White Mughals (8 page)

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’.
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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.

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.
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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.
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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.’
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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’.
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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,
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while in Algeria the ‘Moorish Kings Executioner’ turned out to be a former butcher from Exeter called ‘Absalom’ (Abd-es-Salaam).
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Equally, a
dragoman
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encountered by some English travellers first in Constantinople, then later in Aden, was described as ‘a Turk, but a Cornishman born’.
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There was also the Ottoman general known as ‘Ingliz Mustapha’: in fact a Scottish Campbell who had embraced Islam and joined the Janissaries.
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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.
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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.’
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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.
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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’.
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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’.
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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’
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(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.
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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,
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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’.
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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
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—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