Courting India: England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire

"This book is vivid, it’s brilliant, it’s elegant. It’s full of surprises. It’s full of wonders. British historians know about the 1615 embassy of Sir Thomas Rowe from the court of James I of England to the great Mughal Empire of Jahangir. Das is a literary scholar, so she’s parsing these accounts. This is a book very long in gestation, I think. She also knows many other languages, and she’s steeped in the records of the East India Company , so she’s showing much more of the encounter. This is little old fusty England encountering this extraordinary empire. Jahangir has got millions of men in his army. He’s ruling this glittering empire that goes from Afghanistan, through India to present-day Bangladesh and Pakistan. In fact, the embassy is a bit of a failure. What has England got to offer Jahangir? The hapless ambassador to the second-order monarch finds himself in these extraordinary palaces, where he hangs around and it’s not even clear that he’s going to be given an audience. Das is conjuring this world. Every sentence gives you a present. It’s absolutely wonderful. It’s constructed like a Swiss watch: everything locks in and returns. One moment you find yourself in Jacobean London, and then, the next moment, you’re encountering something oriental and remote. I’m a great lover of India and Indian miniatures, and I have been to some of the Mughal palaces, but you could never get to the bottom of it. I simply adored it. I have had a go at writing diplomatic history myself, and it’s very difficult to do without the ‘he said, she said’ of it. Das just makes you realise what it is to be an ambassador, far from home, with all your hopes crumbling in both places. Find out more about the Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize . The winner will be announced on March 4th, 2024"

"This one is very different in scale from Chatterji’s book. It’s the story of one incident, an unsuccessful embassy of a remarkable English Jacobean diplomat to India. So it’s uniting two places which previously had had virtually no contact, at a very specific time. In 1615, Thomas Roe arrived as an ambassador to the Mughal Emperor from the court of King James I of England and VI of Scotland, hung around for three years, and really didn’t achieve anything. He was constantly ill. He misunderstood customs. He bigged himself up in his own mind but, very revealingly, left no trace in the diaries of the Mughal emperor, Jahangir, whom Roe presents as a bosom buddy and hugely impressed by him. Clearly, Jahangir wasn’t. Roe was a bedraggled person from a puzzlingly faraway country with which the emperor had very little dealings and not much interest. In the past, Roe’s embassy has been presented as part of the grand narrative of British triumph in India—the first stirrings of the symphony. And in a sense, it was: perhaps by its failures, it taught the English, and then the British, what the problem was. But it is fascinating because Roe was involved in the Jacobean court back home in London. He knew how courts worked, and so his observations are very interesting. He’s looking at a far greater, more powerful court in Delhi. He is often misreading situations, but applying the insights that a Jacobean courtier might apply. And he was a man of considerable world experience. He had traveled across the Atlantic as well as getting to India. He’s not naive but he is soaked, as we all are, in his own culture and finds it very difficult to understand what’s going on around him."

"This is an excellent book with extraordinary historical depth. It focuses on the moment when Britain encountered the Mughal court in northern India, through the journey of the British envoy Thomas Rowe. He left Stuart Britain, which was chaotic and in conflict about its own identity. I would say that Das shows us how impoverished Britain was in contrast with Mughal India . Rowe arrives in India and Das follows his journey on a boat—a difficult and hazardous trip at the time. He then moves on land to reach the amazing Mughal court where successive Mughal emperors lived. The book captures all the interesting literature, letters and memoirs that were produced at the time. Das has great command of that literature, in addition to the primary sources and the archival sources that document that journey. What is also fascinating is that she consults the records of the East India Company , which was the main actor on the Indian subcontinent before the British government went in. We see how trade came first, then politics and Empire second. What fascinated me about this book is how it helps a greater global cultural understanding, because we see the Indians through the eyes of the administrators of the British East India Company and of Thomas Rowe. It’s amazing how they documented every minute of their journey. But, also, we see Britain through the eyes of the personalities of the Mughal court. Das has access to vast literature. She has this ability to extract from the primary sources very interesting data that tell us about how India was perceived. She also explores prejudices and racism. The prospect of wealth—gold and trade—were the primary push factors that triggered the penetration of the Indian subcontinent. The East India Company was joined by other trading nations, the French, the Dutch, etc. to appropriate this wealth. At the same time, we see Britain through the eyes of the Mughal emperors, their viziers and entourage. In the book, we have these two worlds, the ambassador and the staff of the East India Company, and the Mughal court coming together with mutual admiration, despisal, and contempt. We have all the human emotions that one could have, in this particular encounter. It wasn’t bad from Day One. There was repression and oppression, but the encounter between Britain and India was more complex than that. There is friendship and contempt; there is love and hate. Das does a good job of explaining how these first encounters in overseas territories between local emperors and the British unfolded. In the case of the Mughal emperor, we’re not talking about a little chieftain; we’re talking about a sophisticated, wealthy, and cultured Mughal Empire, at a time when Britain was lagging behind. The book is a valuable contribution to historical research, and, more importantly for the purpose of the prize, it fosters global cultural understanding between two nations and their representatives."