introduction calendar of persian corresp

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National Archives of India

ARCHIVES IN INDIA HISTORICAL REPRINTS

CALENDAR OF PERSIAN CORRESPONDENCE

VOL. I, 1759–1767


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Archives in India Historical Reprints

CALENDAR OF PERSIAN CORRESPONDENCE

Vol. II 1767–1769

Vol. III 1770–1772

Vol. IV 1772–1775

Vol. V 1776–1780


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IMPERIAL RECORD DEPARTMENT

C A L E N D A R O F

Persian Correspondence

Being Letters, referring mainly to Affairs in

Bengal, which passed between some of

the Company’s Servants and Indian

Rulers and Notables

VOL. I, 1759–1767

With an Introduction by

Muzaffar Alam • Sanjay Subrahmanyam


ARCHIVES IN INDIA HISTORICAL REPRINTS


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Archivs in India Historical Rprints is a collaborativ publishing ffort btwn th National Archivs of India and Primus Books.


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C O N T E N T S

F O R E W O R D vii Mushirul Hasan

I N T R O D U C T I O N ix Muzaffar Alam & Sanjay Subrahmanyam

C A L E N D A R O F P E R S I A N C O R R E S P O N D E N C E

Preface v Introduction ix

Errata xxvii

Abbrviations xxviii

Calendar 1

Appendix 467

Glossary 469

Index 485


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F O R E W O R D

This major projct was initiatd in arly twntith cntury and compltd in 1959. Th10 volums publishd as Calendar of Persian Correspondence included documents andlttrs, dating from 1759 to 1793, xchangd btwn ‘som of th [east India]Company’s srvants and Indian Rulrs and Notabls’. An additional lvnth volumon 1794-95 appard in 1969. Partially rprintd by th National Archivs of India in1970, this sris is now bing r-issud as a spcial dition with a substantial nw‘introduction’ writtn by two of India’s formost scholars, Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay

Subrahmanyam.I am gratful to ths two minnt historians for providing nw insights into th

documnts, but also to th publishrs of th prsnt sris for thir xcllnt job inbringing out ths volums. I would also lik to xprss my gratitud to th staff atthe National Archives of India for their cooperation and support.

New Delhi MUSHIRUL H ASANFebruary 2013 Director General



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I N T R O D U C T I O N

Coercion, Communication, and the East India Company

Muzaffar Alam & Sanjay Subrahmanyam

The records of the company’s governments in India are, probably, the best

historical materials in the world: there we nd the reasons for everyundertaking.

— J A M E S G R A N T D U F F , History of the Mahrattas 1826.

The Imperial Durbar of 1911, held in Delhi in December of that year, marked theaccession of the forty-six-year old George V to the throne as king-emperor. Unliketwo earlier such events, held in 1877 and 1903, which had been attended not by theimperial rulers themselves but by their representatives (in 1877, the viceroy LordLytton; and in 1903, the viceroy Lord Curzon and the Duke of Connaught, brother

of Edward VII), the 1911 event was actually marked by the presence of George V andQueen Mary. It deliberately and conspicuously recovered several Mughal royalceremonies, including not only the darb " ar form itself, but that of the jharoka darshan atthe Red Fort, making it clear that the British monarchy continued to see itself in some ways as the direct and legitimate successor of the Mughal dynasty in India. It was thuslogical that the very same year, 1911, saw the publication of the rst volume of theCalendar of Persian Correspondence , arguably the most signicant publication of theperiod of the Imperial Record Department that had been founded in 1891, under G.W.Forrest. One of Forrest’s eventual successors was C.R. Wilson, who—as a laterarchivist of note was to state—conceived a ‘brilliant scheme, that of calendaring theentire series of Persian records, [which] was taken up by his successor, Mr. (later Sir)E. Denison Ross, who formulated the detailed plan for the work’.1 These records were

a part of the very large corpus of ‘ancient papers’ of the East India Company that

*For their invaluable help in the preparation of this introduction, thanks are due to Ananya Chakravarti and Hajnalka Kovacs.

1S.N. Sen, ‘A Note on the Imperial Record Department’, The American Archivist , vol. 7,no. 3, 1944, pp. 153–64 (citation on p. 155).


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x Introduction

had long been held in ‘various secretariat ofces at Calcutta’. They included some26,000 bound volumes, as well as 1.5 million unbound documents, making up a totalof roughly 18 million folios of Company-related papers in various languages. TheCalendar was to present to the public a summary version of merely a part of these,namely the Persian-language ‘letters which passed between some of the [East India]Company’s Servants and Indian Rulers and Notables’, commencing in 1759.

