent career, see Ghulam Ahmad Nadri, “Commercial World of Mancherji Khurshedji and the Dutch East India Company: A Study of Mutual Relationships,” Modern Asian Studies 41, no. 2 (2007): 315– 42; also see Nadri, Eighteenth- Century Gujarat: The Dynamics of its Political Economy, 1750–1800 (Leiden: Brill, 2009). 91. There is evidence that points to a close relationship between Jagannathdas Parekh and Damaji Rao Gaikwad (r. 1732–68); see Das Gupta, Decline of Surat, 277–78. 92. BL, OIOC, P / 341/15, Bombay Public Consultations (January 1748), 18–23, meeting of 1January 19, 1748. 93. BL, OIOC, E / 1/35, Nos. 162(a)–162(c), “The Humble Memorial of James Fraser late of Surat.” 94. BL, OIOC, E / 1/35, Nos. 165(a)–165(b), proofs adduced by James Fraser in relation to his accusations against Governor Wake. 95. BL, OIOC, E / 1/35, Nos. 162(b)–162(c), “The Humble Memorial of James Fraser late of Surat.” 96. Ibid.; also E / 1/35, Nos. 165(d)–165(i). 97. BL, OIOC, E / 1/35, Nos. 163(a)–163(b), and 164, documents relating to the charges of Fraser against Wake, and draft comments of the Committee of Correspondence. 98. For some details of the subsequent career of Wake’s family, see Paul David Nelson, William Tryon and the Course of Empire: A Life in British Imperial Ser vice (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 7–9; Tryon was Wake’s son-in-law, and a prominent governor in late colonial Amer ica. 99. Irvine, “Note on James Fraser,” 215. 100. The clear identification of Cockell as the author of two sections of the text is due to Laurence Lockhart, Nadir Shah: A Critical Study based mainly upon Contemporary Sources (London: Luzac, 1938), 304–6. 101. See Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Un Grand Dérangement: Dreaming an Indo-Persian Empire in South Asia, 1740–1800,” Journal of Early Modern History 4, nos. 3–4 (2000): 337–78. 102. Histoire de Thamas Kouli-Kan, Sophi de Perse (Amsterdam: Arkstee & Merkus, 1740); for the English translation, see The Compleat History of Thamas Kouli Kan, (at Present Called Schah Nadir) Sovereign of Persia, 2 vols. (London: J. Brindley et al., 1742). 103. A Genuine History of Nadir- Cha, Present Shah or Emperor of Persia, Formerly call’d Thamas Kouli-Kan, with a Par tic ular Account of His Conquest of the Mogul’s Country (London: J. Watts, 1741), dedication, 1. 104. Christiaan J. A. Jörg, “Jan Albert Sichterman: A Groninger Nabob and Art- Collector,” Itinerario, 9, no. 2 (1985): 178–95; Wiet Kühne-van Diggelen, Jan Albert Sichterman: VOC- dienaar en ‘Koning’ van Groningen (Groningen, Netherlands: REGIO Projekt, 1995). 105. A Genuine History of Nadir- Cha, 9. 106. Kuruppath, “Casting Despots in Dutch Drama,” 260–61. 107. A Genuine History of Nadir- Cha, 47.

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108. Fraser, History of Nadir Shah, 11. 109. A Genuine History of Nadir- Cha, xxxvii. Also compare The Compleat History of Thamas Kouli Kan, 2:9: “This good Prince [Akbar] poisoned himself by Mistake in 1605.” In this, as in other places, the editor’s introduction to the Genuine History seems to draw on Histoire de Thamas Kouli- Kan. 110. Edward Rehatsek, “A Letter of the Emperor Akbar asking for the Christian Scriptures,” Indian Antiquary 16 (1887): 135–39. 111. Jaswant Rai, Sa‘īd Nāma, cited in Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Writing the Mughal World: Studies on Culture and Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 376. 112. Fraser, History of Nadir Shah, 12–18. 113. Ibid., 20–21. 114. See Bodleian Library, Oxford, Ms. Fraser 118, with one of Fraser’s “commonplace books,” and including Aurangzeb’s last will (fl. 13a). 115. A Genuine History of Nadir- Cha, xxxix. 116. Fraser, History of Nadir Shah, 26–27, 33–35. Compare these figures to the jama‘ (or assessment) numbers for the empire in 1646–56 and 1687–95, respectively, in Irfan Habib, The Agrarian System of Mughal India, 1556–1707, 2nd ed. (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), 455. It is clear from Habib’s discussion that Fraser drew his numbers from official Mughal sources, notably, Bodleian Library, Oxford, Ms. Fraser 86, fls. 57b–61b, a dastūr- ul-‘amal text from late in Aurangzeb’s reign. 117. Mubarakullah Wazih, Tārīkh-i ‘Irādat Khān, ed. Ghulam Rasul Mihr (Lahore: Punjab University, 1971), 129–30; Jonathan Scott, A Translation of the Memoirs of Eradut Khan, a Nobleman of Hindostan (London: John Stockdale, 1786), 79–84. For an extended discussion, see Muzaffar Alam, introduction to The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India: Awadh and the Punjab, 1707–1748, 2nd ed. (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013). 118. Fraser, History of Nadir Shah, 45–53; for the text, see Bodleian Library, Oxford, Ms. Fraser 118, fl. 23a. 119. Ibid., 61–62. 120. On this question, see the valuable essay by Setu Madhavarao Pagadi, “Maratha-Nizam Relations: Nizam-ul-Mulk’s Letters,” Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute 51, nos. 1–4 (1970): 93–121. 121. Fraser, History of Nadir Shah, 64–69. 122. See Zahiruddin Malik, A Mughal Statesman of the Eighteenth Century: Khan-i-Dauran, Mir Bakhshi of Muhammad Shah, 1719–1739 (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1973). 123. For a biography of Sarbuland Khan, see Samsam-ud-Daula Shah Nawaz Khan and ‘Abdul-Hayy, The Ma’āsir- ul-Umarā, trans. H. Beveridge, rev. Baini Prashad, vol. 2, Being Biographies of the Mu.hammadan and Hindu Offi cers of the Timurid Sovereigns of India from 1500 to about 1780 (Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1952), 704–708. This Ira nian amīr migrated to India at time of Aurangzeb and was prominent in the 1710s and 1720s; he eventually died in 1742 in a poor fi nancial state. 124. Fraser, History of Nadir Shah, 138–39.

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125. For a clear description of the engagement, see Lockhart, Nadir Shah, 135–40. Fraser consistently errs here in translating Hijri dates into the Christian calendar by a factor of 9–11 days. 126. Fraser again has this wrong, as March 10, instead of March 21; in this year this day marked not only the Persian Nauroz but the ‘Id al-Zuha. 127. Lockhart prefers Jadunath Sarkar’s fairly modest estimate of 20,000 killed on the Indian side on that day. Lockhart, Nadir Shah, 149. 128. Fraser, History of Nadir Shah, 198–202. 129. Ibid., 217. Compare Ernest Tucker, “1739: History, Self, and Other in Afsharid Iran and Mughal India,” Iranian Studies 31, no. 2 (1998): 207–17. 130. Fraser, History of Nadir Shah, 234. Compare the far more mitigated judgment of Khwaja ‘Abdul Karim Kashmiri, cited in Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Indo-Persian Travels in the Age of Discoveries, 1400–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 263. 131. For more on this complex figure, see Lucette Valensi, “Éloge de l’orient, éloge de l’orientalisme: Le jeu d’échecs d’Anquetil-Duperron,” Revue de l’histoire des religions 212, no. 4 (1995): 419–52. Also contrast the account in Urs App, The Birth of Orientalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennyslvania Press, 2010), 363–439. 132. A. H. Anquetil Duperron, Voyage en Inde, 1754–1762: Relation de voyage en préliminaire à la traduction du ‘Zend-Avesta’, ed. Jean Deloche, Manonmani Filliozat, and Pierre-Sylvain Filliozat (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1997), 74, 340. Also see Karl F. Geldner, ed., Avesta: the Sacred Books of the Parsis (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1896), xii, for a description of a manuscript of the Khorda Avestâ (or Xwardag Abastag Sāde), Bodleian Library, Ms. Fraser 258. 133. Anquetil Duperron, Voyage en Inde, 451. Anquetil made a manifest error here; the three incomplete volumes were of the Rāmāyana (Fraser Sanskrit 8; Aufrecht 804–806), and there are no Mahābhārata manuscripts in the Bodleian Fraser collection. 134. See Chapter 5. 135. For a recent reformulation of the problem of the “forceful, contentious, contradictory language of the Enlightenment” in relation to the extra-European world, see Carlo Ginzburg, “Provincializing the World: Eu ropeans, Indians, Jews (1704),” Postcolonial Studies 14, no. 2 (2011): 135–50.

chapter 4 . The Transition to Colonial Knowledge Epigraph: My translation. For the original letter, from the Archivio di Stato di Firenze, III Serie Strozziana, fi lza 185, c. 15, see Marco Spallanzani, Mercanti fi orentini nell’Asia Portoghese (Florence: Edizioni Scelte, 1997), 213–15. 1. An exception to this rule is Burton Stein, Thomas Munro: The Origins of the Colonial State and His Vision of Empire (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989). But also see the exercise in intellectual history by Ranajit Guha, A Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of the Permanent Settlement (Paris: Mouton, 1963), a marked contrast to the same historian’s later disdain for the study of such “elite” subjects.

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2. For a reiteration of this viewpoint, see Vitorino Magalhães Godinho, Le devisement du monde: de la pluralité des espaces à l’espace global de l’humanité, XVème–XVIème siècles (Lisbon: Instituto Camões, 2000). 3. Donald F. Lach and Edwin J. Van Kley, Asia in the Making of Europe, vol. 3, A Century of Advance, bk. 1, Trade, Missions, Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 596–97. 4. Partha Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters: A History of European Reactions to Indian Art, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), xiii. 5. For a largely “heroic” view with respect to figures such as Francis W. Ellis, see Thomas R. Trautmann, “Inventing the History of South India,” in Invoking the Past: The Uses of History in South Asia, ed. Daud Ali (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), 36–54. Also the earlier work by Garland Hampton Cannon, The Life and Mind of Oriental Jones: Sir William Jones, the Father of Modern Linguistics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), where Jones is even described as a “scholar-martyr,” whose “personal life was as spotless as his professional life” (82). 6. Joan-Pau Rubiés, Travel and Ethnology in the Re naissance: South India through European Eyes, 1250–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 287. 7. For instance J. A. Ismael Gracias, O Bispo de Halicarnasso D. António José de Noronha: Memória Histórica (Nova Goa: Imprensa Nacional, 1903); the most recent biographical sketch is that by Carmen Radulet, “D. António José de Noronha: Ficha biográfica,” in Sistema Marcial Asiático, Político, Histórico, Genealógico, Analítico e Miscelânico, by António Josó de Noronha, ed. Carmen M. Radulet (Lisbon: Fundação Oriente, 1994), xi–xxvi. 8. Halicarnassus corresponds to the modern Bodrum in Turkey. Noronha was thus named titular or nonresident Bishop in partibus infi delium, a term meaning “in the lands of the unbelievers.” 9. Noronha, Sistema, xxi. 10. Ibid., xxiii. 11. Ibid., xxv. 12. D. António José de Noronha, Diário dos sucessos da viagem que fez do Reino de Portugal para a cidade de Goa, D. António José de Noronha, Bispo de Halicarnasso, principiada aos 21 de Abril de 1773, ed. Carmen M. Radulet and Francisco Contente Domingues (Lisbon: Fundação Oriente, 1995). 13. Compare against Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500–1700: A Political and Economic History, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 198–211; Glenn J. Ames, Renascent Empire? The House of Braganza and the Quest for Stability in Portuguese Monsoon Asia, c. 1640–1683 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2000). 14. For the relative importance of the Old and New Conquests, see Rudy Bauss, “A demographic study of Portuguese India and Macau as well as comments on Mozambique and Timor, 1750–1850,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 34, no.  2 (1997): 199–216; and Maria de Jesus dos Mártires Lopes, Goa setecentista: Tradição e modernidade (1750–1800) (Lisbon: Universidade Católica Portuguesa, 1996).

