White Mughals

by William Dalrymple

  But, equally, reading through the report there are other moments when the sensation of familiarity dissolves and it is as if we are back in some semi-mythical world of Scheherazade and the Arabian Nights: we read of discreet interviews taking place through bamboo harem screens, of hunting expeditions where cheetahs are let slip at grazing gazelles, of spies following palanquins through the bazaars, and of a threat by the girl’s grandfather ‘to turn fakeer’—become a wandering ascetic—as the only recourse to save the family honour.

  Above all, one is also confronted with the unexpected sight of a senior British official who was believed, not least by his Hyderabadi in-laws, to be a practising Muslim, who routinely wore Indian clothes and who—even before this liaison—clearly kept his own harem at the back of his house, complete with Mughal maidservants, aseels (wetnurses), midwives and harem guards. It is all a very surprising world to find in such close and intimate association with official British India. It is certainly unfamiliar to anyone who accepts at face value the usual rigid caricature of the Englishman in India, presented over and over again in films and cheap TV dramas, of the Imperialist Incarnate: the narrow-minded, ramrod-backed sahib in a sola topee and bristling moustache, dressing for dinner despite the heat, while raising a disdainful nose at both the people and the culture of India.

  Yet the more one probes in the records of the period, the more one realises that there were in fact a great many Europeans at this period who responded to India in a way that perhaps surprises and appeals to us today, by crossing over from one culture to the other, and wholeheartedly embracing the great diversity of late Mughal India.

  Beneath the familiar story of European conquest and rule in India, and the imposition of European ways in the heart of Asia, there always lay a far more intriguing and still largely unwritten story: the Indian conquest of the European imagination. At all times up to the nineteenth century, but perhaps especially during the period 1770 to 1830, there was wholesale interracial sexual exploration and surprisingly widespread cultural assimilation and hybridity: what Salman Rushdie—talking of modern multiculturalism—has called ‘chutnification’. Virtually all Englishmen in India at this period Indianised themselves to some extent. Those who went further and converted to Islam or Hinduism, or made really dramatic journeys across cultures, were certainly always a minority; but they were probably nothing like as small a minority as we have been accustomed to expect.

  Throughout, one has a feeling that people are being confronted by an entirely new type of problem as two very different worlds collide and come into intimate contact for the first time. There are no precedents and no scripts: reading the letters, diaries and reports of the period, it is as if the participants are improvising their way through problems, prejudices, tensions and emotions that people have simply never experienced in this way before.

  India has always had a strange way with her conquerors. In defeat, she beckons them in, then slowly seduces, assimilates and transforms them.

  Over the centuries, many powers have defeated Indian armies; but none has ever proved immune to this capacity of the subcontinent to somehow reverse the current of colonisation, and to mould those who attempt to subjugate her. So vast is India, and so uniquely resilient and deeply rooted are her intertwined social and religious institutions, that all foreign intruders are sooner or later either shaken off or absorbed. The Great Mughals, as one historian memorably observed, arrived in India from central Asia in the sixteenth century as ‘ruddy men in boots’; they left it four centuries later ‘pale persons in petticoats’.7 Until the 1830s, there was every sign that India would have as dramatic a transforming effect on the Europeans who followed the Mughals. Like all the foreigners before them, it seemed that they too would be effortlessly absorbed.

  This ‘crossing over’ was a process that dated from the very beginning of the European presence in India. The Portuguese were the first to make the transition. After the conquest of Goa in 1510-some sixteen years before the arrival of the Mughals in north India—the Portuguese commander Afonso de Albuquerque made a point of ordering his men to marry the widows of the Muslim defenders they had massacred during the taking of the city. Albuquerque himself presided at the weddings of these ‘fair Mooresses of pleasing appearance’8 and provided them with dowries. The fair Mooresses were then forcibly converted to Christianity, and after baptism, many were made to receive the rudiments of the Catholic faith. But this crude attempt at force-feeding unadulterated Portuguese culture to India proved as short-lived, and as unsuccessful, as previous attempts to impose unadulterated Turkish, Sassanian Persian or Greek culture had been during the preceding centuries.

  Over the course of the next fifty years, the women, the environment and the sheer distance of Goa from Europe all worked on the new arrivals, so that gradually, generation by generation, the conquistadors began abandoning the ways of Portugal and taking on instead the customs of India. Already, by the time the Portuguese Inquisition arrived in India in 1560, Goa much more closely resembled the Mughal capitals of Delhi and Agra than it did Lisbon or any city in Portugal. As one shocked Jesuit reported back to Rome, ‘the Inquisition is more necessary in these parts than anywhere else, since all the Christians here live together with the Muslims, the Jews and the Hindus and this causes laxness of conscience in persons residing therein. Only with the curb of the Inquisition will they live a good life.’

  By 1560, the Portuguese grandees of Goa dressed ostentatiously in silks, shielding themselves with umbrellas, never leaving their houses except accompanied by vast retinues of slaves and servants. Travellers reported how the Goan aristocracy kept harems and that even the Christian women wore Indian clothes inside the house and lived as if in purdah, ‘little seene abroad’.9 If they had to go out, they did so veiled or in modestly covered palanquins.