Though initially concerned mainly with the ‘Affairs in Bengal’, the series—of which the rst ve volumes, covering the years to 1780, had appeared by 1930— eventually came to take into account other parts of India as well. The series wasconcerned therefore with the rst phase of indirect rule by the British in India, thatmediated by the East India Company. It was a phase for which a vast quantity ofEnglish-language records obviously existed as well, and these records had been

extensively used by historians of the Company from the 1760s onwards. Since theCompany’s history from that time had been plagued not only by bitter factionalinghting amongst its servants, but by quarrels with Parliament, even such records didnot speak in unison. The early scandals surrounding Robert Clive, Henry Vansittart, Warren Hastings, and many others had, on the contrary, given rise to a very diversebody of materials, written from a variety of angles, and supporting a number ofdistinct positions.2 Nevertheless, it was clearly the view of Wilson, Denison Ross, andothers, that something important was to be gained by adding to this body of English-materials the considerable corpus of Persian-language correspondence as well.3 Although they may not have had a well-articulated theory of the matter, it would seemthat they comprehended that a history of Company rule based purely on that body’sown internal records was somehow incomplete, and skewed.

What then was this Company which was still the object of so much belatedattention? The English East India Company, a joint-stock company bringing togetherinterests of merchants and gentlemen, was formally founded under a charter of theEnglish Crown on the very last day of 1600 with a modest initial capital of about£68,000 and a term of fteen years.4 It emerged after an extended period of

2See Nicholas B. Dirks, The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain ,Cambridge, Mass., 2006; Robert Travers, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century India: The Britishin Bengal , Cambridge, 2007.

3Much of the actual work on the Persian texts appears to have been done by variousother ofcials employed in the Record Department, such as Maulavi Zarif Muhammad,Maulavi Amjad Husain, and Maulavi Badruddin Ahmad.

4 The best analyt ical narrative of the early years of the Company remains K.N.Chaudhuri, The English East India Company: The Study of an Early Joint-Stock Company, 1600–1640,London, 1965. For an important reinterpretation of the Company as a political as well as aneconomic actor, see Philip J. Stern, The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early ModernFoundation of the British Empire in India , New York, 2011. For a pithy narrative account, see P.J.Marshall, ‘The English in Asia to 1700’, in The Origins of Empire: British Overseas Enterprise to the


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Introduction xi

experimentation by the English with routes of trade to the Indian Ocean, as well assome direct maritime ventures into that area that followed on Francis Drake’scelebrated voyage of circumnavigation from 1577 to 1580. Thus, Sir James Lancaster, who led the rst ‘Separate Voyage’ on behalf of the newly formed Company in 1601had already been in the Indian Ocean with a eet once, from about 1591 to 1594.5 Hisexpedition of 1601 was followed by eleven others under the regime of Separate Voyages, the last of which left England in 1612.6 From 1614, a new system of ‘Joint-Stock Voyages’ was then inaugurated, of which the rst was that of Nicholas Downton, which carried on board the rst ofcial English ambassador to the Mughal court, Sir Thomas Roe. By this time, the initial monopoly and patent of fteen years granted byQueen Elizabeth, had already been declared ‘perpetual’ by James I on the basis of agrant dated May 1609.7 Over the next decades, the Company—which had quickly

extended its operations from East Africa and the Red Sea, to India and South-East Asia, and even founded a factory in Hirado (southern Japan) in 1613—came to acquirea fair number of dispersed trading posts and fortied centres. The earliest of theseforts in India was Armagon, just north of Lake Pulicat in central Coromandel, which was founded as a trading outpost in 1625–6, fortied with twelve guns not long after,and eventually abandoned piecemeal in around 1638 to be replaced not long after byFort St George in Madras (or Chennai) which lay somewhat to the south.8

It is important to note that from the very outset the ‘Governor and Companieof the Marchaunts of London trading into the East Indies’ (as the Company is termedin its initial grant), were not at all averse in principle to combining trade with violence. This was for a number of reasons. At the very end of the fteenth century, under therule of Henry VII, the merchants of Bristol had been interested in the exploration of

the north-eastern seaboard of America. An Italian acting under English patronage, John Cabot (or Giovanni Caboto) made strides in exploring Newfoundland in the late

Close of the Seventeenth Century (The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 1), ed. Nicholas Canny,Oxford, 1998, pp. 264–85.

5Clements R. Markham, ed., The Voyages of Sir James Lancaster, Kt., to the East Indies, with Abstracts of Journals of Voyages to the East Indies during the Seventeenth Century, preserved in the IndiaOfce: And the Voyage of Captain John Knight (1606), to seek the North-West Passage , London, 1877.

6For a recently unearthed set of documents on one of these voyages, see RichmondBarbour, ‘The East India Company Journal of Anthony Marlowe, 1607–1608’, HuntingtonLibrary Quarterly , vol. 71, no. 2, 2008, pp. 255–301.

