Book review-Courting India: Seventeenth-Century England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire

By Arnold Zeitlin

      The formal beginning of India’s relationship with Great Britain hardly was auspicious.

       Sir Thomas Roe, 35, sick with dysentery that was rarely to leave him for three years in India, presented his royal credentials as Britain’s King James I’s first ambassador to Jahangir, at age 47 the fourth Mughal emperor, at his court in the Rajasthan city of Ajmer in January 1616. Included was a letter James had addressed to the “Great Mogor”, an indication of how much the king and his court knew about India.

       Roe in the daily journal he kept wrote that Jahangir “dismissed me with more favour and outward grace…than ever was showed to any ambassador”. He also offered to send Roe his physicians.

       But Jahangir’s reaction to what might be considered a historical event is unknown. Not only did he not mention anything about Roe’s presentation in a meticulous daily journal he kept, despite Roe’s presence at the court for three years, he never once mentions the ambassador.

       Perhaps the emperor did not recognize the historical value of the presentation. He already had met Sir William Hawkins, an ambitious English pirate, who in 1609 had not only presented his credentials as an envoy but married an Armenian Christian woman he was offered from Jahangir’s harem. Britons in a privately-funded vessel first touched on to Indian soil in 1583 during the 49-year Mughal reign of Akbar, Jahangir’s father. The Portuguese and Dutch were much more involved than the British in the East India trade.

       Roe was the first formally dubbed ambassador, his three-year tenure the subject of Nandini Das’ book, in which the Oxford University political scientist notes that at the moment of Roe’s arrival in South Asia,  the annual revenue of Jahangir’s government was a mere 100 times that of the British monarchy. Any suggestion at that time that the British would be running India within a century and a half and that a woman, Victoria, would be empress of India, would doubtlessly be put down to madness. However, Hawkins, before he left India, did mention, using the spelling of the day, that his rivals were warning Jahangir that the British “if once we would set foot, we would take his Countrey from him.”

       In fact, in remarks that might earn the highest global prize for irony,  Roe wrote in a letter to Khurram, Jahangir’s son and crown prince, that his trading rivals, the nasty Portuguese had evil designs on India.

       “Contrary to all Honor and Justice,” Roe wrote, “they call their king in Europe the king of India.” As for the British, Roe wrote, also using the spelling of the day. “we only desire open trade for all Nations to the enriching of  your highness’ kingdomes and the advancing of your Customes….wheras they (the Portuguese) have ever sought to keepe in subjection your subjects, suffering none to trafique but them selves and exacting dutyes for licence to passe upon your seas.”

       Roe’s mission was the promote trade between India and Britain. As a result, his embassy was funded not by James I’s state but by the British East India Company, to which Queen Elizabeth I had given in 1600 a monopoly of trade in the Far East. When Roe reached India in September 1615 after a six-month sail, company factors already were working in the port of Surat. Trade was difficult; British woolen were not made for South Asian weather, which also rusted English steel swords and knives. Roe insisted that his small entourage wear their English clothing, unsuitable as it was for the Indian climate.

       “We know,” author Das concludes, “that nothing particularly significant emerged from Roe’s embassy.”

       With little material about Roe to go on, Das makes an invaluable and impressive effort to draw the context around Roe’s South Asian experience. A two-volume edition of Rose’s daily diary was published in Britain in 1899, but much of his commentary was missing. Jahangir’s diary was a valuable asset in creating a picture of his court. In fact, Jahangir comes off as a much more interesting character than Roe.

        Das bulks up her narrative with glimpses of Jahangir’s court and by creating a picture, too, of 17^th century London, of James I’s coronation and the gossip and conspiracies of his court. The reader gets an entire chapter around an apparent wager between Roe and Jahangir over how well the Indian court artist could duplicate the miniature portrait of an otherwise unidentified English woman (who may have been the wife Roe left behind in London). Much to Jahangir’s amusement, Roe whittles his initial bet of 10,000 rupees to a 50-rupee award to the artist.

       Around this obscure but significant historical event, Das has built an engaging, informative tale of British diplomatic bumbling that eventually led to an empire and of Mughal power at its height but containing the seeds that led, also eventually, to its decline.