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15. The text is published in D. António José de Noronha, Obras politicas, ed. Carmen  M. Radulet (Lisbon: Fundação Oriente, 2001), 39–54; and had earlier been published by J. H. da Cunha Rivara in O Chronista de Tissuary, nos. 10–11 (1866): 260–66, 288–94. 16. Compare against N. K. Sinha, Haidar Ali (Calcutta: J. C. Sarkhel and Oriental Press, 1941). 17. BL, Oriental and India Office Collections (henceforth OIOC), Orme Mss. No. 33, Document 7, “An Account of Hyderally’s Revenues, his provinces, his expenses, sent by G. Mackay to R. O.,” 111–19. 18. Noronha, Sistema, 66–67. 19. This is a creative use of the legend of Alexander and the Jews, for which see Andrew Colin Gow, The Red Jews: Antisemitism in an Apocalyptic Age, 1200– 1600 (Leiden: Brill, 1995), chapter 2; and Bernard McGinn, Visions of the End: Apocalyptic Tradition in the Middle Ages (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), 56. The distant origins may be found in the Greek text from the third century CE of Pseudo-Callisthène, Le Roman d’Alexandre: La vie et les hauts faits d’Alexandre de Macédoine, trans. Gilles Bounoure and Blandine Serret (Paris: Belles-Lettres, 1992). 20. Noronha, Sistema, 50–51. 21. Ibid., 77–78. 22. Biblioteca Nacional, Rio de Janeiro, Seção de Iconografia, C. I, 2, 8, “Notícia summaria do gentilismo da Ásia com dez Riscos Iluminados.” For a brief discussion of the author, also see Lygia da Fonseca Fernandes da Cunha, Riscos Illuminados de figurinhos de brancos e negros dos uzos do Rio de Janeiro e Serro do Frio (Rio de Janeiro: Fundação Biblioteca Nacional, 1960). 23. Noronha, Obras politicas, 117–44, 161–83. 24. Noronha, Sistema, 139. 25. For standard works, see Marc Chassaigne, Bussy en Inde (Chartres: Marchand, 1976), and Roger Glachant, “Un conquérant sans étoile, le marquis de Bussy (1720–1785),” Revue d’histoire diplomatique 4 (1968): 289–314. 26. Patrick Clarke de Dromantin, Les réfugiés jacobites dans le France du XVIIIe siècle: L’exode de toute une noblesse «pour cause de religion» (Pessac, France: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2005), 221–29. While a competent officer, Lally was disliked by many as a court favorite. 27. He is also an excellent example of the “portfolio capitalist” of the period, for which see Sanjay Subrahmanyam and C. A. Bayly, “Portfolio Capitalists and the Political Economy of Early Modern India,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 25, no. 4 (1988): 401–24. 28. For more on Dupleix, see Marc Vigié, Dupleix (Paris: Fayard, 1993); and the rather extravagant interpretation in Massimiliano Vaghi, Joseph-François Dupleix e la prima espansione europea in India: ‘Le trône du grand Mogol tremble au seul bruit de votre nom’ (Milan: UNICOPLI, 2008). For more on questions of private trade, see Catherine Manning, Fortunes à faire: The French in Asian Trade, 1719–1748 (Aldershot, UK: Variorum, 1996). 29. See Pierre-Antoine Perrod, L’affaire Lally Tolendal: le journal d’un juge: une erreur judiciaire au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Klincksieck, 1976).

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30. Charles-Joseph de Bussy, Mémoire pour le sieur de Bussy, brigadier des armées du roi, expositif de ses créances sur la Compagnie des Indes (Paris: M. Lambert, 1764); Charles-Joseph de Bussy, Mémoire pour le marquis de Bussy . . . contre les syndics et directeurs de la Compagnie des Indes (Paris: Louis Cellot, 1767). 31. This is largely the implication of Jean-Marie Lafont, “India and the Age of Enlightenment, 1612–1849,” in Indika: Essays in Indo-French Relations, 1630– 1976 (New Delhi: Manohar, 2000), 23–50, and seems to underlie Guy Deleury, Les Indes fl orissantes: Anthologie des voyageurs français (1750–1820) (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1991). 32. Alfred Martineau, Dupleix et l’Inde française, 1749–54 (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1928), 4:17, letter dated May 24, 1751. 33. Alfred Martineau, Bussy et l’Inde française, 1720–1785 (Paris: Société de l’Histoire des Colonies Françaises, 1935), 71. 34. Ibid., 80. 35. “Mémoire instructif sur 1’état politique des Maures et des Français dans le Décan et sur leurs intérêts réciproques,” 10 July 1753, in Martineau, Bussy, 108. 36. Ibid., 185–86. 37. Jean Deloche, “Le mémoire de Moracin sur Macilipattinamu: Un tableau des conditions économiques et sociales des provinces côtières de l’Andhra au milieu du XVIIIe siècle,” Bulletin de l’Ecole Française d’Extrême- Orient 62 (1975): 125–50. 38. Martineau, Bussy, 310. 39. Ibid., 130–31. 40. Hanno (or Hannon) being a famous navigator from Carthage of the fourth century BCE, we may presume that this verse was in fact taken from a French tragedy in which he was a character, or from a translation of the socalled Periplus of Hanno. 41. The reference is to the māhī marātib, or “fish standard,” which had been held earlier by such high umarā’ as Ghazi-ud-Din Khan and Zu’lfiqar Khan; cf. Satish Chandra, Parties and Politics at the Mughal Court, 1707–1740, reprint (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002). 42. Martineau, Bussy, 136–37 (citing ANOM, Colonies, C2 84, 138–51). 43. Ibid., 126, 132–33. 44. The career of Paul Benfield (1741–1810), who claimed that “by long and extensive dealings as a merchant, he had gained credit at Fort St. George and confidence with the natives of India . . . to an extent never before experienced by any Eu ropean in that country,” would undoubtedly repay closer study. See BL, OIOC, Mss. Eur. C. 307, “The Paul Benfield Papers,” in 5 vols. 45. Compare against Sylvia Murr, L’Inde philosophique entre Bossuet et Voltaire, II, L’Indologie du Père Cœurdoux: Stratégies, Apologétique et Scientificité (Paris: Ecole française d’Extrême- Orient, 1987). Incidentally, Duperron did meet Bussy at least once, in Srikakulam in June 1757, and was in general much in awe of him; compare against Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron, Voyage en Inde, 1754–1762: Relation de voyage en préliminaire à la traduction du ZendAvesta, ed. Jean Deloche, Manonmani Filliozat, and Pierre-Sylvain Filliozat (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1997), 146–48.

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46. For more on his career, see Robert Travers, “The Connected Worlds of Haji Mustapha (c. 1730–91): A Eurasian cosmopolitan in eighteenth-century Bengal,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 52, no. 3 (2015): 297–333. 47. “Mustapha’s Journey, from Bengal to Pondicherry, 1758: A Fragment,” in Oriental Repertory, ed. Alexander Dalrymple (London: G. Bigg, 1791), 2:213–72 (citations on 2:219–24). 48. An impor tant early reconsideration of Polier may be found in Constantin Regamey, “Un pionnier vaudois des études indiennes: Antoine-Louis de Polier,” in Mélanges offerts à Monsieur Georges Bonnard professeur honoraire de l’Université de Lausanne, à l’occasion de son quatre-vingtième anniversaire (Geneva: Droz, 1966), 183–210. 49. Muzaffar Alam and Seema Alavi, A European Experience of the Mughal Orient: The “I‘jāz-i Arsalānī” (Persian Letters, 1773–1779) of Antoine-Louis Henri Polier (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001). 50. For an exploration of Polier’s career in the context of the Anglo-French imperial projects of the period, see Maya Jasanoff, Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750–1850 (New York: Knopf, 2005), 63–71, 81– 90. The larger context of the Euro-Indian intellectual encounter in the last years of the eighteenth century has been addressed in C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 51. Paul F. Geisendorf, ed., Livre des Habitants de Genève, vol. I, 1549–1560 (Geneva: E. Droz, 1957), 28–29. For the larger context of these migrations, see Daniela Solfaroli Camillocci, “Refuge et migrations à Genève au miroir de polémistes, missionnaires et voyageurs (XVIe–XVIIe siècles),” Revue de l’histoire des religions 232, no. 1 (2015): 53–81. 52. Eugène and Emily Haag, La France Protestante: ou vies des protestants français qui se sont fait un nom dans l’histoire (Paris: Joël Cherbuliez, 1857), 8:274– 83, entry for “Polier.” 53. “Liste des réfugiés français à Lausanne,” in Bulletin de la Société de l’Histoire du Protestantisme 21 (1872): 476. 54. For more on Voltaire, his contemporaries, and India, also see Sylvia Murr, “Les conditions de l’émergence du discours sur l’Inde au Siècle des Lumières,” in Inde et Littérature, Collection Purusārtha 7, ed. Marie-Claude Porcher (Paris: Editions de l’Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, 1983), 233–84. 55. Article “Polier,” in La France Protestante, 278–79, collated with the article “Polier” from the Dictionnaire historique et biographique de la Suisse (Neuchâtel: Administration du Dictionnaire historique et biographique de la Suisse, 1930), 5:313. 56. See the discussion in Georges Dumézil, preface to Le Mahabarat et le Bhagavat du colonel de Polier (Mythologie des Indous: Selections) (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), 14–21. 57. Mythologie des Indous; travaillée par Madame la Chanoinesse de Polier, sur des manuscrits authentiques apportés de l’Inde par M. le Colonel de Polier, 2 vols. (Roudolstadt / Paris: F. Schoell, 1809). 58. For more on Paul-Philippe Polier, see Emile Piguet, “Paul-Philippe Polier et la reddition du Fort St-David aux Indes,” Revue historique vaudoise

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41  (1933): 174–86. Paul-Philippe Polier entered the East India Company in 1751 as captain, and rose to the rank of major. He was held responsible for the surrender of Fort St. David by Robert Clive, and died somewhat disgraced. 59. Polier, Mythologie des Indous, 1:iii–iv. 60. Ibid., 1:iv–v. 61. See, by way of contrast, Willem G. J. Kuiters, The British in Bengal, 1756–1773: A Society in Transition Seen through the Biography of a Rebel: William Bolts (1739–1808) (Paris: Indes savantes, 2002). 62. Jean Deloche, ed., Voyage en Inde du Comte du Modave, 1773–1776: Nouveaux mémoires sur l’état actuel du Bengale et de l’Indoustan (Paris: École française d’Extrême- Orient, 1971), 77. 63. Jean Deloche, ed., Les aventures de Jean-Baptiste Chevalier dans l’Inde Orientale (1752–1765): Mémoire historique et Journal de Voyage à Assem (Paris: École française d’Extrême- Orient, 1984). 64. Compare, for example, Émile Barbé, Le nabab René Madec: Histoire diplomatique des projets de la France sur le Bengale et le Penjab (1772–1808) (Paris: F. Alcan, 1894). 65. For the standard accounts of Anquetil, see Raymond Schwab, Vie d’Anquetil-Duperron, suivie des usages civils et religieux des Parses par AnquetilDuperron (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1934); Jean-Luc Kieffer, Anquetil-Duperron: L’Inde en France au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1983). 66. Francis Richard, “Jean-Baptiste Gentil, collectionneur de manuscrits persans,” Dix-huitième siècle 28, no. 1 (1996): 91–110. 67. Susan Gole, Maps of Mughal India: Drawn by Colonel Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Gentil, Agent for the French Government to the Court of Shuja- ud-daula at Faizabad in 1770 (New Delhi: Manohar, 1988). 68. Polier, Mythologie des Indous, 1:vi–vii. 69. Jean Deloche, ed., Les mémoires de Wendel sur les Jāt, les Pathān, et les Sikh (Paris: École française d’Extrême- Orient, 1979); a partial translation may be found in Jean Deloche and James Walker, Wendel’s Memoirs on the Origin, Growth and Present State of Jat Power in Hindustan (1768) (Pondicherry: Institut français de Pondichéry, 1991). 70. Rosie Llewellyn-Jones, A Very Ingenious Man: Claude Martin in Early Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992), 55–56. 71. Ibid., 56. 72. For an overview of survey operations in these years, see Matthew H. Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765– 1843 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 73. BL, OIOC, Bengal Secret Consultations, February 24, 1775, cited in Jones, A Very Ingenious Man, 56. 74. Polier, Mythologie des Indous, 1:vii. 75. The English commander in question was a certain Colonel Champion, with whom Polier had an altercation in the course of a campaign against the Rohillas; compare against Deloche, ed., Voyage de Modave, 442n. 76. Polier, Mythologie des Indous, 1:vii–ix. 77. Sir Eyre Coote sailed for India in 1754, and was at the Battle of Plassey (1757) and the capture of Pondicherry (1761). He then returned to England in