  Their menfolk chewed betel nut, ate rice (but only with their right hand) and drank arrack; they rubbed themselves with ‘sweet sanders’,10 and their hospital doctors prescribed the old Hindu panacea of cow’s urine three times a day to their patients ‘in order to recover their colour, one glass in the morning, one at midday, and one in the evening’.11 They drank water from the pot in the Indian fashion ‘and touch it not with their mouths, but the water running from the spout falleth into their mouthes, never spilling a drop … and when any man commeth newly from Portingall, and then beginneth to drink after this manner, because he is not used to this kinde of drinking, he spilleth it in his bosome, wherein they take great pleasure and laugh at him, calling him Reynol, which is a name given in jest to such as newlie come from Portingall’.12

  Even the ecclesiastical establishment showed signs of taking on the ways of its Indian environment: from 1585 a bizarre edict was issued commanding that only Indo-Portuguese with Brahminical (Hindu priestly) blood would be accepted in the colony’s seminaries to train for the priesthood of the Roman Catholic Church: ‘all this they have learned and received from the Indian heathens,’ wrote a surprised Dutch traveller, Jan van Linschoten, ‘which have had these customs of long time.’13

  By 1642, the governor of the Dutch East India Company Anthony van Diemen could report that ‘most of the Portuguese in India look upon this region as their fatherland, and think no more about Portugal. They drive little or no trade thither, but content themselves with port to port trade as if they were natives and had no other country.’14 His compatriot, van Linschoten, came to the same conclusion: ‘The posteritie of the Portingales, both men and women, doe seeme to be naturall Indians, both in colour and in fashion.’15

  These early descriptions of Indo-Portuguese culture set the tone for what was to come over the next three hundred years, in a wide range of encounters between different Indian peoples and various colonial intruders. It is clear from the start that what was happening was not so much a wholesale substitution of one culture for another, so much as a complex process of fusion. Indo-Portuguese society was neither purely Portuguese nor wholly Indian, but a hybrid mixture of the two:
a European template adapted to the climate and social mores of India, or, from the opposite perspective, an Indian environment tinct with European institutions, Indo-Portuguese architecture and an amalgam of increasingly Indianised European cultural importations. The Portuguese in India, and their Indo-Portuguese descendants, did not leave one culture to inhabit another so much as live in both at the same time, accommodating in their outlook and lifestyles rival ways of living in and looking at the world.

  To the Dominican fathers of the Goan Inquisition, of course, this process of acculturation was always unacceptable. Any signs that Hindu customs were being followed in a Christian house were enough to get the entire family and their servants arrested and put to torture. A list was drawn up by the Inquisition of banned Indian practices, which can now act for the social historian as a useful index of the different ways in which the Portuguese picked up the habits, tastes and superstitions of their Indian neighbours.

  Included in this list are such shockingly heretical practices as ‘cooking rice without salt as the Hindus are accustomed to do’, wearing a dhoti (loincloth) or choli (short, often transparent Indian bodice), and refusing to eat pork. Even certain trees, plants and vegetables were proscribed. It was forbidden, for example, to grow a Tulsi plant, considered by many Hindus to be a talisman against the Evil Eye.e

  Perhaps partly because of the Inquisition, a surprisingly large number of Portuguese made the decision to emigrate from Portuguese territory and seek their fortunes at different Indian courts, usually as gunners or cavalrymen. Again this was a process whose origins dated from the very beginning of the Portuguese presence in India: in 1498, on his famous first journey to India, Vasco da Gama found that there were already some Italian mercenaries in the employ of the various rajahs on the Malabar coast; and before he turned his prow homewards two of his own crew had left him to join the Italians in the service of a Malabar rajah for higher wages.16 Sixty years later, by 1565, according to the Portuguese chronicler Barros, there were at least two thousand Portuguese fighting in the armies of different Indian princes. By the early seventeenth century, another Portuguese writer thought the number must have reached at least five thousand.17

  The men who ‘went over’ were often from the very margins of Portuguese society. They were attracted by the remarkable religious freedom of India, and also by the better prospects, and higher and more regular pay. Others were no doubt lured from Portuguese service by the delights of a society in which slavery, concubinage and polygamy were widespread and entirely accepted, and where they could emulate the curious figure some British sailors encountered at the beginning of the seventeenth century living it up on the Moluccas ‘with as many women as he pleaseth … he will sing and dance all day long, near hand naked … and will be drunk two days together’.18 By contrast, conditions of service in the Goan army were very harsh, especially during the monsoon rains, when inactive soldiers, unhoused and often unpaid, could be seen wandering the red earth roads of Goa ‘seeking alms’.19

  Whatever the reason, many thousands of Europeans took service in Indian courts all over the subcontinent. Nor was it just the Portuguese. At the height of the Mughal Empire, so many Europeans took service in the Mughal army that a special suburb was built for them outside Delhi called Firingi Pura (Foreigners’ Town). The inhabitants of Firingi Pura included renegade Portuguese, Englishmen and French, many of whom chose to convert to Islam, and who formed a distinct Firingi (or Foreigners’) regiment under a Frenchman titled Farrashish Khan.20