7For details, see George Birdwood and William Foster, eds., The Register of Letters of the

Governour and Company of Merchants of London trading into the East Indies, 1600–1619 , London,1893.

8See Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Madras, Chennai and São Tomé: An Irregular UrbanComplex in South-Eastern India 1500–1800’, in Ciudades mestizas: Intercambios y continuidades enla expansión occidental, siglos XVI a XIX , ed. Clara García Ayluardo and Manuel Ramos Medina, Mexico City, 2001, pp. 221–39.


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1490s, and others periodically took up the idea in the decades that followed, often withthe idea of nding a viable ‘Northwest Passage’ into the Indian Ocean.9 The far northof the Atlantic, relatively seldom frequented by Iberian mariners, did not pose a greatproblem in terms of competition. But real difculties were encountered further southon account of the existence of extensive Spanish and Portuguese claims, thatamounted to a virtual duopoly over maritime trade and exploration in the Atlantic assanctioned by the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) and related Papal Bulls. By the earlysixteenth century, the Spaniards had established more or less regular maritimecommunication with the Caribbean, and this trafc became ever more intense in the1520s and 1530s, with the Spanish conquest of rst Mexico and then Peru. TheSpanish Atlantic route, or Carrera de Indias , eventually largely centralized from the portof Seville, linked Spain to western Atlantic ports such as Veracruz, Havana, Portobelo,

and Cartagena. Less important for the greater part of the sixteenth century, but stillnot wholly insignicant, was Portuguese transatlantic commerce, linking the metropolisto Brazilian ports such as Salvador de Bahia. These lively trade routes were temptingtargets for those excluded from the spoils of Tordesillas, among whom were includedsome Italians like the Verrazano brothers, but also northern French corsairs (especiallythose from Normandy), and increasingly after 1550, English privateers.

The long reign in England of Elizabeth (1558–1603), which culminated in thefoundation of the English East India Company, is rightly known as the golden age ofsuch privateering enterprise. Even a rapid examination of the chief entrepreneurs inthese networks shows intricate patterns of connection not only between them, butalso with other more extended ventures elsewhere. Thus Martin Frobisher, who wasinvolved in various ventures in regard of the so-called ‘Northwest Passage’, was tied

to Humphrey Gilbert, a particularly violent actor who is well known for his brutal rolein the colonization of Ireland in the sixteenth century; and both were linked in turnto the Muscovy Company that had been formed—amongst other purposes—toexplore possibilities of overland trade into Asia. John Hawkins, another major gureof this milieu, was a relative and sometime business associate of Francis Drake. Again,Gilbert was the half-brother of Walter Raleigh, still another celebrated Elizabethan with extensive privateering interests, who in turn was an associate of Thomas Roe withregard to projects in the Caribbean.10 The one important aristocrat who was involved

with the foundation of the East India Company was George Clifford, third Earl ofCumberland, also a man with extensive privateering and trading investments, whoseaddiction to gambling however ensured that he lost money as rapidly as he acquired

9 James A. Williamson, The Cabot Voyages and Bristol Discovery under Henry VII , Cambridge,1962; also Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Pathnders: A Global History of Exploration , New York,2006, pp. 171–4.

10 Kenneth R. Andrews, Trade, Plunder, and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis ofthe British Empire, 1480–1630, Cambridge, 1984.


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it. Many of the investors, as well as the captains and mariners, who were involved inthe rst two decades of the East India Company’s activities in Asia were thus intimatelybound up with earlier privateering and raiding, as well as colonial projects in Ireland. To be sure, this cannot be said with equal certainty of all of them. One of the mostprominent actors in the early history of the Company, and its governor on more thanone occasion between 1600 and 1621, was Sir Thomas Smythe, the son of ahaberdasher and an extensive investor in the East India Company, as well as in Virginia,the Caribbean, and the Muscovy trade. Smythe appears to be one of those upwardly-aspiring London bourgeois from a trades background, whose descendants wouldeventually buy themselves a position in the aristocracy.11