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1762, but came back to India as commander-in- chief of the Madras army in 1769. After a further brief stint in England, he returned to India for the last time in 1779, after he had been named commander-in-chief in 1777. In 1781, he fought against Haidar ‘Ali in the Karnatak; he died in Madras in 1783. Also see, in this context, Antoine-Louis-Henri Polier, Shah Alam II and His Court: A Narrative of the Transactions at the Court of Delhy from the Year 1771 to the Present Time, ed. Pratul C. Gupta (1947; repr., Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1989). 78. Polier, Mythologie des Indous, 1:ix–x. 79. Deloche, Voyage de Modave, 441. 80. Polier, Mythologie des Indous, 1:x–xii. 81. Jones, A Very Ingenious Man, 92–93. 82. Polier, Mythologie des Indous, 1:xii–xiii. See Ganda Singh, “Colonel Polier’s Account of the Sikhs,” Panjab Past and Present 4, no. 2 (1972): 232–53. 83. See Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900 (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 84. Lucette Valensi, “Éloge de l’orient, éloge de l’orientalisme: Le jeu d’échecs d’Anquetil-Duperron,” Revue de l’histoire des religions 212, no. 4 (1995): 419–52. 85. Polier, Mythologie des Indous, 1:xiii–xv. 86. Some of these manuscripts, both with and without illustrations, can be found dispersed across various European collections. For those in Paris, see Gérard Colas and Francis Richard, “Le fonds Polier à la Bibliothèque nationale,” Bulletin de l’Ecole française d’Extrême- Orient 73, no. 1 (1984): 99–123. They were also the focus of an exhibition entitled Ein indischer Aristokrat: Antoine-Louis Henri de Polier und seine Sammelalben, Museum für Islamische Kunst, Berlin, March 5– May 30, 2010. 87. For more on Banks, see John Gascoigne, Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment: Useful Knowledge and Polite Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); also Neil Chambers, Joseph Banks and the British Museum: The World of Collecting, 1770–1830 (Abingdon, Oxford: Routledge, 2016). For more on Leitão in Jaipur, see João Vicente Carvalho de Melo, “ ‘Lord of Conquest, Navigation and Commerce’: Diplomacy and the Imperial Ideal during the Reign of John V, 1707–1750” (PhD thesis, Swansea University, 2012), 88–93. 88. BL, Additional Manuscripts 5346, fls. 1–4, letter from Polier to Sir Joseph Banks, May 20, 1789, transcribed in Regamey, “Un pionnier vaudois des études indiennes,” 200–202. 89. Peter J. Marshall, ed., The British Discovery of Hinduism in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970); Thomas R. Trautmann, Aryans and British India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). Also see the recent, and wide-ranging, work of Urs App, The Birth of Orientalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). 90. An interest ing discussion of some of these visual materials may be found in Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters and in earlier chapters of this book. 91. For a general discussion of these materials, see Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “An Eastern El-Dorado: The Tirumala-Tirupati Temple Complex in Early

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European Views and Ambitions, 1540–1660,” in Syllables of Sky: Studies in South Indian Civilization in Honour of Velcheru Narayana Rao, ed. David Shulman (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), 338–90. 92. Compare with Ines G. Županov, “Le repli du religieux: Les missionnaires jésuites du 17e siècle entre la théologie chrétienne et une éthique païenne,” Annales Histoire, Sciences Sociales 51, no. 6 (1996): 1201–23. 93. Daniel S. Hawley, “L’Inde de Voltaire,” Studies on Voltaire and the 18th Century 120 (1974): 139–78. 94. See the broad survey in Massimiliano Vaghi, “Entre le pittoresque et l’érudition: L’idée de l’Inde en France (1760–1830),” Annales historiques de la révolution française 375 (2014): 49–68. 95. For an example of their interests, see Gérard Colas, “Les manuscrits envoyés de l’Inde par les jésuites français entre 1729 et 1735,” in Scribes et manuscrits du Moyen- Orient, ed. François Déroche and Francis Richard (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France, 1997), 345–62. 96. See various letters in Alam and Alavi, A European Experience of the Mughal Orient, 162, 164. For Polier as a patron of the arts and music in Awadh, see Stephen Markel and Tushara Bindu Gude, eds., India’s Fabled City: The Art of Courtly Lucknow (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2010). 97. The treatment of these questions in Kate Teltscher, India Inscribed: European and British Writing on India, 1600–1800 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), chapter 6 and elsewhere, is interest ing but manifestly inadequate. 98. See William Hauptman, “Beckford, Brandoin, and the ‘Rajah’: Aspects of an Eighteenth-Century Collection,” Apollo 411 (1996): 30–39; Lucian Harris, “Archibald Swinton: A New Source for Albums of Indian Miniatures in William Beckford’s Collection,” Burlington Magazine 143, no. 1179 (2001): 360–66. 99. The melodramatic account in Jasanoff, Edge of Empire, 88–89, unfortunately further gilds the Chanoinesse’s lily. 100. For a balanced evaluation of the extent and nature of the Chanoinesse’s interventions, see Regamey, “Un pionnier vaudois des études indiennes.” 101. See Edward Moor, Hindu Infanticide: An Account of the Measures Adopted for Suppressing the Practice of the Systematic Murder by Their Parents of Female Infants (London: J. Johnson, 1811), 216–19. For a wide-ranging account of such men, see Military Memoir of Lieut.- Col. James Skinner: For Many Years a Distinguished Offi cer Commanding a Corps of Irregular Cavalry in the Ser vice of the Honourable East India Company: Interspersed with Notices of Several of the Principal Personages Who Distinguished Themselves in the Ser vice of the Native Powers in India, 2 vols., ed. James Baillie Fraser (London: Smith, Elder, 1851). 102. See Ronald Rosner, “John Parker Boyd: The Yankee Mughal,” Asian Affairs 34, no. 3 (2003): 297–309. Also see the entry for “John Parker Boyd (1764–1830),” in American National Biography, ed. John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 3:311–12. 103. Alexander Walker, An Account of a Voyage to the North West Coast of America in 1785 and 1786, ed. Robin Fisher and J. M. Bumsted (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982). 104. Cf. Colonial Alexander Walker, Reports on the Resources and c. of the Districts of Neriad, Matur, Mondeh . . . in Guzerat . . . , with memoirs on the Districts

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of Jhalawar, Kattywar proper; Reports of the Measures adopted . . . by Colonial Alexander Walker and by his successors, for the suppression of female infanticide, compiled and edited by R. Hughes Thomas, 2 vols. (Bombay: Bombay Education Society’s Press, 1856). 105. Moor, Hindu Infanticide, iv. Walker’s Report occupies 42–103 of the work, with a postscript (also by him, 103–7) discussing human sacrifice among the Karada Brahmins. On Duncan’s interests in such questions, see Radhika Singha, A Despotism of Law: Crime and Justice in Early Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998). 106. Fisher and Bumsted, “Introduction,” in Walker, An Account, 12. 107. Rosane Rocher, Alexander Hamilton (1762–1824): A Chapter in the Early History of Sanskrit Philology (New Haven: American Oriental Society, 1968); Stein, Thomas Munro; Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), chapter 5. 108. On Fraser, see Chapter 3. 109. Falconer Madan, A Summary Catalogue of Western Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library at Oxford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897), 4:674–79. 110. National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh (henceforth NLS), Walker of Bowland Papers, Mss. 13817, and 13818, preface, 6–7. 111. Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth- Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). For a development of the notion of “civility” in an Indian context, see Kapil Raj, “Refashioning Civilities, Engineering Trust: William Jones, Indian Intermediaries and the Production of Reliable Legal Knowledge in Late 18th- Century Bengal,” Studies in History, n.s., 17, no. 2 (2001): 175–209. 112. NLS, Walker of Bowland Papers, MS. 13813, fl. 110. 113. Ibid., MS. 13886, fl. 517. Compare Peter J. Marshall, “Edmund Burke and India: The Vicissitudes of a Reputation,” in Politics and Trade in the Indian Ocean World: Essays in Honour of Ashin Das Gupta, ed. Rudrangshu Mukherjee and Lakshmi Subramanian (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 250–69. 114. NLS, Walker of Bowland Papers, MS. 13813, fl 110–110v. 115. Peter Burke, “The Philosopher as Traveller: Bernier’s Orient,” in Voyages and Visions: Towards a Cultural History of Travel, ed. Jaś Elsner and JoanPau Rubiés (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), 124–37. 116. NLS, Walker of Bowland Papers, Miscellaneous Notices, MS. 13881, preface, xiv. 117. Ibid., xviii–xix. 118. Ibid., MS. 13886, Miscellaneous Notices, 6:487–88. 119. Walker, An Account, 75. 120. Fisher and Bumsted, introduction to Walker, An Account, 11. 121. For example, NLS, Walker of Bowland Papers, MS. 13816, “Figures and Drawings.” 122. Dirks, Castes of Mind, 91. 123. NLS, Walker of Bowland Papers, MS. 13903. 124. Edward Moor, The Hindu Pantheon (London: J. Johnson, 1810), has been described as “a work of considerable value, which for more than fifty years remained the only book of authority in English upon its subject”: entry for

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Edward Moor, 1771–1848, in Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee (Oxford, 1921–1922), 13:781–82. For a discussion, see Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters, 178–81. 125. NLS, Walker of Bowland Papers, MS. 13903, “An Account of Various Hindoo Deities,” 1–3. 126. Ibid., MS. 13813, fls. 104, 112, 114. Again, it is interest ing to compare Walker’s modus operandi with that of the nineteenth- century German missionary scholar in Kerala, Hermann Gundert; see the materials surveyed in Albrecht Frenz and Scaria Zacharia, Hermann Gundert: Quellen zu seinem Leben und Werk (Ulm: Süddeutsche, 1991). 127. NLS, Walker of Bowland Papers, MS. 13818, “Arbores et Herbae Malabaricae,” vol. 2, fl. 285. The texts in question are Vahata’s Astāngahrdayasamhita and the Amarakośa, respectively; they are discussed in Francis Zimmermann, Le discours des remèdes au pays des épices: Enquête sur la médecine hindoue (Paris: Payot, 1989), 40–42, 248–49. 128. Unfortunately, the Walker Papers have not been used so far to study the rule of Tipu Sultan; see, for example, Kate Brittlebank, Tipu Sultan’s Search for Legitimacy: Islam and Kinship in a Hindu Domain (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997); and Irfan Habib, ed., Confronting Colonialism: Resistance and Modernization under Haider Ali and Tipu Sultan (New Delhi: Tulika, 1999). 129. NLS, Walker of Bowland Papers, MS. 13615-A, “Narrative of the Operations of the Army under General Mathews,” fls. 1–25. 130. Ibid., “An Account of Tippoo Sultan, His Family, and the Revenues of His Country etc,” Fort St. George, December 14, 1789, fls. 27–34v. 131. Ibid., MS. 13794-A, preface, to “Memoir of the life and principal transactions of Tippoo Sultan written by a Mahrattah Sirdar in his ser vice,” iv. 132. This estimate may be found in NLS, Walker of Bowland Papers, MS. 13615-B; for its wider context, see Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “The Politics of Fiscal Decline: A Reconsideration of Maratha Tanjavur, 1676–1799,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 32, no. 2 (1995): 177–217. 133. NLS, Walker of Bowland Papers, MS. 13793, Description of Seringapatam, etc., written December 1800. 134. Dilip M. Menon, “Houses by the Sea: State-Formation Experiments in Malabar, 1760–1800,” Economic and Political Weekly 34, no. 29 (1999): 1995– 2003. Menon makes extensive use in the essay of the Walker Papers to examine the political situation in Malabar in the 1790s. 135. NLS, Walker of Bowland Papers, MS. 13886, 494–97. 136. William R. Pinch, “Same Difference in India and Eu rope,” History and Theory 38, no. 3 (1999): 389–407; the critique is directed at Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). For a response, see Dirks, Castes of Mind, 311–12. 137. The discussion by Peter J. Marshall, “British Assessments of the Dutch in Asia in the Age of Raffles,” Itinerario 12, no. 1 (1988): 1–16, is ambiguous on this point. But see Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Three Ways to be Alien: Travails and Encounters in the Early Modern World (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2011), 160–72.

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138. Juan R. I. Cole, “Invisible Occidentalism: Eighteenth- Century IndoPersian Constructions of the West,” Iranian Studies 25, nos. 3–4 (1992): 3–16; and Tapan Raychaudhuri, “Eu rope in India’s Xenology: The NineteenthCentury Record,” Past and Present 137 (1992): 156–82.

