White Mughals
Page 6
It was reports that very large numbers of British captives were converting to Islam that really rattled the Stuart authorities. Worse still, while some of these conversions were forced, many were clearly not, and British travellers of the period regularly brought back tales of their compatriots who had ‘donned the turban’ and were now prospering in the Islamic world: one of the most powerful Ottoman eunuchs during the late sixteenth century, Hasan Aga, was the former Samson Rowlie from Great Yarmouth,25 while in Algeria the ‘Moorish Kings Executioner’ turned out to be a former butcher from Exeter called ‘Absalom’ (Abd-es-Salaam). 26 Equally, a dragomanh encountered by some English travellers first in Constantinople, then later in Aden, was described as ‘a Turk, but a Cornishman born’.27 There was also the Ottoman general known as ‘Ingliz Mustapha’: in fact a Scottish Campbell who had embraced Islam and joined the Janissaries.28i
The English Ambassador to the Ottoman court, Sir Thomas Shirley, purported to have little time for these renegades, describing them as ‘roagues, & the skumme of people, whyche being villaines and aethiests are fledde to the Turke for succour & releyffe’. But his reaction is undoubtedly as much a reflection of English anxiety and insecurity at this period as it is of any incipient Imperial arrogance. Certainly those who ‘turned Turk’ seemed to include a fairly wide cross-section of British society, including arms dealers and money counterfeiters, sea captains and soldiers of fortune as well as a ‘trumpeter’, ‘divers English gentlemen’ working as pirates out of the North African Barbary Coast, and a lone Englishwoman who became one of the wives of the Dey of Algiers.29
As Shirley pointed out in one of his despatches, the more time Englishmen spent in the East, the closer they moved to adopting the manners of the Muslims: ‘Conuersation with infidelles doeth mutch corrupte, ’ he wrote. ‘Many wylde youthes of all nationes, as well Englishe as others … in euerye 3 yeere that they staye in Turkye they loose one article of theyre faythe.’30 Islam overcame the English more by its sophistication and power of attraction than by the sword: in 1606 even the English Consul in Egypt, Benjamin Bishop, converted and promptly disappeared from public records.31j
It was thus very much with the weary expectation that large numbers of English traders were bound to be tempted to swap religions and cultures, and to desert the Company in order to join Mughal service, that the first British treaty with the Mughal Empire was drawn up in 1616. Its author, the Jacobean ambassador Sir Thomas Roe, was quite clear about the potential danger posed to the Company by the defection of renegades, and insisted as point eight of the treaty that all ‘English fugitives were to be delivered up to the factory’.k The Mughal Prince Khurram—later Shah Jehan—disputed this article—‘a stand was made against the surrender of any Englishman who might turn Moor’—but Roe stood firm, realising from his experience of the Ottoman Middle East the crucial importance of the provision. In the end, according to the report sent back to England, the vital ‘point was yielded to the ambassador’s insistence’. 32
The great Mughal port of Surat on the coast of Gujerat was the focus for the first contacts between British traders and the peoples of the Mughal Empire. Here the British ‘factors’ as they called themselves, inhabited a building that combined elements of both an Oxbridge college and a Mughal caravanserai. On one hand, the day started with prayers and ended at a communal meal presided over by both the President and the Chaplain, whose job it was to monitor the behaviour of the factors, ensure regular attendance at chapel and prevent un-Christian behaviour. On the other hand, this cosy English collegiate scene took place within a ‘Moor’s building’, and after dinner the factors could wash and unwind in a ‘hummum’33 (Turkish bath). In the absence of European goods, the factors quickly adapted themselves to the material culture of India, and very soon such specifically Indian luxuries as ‘a betle box, two pigdanes [from the Hindi pikdan, a spittoon], and a rosewater bottle’ begin to turn up in the inventories of the factories.34
The best descriptions of the daily life of the Surat factory are contained in travel accounts, for although the official correspondence of the factors is almost entirely extant,l most of the letters are concerned with the minutiae of trade and touch only very obliquely on the way the factors are actually living their daily lives. Yet occasionally there are hints as to the degree to which the factors are adapting themselves to the world outside their walls.
