Why did you choose English diplomat Thomas Roe’s writings for a book on Indian history? What makes his journal relevant today?
The focus of Courting India is on the first English embassy to the court of the Mughal emperor Jahangir, sent jointly by James I and the East India Company (EIC). It tells the story of a complex network of trade and politics in both countries, long before the idea of the British empire in South Asia became a possibility. The history of this period is often strictly geographically limited, so what happens in India is treated as a separate field of inquiry from that in American colonies, and English politics at home.
Yet, the book illuminates how the fortunes of England and Mughal India intertwined and intersected, along with other global trades––both for Roe and the British empire in centuries that followed. I was particularly interested in finding out how political and economic developments in England, and Europe in general, helped shape Roe’s experience here, as well as exploring how his presentation of India shaped European perceptions of the country. That tells us about how later, more familiar periods of history unfolded. It also reveals how memory and home-grown assumptions shape a traveller’s experience abroad, both then, and now.
Besides Roe’s journal, what else entailed your research?
I draw heavily on over 10 years of archival research. There is Jahangir’s memoir, the Jahangirnama. They are supplemented by the accounts of other travellers, both English and non-English, and by the meticulous paperwork of the EIC. Collectively, Courting India uses a huge range of sources from multiple languages–– English, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, Latin, among European languages, and Marathi, Sanskrit, Persian, among those in India.
But I’ve also gone beyond textual sources, and drawn on the literature and art of both nations to illuminate the mental worlds in which these figures operated, so Sanskrit poets and Shakespeare, English and Indian miniatures, Indian epics and scenes from English popular theatre jostle for space in that landscape.
You have a rather sympathetic tone towards Roe. Why is that?
Roe was a complicated figure––prickly, opinionated, with insecurity about the status of the English at the Mughal court, which he attempted to balance with a cultivated sense of superiority about his status as a Protestant, Christian, English man. His complaints are supplemented by flashes of dry humour and insight. His journals and letters record the messiness of human experience and emotions in alien circumstances, and that is what makes him an interesting source.
This is a man who writes warmly in support of the plea of his Indian interpreter, Jadu, for a salary raise and grumbles in the same breath about how bureaucracy makes it impossible for the English to trade in the subcontinent.
You have been an academic for a large part of your career. What was the transition to becoming
an author like?
When I write as an academic, there are certain things I can take for granted: familiarity with the context, and assumptions made in existing research. Writing for a wider audience is challenging, but also productive. It does not mean it’s less academically rigorous but encourages us to take a fresh look, ask fundamental questions that might otherwise be buried under critical wrangles, and accommodate material that conventional research may not always have space for.
How do you see present-day India vis à vis Roe’s impressions of Mughal India?
Much of Indian history is framed still by the shadow of the British Empire, and the subsequent economic and political instability. The historical records of this embassy––both Roe’s and his travel companions’ writings––challenge those assumptions to show the cultural diversity, richness and economic power, which characterised the subcontinent in the early 17th century.