  The Mughals had no monopoly on these renegades: their rivals, the four great Deccani Muslim sultanates that controlled much of southern and central India, were also keen to make use of their services. Attached to the Adil Shahi court of Bijapur, for example, there was Gonçalo Vaz Coutinho, formerly a powerful landowner in Goa, who was imprisoned on a murder charge before escaping to Bijapur where he converted to Islam. Here he was given ‘lands with great revenues, where he remained as a perfect Moor, with his wife and children’.21

  It was also often to these sultanates of the Deccan that English renegades tended to make their way when, a century later, large numbers of Englishmen first started arriving in India. An eyewitness account of one of the earliest defections was written by the early English trader Nicholas Withington. His account gives a clear picture of the number of independent Europeans on the loose in India at the beginning of the seventeenth century, all of them intent on making their fortunes and quite prepared, if necessary, to change and change again their clothes, their political allegiance and their religion. It also shows the dangers that were inherent in undergoing circumcision—the biggest single obstacle for many potential converts to Islam. ‘There came likewise unto us one that had formerlye rune awaye from our shippes to the Portungales, and agayne from them to us,’ wrote Withington.

  In this way passing through the Decannes countrye, he was perswaded by another Englishmen (that was turned Moore and lived there) to turne Moore; which hee did and was circumsized, the Kinge allowinge him 7s 6d per daye and his diett at the Kinge’s own table; but within eighte dayes after his cirumsizion he dyed.

  Likewise another of our companie, [a trumpeter] called Robert Trullye … went to [the] Decanne to the King thereof, carryinge along with him a Germayne for his interpritor that understoode the language; and coming there, offred bothe to turne Moores, which was kyndlye accepted by the Kinge. So Trullye was circumsized, and had a newe name given to him and a great allowance given to him by the King, with whom he continued. But they cominge to cutt the Germayne, founde that hee had ben formerly circumcised (as he was once in Persia) but thought nowe to have deceaved the Deccannes, whoe, fyndinge him allreddy a Moore, would not give him entertaynment; soe hee retorned to Agra and gott himselfe into the service of a Frenchman, and is turned Chrystian againe, going usually to Mass with his master … So there is with the King of the Decanne fower Englishemen which are turned Moores, and divers Portungales allsoe. 22

  From the margins of their own society, these early European renegades became important mediators between the world of Europe and the world of India. They also demonstrated the remarkable porousness and fluidity of the frontier which separated the two. From the mid-sixteenth century, with the advent of wholesale defections from Portuguese Goa, followed a century later by a new wave of renegades from the British East India Company bridgehead at Surat in Gujerat, the borderlands of colonial India had taken up the role they would continue to occupy over the next three hundred years: as spaces where categories of identity, ideas of national loyalty and relations of power were often flexible, and where the possibilities for self-transformation were, at least potentially, limitless.

  Contrary to the Imperial mythology propagated by the Victorians, the British were initially no more immune than any other nation to the social forces that transformed the Portuguese in India. Indeed it was one of the distinguishing marks of the ragtag assortment of Englishmen who first ventured into the Mughal Empire during the seventeenth century that they excelled in accommodating themselves to what must at first have appeared to them a profoundly foreign society.

  Unlike the Portuguese, who usually came out to Goa with the intention of settling in India for good, the English did in general envisage returning home at the end of their postings, and this profoundly affected the way they looked at the country in which they lived.f Nevertheless, the success of the East India Company in its formative years depended as much on contacts across the lines of race and religion as it did on any commercial acumen, and to varying extents the traders, soldiers, diplomats and even the clergymen who ventured eastwards had little choice but to embrace Mughal India. Nor should this tendency surprise us: from the wider perspective of world history, what is much odder and much more inexplicable is the tendency of the late-nineteenth-century British to travel to, and rule over, nearly a quarter of the globe, and yet remain resolutely untouched by virtually all the cultures with which they came into contact.

  There was, however,
nothing very new in this crossing of cultures. English merchants trading in the Middle East had been mixing with Muslims and converting to Islam for centuries.g Much of the initial contact between Britain and the wider Islamic world took place against a background of seventeenth-century naval skirmishes, where Muslim technological superiority at sea led to the capture and sinking of large numbers of British vessels. Between 1609 and 1616 it was reported that 466 English ships were attacked by Ottoman or Barbary galleys, and their crews led away in chains. By May 1626 there were more than five thousand British captives in the city of Algiers and a further 1500 in Sali, and frantic arrangements were being made in London to redeem them ‘lest they follow the example of others and turn Turk’.

  By the 1620s the Turkish naval presence was no longer confined to the Mediterranean, and had extended its reach into the waters of the British Isles: in August 1625, ‘The Turks took out from the Church of “Munnigesca” in Mounts’ Bay [Cornwall] about 60 men, women and children, and carried them away captives.’23 What was more worrying still were reports that some of these raids were being led by Englishmen who had converted to Islam and ‘turned Turk’: for example, in September 1645 seven ships ‘from Barbary’ landed in Cornwall and their crews were led inland ‘by some renegade of this country’.24