One such slip occurs in 1630 when President William Methwold admits that the factors have almost completely given up using the Western drugs that the Company was in the habit of sending out to Surat, preferring to take the advice of local Mughal doctors: ‘The utility of the drugs is not to be doubted,’ writes Methwold, ‘but being farr fecht and longe kept, applied by an unskilful hand, without the consideration of the temprature of a mans body by the alteration of climats, they peradventure have small or contrary effects.’ Rather sheepishly he then admits: ‘wee for our parts doe hold that in things indifferent it is safest for an Englishman to Indianize, and, so conforming himselfe in some measure to the diett of the country, the ordinarie phisick of the country will bee the best cure when any sicknesse shall overtake him’.35
Only when an articulate traveller turns up is it suddenly possible to colour in the hard commercial outlines revealed in these carefully phrased public letters. John Albert de Mandelslo, the Ambassador of the Duke of Holstein, visited the English factory at around the same time as President Methwold was writing his medical letter to London. His account reveals that despite the attempts of the factors to portray their establishment as a sort of sober, pious outpost of Trinity College, Cambridge, washed up on the shores of Gujerat, the life of the factors was in fact much more lively than anyone was prepared to let on to London. The factors may have kept to the rule that they should remain unmarried—indeed there is only one reference in the earliest years to a factor formally marrying an Indian girl, and that caused a major scandal m—but this did not stop them dressing in Indian clothes and being serenaded of an evening by troupes of Mughal dancing girls and courtesans. North of Surat, the British had rented a ‘lodge’ attached to a garden tomb, or as Mandelslo puts it, ‘a mausoleum of a person of quality of the country’. One evening during Mandelslo’s visit, the factors drove out, and after first taking ‘two or three turns about the garden’ they—presumably well out of sight of their Chaplain—laid on
the greatest entertainment imaginable, and to come to the height of that country’s endearments, they sent for some Benjan women, who were very desirious to see my cloaths, which I still wore after the Germane fashion, though the English and Dutch who are settled in the Indies go ordinarily according to the mode of the country, and would have obliged me to put them off; but perceiving I was unwilling to do it, and withal that I made some difficulty to accept of the profers they made me to strip themselves naked, and to doe anything that I would expect from persons of their sex and profession, they seem’d to be very much troubled, and so went away.36
The further the factors went from the English base in Surat, the more they found themselves adapting to Indian ways. At the end of the seventeenth century Job Charnock, the founder of Calcutta, adopted the Bengali lungi and married a Hindu girl whom he allegedly saved from the funeral pyre of her first husband. The story is told in one of the first English travel books about India, Alexander Hamilton’s New Account of the East Indies: Mr Channock choosing the Ground of the Colony, where it now is, reigned more absolute than a Rajah … The country about being over-spread with Paganism, the Custom of Wives burning with their deceased Husbands is also practiced here. Mr Channock went one Time with his ordinary guard of Soldiers, to see a young widow act that tragical Catastrophe, but he was so smitten with the Widow’s Beauty, that he sent his guards to take her by Force from her Executioners, and conducted her to his own Lodgings. They lived lovingly many Years, and had several children. At length she died, after he had settled in Calcutta, but instead of converting her to Christianity, she made him a Proselyte to Pagani
sm, and the only Part of Christianity that was remarkable in him, was burying her decently, and he built a Tomb over her, where all his Life after her Death, he kept the anniversary Day of her Death by sacrificing a Cock on her Tomb, after the Pagan Manner.37
It was in the Mughal capital of Agra, however, that the factors found themselves most profoundly challenged both by the might and prosperity of the Mughal Empire, and by the seductive elegance of Mughal civilisation at its zenith. According to one of them, ‘heere in the heart of the city we live after this country in manner of meat, drink and apparel … for the most part after the custom of this place, sitting on the ground, at our meat or discourse. The rooms are in general covered with carpets and with great, high round cushions to lean on.’38 One of the very first English envoys, William Hawkins, even accepted a wife offered to him by the Emperor and ‘in his howse used altogether the customes of the Moores or Mahometans, both in his meate and drinke and other customes, and would seeme to bee discontent if all men did not the like … he was very fickle in his resolucion, as alsoe of his religion’.39
It was not long before one of these factors made a formal conversion. On 5 April 1649, Francis Breton, the East India Company’s most senior official in Asia, took up his quill and began to write a letter to the Directors back home. He had some bad news to break: ‘And heere we wish to our penn might bee sylent,’ he wrote, ‘but to our griefe it must imparte unto you a sad story, itt tending not only to the losse of a man, but the dishonour of our nation, and (which is incomparably worse) of our Christian profession; occasioned in Agra by ye damned apostacy of one of your servants, Josua Blackwelle.’