The major constraints that limited the recourse to violence in Asia by the EastIndia Company in the rst half-century of its existence were thus three in number,

and none of them had to do with the peaceful pasts or inclinations of its employeesin an Atlantic context. The rst was its relative weakness with regard to its chiefEuropean rivals, namely the United Dutch East India Company (or VOC) founded inMarch 1602, but also the Portuguese Estado da Índia and its private auxiliaries.12 Thesecond was its awareness of the difference between the Asian (and Indian Ocean)context and the Atlantic one: dealing with polities such as the Mughal empire or theemerging Tokugawa shogunate called for a certain degree of caution. The third wasthe unstable place of the Company itself in the context of Britain, or even London,in turn linked to the highly volatile state of political conditions there during the entireseventeenth century. To be sure, political conditions in the Netherlands in the sameperiod were not entirely stable either, but the VOC was still able with great success to ward off any challenges to its national monopoly, and its consolidation from the chaos

of the ‘pre-companies’ of the period 1595–1602 was already in itself a great triumph.Disgruntled Dutch investors thus had little choice but to go elsewhere, and theyparticipated for example in the foundation of the Danish Company in 1616 and itsfunctioning thereafter.13 In contrast, the Englishmen of the early ‘Separate Voyages’

were frequently and publicly at loggerheads with one another. Later, in the 1630s, thedeteriorating relations between Charles I and the Company led him to rst give lettersof marque to some English privateers in the Indian Ocean, and eventually also to allowthe formation of the short-lived Courteen’s Association, which was briey active in

11Robert Brenner, ‘The Social Basis of English Commercial Expansion, 1550–1660’, Journal of Economic History , vol. 32, 1972, pp. 361–84; Theodore K. Rabb, Enterprise and Empire: Merchant and Gentry Investment in the Expansion of England, 1575–1630, Cambridge, Mass., 1967.

12

For the Dutch Company and its early strengths, see the classic study by KristofGlamann, Dutch - Asiatic Trade, 1620–1740, 2nd edn., The Hague, 1981. Also consult the recentattempt at a global synthesis in Piet Emmer and Jos Gommans, Rijk aan de rand van de wereld:De geschiedenis van Nederland overzee 1600–1800, Amsterdam, 2012.

13Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘The Coromandel Trade of the Danish East India Company,1619–1648’, The Scandanavian Economic History Review , vol. 37, no. 1, 1989, pp. 41–56.


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xiv Introduction

western Indian ports such as Karwar and Rajapur.14 These rivalries, as well as thedisturbed state of English markets, ensured that the Company’s fortunes did not reviveuntil the 1660s, and that its stocks were poorly subscribed in the middle decades ofthe century.

The quarter-century long reign of Charles II, beginning in 1660, is oftenregarded as the moment when the Company’s fortunes rst took a distinct turn forthe better. As a prince in exile in France, Charles and his entourage had already showninterest in Asian trade, even sending an unofcial envoy to deal with the Safavids inthe 1650s.15 By the time of his accession, the East India Company’s prole in Asia hadaltered a good deal from what it had been 50 years earlier. In the initial phase, Englishhostility to the Portuguese had been considerable, and they had even briey had analliance with the VOC against the Iberians in the Indian Ocean. This included an ill-

fated attempt at cohabitation with the Dutch in several fortresses that ended inbitterness and recriminations.16 From the 1630s, the Company therefore sought outother means to make a space for itself in the Indian Ocean world. It was clear thatDutch dominance in South-East Asia was too weighty to be resisted. The Japan tradeof the English too was nothing if not fragile.17 The decision that emerged was toconcentrate efforts in India and in the western Indian Ocean more generally. However,in this area the English had repeatedly challenged the Portuguese, ghting navalengagements off the coast of Gujarat in the 1610s and aiding Shah ‘Abbas of Iran toexpel them from Hurmuz in 1622. A reversal in policy had to be envisaged. Duringthe viceroyalty in Goa of the Count of Linhares, a new entente emerged between thetwo, culminating with the signing of an agreement between the viceroy and WilliamMethwold, the English Company’s president of its Surat factory in 1635.18 This alliance

proved crucial not only in helping the English Company to consolidate in variousIndian regions, but also in dening a certain style of functioning. The English ‘countrytrader’ now emerged as an actor side-by-side with the Company, just as the Portuguesecasado trader had been the counterpart and complement to the Estado da Índia .19

14Robert Ashton, ‘Charles I and the City’, in Essays in the Economic and Social History ofTudor and Stuart England , ed. F.J. Fisher, Cambridge, 1961, pp. 138–63.

15Laurence Lockhart, ‘The Diplomatic Missions of Henry Bard, Viscount Bellomont, toPersia and India’, Iran , vol. 4, 1966, pp. 97–104.

16D.K. Bassett, ‘The “Amboyna Massacre” of 1623’, Journal of Southeast Asian History , vol. 1, no. 2, 1960, pp. 1–19.

17Derek Massarella, A World Elsewhere: Europe’s Encounter with Japan in the Sixteenth and

Seventeenth Centuries , New Haven, 1990.18On Linhares’s administration, and his compromise with Methwold, see Anthony R.Disney, Twilight of the Pepper Empire: Portuguese Trade in Southwest India in the Early SeventeenthCentury , Cambridge, Mass., 1978.