By Way of Conclusion Epigraph: My translation, from Luís Silveira, ed., Itinerário de Sebastião Manrique, 2 vols. (Lisbon: Agência-Geral das Colónias, 1946), 2:267–68. For another version, see C. Eckford Luard and Henry Hosten, ed. and trans., Travels of Fray Sebāstien Manrique, 1629–1643, 2 vols. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1927), 2:219. 1. Margaret R. Hunt and Philip J. Stern, The English East India Company at the Height of Mughal Expansion: A Soldier’s Diary of the 1689 Mughal Siege of Bombay (Boston: Bedford-St. Martin’s, 2016). 2. ‘Abdul Hamid Lahori, Bādshāh Nāma, ed. Kabir-ud-Din Ahmad, ‘Abdul Rahim, and W. N. Lees, 3 vols. (Calcutta: College Press, 1867), 1:433–40. 3. Lahori, Bādshāh Nāma, 1:534–35. I have used, and emended where necessary, the translation of the passage by Wheeler Thackston that appears in Milo Cleveland Beach and Ebba Koch, King of the World: The Padshahnama, an Imperial Mughal Manuscript from the Royal Library, Windsor Castle (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997), 56. 4. ANTT, Documentos Remetidos da Índia, Livro 30, fls. 281v–82. 5. Luard and Hosten, Travels of Fray Sebastien Manrique, 2:299–333. Manrique claimed, incidentally, to be very close to the great Ira nian amīr Khwaja Abu’l Hasan Asaf Khan (d. 1641), but nevertheless remains highly critical of the Mughals. 6. See, for example, Alain Desoulières, “La communauté portugaise d’Agra (1633–1739),” Arquivos do Centro Cultural Português 22 (1986): 145–73. 7. The problem is squarely posed in Kumkum Chatterjee and Clement Hawes, eds., Europe Observed: Multiple Gazes in Early Modern Encounters (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2008). 8. For two well-known but highly problematic formulations of the question, see Ashis Nandy, “History’s Forgotten Doubles,” History and Theory 34, no. 2 (1995): 44–66; and Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 9. Rudi Matthee, “Between Aloofness and Fascination: Safavid Views of the West,” Iranian Studies 31, no. 2 (1998): 219–46. 10. Rudi Matthee, “The Safavids under Western Eyes: SeventeenthCentury Eu ropean Travelers to Iran,” Journal of Early Modern History 13, no. 2 (2009): 137–71. But contrast the rich and diverse materials presented in Willem M. Floor and Edmund Herzig, eds., Iran and the World in the Safavid Age (London: I. B. Tauris, 2012). 11. The citation is taken by Matthee from Joan-Pau Rubiés, Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance: South India through European Eyes, 1250–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 353.

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12. E. G. Ravenstein, ed., A Journal of the First Voyage of Vasco da Gama, 1497–1499 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1898), 105–8. 13. Georg Schurhammer, “The Malabar Church and Rome before the coming of the Portuguese: Joseph the Indian’s Testimony,” in Orientalia, ed. László Szilas (Lisbon: Centro de Estudos Históricos Ultramarinos, 1963), 351–63. 14. For earlier discussions of these themes, see Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “On Indian views of the Portuguese in Asia, 1500–1700,” in From the Tagus to the Ganges: Explorations in Connected History (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005), 17–44; and Subrahmanyam, “Taking Stock of the Franks: South Asian Views of Eu ropeans and Eu rope, 1500–1800,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 42, no. 1 (2005): 69–100. 15. R.  B. Serjeant, The Portuguese off the South Arabian Coast: Hadrami Chronicles (Oxford: Clarendon, 1963), 43. 16. Schurhammer, “Three Letters of Mar Jacob,” in Orientalia, 335–37. 17. See the discussion in Ayal Amer, “The Rise of Jihādic Sentiments and the Writing of History in Sixteenth- Century Kerala,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 53, no. 3 (2016): 297–319. The author argues that Zainud-Din represents a viewpoint that seeks alliances for the Mappilas with Muslims outside the region, whereas other authors have a more accommodative view of local non-Muslims, such as the Samudri raja of Calicut. 18. Zain-ud-Din, História dos Portugueses no Malabar por Zinadím: Manuscripto árabe do século XVI, trans. and ed. David Lopes (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional, 1898), 44–47. 19. A somewhat dif ferent view may be found in Qazi Muhammad ibn ‘Abdul ‘Aziz, Fat’h al-Mubīn: A Contemporary Account of the Portuguese Invasion on Malabar in Arabic Verse (Arabic text and English translation), ed. K. S. Shameer, C. Hamza, and A. K. Bhattacharya (Calicut: Other Books, 2015). 20. For a discussion of a few additional sources from the Deccan, see Sumit Guha, “Conviviality and Cosmopolitanism: Recognition and Representation of ‘East’ and ‘West’ in Peninsular India, c. 1600–1800,” in Cosmopolitismes en Asie du Sud: Sources, itinéraires, langues (XVIe–XVIIIe siècle), ed. Corinne Lefèvre, Ines G. Županov, and Jorge Flores (Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS, 2015), 275–92. 21. Chandra Richard De Silva, “Beyond the Cape: The Portuguese Encounter with the Peoples of South Asia,” in Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting, and Reflecting on the Encounters between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era, ed. Stuart B. Schwartz (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 295–322. Some of these materials may be found excerpted in Chandra R. De Silva, ed., Portuguese Encounters with Sri Lanka and the Maldives: Translated Texts from the Age of Discoveries (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009). For an important close reading of another set of texts from the seventeenth century, see Stephen C. Berkwitz, Buddhist Poetry and Colonialism: Alagiyavanna and the Portuguese in Sri Lanka (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 22. Michael Roberts, “A Tale of Resistance: The Story of the Arrival of the Portuguese in Sri Lanka,” Ethnos 54, nos. 1–2 (1989): 69–82. 23. This is taken from Sikandar ibn Manjhu, “Mirāt-i Sikandari,” in E. C. Bayley, The Local Muhammadan Dynasties: Gujarat (London: W. H. Allen, 1886),

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394–95. Bayley points out that in one manuscript, Sikandar notes that “it seems improbable that the Sultan should have been so foolish,” and rejects the story as a fabrication. But also compare the exchange of letters between Bahadur, the Portuguese king, and Nuno da Cunha, in Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Writing the Mughal World: Studies in Political Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 61–87. 24. See Luís Filipe Thomaz, “Os Frangues na Terra de Malaca,” in A Abertura do Mundo: Estudos de História dos Descobrimentos Europeus, ed. Francisco Contente Domingues and Luís Filipe Barreto (Lisbon: Editorial Presença, 1987), 2:209–17. 25. Cited in Ahsan Jan Qaisar, The Indian Response to European Technology and Culture AD 1498–1707 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982), 108. For a general discussion of such passages, see Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “The Circulation of Musical Instruments in the Indian World, 1500–1800,” Oriente (Lisbon) 2 (2002): 76–83. 26. Waqā’i’-i Asad Beg, Maulana Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University, Abdus Salam Collection, no.  270/40 (4), 90–92. Also see the discussion in Qaisar, Indian Response, 118–20. Asad Beg’s account is discussed at some length in Alam and Subrahmanyam, Writing the Mughal World, 133–61, 192–201. 27. Wheeler M. Thackston, trans., The Jahangirnama: Memoirs of Jahangir, Emperor of India, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), citations on 133–34 and 206. 28. Ibid., 154. 29. William Foster, ed., The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to India, 1615–1619 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1926), 380–82. 30. Edward Terry, A Voyage to East India: Wherein Some Things Are Taken Notice of, in Our Passage Thither, but Many More in Our Abode There, within the Rich and Most Spacious Empire of the Great Mogol (London: J. Martin and J. Allestrye, 1655), 367; fi rst published in part as True Relation without All Exception, of Strange and Admirable Accidents which Lately Happened in the Kingdome of the Great Magor, or, Magull, Who Is the Greatest Monarch of the East Indies (London: Thomas Archer, 1622). For an analysis of this account, see Corinne Lefèvre, “Entre despotisme et vertu: Les représentations de l’Inde dans A Voyage to EastIndia d’Edward Terry (1655),” in Rêver d’Orient, connaître l’Orient. Visions de l’Orient dans l’art et la littérature britanniques, ed. M.-E. Palmier- Chatelain and I. Gadoin (Lyons: ENS Éditions, 2008), 99–112. 31. Irfan Habib, “Cartography in Mughal India,” Medieval India— A Miscellany 4 (1980): 122–34. 32. Simon Digby, “Beyond the Ocean: Perceptions of Overseas in IndoPersian Sources of the Mughal Period,” Studies in History, n.s., 14, no. 2 (1999): 247–59. 33. M. N. Pearson, Merchants and Rulers in Gujarat: The Response to the Portuguese in the Sixteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976). 34. Digby, “Beyond the Ocean,” 250–52. Digby has written more extensively to suggest that such materials can be located in a larger tradition of “wonder-tales,” for which see Simon Digby, Wonder-Tales of South Asia (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006).

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35. Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998), which can be compared to the far more teleological vision in Jean Céard, La Nature et les Prodiges: L’insolite au XVIe siècle, 2nd ed. (Geneva: Droz, 1996). 36. See, for example, Emblema vivente, ou, Notícia de hum portentoso monstro que da província de Anatolia foy mandado ao Sultão dos Turcos. Com a sua figura, copiada do retrato, que delle mandou fazer o Biglerbey de Amasia, recebida de Alepo, em huma carta escrita pelo mesmo autor da que se imprimio o anno passado (Lisboa Occidental: Pedro Ferreira, 1727), perhaps authored by José Freire de Monterroio Mascarenhas (1670–1760). For a discussion of this text, see Laura Lunger Kuppers and Joan B. Landes, introduction to Monstrous Bodies / Political Monstrosities in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 1–6, 21–22. 37. Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS. Elliot 314 (Sachau-Ethé No.  100), Rauzat- ul-Tāhirīn, bk. 5, chapter  5, fl s. 621a–26; also see British Library, London, MS. Or. 168, fls. 698a–700. For a discussion, see Alam and Subrahmanyam, Writing the Mughal World, 97–115. 38. This repeats an idea about Pegu that may already be found in the fifteenth-century Russian account of Afanasii Nikitin, for which see Jean-Yves Le Guillou, Le voyage au- delà des trois mers d’Afanasij Nikitin (1466–1472) (Québec: Coméditex, 1978), 34. For recent reconsiderations of Nikitin, see Mary Jane Maxwell, “Afanasii Nikitin: An Orthodox Russian’s Spiritual Voyage in the ‘Dar al-Islam’, 1468–1475,” Journal of World History 17, no. 3 (2006): 243– 66; and Michèle Toucas-Bouteau, “Le Voyage par-delà trois mers: Errances et découvertes d’un marchand russe au XVe siècle,” in Les voyageurs au Moyen Âge, ed. Henri Bresc and Denis Menjot (La Rochelle: 130e Congrès national des sociétés historiques et scientifiques, 2005), 124–33. 39. For a discussion of these events, see Victor B. Lieberman, Burmese Administrative Cycles: Anarchy and Conquest, c. 1580–1760 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 38–60. 40. Rauzat- ul-Tāhirīn (Bodleian MS.), fl. 623b. 41. Compare Jorge M. dos Santos Alves and Pierre-Yves Manguin, O ‘Roteiro das Cousas do Achem’ de D. João Ribeiro Gaio: Um olhar português sobre o Norte de Samatra em finais do século XVI (Lisbon: Comissão nacional para as comemorações dos descobrimentos portugueses, 1997). 42. Rauzat- ul-Tāhirīn (Bodleian MS.), fl. 626a. 43. The battle in fact took place on August 4, 1578 (Jumada 30, I 986 AH). For more about the circumstances of the battle, see Maria Augusta Lima Cruz, D. Sebastião (Lisbon: Círculo de Leitores, 2006), 267–84. 44. S. N. Banerjee and John S. Hoyland, The Commentary of Father Monserrate, S. J., on His Journey to the Court of Akbar (London: Oxford University Press, 1922), 128–29. 45. For an extended discussion of this battle, see Pierre Berthier, La bataille de l’Oued El- Makhazen dite bataille des Trois Rois (4 août 1578) (Paris: Editions du Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1985); and Lucette Valensi, Fables de la mémoire: La glorieuse bataille des trois rois (Paris: Seuil, 1992). For a broader perspective, see Weston F. Cook Jr., The Hundred Years