Breton went on to describe how after prayers one Sunday, Blackwell had ‘privately conveighed himselfe to the Governor of ye citty, who, being prepaired, with the Qazi [judge or senior lawyer] and others attended his comeing; before whome hee most wickedly and desperately renounced his Christian faith and professed himself a Moore, was immediately circumcised, and is irrecoverably lost’.n
Blackwell was only twenty-three, the son of ‘the King’s Grocer’ at the Court of St James. He had left home at the age of seventeen and early on had been sent to oversee the East India Company’s trading post at the Mughal court. It was an important appointment, for this was the apex of India’s Mughal golden age, and from Agra the Emperor Shah Jehan ruled an empire that covered most of India, all of Pakistan and great chunks of Afghanistan; across the river from the small English community, the great white dome of the Taj Mahal was already rising from its plinth above the River Jumna. Blackwell was ambitious, and he knew that the wealth of the Mughal Emperor surpassed that of any prince in Europe; moreover the sheer size, sophistication and beauty of the Mughal capital at this point could not but profoundly challenge any notions Blackwell may ever have entertained of the superiority of Christendom. The pain of circumcision, he reckoned, was a small price to pay for gaining access to such a bountiful fount of patronage.40 The letters sent after Blackwell by his colleagues are explicit about his motives, namely: ‘idle hopes of worldly preferments’ and ‘the vaine suggestions of the Devill’ which led him to hope for rapid enrichment.41 As far as the other factors were concerned, it was ambition, not religious conviction, that led Blackwell to cross.
Blackwell was soon joined by many more British renegades, most of whom headed into the service of the Deccani sultanates. In 1654, twenty-three East India Company servants deserted Surat in a single mass break-out. Others soon followed, having first run amok in Surat in the manner of many later groups of English hooligans on a night out abroad: ‘Their private whorings, drunkenesse and such like ryotts … breaking open whorehouses and rackehowses [i.e. arrack bars] have hardened the hearts of the inhabitants against our very names,’ wrote a weary William Methwold. Little wonder that the British were soon being reviled in the streets ‘with the names of Ban-chudeo and Betty-chudep which my modest language will not interprett’.42
As with the Portuguese before them, the willingness of so many Britons to defect to the Mughals was partly a reflection of the disgusting conditions in which the British kept their ordinary soldiers and sailors, many of whom had not chosen to come to India of their own volition in the first place. The correspondence of the Madras Council is often full of complaints that the recruits the Company was sending out to India were the lowest detritus of British society: ‘It is not uncommon to have them out of Newgate [prison], as several have confessed,’ reads one letter, ‘those however we can keep pretty much in order. But of late we have had some from Bedlam.’43
Men like this, often from the furthest geographical and social margins of British society, had little reason to feel any particular loyalty to the flag of a trading company owned by rich London merchants, and to such people the prospects offered by Mughal service often proved irresistible. In the 1670s the British were disturbed to discover that the Mughals had set up an active network of covert recruiting agents in Bombay, and by the 1680s such was their success that Charles II of England found it necessary to call home from India ‘all Englishmen in indigenous service there’.44 Few heeded his words. By the end of the century desertion had become a critical problem for the Company as more and more Britons fled into Indian service, sometimes to the Mughal court, but increasingly, like the trumpeter Robert Trullye, to the rich and tolerant sultanates of Bijapur and Golconda which between them still controlled much of southern and central India.