19D.K. Bassett, ‘British “Country” Trade and Local Trade Networks in the Thai andMalay States, c . 1680–1770’, Modern Asian Studies , vol. 23, no. 4, 1989, pp. 625–43; also, the


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It took the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and its extended aftermath to nallyput the English Company on a sound footing, a prelude to the aggressive posture it was to then adopt in India in the course of the eighteenth century.22 The 1680s hadseen a revival of the earlier rivalry with the Dutch Company, and ugly disputes hadbroken out regarding Dutch ambitions concerning the port of Banten in western Javaas well as Masulipatnam. The period from 1688 to 1690 then saw a futile armedconict between the English Company and the Mughal empire of Aurangzeb, largelyprovoked by the belligerence of Sir Josiah Child.23 Child could hardly have chosen a worse moment to pick such a ght, for in the years 1686–7 the Mughals completedtheir conquest of the sultanates of Bijapur and Golkonda, and thus emerged as amajor power in the southern peninsula. Not just Surat and Hughli, but Masulipatnamand Madras were thus now located in areas where Mughal governors were the chief

administrative interlocutors of the English Company’s factors. Even Bombay, whichthe Company and Crown had acquired from the Portuguese through the marriagenegotiations in the 1660s of Charles II with Catherine of Braganza, was now thatmuch more proximate to the Mughal frontier.24 Though English Company observersof the time insisted, like many other European analysts, that the Mughal empire wasactually a fragile entity and that the imminent demise of Aurangzeb would be theoccasion for an unpleasant power-struggle, the continued territorial expansion of theMughal juggernaut in the 1680s could only have provoked unease. Only the Marathasseemed to stand between the Mughals and domination over the entire length of thepeninsula.

The expulsion from England of James II, and the accession to the throne of hisDutch son-in-law William III and his daughter Mary in 1688–9, corresponded broadly

with Sir Josiah Child’s war on the Mughals. In its immediate aftermath, the GloriousRevolution did not favour the Company. Child himself had been close to James II, andthe Company was thus investigated by a parliamentary committee which suspected itof being both Tory and Jacobite. After many mutual recriminations had beenexchanged, a ‘New Company’ eventually emerged to rival the old one in September1698, with backing from the new political dispensation. Strenuous efforts now had tobe put into place to reconcile the claims and interests of the two, and these includedthe sending to India of Sir William Norris as the rst ofcial English ambassador since

22See Jonathan I. Israel, ed., The Anglo-Dutch Moment: Essays on the Glorious Revolution and

its World Impact , Cambridge, 1991; and more recently, Steven C.A. Pincus, 1688: The First ModernRevolution , New Haven, 2009.23I. Bruce Watson, ‘Fortications and the “Idea” of Force in Early English East India

Company Relations with India’, Past and Present , no. 88, 1980, pp. 70–87.24Glenn J. Ames, ‘The Role of Religion in the Transfer and Rise of Bombay, c . 1661–

1687’, The Historical Journal, vol. 46, no. 2, 2003, pp. 317–40.


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Sir Thomas Roe in the 1610s.25 Matters between the two Companies would only besettled at long last in 1709. But Norris’s embassy, even if it was broadly unsuccessful, was still instructive for the English. He set sail from Plymouth in January 1699 andarrived in Madras in September of the same year. Though he was poorly received bythe English governor there (a symptom of the tensions within the English establishment),Norris decided to press on towards the Deccan where Aurangzeb was to be found inhis ongoing campaigns. To this end, he made his way to the port of Masulipatnam butremained stranded there for nearly a whole year. Thereafter, he thought it wiser toaccede to the Deccan via Surat. In 1701, he eventually made his way to the imperialcamp at Panhala, but by the time he arrived there, his credibility had been compromisedboth by the machinations of the Old Company and by his reputation with his ownemployers for extravagance. Norris eventually left for England in 1702, but died on

shipboard while returning home.Norris’s embassy was the subject of a great deal of barely concealed mockeryat the time. The Venetian doctor and chronicler Nicolò Manuzzi is one of those whois quite unsparing in his views of him. At one point, he notes that Norris was unableeven to have the Mughal faujd " ar at Masulipatnam obey the royal orders (or hasb-ul-hukm )granting him passage into the Deccan and was forced to sell off all his horses andpack-animals to pay claims that he owed considerable duties. ‘This has caused himconsiderable loss through the great expense incurred’, wrote Manuzzi, ‘the whole of which was thrown away.’ Later, he notes that on arriving at the Mughal camp in 1701,Norris attempted to play off the New Company against the Old Company, assertingthat ‘the pirates who, during seventeen years past, have captured many merchant vessels belonging to Surat, used ships belonging to the Old Company’, but was then

unable to prove this claim. To be sure, he ‘made a great show, and his expenses wereextraordinary’, to the point that ‘the nickname “King of England” [was] given him bythe common people in the army’. But Norris was apparently ill-advised regarding thefunctioning of the Mughal court, so that he was left waiting for weeks and evenmonths on end for his various requests to be answered. Further, he was unable to givea clear explanation to the Mughals of political developments in Europe, including whatthe precise status of William III in regard to the Netherlands and England was, as wellas his relative rank and place in comparison to that of Louis XIV. At least some ofthose in the Mughal court appeared to be dismayingly well-informed regarding the insand outs of high European politics, and these included a certain Kifayat Khan,