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War for Morocco: Gunpowder and the Military Revolution in the Early Modern Muslim World (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1994). 46. For a small sample, see “Principes, e pessoas de sangue real convertidos no Oriente pelos religiosos de S. Agustinho,” in Documentação para a história das missões do padroado português do Oriente: Índia, ed. António da Silva Rego, 12 vols. (Lisbon: Agência Geral do Ultramar, 1947–1958), 12: 62–66. 47. BL, OIOC, MSs. Eur. D. 1075, from O.C. 57-I, 7561. “The answer of the King of England, the Wearer of Hats, concerning what was demanded of the Ambassador.” For more about the historical context, see Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Frank Submissions: The Company and the Mughals between Sir Thomas Roe and Sir William Norris,” in The Worlds of the East India Company, ed. H. V. Bowen, Margarette Lincoln, and Nigel Rigby (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2002), 69–96. 48. Marie-Claude Porcher, Un poème satirique sanskrit: La Viśvagunādarśacampū de Venkatādhvarin (Pondicherry: Institut français d’Indologie, 1972), verses 502–6. For a discussion, see Velcheru Narayana Rao, David Shulman, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Symbols of Substance: Court and State in Nayaka-period Tamilnadu (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992), 1–12. 49. Tapan Raychaudhuri, “Eu rope in India’s Xenology: The NineteenthCentury Record,” Past and Present 137 (1992): 156–82. 50. For an intelligent summing-up, see Juan R. I. Cole, “Invisible Occidentalism: Eighteenth- Century Indo-Persian Constructions of the West,” Iranian Studies 25, nos. 3–4 (1992): 3–16; and for two broad surveys of the material, see Gulfishan Khan, Indian Muslim Perceptions of the West During the Eighteenth Century (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1998), and Michael H. Fisher, Counterfl ows to Colonialism: Indian Travellers and Settlers in Britain, 1600–1857 (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004). 51. Mirza Abu Talib Khan Isfahani, Masīr-i Tālibī: Safar Nāma-yi Mīrzā Abū Tālib Khān, ed. Husayn Khadivjam (Tehran: Shirkat-i Sahami-i Kitabhayi Jibi, 1352 [1974]); also Charles Stewart, trans., The Travels of Mirza Abu Talib Khan in Asia, Africa and Europe during the Years 1799–1803, 2 vols. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1810). 52. For an older English adaptation, see J. E. Alexander, Shigurf namah-ivelaët: Or Excellent Intelligence Concerning Europe; Being the Travels of Mirza Itesa Modeen, Translated from the Original Persian Manuscripts into Hindostanee, with an English Version and Notes (London: John Taylor, 1827). A more recent version, Mirza Shaikh I‘tisam-ud-Din, The Wonders of Vilayet: Being the Memoir, Originally in Persian, of a Visit to France and Britain in 1765, trans. Kaiser Haq (Leeds: Peepal Tree, 2001), in fact derives from the Bengali translation by A. B. M. Habibullah, Bilāyetnāmā (Dhaka: Muktadhara, 1981). For the larger context, also see Kalikinkar Datta, “A Letter of Shāh Alam II to George III, in 1772,” Journal of the Bihar and Orissa Research Society 26, no. 4 (1940): 309–22. 53. At last count, at least fi fteen manuscripts exist of Mirza I‘tisam-udDin’s text. These include Nadwat-ul-‘Ulama, Lucknow, Tarikh 146; Cambridge University Library, Or. 1060; British Library, London, Or. 200, Or. 5848, Delhi Persian 595, Delhi Persian 685, and IO. 4021 (the last three listed by C.  A. Storey, Persian Literature, vol. 1, part 2, 1143–44); Asiatic Society of

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Bengal, Kolkata, Ivanow-Curzon, No. 96; Bodleian Library, Oxford, SachauEthé No. 1854 (Caps. Or. A. 8); Maulana Azad Library, AMU, Aligarh, Habibganj Collection, HG. 35/7; a manuscript in the Khuda Bakhsh Oriental Public Library, Patna; two copies at the Andhra Pradesh Government Oriental Manuscripts Library and Research Institute, Hyderabad (old Asafiya collection, II, 836, no. 25 and III, 350, no. 94); Government Oriental Manuscripts Library, Chennai, Persian MS. 778; National Archives of India, New Delhi, Acc. nos. 402 and 2364. 54. I‘tisam-ud-Din, Wonders of Vilayet, 71–72. 55. Simon Digby, “An Eighteenth- century Narrative of a Journey from Bengal to England: Munshi Ismā’īl’s New History,” in Urdu and Muslim South Asia: Studies in Honour of Ralph Russell, ed. Christopher Shackle (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991), 49–65. 56. But also see, in this context, the interest ing materials by a rather less lettered Indian presented in Michael H. Fisher, The First Indian Author in English: Dean Mahomed (1759–1851) in India, Ireland and England (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996). 57. Khwaja ‘Abdul Karim ibn Khwaja ‘Aqibat Mahmud Kashmiri, Bayān-i Wāqi’: A Biography of Nādir Shāh Afshār and the Travels of the Author, ed. K. B. Nasim (Lahore: University of Punjab, 1970), 161–165. For a discussion, also see Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Indo-Persian Travels in the Age of Discoveries, 1400–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 247–94. 58. For the Malayalam text, see Matthew Ulakamthara, ed., Varttamānappustakam, athavā Rommayātrā (Kottayam: D. C. Books, 1983). For an English translation, see Cathanar Thomman Paremmakkal, The Varthamanappusthakam: An Account of the History of the Malabar Church between the Years 1773 and 1786 . . . [and] the Journey from Malabar to Rome via Lisbon and Back . . . , trans. Placid  J. Podipara (Rome: Pont. Institutum Orientalium Studiorum, 1971). I am grateful to Kesavan Veluthat who first drew my attention to this text. 59. Thus, see John-Paul A. Ghobrial, “The Secret Life of Elias of Babylon and the Uses of Global Microhistory,” Past and Present 222 (2014): 51–93; and Hanna Dyâb, D’Alep à Paris: Les pérégrinations d’un jeune Syrien au temps de Louis XIV, ed. and trans. Paule Fahmé-Thiéry, Bernard Heyberger, and Jérôme Lentin (Paris: Sindbad-Actes Sud, 2015). 60. For an earlier discussion, see Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Dom Frei Aleixo de Meneses (1559–1617) et l’échec des tentatives d’indigénisation du christianisme en Inde,” Archives de Sciences Sociales des Religions 103 (1998): 21–42. 61. Paremmakkal, The Varthamanappusthakam, 23. 62. Ibid., 76. 63. Ibid., 173. 64. Ibid., 253. 65. Ibid., 259. 66. The Arabic materials are dealt with in Nabil Matar, In the Lands of the Christians: Arabic Travel-Writing in the Seventeenth Century (New York and London: Routledge, 2003).

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67. Osman Agha de Temechvar, Prisonnier des Infi dèles: Un soldat dans l’Empire des Habsbourg, trans. Frédéric Hitzel (Paris: Actes Sud, 1998). 68. Some thirty such accounts are to be found listed in Faik Reşit Unat, Osmanlı sefi rleri ve sefaretnameleri (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1968); they concern embassies to Vienna, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Paris, Madrid, Morocco, Iran, the Mughal court, and Bukhara. 69. For his account, see Julien- Claude Galland, Le Paradis des infi dèles: Un ambassadeur ottoman en France sous la Régence, ed. Gilles Veinstein (Paris: François Maspero, 1981). 70. Morali Seyyid Ali Efendi and Seyyid Abdürrahim Muhibb Efendi, Deux Ottomans à Paris sous le Directoire et l’Empire: Relations d’ambassade, trans. Stéphane Yerasimos (Paris: Actes Sud, 1998). 71. Jean-Louis Bacqué- Grammont, trans., La première histoire de France en turc ottoman: Chroniques des pādichāhs de France, 1572 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997); and Thomas D. Goodrich, The Ottoman Turks and the New World: A Study of ‘Tarih-i Hind-i Garbi’ and Sixteenth- Century Ottoman Americana (Wiesbaden, Germany: Otto Harrassowitz, 1990). 72. Partha Chatterjee, “Five Hundred Years of Fear and Love,” Economic and Political Weekly 33, no. 22 (1998): 1330–36, reprinted (with some revisions) in Chatterjee, Lineages of Political Society: Studies in Postcolonial Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 29–52. 73. Our reading may thus be contrasted to the classic and still valuable essay by Sylvia Murr, “Le politique ‘au Mogol’ selon Bernier: Appareil conceptuel, rhétorique stratégique, philosophie morale,” Purusartha 13 (1990): 239–311 (special issue edited by Henri Stern and Jacques Pouchepadass, De la royauté à l’État dans le monde indien). 74. Stewart, trans., The Travels of Mirza Abu Talib Khan, 2:40–41.

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INDEX

Page numbers in italics refer to figures. Abdürrahim Muhibb Efendi, Seyyid, 322 ‘Abdus Sattar ibn Qasim Lahauri, 81, 173 Abu’l Fazl, Shaikh (mīr munshī), 30, 75, 141, 249, 302; Fraser manuscripts of, 177, 179–180, 194–195; Lewis manuscripts of, 175–176 Aceh, 305–306; French presence, 8; resistance to Portuguese, 306–307; rulers and political transitions, 306 Achhan, Miyan, 187–188 Agra, 4, 12, 14, 27, 31, 53, 101, 135, 159, 222, 247, 252–254, 257, 264, 286–287, 298 Agüero de Trasmiera, Juan, 62, 156 Akbar, Jalal-ud-Din Muhammad, 10, 36, 173, 177–179, 194–195, 197, 209, 249, 297–299, 305–307, 309, 362, 364 Albuquerque, Afonso de, 62, 64, 73–74, 84 Alexander the Great, 16–17 Almeida, Dom Francisco de, 17, 50, 62, 72 Amadís de Gaula, 65 Añaya, Pedro de, 62 Andrade, Fernão Peres de, 73 Angel, Philip, 35, 129, 136 Ango, Jean, 48 Animals, trade in, 14–15 Anquetil-Duperron, Abraham Hyacinthe, 207–210, 231, 247–248, 258–259, 263–265, 268 Antiquities. See Art Arabic language, 17, 54–62; Romance languages in Arabic script, 57 Arabic written materials, burning of, 57

Arbores et Herbae Malabaricae (Walker), 271 Art: daśāvatāra paintings, 136; Dutch painters and paintings, 34–36; Eu ropean artists in India, 43–44; Eu ropean collectors and artists, 38; exchange of Eu ropean and Indian prints and woodcuts, 32; German art based on early accounts of India, 51; Indian art in Eu rope, 133–136; Jesuits and antiquities, 26; looting by East India Company, 40–41; Naauwkeurige beschryvinge van Malabar en Choromandel, 35; Scottish antiquarians, 40; Vatican collection of Mughal portraits, 34. See also Illustrations in printed works Asad, Talal, 105 Asia (Dapper), 132 Asia in the Making of Europe (Lach), 107, 212–213 Asiatic Researches, 41 Asiatic Society (Bengal), 41 Atlas (Fernão Vaz Dourado), 20 Atlas Historique (Châtelain), 134–135 Aurangzeb-‘Alamgir, Muhyi-ud-Din, 1, 4, 5, 35–36, 156, 170, 177, 179, 197, 225, 262, 312; history written by Murad, 170; portrayal in Schellinks’s painting, 36 Aureng-zebe (Dryden), 36 Azevedo, Agostinho de, 22, 94–95, 98–99 Bahadur (Sultan of Gujarat), 34, 46–47, 66, 175, 296–297 Baihaqi, Abu’l Fazl, 75

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INDEX Balde, Philip (Baldaeus), 35, 107, 129–130, 132, 136 Baldini, Giovanni Antonio, 134–135, 138 Barani, Ziya-ud-Din, 75 Barbosa, Duarte, 18, 52, 83–84, 89–90, 94–95; kingdoms of Gujarat and Sind, 86–88 Barros, João de, 18, 23, 26, 63–64, 75–81, 226; translators for, 67–73 Bassingh, Adolph, 29–30 Bataillon, Marcel, 57 Bayān-i Wāqi‘ (Kashmiri), 314 Beaulieu, Augustin de, 8–11 Beckford, William Thomas, 267 Bedwell, William, 171 Benfield, Paul, 237, 368n44 Bernand, Carmen, 106 Bernard, Jean-Frédéric, 38–39, 106, 115, 123, 127 Bernier, François, 1–7, 14–16, 37, 129, 324 Bhartrihari, 39 Bhimsen, 32 Bocarro, António, 22 Bodleian Library: portrait of Shahjahan, 201; portrait of Timur, 165; Rāgamāla (Laud), 33, 135, 163; Walker collection, 268, 270. See also Fraser, James, manuscript collection; Laud, William Bolts, William, 246 Bomanji, Naushirvanji, 185 Bombay (Mumbai), 19, 53, 152, 154, 158–162, 166–167, 182–186, 188–189, 207–208, 286, 317 Bombay Mayor’s Court, charges of extortion against Lowther, 161–163 Bouchet, Jean-Venant, 126–127 Bowrey, Thomas, 34 Boxer, Charles R., 68–69, 79 Boysson, François, 2–3 Braddyll, John, 162–163 Brahmins. See Religion, Hinduism Breu, Jörg, 51 Breu, Jörg (the Elder), 23 Brito, João de, 39, 125–126 Bryant, Gerald James, 152 Buchanan, George, 151 Burgkmair, Hans, 51, 52 Bussy, Charles de, 227–239, 268, 272–274; comparison to Noronha, 231; Hanno of Carthage quoted in letter, 368n40;

la politique à l’asiatique, 233–234; letter to Léon Moracin, 235–236; return to India, 230–231 Calcoen (also see Calicut) 27, 49–50 Calcutta (Kolkata), 243–246, 249, 251–254, 256, 258, 266, 314, 324 Calicut, ix, 17, 27, 49, 51, 53, 104, 293, 212 Cambridge, Richard Owen, 226 Camões, Luís Vaz de, 23 Campbell, Archibald, 153 Cantino, Alberto, 49 Carmichael, Charles and George, 154, 158 Caron, François, 4, 7 Cartography and maps: Cantino planisphere, 49, 213; “Dieppe school” of cartography, 48–49; early Eu ropean settlements, 53; Eu ropean influence on Indian maps, 301; gift of Mercator to Jahangir, 300–301; João de Castro and navigation of Indian Ocean, 20; Map of the settlement of São Tomé de Meliapor, 218; Portuguese and navigation, 311; Portuguese Atlas, 20–21 Casta. See Caste system Castanheda, Fernão Lopes de, 23, 59–60, 63–66, 68, 72, 79, 81, 86 Caste and caste system, 90–92, 347n128; “A Dissertation on the Religion and Manners of the Bramins,” 120–122; cosmology and creation myth described in Picart’s work, 117–118; description of social groups in India and Asia, 94–95, 98–99; parallels to Biblical material in Henry Lord’s work, 117–118; Pariahs, 120–121; Walker’s views of, 279–280 Castro, Américo, 54 Castro, Dom João de, 20, 23, 100 Cātikal Tottam, 99 Cecil, Robert, 11 Çelebi, Evliya, 322 Çelebi Mehmed Efendi, Yirmisekiz, 322 Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde (Bernard, Picart), 38–39, 106; “A Discovery of the Sect of the Banians, 116; “A Dissertation on the Religion and Manners of the

