Anyone who has studied the British Empire would be familiar with such illustrious imperialists as James Cook, Robert Clive, Walter Raleigh and John Franklin. English triumphalism sometimes neglects to mention that those luminaries, in turn, failed to notice Sydney Harbour, looted voraciously, had his head cut off and ate his own boots. Few of us, though, would ever have heard of Thomas Roe.
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In 1616, Roe became the first British Ambassador to India's Mughal Empire. Roe's first, fumbling encounters with an incalculably wealthy and powerful empire were oddly similar to the first British mission to China, almost two centuries later (1792-93). Presented with clocks, watches and carriages, the Chinese Emperor derisively remarked that "I set no value on objects strange and ingenious".
Sailing to India, Roe's gifts were ruined by rot and mould, "confined in a pitching, swaying box infested by rats". Once he turned up at court, Roe realised that "they laugh at us for such as we bring". As he lamented (accurately), "I am here a pawn". Although Roe fussed interminably about trade permits, concessions, factories and ways to dud the Portuguese, his embassy comprised a melancholy, miserable false start.
Nonetheless, Nanditi Das transmutes Roe's travails into rich drama and high art. A professor at Oxford of English literature and culture, Das applies her deep, thoughtful, questioning knowledge of Stuart England. Looking away from England to India, she demonstrates mastery of Mughal source material, an informed love of Indian miniature painting, and frank admiration for the elegance and sophistication of the Mughal rulers.
At a time when the standing of Babur, Humayuin, Akbar, Jahangir and Shah Jehan is deprecated and diminished in India, Das reminds us of the wondrous culture they created. For any remaining sceptics, she includes a selection of ravishing miniatures of court life. Surely those delicate, exquisite paintings are the Mughal equivalent of Tang poetry. Das contends that, for the emperors, "painting has always been central to the way they imagined their inherited stories". She underestimates the miniatures; painting was also a luminous, captivating insight into the Mughal realm.
Das is gifted at one of the most traditional skills for an historian, the art of finding, filleting and re-telling stories. Even the beginnings of her chapters are memorable for pithy wit. "It was the kind of day you were meant to remember." "For once, things were going well." All Das' well-wrought artifice - in words, images, allusions and lessons - is backed up by exhaustive use of Roe's letters and journals as well as the compendious records so obsessively kept by the East India Company. "John" Company's enormous Writers' Building in Kolkata, which housed those scribblers and their archives, remains one of the nutty glories of Indian architecture.
Das can be quite strict on Roe. The Ambassador turned up in India with a chaplain, a surgeon, a couple of musicians and a coachman, but without any relevant experience, skills, languages or context. The former member of the Addled Parliament was "good on horseback and handy with swords and guns, with a discerning taste in clothes". He was, however, also muddled, obstinate, vain and combative. Although those attributes may have impaired his mission, they certainly gave a sharp, wry edge to his diary entries.
As is fitting, the Emperor Jahangir is treated more generously. He loathed tobacco and adored hunting. Jahangir survived endless intrigues to provide India with two decades of relatively quiet consolidation.
Das thinks "'India' stood for all the treasures and wonders that came from the East". Had that been true, then the English, Roe included, might have adopted a less prejudiced, less mercenary approach to the sub-continent. Readers wanting to know how the wretched tale of English rule developed might be referred to William Dalrymple's The Company (though that is by no means his best book) or to Shashi Tharoor's Inglorious Empire (which is his best).
Summing up Roe's encounters with India, Das concludes that "it is no easy resting place, but it is an illuminating one". The author deftly illuminates a fascinating range of odd subjects: the right to pitch a scarlet tent; the flavouring of water sprayed in the air (attar of rose and jasmine); how to move and feed a Mughal army; punishments warranting trampling by elephants. Throughout, Das is alert to the fault-lines in history, to alternative futures which never eventuated, to the way historical facts themselves can shimmer and shift.
Now everyone in the world is courting India once more. As did the Emperor Jahangir, so might Prime Minister Modi pick and choose among his suitors, taking his time rejecting some gifts or offers as incompatible with his vision of what India should be, selecting what he needs on a basis as transactional and unsentimental as any Jahangir devised.