25See the discussion in Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Frank Submissions: The Company andthe Mughals between Sir Thomas Roe and Sir William Norris’, in The Worlds of the East IndiaCompany , ed. H.V. Bowen, Margarette Lincoln and Nigel Rigby, Woodbridge, 2002, pp. 69–96.For the primary sources on the Norris embassy, see Harihar Das, The Norris Embassy to Aurangzeb (1699–1702), ed. S.C. Sarkar, Calcutta, 1959.


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apparently a ‘great friend’ of Manuzzi, who ‘speaks Portuguese fairly well, and bothspeaks and writes Latin to perfection’.26

Nevertheless, the English made an astonishingly quick recovery from this asco. As noted above, by 1709, matters between the New and Old Companies had at lastbeen resolved. In the aftermath of Josiah Child’s war, the project of a new and moredefensible settlement in Bengal was broached, and this was Calcutta, founded in theearly 1690s near the major port-city of Hughli (known to the Portuguese as PortoPequeno or Golim). Here, as appropriate in the context of the Glorious Revolution,the new fort was given the name of Fort William. Its ofcial founder Job Charnock,an old India hand with extensive experience of trade in Hughli, Qasimbazar, andPatna, seems to have acted in part on his own initiative rather than orders fromLondon; his activities were considerably aided, and perhaps even guided, by Armenian

intermediaries who were familiar both with European mercantile culture and Mughalcourt-practices.27 Fort St George in Madras had meanwhile grown steadily in size andmercantile wealth through the middle decades of the seventeenth century, and was atthis time undoubtedly the leading English trading settlement in India. Finally, Bombay,acquired by the Crown and then given over to the Company in the 1660s, also cameto have a small artillery fortress (or Bombay Castle) built under Gerald Aungier, andits fortications were steadily expanded so that by the 1710s, it was a fully defensiblecentre.28 In 1686, the Company decided to move its centre in western India from Suratto Bombay, making the former subordinate to the latter, and this was effected over thenext few years. Thus, by the time of Norris’s embassy, there existed the kernel of thesystem of three Presidencies based at Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta.

One of the motors of the Company’s resilience in the early eighteenth century

was undoubtedly the rather unique relationship between Company trade, and privateor ‘country’ trade. In this matter, the English made a quite distinct institutional choicefrom the Dutch, whose Company jealously guarded its trading privileges and frownedupon the trade of private Dutchmen in the Indian Ocean. (Only in a brief phase inthe mid-seventeenth century did the VOC have a policy of limited encouragement tothe trade of so-called vrijburgers. ) As a consequence, the Dutch inadvertently fomenteda curious form of employee corruption; being obliged to conceal their illegal privatetrade, the factors of the VOC systematically ‘cooked their books’, and both undersold

26Nicolò Manuzzi [Manucci], Mogul India, 1653–1708, or Storia do Mogor , trans. WilliamIrvine, 4 vols., repr., Delhi, 1990, vol. 3, pp. 285–8.

27

See the interesting essay by Farhat Hasan, ‘Indigenous Cooperation and the Birth ofa Colonial City: Calcutta, c . 1698–1750’, Modern Asian Studies , vol. 26, no. 1, 1992, pp. 65–82, which does not however develop the Armenian connection. We are grateful to Kapil Raj fordrawing our attention to this aspect of the early history of Calcutta.

28Samuel T. Sheppard, ed., Bombay in the Days of Queen Anne: Being an Account of theSettlement written by John Burnell , London, 1933.