INDEX Bramins,” 118; comparison to Pansebeia, 138; illustrations in, 131–132, 135, 137; quotations from authoritative travelers and missionaries, 129–130; section on India, 108–110, 115–116; sources, cited and plagiarized, 130; “Supplement to the Preceding Dissertations,” 127–130 Charles I (king of England), 32–33, 171, 173 Charpentier, Jarl, 129, 136 Châtelain, Henri, 134 Chatterjee, Partha, 322 Chevalier, Jean-Baptiste, 246–247 Chézy, Antoine-Léonard de, 42 China, Ming Dynasty, 73 China illustrata (Kircher), 130 Christian ity, 18; claim of Indian religion as lost Christians, 126–127; contrast to eastern religions, 23; differences with English and Dutch in India, 28; New Christian ( Jewish converts), 19–20, 26; Rópica Pnefma (Barros) banned by Inquisition, 68–69; Syrian and Catholic Church relations, Synod of Diamper, 315–317; view of Mughals toward Catholics and Reformed Church, 28–29 Chronicles: Castilian account by Figueroa, 62; Indian travels to England, 313–314; Pādshāh Nāma (Lahori), 287; Sistema Marcial Asiático (Noronha), 223; Timurid chronicle, 31; Varttamānappustakam of Tommakattanar, 315–320. See also Portugal, chronicles and chroniclers Cisneros, Francisco Jiménez de (Cardinal), 57 Cleland, John, 160–163, 166–167; altercation with Lowther, 161–163, 166; “Secretary for the Portugeze Affairs,” 166 Cleland, William, 160–161 Cleynaerts, Nicolas, 57 Clive, Robert, 40, 228, 237–238, 244–245, 253 Cochin (Kochi), 5, 16, 49–51, 53, 81, 84, 100 Cockell, William, 168, 190, 202, 206 Codex Casanatense, 24, 91–92 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste, 4

Cole, Humphrey, 168, 190, 200 Colección de crónicas árabes de la Reconquista (Miranda), 54 Colóquios dos simples e drogas e coisas medicinais da Índia (Orta), 19–20 Columbus, Christopher, 58 Commerce and trade: France and Mughal empire, 4–9; Portugal and Malay peninsula, 83–84, 100 Compagnie royale des Indes Orientales, 3–4, 6 Company of Scotland Trading, 152 Conquista de las Indias de Persia e Arabia que hizo la armada del rey don Manuel de Portugal (Figueroa, Agüero) , 62 Coote, Eyre, 253, 256, 258, 370n77 Correia, Gaspar, 23, 63, 64–68, 72, 79–80, 86 Corsairs or pirates. See Ango, Jean; Hugo, Hubert Corsali, Andrea, 51 Corte-Real, Jerónimo, 24 Costa, Cristóvão da, 132 Couto, Diogo do, 22–23, 63, 68, 80, 86, 94, 130, 226 Coutre brothers ( Jacques and Joseph), 27 Cowan, Robert, 162, 182 Cron, Ferdinand, 100 Crónica da Guiné (Zurara), 60 Crónica da tomada de Ceuta (Zurara), 61 Crónica d’El Rei Dom João I (Lopes), 59 Crónica do Conde Dom Duarte de Meneses (Zurara), 60 Crónica do emperador Clarimundo donde os Reys de Portugal descendem (Barros), 67 Daniell, Thomas and William, 43 Danishmand Khan. See Yazdi, Mulla Muhammad Shafi‘ Dapper, Olfert, 132 Das, Kesu, 32 Das Gupta, Ashin, 154, 158–159, 182, 359n42 Década Quarta, 80 Décadas da Ásia (Barros), 18, 67, 69–71, 74, 79, 80 Década Segunda, 74, 77. See also Décadas da Ásia (Barros) Deccan, 13, 19–21, 72, 74–77, 80, 82, 156; chronicles of, 172, 179, 194, 199, 219; Sultanates, 37, 53

385

386

INDEX Decker, Coenrat, 136 Decker, Matthew, 191–192 De Imperio Magni Mogolis (Laet), 31 De l’idolâtrie: Une archéologie des sciences religieuses (Bernand, Gruzinski), 106 Delhi, xi, 3, 27, 42, 53, 74–77, 149, 169, 190, 193, 200, 202–206, 225, 229, 251, 253–255 Dellon, Charles, 124–125, 130 De rebus Emmanuelis regis Lusitaniae (Osório), 63 Desceliers, Pierre, 49 De variolis et morbillis liber (Mead), 168 De Voulton, Joseph, 168, 191 Dias, Estêvão (Estiene Dies), 46–47, 49 Dieu, Louis de, 31 Digby, Simon, 301–303, 314 Diplomacy: Persian and Arabic language and, 72–73; translators of Persian for Portuguese, 73 Dirks, Nicholas, 90, 91, 275 Discourse on the Plague, A (Mead), 168 Display of Two Forraigne Sects in the East Indies, A (Lord), 116; illustrations in, 131 Dissertation on the Manners and the Religion of the Bramins (Rogerius), 122; illustrations in, 131–132 Don Claribalte (Oviedo), 67 Dourado, Fernão Vaz, 20 Drummond, John, 153–154, 162 “Drummond network,” 154 Dryden, John, 36 Dundas, Henry, 40, 152, 153 Dupleix, Joseph-François, 191, 216, 220, 228, 235; view of Indian character, 230–232 Dutch East India Company (VOC), 1, 4–8, 16, 21, 26–32, 34–35, 39, 107, 118–121, 129–131, 134, 157–159, 182, 188, 191–193, 301, 312, 316, 324; schenkagie goederen to India, 32; secret dealings between Wake and Mossel, 182 East India Company (English), 7, 10, 147, 159; Arabic and Persian manuscripts requested, 32–33; collections of art, manuscripts, and paintings, 38, 171–172; colonial civility after conquest, 284; factory reform and

moral order, 157; fraud at Surat factory, 162–163; Laud Rāgamāla, 33; Mylapore, attack on, 216; politics and intrigues, 245–246; power of, 40–41; Rustom and Manakji family, brokers, 182–183; Scottish role in, 40, 151–153; transition to colonial power, 211, 270 Elstrack, Renold, 32 England: beginnings of an Indo-Persian collection, 32; Government of India Act, 40. See also East India Company (English) Erskine, Charles, 145, 146 Erskine, William, 40 Ethnography: Malay geograph ical perspective, 83–84. See also Barbosa, Duarte; Codex Casanatense; Pires, Tomé Eu rope, trade with India, 17 Eu ropean presence in extra-European world, 290 Eu ropeans, common identity, 282–284 Evans-Pritchard, Edward Evan, 104 Evenemens particuliers (Bernier), 3 Farrukhsiyar, 198–199, 202 Fenício, Jacobo (Giacomo), 129, 136 Figueroa, Martín Fernández de, 62, 66 Filipe, António, 57 Firdausi, 75, 79 Flanders and Flemish, early publications’ influence, 27, 49, 51, 62 France: commerce with Mughal empire, 4–9, 237; comparison to other Eu ropean nations, 5–6, 8; distancing from Hugo, French corsair, 6–7; role of Englishman in trade with Mughal empire, 9; stolen plans for defense of Fort William, 246 Frangistan, 5, 6 Fraser, James, 362n78; called a discontented Jacobite, 148–149; collector of textual materials in India, 166, 169, 208–209; dispute involving James Grant, 147–149; dispute involving Rustamji and Parekh families, 183–185; education in Persian and Sanskrit language and religion, 169, 176, 180–181; to Eu rope then back to India, 181; friendship with Cleland, 163; mussel beds dispute, 145; not part of fraud at Surat factory, 163; return to

INDEX Eu rope and back to India, 166–167; time in Surat and other Indian locales, 154, 156; view of India by “unruly orientalist,” 150–151 Fraser, James in Khambayat, 151, 154, 156, 160; study with Shaikh Muhammad Murad, 169–170 Fraser, James in Surat, 149, 151, 154, 156, 157–158, 160; return to India, 181–182; suspended from post, 185–189 Fraser, James, manuscript collection, 177, 208–209; Bodleian collection on ethics, politics, novels, 180–181; Bodleian collection on history, 177–179; poetry collection, 179–180; rubrics of, 176–177 Fraser, James Baillie, 149 Fraser, Mary Satchwell, 149, 166, 181 Fraser, Simon, Lord Lovat, 144–145 Fraser, William, 149 French East India Company, 110, 191, 217, 228–230, 238, 246–247 Fryer, John, 130 Furber, Holden, 162–163 Gama, Gaspar da, 291 Gama, Vasco da, 17, 27, 58; Indians return to Portugal, 291; voyage to India described, 49 Gassendi, Pierre, 2, 15, 129 Geertz, Clifford, 104–105 Geleynssen de Jongh, Wollebrant, 28; understanding of Persian and Hindustani, 159 Gendrón, Pedro Chalmeta, 54–55 Gentil, Jean-Baptiste, 247–249, 265 Gentze, Georg (Gentius), 31, 174 Georg, Johann, 174 Germany and German traders: early publications’ influence, 24, 31, 49, 62; Sprenger’s account of voyage to India, 50–51; Welsers, early presence in India, 50–51 Goa, 13, 16, 19–20, 24, 26, 28, 53, 62, 74, 77, 80–81, 84, 92, 100, 124, 132, 155, 211, 216, 218–220, 222–223, 227, 247, 289, 297, 300, 307–309, 317–321 Góis, Damião de, 63 Golius, Jacob, 31, 32 Grant, Alexander, 147 Grant, James, 145–149

Greaves, John, 171 Grierson, George, 43 Gruzinski, Serge, 106 Grynaeus, Simon, 52 Guerand, Augustin (also see Herryard), 11 Guha, Sumit, 91 Gujarati, Shaikh Muhammad Chishti, 170 Haidar ‘Ali Khan, 217, 219–222, 227 Hamilton, Alexander, 152, 270 Hastings, Warren, 42, 108, 245, 248–249, 251, 253, 256–257 Herryard, Augustin, 11–16, 332n21, 334n40 Hindu Infanticide (Moor), 269 Hindu Pantheon, The (Moor), 39, 276, 373n124 Hindu religion. See Religion, Hinduism Hindushah Muhammad Qasim (Firishta), 38, 82, 173, 177, 249, 293–294 Histoire de la dernière révolution des Estats du Grand Mogol (Bernier), 3 Histoire de la littérature hindoue e hindoustanie (Tassy), 43 Histoire de l’Espagne musulmane (LéviProvençal), 54 Historia Arabum (Rada), 55 História do descobrimento e conquista da Índia pelos Portugueses (Castanheda), 63–64 Historia religionis veterum Persarum (Hyde), 33 Historiography: Arabic in the Iberian peninsula, 54, 56–57; Eu ropean view of India, 212–214; French view of Bussy and Dupleix, 228, 230; khabar and tārīkh, 60–61, 69, 71, 77, 79–83; Mughal study of Eu ropeans, 81; Persian, 72, 75; Portuguese, 63–64; Sultanate of Delhi in Persian, 75 History of Nadir Shah (Fraser), 164, 168, 189; assassination of Nadir Shah, 207; comparison to Rehatsek translation, 196; conquest of Delhi, 202–206; differences from Genuine History , 191–193, 197; earlier translations of works on Nadir Shah, 190–192 Holwell, John Zephaniah, 99