This Deccani context is significant, for the great city states of the Deccan—like those of their contemporaries in Renaissance Italy—were always more eclectic and open to outsiders than even the cosmopolitan Imperial Mughal court in Agra. Relations between Hindus and Muslims had always been easier in the Deccan than in the more polarised north, and it had long been a Deccani tradition that the Hindu kings of Vijayanagar should make the gesture of dressing in public in Islamic court costume,45 while every Muslim sultan in the region made a point of employing a Hindu Chief Minister.q
Into this ethnic and religious confusion was thrown a fantastic influx not just of Portuguese and other European mercenaries, but also galleys full of Middle Eastern immigrants who arrived at the Deccani ports direct from Persia, the Yemen and Egypt. These Middle Eastern immigrants turned the Deccan into the greatest centre of Arabic learning and literary composition outside the Levant, and brought with them a taste for the tilework of the Ottomans and the architectural innovations of Persia and Transoxiana.
This hybridity is immediately apparent in Deccani paintings. Typical is a miniature painted by Rahim Deccani around 1670.46 On one side a prince is shown seated in profile wearing Deccani court dress; on the other are two female attendants, one playing a vina, the other looking on, bare-bellied, her dark nipples visible through the light covering of a diaphanous silk choli. So far no surprises: it is a conventional seventeenth-century Indian garden scene, an arcadia of cultivated indulgence. But placed in the centre of the picture is a fourth courtesan, wearing gorgeous silk knickerbockers and the plumed, wide-brimmed hat and tumbling locks of a Jacobean dandy; at her feet is an Indian rendering of a King Charles spaniel. She serves her prince wine in a European glass.
A miniature where the world of Shah Jehan’s harem comes into collision with the wardrobe of Guy Fawkes indicates the astonishingly eclectic tone of the Deccani courts, and helps explain why so many Europeans found themselves so easily absorbed into the ethnically composite élites of the region. Here former Portuguese artillerymen might find themselves in court beside Persian poets and calligraphers, turbaned Afghan warlords, reformed Shirazi sailors, ex-camel cavalrymen from the Hadramaut, renegade French jewellers and, not least, a smattering of newly ennobled English trumpeters.
The courts of the Deccan retained this ability to seduce and assimilate outsiders. One hundred and fifty years after Robert Trullye was circumcised at the court of Golconda, James Achilles Kirkpatrick submitted to the same operation in the court of the dynasty which succeeded the Qutb Shahis: the Asaf Jahi Nizams of Hyderabad.
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br /> It was the long campaign of conquest against the Deccan sultanates, begun in 1636 by Shah Jehan and completed half a century later by Aurangzeb in 1687, that fatally overstretched the Mughal Empire, initiating its gradual 150-year-long decline. This in turn created a vast vacuum of power at the heart of India—a vacuum that some among the British were determined to fill.
In the course of the eighteenth century, as British power steadily increased, and that of the Mughals gradually declined, the incentives to cross cultures for financial betterment steadily diminished; as a result open conversions to Islam seem to have become correspondingly less common. But in India at least, as the East India Company slowly transformed itself from a mercantile organisation into a colonial government, discreet conversions did continue, albeit for rather different motives: by the late eighteenth century conversion was usually a precondition for marriage to any well-born Muslim lady.47
There were also a significant number of forced conversions. Between 1780 and 1784, following the disastrous British defeat by Tipu Sultan of Mysore at the Battle of Pollilur, seven thousand British men, along with an unknown number of women, were held captive by Tipu in his sophisticated fortress of Seringapatam.r Of these over three hundred were circumcised and given Muslim names and clothes.48 Even more humiliatingly, several British regimental drummer boys were made to wear ghagra cholis and entertain the court as dancing girls.49 At the end of ten years’ captivity, one of these prisoners, James Scurry, found that he had forgotten how to sit in a chair or use a knife and fork; his English was ‘broken and confused, having lost all its vernacular idiom’, his skin had darkened to the ‘swarthy complexion of Negroes’, and he found he actively disliked wearing European clothes.50 This was the ultimate colonial nightmare, and in its most unpalatable form: the captive preferring the ways of his captors, the coloniser colonised.