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imported products and overpriced their purchases in their Indian factories, usually incollusion with their Indian brokers (or makelaars ). This problem had reached endemicproportions already by the closing decades of the seventeenth century, and was onlyto grow graver thereafter.29 In contrast, as early as the 1620s and 1630s, high EnglishCompany ofcials such as William Methwold in Masulipatnam and Surat were knownfor their extensive private trade, to which the Company just turned a blind eye. Withthe foundation of Fort St George and its consolidation in the 1650s and 1660s, thesepractices developed into an elaborate system. On the one hand, English Companypresidents and members of the council made use of ofcial privileges in their relations with weavers and other producers. On the other, they developed extensive relations with the so-called ‘country traders’, private Englishmen who had very often beenCompany employees for a time. A gure such as Thomas Bowrey, who has left us

extensive papers from his trade around the Bay of Bengal, is emblematic of suchprivate shipowning merchants in the 1670s and 1680s, interested in textiles, spices, andeven elephants.30 But we also know now, thanks to detailed research into the privatepapers of some of these traders, that they had signicant links with England and the Atlantic economy more generally. Many acted as commission agents for principals inEngland, purchasing diamonds in the Deccan, and sending them back on Companyships.31 One of the more visible actors in the matter was a certain Robert Freeman, who spent roughly two decades in India between 1668 and 1689, especially on theCoromandel coast. Initially an employee of the Company, he was removed from itsservice for embezzlement, but then emerged in the 1680s as a leading shipowningmerchant, largely acting as an agent for others—both in Company service and outsideof it. Though Freeman eventually could not himself amass a great fortune, some

others in his broad network did.It could therefore be argued that the English network of Indian Ocean trade by

the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was deliberately built on a set oflegal and institutional ambiguities. There was an enormous grey area between thesphere of the Company and that of the private trader. The Company itself had asignicant overlap with the state, and indeed the very charter of the Company wasconstructed so that the Crown had farmed out certain state-like functions—signingtreaties, waging war on sea and on land, building fortresses, even managing some

29See Ashin Das Gupta, ‘Pieter Phoonsen of Surat, c . 1730–1740’, Modern Asian Studies , vol. 22, no. 3, 1988, pp. 551–60.

30

Thomas Bowrey, A Geographical Account of Countries Round the Bay of Bengal, 1669 to 1679 ,ed. R.C. Temple, Cambridge, 1905; R.C. Temple, ed., The Papers of Thomas Bowrey, 1669–1713,discovered in 1913 by John Humphreys , London, 1927.

31See Søren Mentz, The English Gentleman Merchant at Work: Madras and the City of London,1660–1740, Copenhagen, 2005; also the earlier work by Gedalia Yogev, Diamonds and Coral:

Anglo-Dutch Jews and Eighteenth-Century Trade , New York, 1978.


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xx Introduction

revenue-resources—to this hybrid entity. It is of course the case that the Companycould not act with total impunity or autonomy in respect of broader state policy. Butthe complex forms of articulation meant that initiatives could come as much from theperiphery as from the centre. The Court of Directors in London was thus oftenfrustrated by its inability to control its employees in Asia, and the length of the cycleof communications did not facilitate notions of a proper hierarchy of command. Thefunctioning of the Atlantic colonies of the English already left a good deal to bedesired in this matter, but east of the Cape of Good Hope matters were exacerbatedeven further. A clear instance of this is provided to us by the scandal around the Whitebrothers, Samuel and George, a cause célèbre of the late 1680s and early 1690s. Samuel White was initially a Company employee in Madras in around 1675, but then made his way to the eastern seaboard of the Bay of Bengal to join his brother George, who was

already a private trader there.32

The Whites’ network of contacts, which extended toBanten and the ports of the Malay peninsula, eventually enabled them to establishthemselves in the western Thai port of Mergui, where Samuel White managed to havehimself named sh " ahbandar by the Thai ruler Narai. Between the late 1670s and late1680s, and until his hasty departure for England in 1688, White ran a curiousenterprise, as trader, tax-collector, political entrepreneur, and corsair. He attacked andplundered ships belonging to Golkonda merchants, as well as Armenians, and evenother English private traders. The Company was eventually enraged by all this, and rstpursued military action against him in Thailand, and then legal action even after hisreturn to England. In spite of this, Samuel White died in 1689 without facingsignicant legal consequences, and his brother George managed in the 1690s to staveoff the Company quite successfully, given that it was on the defensive anyway because

of the new political context.If White recalls some of the Caribbean buccaneers of the mid-seventeenth

century, such as Henry Morgan, his actions also point the way to how difcult it wasin the Indian Ocean context to distinguish the various levels of English activity. Faced with the annoyance of the Sultan of Golkonda or his courtiers, the English factors atMasulipatnam and their superiors in Madras tried in vain to explain that while Samuel White had indeed been one of them, he was now operating on his own, or perhaps incollusion with others in Thailand. Again, the dramatic upsurge in the 1690s of English(as well as Scottish) piracy in the waters between Madagascar and the Red Sea wasdifcult to explain away to the Indian interlocutors of the Company. The most famousof these pirates, the Dundee-born William Kidd, was a sometime employee of theCrown, but this did not prevent him from capturing the Armenian ship, the Kedah

Merchant and looting it. He, like many others, had connections with English ofcialsboth in the metropolis, and in the Caribbean, and even in New England. Henry Every

32Stern, The Company-State , pp. 76–80, 146–7; Mentz, English Gentleman Merchant at Work,pp. 225–9.