387

388

INDEX “Honaremand.” See Herryard, Augustin Horne, John, 183 Huet, Pierre-Daniel, 126–127 Hughli, 192–193, 286–289 Hugo, Hubert, 6–7 Hunt, Thomas, 168, 208–209 Husaini, Kamgar, 170, 177 Husaini, Mir Muhammad Husain ibn ‘Abdul, 314 Hyde, Thomas, 33, 208 Hyderabad, 37–38, 198–199, 225, 229 Iberian peninsula: Arabic historiography, 54–56, 60–61; convivencia between Muslims, Christians, and Jews, 54; expulsion of Jews and Muslims, 58; fi rst chronicle of Portuguese in Asia, 62; hispanidad or “Spanishness,” 54; Iberian chivalric fiction, 65–67; rediscovery of tārīkh in India, 58 Ibn Bassam al-Shantarini, Ali, 56, 57 Ibn Khaldun, 56 Ibn Sahib al-Salah, Abd, 56, 57 I‘jāz-i-Arsalānī (Polier), 239, 253, 266 Illustrations in printed works, 35, 51, 131–133, 275; Codex Casanatense, 24; Eu ropean portrayals of widow burning, 23; in The Hindu Pantheon (Moor), 276; in Julião’s work, 226; in Picart’s work, 128, 131–133, 136; in Walker’s “An Account of various Hindoo Deities,” 276–277, 278 India, kingdoms of: Awadh, Bengal, and Hyderabad regional dynasties, 37; Mughal conquerors, 37–38; Tamil country, 99; Vijayanagara, 37, 72, 74, 88–90, 224 Indian Ocean and land surrounding: Codex Casanatense, 24; knowledge and information of, 48–49 Indian views of Eu rope and Eu ropeans, 291, 311–315, 324; comparison to Ottoman written views, 321–322; Eu rope ans without Eu rope, 294; Gulshan-i Ibrāhīmī (Firishta), 293–294; Joseph of Cranganore, 291–292; no written descriptions of, 312; Syrian Christian authors, 292; Tuhfat al-Mujāhidīn fī ba‘z Ahwāl al-Burtukāliyyīn (Zain-ud-Din), 293; untrustworthy “Franks,” but purveyors

of strange and wonderful, 297–298, 300 Isfahani, Mirza Abu Talib Khan, 43, 313, 324 Islam: Portuguese expansion and, 69–70; Portuguese view of “law of Muhammad,” 21; Shi‘i and Sunni, 21, 52, 53, 71. See also Religion, eastern Isma‘il, Munshi, 314 Italy and Italians: Arabic and “Oriental” languages in, 57–58; early Italian publications’ influence, 49, 51–53; Navigationi et Viaggi (Ramusio), 18, 52 Itinerario (Varthema), 51 I‘tisam-ud-Din, Mirza Shaikh, 313, 316, 324, 379, 380 Ja‘far Khan ‘Umdat al-Mulk, 5 Jagannathdas Laldas Parekh, 182–185 Jahangir, Nur-ud-Din Muhammad, 9, 11–13, 15, 197–198; Jesuit text about, 101–102; memoirs and views of Eu ropeans, 299–301; painting of, 32, 36 Jesuits: abridged versions of doctrines of “gentiles,” 26; acting for Portuguese traders, 28; in Agra, 12; caste system and, 94; Dāstān-i Ahwāl-i Hawāriyān, lives of saints, 173; disarray in Eu rope, 265; presence in India, 263–264; Tamil, understanding of, 30; treatise on Mughal court, 101–102. See also Christian ity Jewels, artefacts or animals: Eu ropean collectors of, 31–32; trade in, 14–15, 26; Wunderkammers, or antiquarian collections, 32 Jews and Judaism: anti-Jewish sentiment in Décadas da Ásia , 69; Brahmins of Jewish descent according to Noronha, 224; expulsion of Jews and Muslims, 58, 66; parallel between the Jews and the Indians, 112–115; residents of Cranganor, 50; translators of Persian for Portuguese, 18, 73. See also Christian ity Johnson, Richard, 38, 209 Jones, William, 41, 190, 210, 231, 253, 258–264, 266, 313 Julião, Carlos, 226 Juzjani, Minhaj al-Siraj, 75

INDEX Kariyattil, Joseph, 315–317, 320–321 Kashmiri, ‘Abdul Karim, 190, 314 Kaywan, Azar, 140–141 Kazim, Muhammad, 170, 177, 190 Kerridge, Thomas, 116–117 Khabar and tārīkh. See Historiography Khambayat. See Fraser, James in Khambayat Khan, Diyanat, 5 Khan, Namdar, 5 Khan, Rustam, 5 Khan, Safdar Muhammad, 156, 181, 187–188 Khan, Tegh Beg, 156, 163, 181, 184, 187 Khattri, Ramchand, 260 Khurshedji, Mancherji, 185 Kidd, William, 152 Kingdom of Gujarat (“Guzerate”). See Barbosa, Duarte Kircher, Athanasius, 129–130, 132, 136 Koedijk, Isaak Jansz, 34 Kroniek (Pelsaert), 31 Lach, Donald, 107, 212–213 La Créquinière, 39, 109–116; on war in India, 115 Laet, Johannes de, 31–32 Lahori, ‘Abdul Hamid, 170, 177, 287 La Marie de Bon Secours (Le Grant Engloys), 46 Lambton, John, 183 Langlès, Louis-Mathieu, 44 Language and culture: Codex Casanatense, watercolors of people of coastal India, 24, 26; illustration and lack of in early texts, 23–24; Indian culture, ancient or modern, 42–43; Portuguese as lingua franca, 157; Portuguese explorers, traders and historians, 17–19; Portuguese facing linguistic complexity of Asia, 72–73; sāstra and purānas, 117. See also Arabic language; Latin; Persian language; Sanskrit; Translators Las Casas, Bartolomé de, 106 Latin, 55, 63; De rebus Emmanuelis regis Lusitaniae (Osório), 63; Rosarium politicum, 174; study by Mughals, 81; translations into, 20, 31, 51 Laud, William, 32, 172; Persian manuscript collection, 33, 135, 170–174

Le Gouz de la Boullaye, François, 37, 130–131, 132, 139 Lendas da Índia (Correia), 64–65 Lettera allo ill. Laurentio de’ Medici ex India (Corsali), 51 Lettera allo illustrissimo Iuliano de Medici venuta dell’India (Corsali), 51 Levant Company, 171 Lévi-Provençal, Évariste, 54 Lewis, George, 34; collection of Persian manuscripts, 175–177 Lhomaca, Dominique, 238 Libro del caballero Zifar, 65 Lord, Henry, 39, 116–118, 123, 125, 131 Lowther , Henry, 154, 157–158, 161–163, 166, 182–183 Lusíadas (Camões), 23 Ma’asir- i Jahāngīrī (Husaini), 170 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 42 Mackenzie, Colin, 40, 41, 149–150, 270–272, 275 Macrae, James, 154 Madras, 16, 34, 37, 39, 119–120, 136, 153–154, 159, 175–176, 186, 216–217, 243, 312, 317, 319 Ma‘lumāt- ul- āfāq (Khan), 302 Manuzzi, Nicolò, 37, 125–126, 136 Marshall, Peter J., 263, 270 Martin, François, 110 Marwan Ibn al-Hakam, 71 Marx, Karl, xii, 42 Master, Streynsham, 157 Mathews, Richard, 279–280 Maule, John, 146, 148 Maupas, Charles Cauchon de, 11 McGilvary, George, 153–154 Mead, Richard, 168 Melo, D. João José de, 218 Melo, Martim de, 319 Mémoire . . . pour l’établissement du commerce dans les Indes, 4, 7 Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (Cleland), 160 Methwold, William, 33, 171 Meurs, Jacob van, 132 Midnall, John (Midenhall), 10, 11, 16 Military battles: siege of English settlement of Bombay, 286–287; siege of Portuguese settlement of Hughli, 286–289

389

390

INDEX Mill, James, 42 Miranda, Ambrosio Huici, 54 Mir Khwand, 31, 78–79, 170, 173, 175, 177, 193 Mirza Zu’lfiqar Azar Sasani, 140–143 Mitter, Partha, 107–108, 133, 213 Montalboddo, Fracanzio da, 52 Monuments anciens et modernes de l’Hindoustan (Langlès), 44 Moor, Edward, 39, 276, 373n124 Moracin, Léon, 234–237 Mossel, Jacob, 182 Muda, Iskandar, 8 Mughal dynasty. See Religion, Mughal and dynasty Muhammad Shah, 156 Müller, Max, 42 Munro, Thomas, 41 Murad, Shaikh Muhammad, 169–170, 176, 178 Muslim religion: in Spain, 54–56, 58, 69, 71. See also Religion, Mughal and dynasty Mustafa, Haji. See Lhomaca, Dominique Mythologie des Indous (Polier), 242, 268 Nadir Shah, 37, 168–170, 189 Nagar, Lacchmidas, 185 Nahrawali, Qutb al-Din Muhammad, 81 National Library of Scotland, Walker collection, 268, 270 Nauroji, Manakji, 185 Navigationi et Viaggi (Ramusio), 18, 52 the Netherlands, Persian, study of, 30–31 New Account of the East Indies, A (Hamilton), 152 Newman, Richard, 10 Noronha, António José de, 216–217, 284; complaints about British historians, 226–227; ecclesiastic turned man- of- action, 218–219; named bishop of Halicarnassus, 217, 366n8; Portuguese governor of Mylapore, 216; views of Brahmins and Islam, 224–226 Northwestern Eu rope, 17 Notícia (de Voulton), 191 Novus orbis regionum ac insularum veteribus incognitarum (Grynaeus), 52 Nuer Religion (Evans-Pritchard), 104

Ogborn, Miles, 157 Oriental Scenery (Daniell), 43 Orme, Robert, 221, 226 Orta, Garcia da, 19–20, 132; language fluency, 19 Osório, Jerónimo, 63 Ottoman art, 133 Ottoman empire, 10, 21, 52, 81, 156, 173, 303 Ottoman writers, 321–322 Oviedo, Gonzalo Fernández de, 67 Oxford University: Arabic language at, 171. See also Bodleian Library Padmanabha, 39, 119, 120 Paesi novamente retrovati (Montalboddo), 52 Paintings. See art Pansebeia: or, A view of all religions in the world (Ross), 138 Parekh, Bhimji, 182 Parmentier, Jean and Raoul, 48 Parsi. See Zoroastrianism Paspor, Matthias, 171 Pecquet, Jean, 2 Pegu, 303–305 Peiresc, Nicolas-Fabri de, 15 Pelsaert, Francisco, 31, 37, 301 Peregrinação (Pinto), 62–63 Pereira, Diogo, 84 Persian language, 9, 10, 72, 172; ‘Abdul Masih, 13; diminishment of importance, 42; “Honaremand,” 13; needed for trade, 17; translations of “Hindu” materials, 81–82 Persian and Arabic written materials, 26; Ajā’ib al- makhlūqāt, 173; al- Barq al-Yamānī fī al- Fath al-‘Usmānī (Nahrawali), 81; al-Mann bi-al-Imāma (Ibn Sahib al-Salah), 56; al-Zakhīra fi mahāsin ahl al-Jazīra (Ibn Bassam al- Shantarini), 56; Atwār dar hall- i asrār (Qutbjahani), 181; Babur’s memoirs (‘Abdur Rahim Khan-i Khanan), 170; Chronicas dos Reys delle, que nos foram interpretadas de Persico, 74; chronicles of the Bahmani Sultanate of the Deccan, 76–77; Dāstān-i Ahwāl-i Hawāriyān, 173; Dīwān-i Anwarī, 33, 172; Dīwān-i Mukhtarī, 173; Gulistān and Bustān of Shaikh Sa‘di Shirazi, 31,

INDEX 33, 173–174; Habīb al- Siyār (Khwandmir), 175; histories of India, 38; looting by East India Company, 40–41; Majma‘ al- bahrain (Dara Shikoh), 181; manuscript collections, 32–34, 170–171, 173; Mughal dynastic history, 31; Mu’nis al-arwāh ( Jahanara), 180; Pādshāh nāma (Lahori), 41, 170; Rauzat al-Tāhirīn (Sabzwari), 81; Samrat al-Falāsifa (Sattar), 81; Shāhnāma (Firdausi), 75, 79; study of, 18, 30–31; Tabaqāt-i Nāsirī ( Juzjani), 75; Tārīkh-i ‘Alamgīrī (Kazim), 170; Tārīkh-i Mas‘ūdī (Baihaqi), 75; Tārīkh-i Rauzat al- Safa’ fi Sirāt al-Anbiya’ wa’l-Mulūk wa’l-Khulafa’ (Mir Khwand), 78–79, 170, 175, 177; Tārīkh-i Yamīnī (‘Utbi), 75; translations of the Gospel, 21, 30, 81; Tuhfat al- mujāhidīn fī ba‘z ahwāl al-Burtukāliyyīn (Zain al-Din), 80–81. See also Fraser, James, manuscript collection Peyrère, Isaac de la, 83 Phélypeaux, Louis, 110 Picart, Bernard, 38–39, 106–110, 123, 127, 131; daśāvatāra paintings, 136–138; Indian art in Eu rope, 134–136 Pierozzi, Antonio, 81 Pinheiro, Manuel, 30 Pinto, Fernão Mendes, 62–63 Pires, Tomé, 52, 83, 86 Pitt, Thomas, 175 Pococke, Edward, 33, 171 Polier, Antoine-Louis-Henri, 38, 110, 239–242, 249–251; biographical notice, 242–246, 254–255; biography, 266–268; and East India Company, 246; military role, 251–253; Orientalist in last years in India, 259–261; Sanskrit manuscripts to British Museum, 209, 261–263, 265; transition to direct Mughal ser vice, 253–255 Polier, Jean-Antoine-Noé, 241–242 Polier, Marie-Élisabeth (Chanoinesse), 242–243, 267, 268 Polier, Paul-Philippe, 241 Politics, Indian: 1759 Castle Revolution, 156; Tegh Beg Khan bid for Surat Castle, 156 Polo, Marco, 17 Pope, Alexander, 161, 163, 168, 210

Portugal, battles and military episodes: Battle of Ourique, 56; capture of Goa, 62, 74; Diu, 24, 25; Hurmuz, 62; kingdom of Maghrib, 308–309; Mamluk fleet at Diu, 62 Portugal, chronicles and chroniclers, 54, 62–68; Décadas da Ásia, 69–70, 71, 73–75; Fernão Lopes, chief chronicle under Dom Duarte, 59–60. See also Barros, João de; Couto, Diogo do Portugal, monarchy of: chronicles of Portugese role in global history, 63–64; Dom Afonso Henriques, 71; Dom Afonso III, 56; Dom Duarte, 59; Dom Manuel and Dom João III, 49, 71, 84; Dom Sebastião, 308–309 Portugal, viceroys of: Count of Linhares, 13; Dom Francisco de Almeida, 17, 50, 62, 72 Portugal and Portuguese: Carreira da Índia (Cape Route), 44, 62; casados moradores or residents of India, 84–86, 100; differences with English and Dutch in India, 27–28; early presence in Cochin and Cranganor, 50; Estado da Índia, 19, 45, 52, 100, 220; fi rst voyages into Indian Ocean and East Asia, 17–18; historiography at home and in Indian Ocean, 63; letter of captive French sailors from Gujarat, 45–48, 49; multinational participation, 27; Papal Bulls and Treaty of Tordesillas, 46; Portuguese Reconquista, 56, 71; Primor e Honra da Vida Soldadesca no Estado da Índia, 21; trade in Indian spices in Eu rope, 27. See also Noronha, António José de Pulicat, 5, 39, 53, 118–120, 122 Qaisar, Ahsan Jan, 301 Qur’an, 21; Persian translation owned by Lewis, 34, 175 Rada, Rodrigo Ximénez de, 55 Rāgamāla (Laud), 33, 135, 172 “Rahim”, Khan-i Khanan, ‘Abdur Rahim, 170, 172 Ramsden, James, 162 Ramusio, Giovanni Battista, 18, 51–53, 83 Rauzat- ul-Tāhirīn (Sabzwari), 303–307

391

392

INDEX Ravelingen, Frans van, 30 Rehatsek, Edward, 195–196 Religion, anthropology of, 106 Religion, defi nition of, 104–105 Religion, eastern: attack on returning hājīs from Mecca, 27, 49; cosmology and creation myth, 117; gentiles, 18th century view of Indian, 38–39, 138–139; gentiles, abridged versions of doctrines of, 26; gentiles, Dutch view of Moors and, 29–30; gentiles, Eu ropean understanding of, 103–104; gentiles, pilgrimage of, 22; gentiles, “sacred books” of, 22; gentiles: Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains, 22–23, 53, 104; horrific images of gods by Jörg Breu, 51; images of Indian gods, 107–108; monotheistic or polytheistic, 39, 131; parallel between the Jews and the Indians, 109, 112–115, 116; parallels to Christian doctrine, 126; peaceful coexistence of religions, 28; Portuguese exploration of Islam, “law of Muhammad,” 21; Qur’an, Eu ropean study, 21; Shaster, book of Religious laws, 117. See also Christian ity; Jesuits; Jews and Judaism Religion, Hinduism, 40, 106, 107, 143, 264; “A Dissertation on the Religion and Manners of the Bramins,” 118–122; Brahmins in, 87–89, 94–95, 96, 120–121; ParamaBruma, monotheism and, 125–126, 131; “School of Sects (or Theologies)” (Sasani), 139–142; Walker’s views of, 276. See also Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde (Bernard, Picart) Religion, idolatry, 106, 108, 110, 123; “Historical Dissertation,” 124–125, 127 Religion, Mughal and dynasty, 37; Arabic language in, 19; combat with Portuguese, 62; fanatical compared to Hindus, 282–283; in India, 60, 80, 82, 86–87; La Créquinière’s writing on, 112–113; Muslims of Malabar treatment by Portuguese, 293–295; Muslims treatment by Portuguese, 300; opinion of Roman Catholic and Reformed Churches, 28; pre-Adamite

argument and narrative of Noah, 83; seeds of Eu ropean secular denunciation, 101–102; Sultanate of Delhi, 19; view of world outside India, 302–305; in Western India, 52 Rembrandt, 35 Remonstrantie (Pelsaert), 31 Resources and treasures: precious stones, 9, 11, 15, 17. See also Spices, medicines, and plants Robinson, John, 162 Roe, Thomas, 10, 32, 151, 170, 300–301 Rogerius, Abraham, 39, 40, 99, 324; “An Historical Dissertation on the Gods of the East- Indians,” 123–124; complex view of India, 120–123; Padmanabha, in for mant on castes, 118–120, 123 Rópica Pnefma (Barros), 68–69 Rosarium politicum. See Persian and Arabic written materials Rose, Hugh, 149 Ross, Alexander, 138 Roth, Heinrich, 129, 136 Roy, Raja Rammohan, 40 Rubiés, Joan-Pau, 86, 90, 104 Rumi, Khudawand Khan, 158 Rustamji Manakji family, 183 Ryer, André du, 31, 173–174 Sabzwari, Tahir Muhammad, 81, 179, 303–313; mission to Goa, learning about Portuguese, 307–308 Said, Edward, xi, xii, 213, 258, 290, 329, 346 Saleh, Mulla, 5 Sampaio, Lopo Vaz de, 45 Sánchez-Albornoz, Claudio, 54 Sankaracharya, 120 Sanskrit: Images of Eu ropeans in, 312–313; Jesuits and antiquities, 30; Latin, compared to, 23, 26; study of ancient Indian culture, 42 Sarbuland Khan, Mubariz ul-Mulk, 202–206 Sati, or forcibly cremated widow, 23, 35, 88, 92, 93, 134, 136, 276 Scaliger, Joseph, 30 Schellinks, Willem, 35–36 Schreuder, Jan, 159 Schuylenburgh, Hendrik van, 35

INDEX Scotland: Bonnie Prince Charlie’s defeat, 150; chronology of Scottish interest in India, 151–152; linen industry, 147; mixed race with Indian wives, 150 Seyyid Ali Efendi, Morali, 322 Shahjahan, Shihab-ud-Din Muhammad, 13–14, 33, 35, 36, 41, 133, 173, 197, 198, 286, 287, 289, 313, 362 Sherley, Robert, 12, 14, 16 Shivshankar Bholanath Vasantrai, Lala, 161 Sichterman, Jan Albert, 191 Sidi Abi al-‘Abbas al-Sabti, 61 Silva, Pedro da, 262 Sistema Marcial Asiático (Noronha), 221–224, 227–228 Smalbroke, Samuel, 149 Smith, Wilfred Cantwell, 139 Sousa, Martim Afonso de, 19 Spices, medicines, and plants, 50; Colóquios dos simples e drogas e coisas medicinais da Índia (Orta), 19–20 Sprenger, Balthasar, 50–51 Steele, Richard, 10–11, 16 Stewart, Charles, Tipu Sultan’s library cata logue, 179 Storia del Mogol (Manuzzi), 125 Strachan, George, 151, 170 Sucesso do Segundo Cerco de Diu (CorteReal), 24, 25 Suite des Mémoires du Sieur Bernier (Bernier), 3 Suma Oriental (Pires), 83–84 Summa Historialis or Chronicon partibus tribus distincta ab initio mundi ad 1360 (Pierozzi), 81 Surat, 1–4, 14, 28, 33, 34, 37, 39, 53, 87, 116, 135, 149, 151, 154–163, 166–167, 169, 171, 176, 180–188, 195, 200, 207–209, 247, 270, 300, 311. Also see Fraser, James in Surat Surat, study and description of, 158–160 Survey of India, 41 Swinton, Archibald, 313 Tārīkh. See Historiography Tassy, Garcin de, 42 Tavernier, Jean-Baptiste, 37, 132, 133 Teixeira, Pedro, 26, 78–79 Thomson, Robert, 149 Tipu Sultan, 179, 231, 272, 280–282

Tirant lo Blanc, 66 tobacco, 298–299 Tod, James, 40 Tommakattanar, Paremmakkal, 315–321 Translators: Briot, Pierre, 116; Fraser, James, 181; Índia, Gaspar da, 73 Trautmann, Thomas R., 263 Trevor-Roper, Hugh, 170 University of Cambridge library: Arabic materials, 174; Lewis donation of Persian material, 175; Rauzat al- Safa’ (Mir Khwand), 175; “secular” content of Persian literature, 174 ‘Utbi, Abu’l Nasr, 75 Valle, Pietro della, 129 Vallisnieri, Antonio, 135 van Doetechem, Jan, 134 Van Erpe, Thomas (Erpenius), 30–31, 174 Van Linschoten, Jan Huyghen, 130, 132, 134, 138 Vansittart, Henry, 42, 246 Vapoer, Hendrik Arentsz, 34 Varthema, Ludovico di, 24, 51, 132 Varttamānappustakam (Tommakattanar), 315 Vecchietti, Giovan Battista and Gerolamo, 21 Venkatadhvarin’s Viśvagunādarśacampū, 312–313 Verdadeira, e exacta notícia dos progressos de Thamas Kouli Khan Schach da Persia no Império do Gram Mogôr (de Voulton), 168 Vida ( Jacques de Coutre), 27 Vijayanagara, 37, 53, 72, 74, 88–90, 104, 224 Vindication of Mr. John Braddyll against Mr. Henry Lowther, The (Braddyll), 162 Voltaire, 241–242, 264 von Wyss- Giacosa, Paola, 106, 131 Voulton, Joseph de, 191 Voyages de Mr Dellon, avec sa relation de l’Inquisition de Goa, augmentée de diverses pièces curieuses (Dellon), 124 Voyages et Observations (Le Gouz de la Boullaye), 131

393

394

INDEX Wake, William, 182, 183–185, 187, 189 Walker, Alexander: biography, 268–269; on English rule and Orientalism, 272–274; in Gujarat, 269; in Kerala, 269; memoirs and views of India, 274–276, 279, 284–285; in the Scottish tradition of India, 270; trust and confidence of Indian natives, 271–272. See also Tipu Sultan Webbe, Frances, 10 Wedderburn, Alexander, 153, 154 Wendel, François-Xavier, 251, 265 Wilson, Horace Hayman, 42 Xavier, Jerónimo, 30, 173

Yazdi, Mulla Muhammad Shafi‘ (Danishmand Khan), 3, 5, 15 Zacut, Abraham, 66 Zain-ud-Din, ibn Ahmad Ma‘bari, Shaikh, 80–81, 293–295 Zanetti, Anton Maria, 135 Zanetti, Anton Maria, the Younger, 135–136 Zoroastrianism, 33, 39, 140; discussed by Henry Lord, 116; pre-Adamite argument, 83 Zurara, Gomes Eanes de, 60–61, 66, 68, 72