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Introduction xxi

(or Avery), who captured the Mughal ships Fath Muhammad and Ganj-i Sawai in mid-1695, was only slightly less ambiguous in his relations to the ostensibly respectable endof English overseas enterprise, and the same could be said of others like EdwardCoates, Robert Culliford, and Thomas Tew, men who transgressed, were at timespunished severely, but more often than not returned to some form of respectability.33 The process by which all this came about was a matter that William Norris, amongothers, found problematic to explain when he was cross-questioned by high Mughalofcials in 1701.

The rst clear hints of English territorial expansion in India can be traced tothe 1730s, in the context of their Coromandel establishments. But some warning signshad already appeared in the preceding decades, especially following the protractedsuccession struggle for the Mughal throne that had ensued on the death of Aurangzeb

in early March 1707. Their early confrontations with rst Da’ud Khan Panni and thenSa‘adatullah Khan, the senior Mughal ofcials who held charge of the KarnatakPayanghat region, were not notably successful. But they showed their belligerencefurther south, around Fort St David in Kadalur, where they were beginning to feeltheir oats with the Bundela Rajput notable whom the Mughals had placed inadministrative charge of the region, Sarup Singh. In 1704, the English factors accusedhim of trying to divert the course of the river away from their settlement, and madea show of force against him. Then, in 1710, some Mughal revenue-farmers who werein arrears ed to Fort St David; the English refused to hand them over, and SarupSingh retaliated by seizing hold of two Englishmen. The English Company professedoutrage at this, and their anger was possibly further fuelled by the fact that the formerdeputy governor of their fort, Gabriel Roberts, had in fact stood security for the

revenue-farmers—another example of the promiscuous mixing of private trade andofcial functioning. The Company therefore sent out a punitive expedition into thecountry, suffered some minor losses of its own, but caused enormous damage. AsRoberts’s successor, Raworth (who was not long after to rebel himself, and desert tothe French after being accused of massive embezzlement), would write in late October1711: ‘Wee must Indeed owne there is no [...] express order for Commencing a Warror Plundering the Country & Destroying that vast quantity of Grain but the Gentlemenconcerned desire you’ll be pleas’d to Consider that as they were Oblig’d in Duty theyacquainted their superiors at Fort St George of every pace they tooke.’ He did howeverconfess to a certain excess: ‘But the Destruction of 50, or 60,000 Pagodas worth of

33

For the Company’s deep ambivalence with regard to this piracy, see Philip J. Stern, ‘ “APolitie of Civill & Military Power”: Political Thought and the Late Seventeenth-CenturyFoundations of the East India Company-State’, Journal of British Studies , vol. 47, no. 2, 2008,pp. 253–83; also Donald R. Burgess Jr., ‘Piracy in the Public Sphere: The Henry Every Trialsand the Battle for Meaning in Seventeenth-Century Print Culture’, Journal of British Studies ,

vol. 48, no. 4, 2009, pp. 887–913.


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xxii Introduction

Graine, about 52 Villages & Townes among which was his [Sarup Singh’s] favourite Towne Yembollam and Killing the Pandarum [priest] there are things which reallymakes his demands carry too much justice with them.’34

In the two decades that followed, the English government at Madras engagedin periodic jousting with Sa‘adatullah Khan and his subordinates, especially in the vicinity of their chief settlement. But it was his death in 1732 that opened up anentirely new set of possibilities. Over the next decade, the Mughal niz " amat in the Arcotregion remained unstable, despite the periodic direct and indirect intervention offorces from Hyderabad. During the government of Richard Benyon (1735–44), theEnglish negotiated not only with Hyderabad and Arcot for greater inuence, but also with a number of important Maratha sard " ars such as Murarirao Ghorpade, who cast aheavy shadow over the Karnatak Payanghat. Since these expansionary ambitions were

shared by the chief French actors in the region, mainly operating out of Pondicherry,a complex multi-cornered conict was the consequence. The protracted Arcot‘succession dispute’ which occupied much of the 1730s and 1740s was therefore therst real occasion for the East India Company to attempt to play a signicant role inIndian interior politics.35 Neither the English nor the French mobilized enormousforces in the rst instance; rather each disposed of limited sepoy armies and hoped touse European-style infantry warfare to their advantage against opponents who weremore adept at deploying cavalry. In this conict, the French periodically appeared tohave gained the upper hand, for example in the second half of the 1740s when theirmaritime forces under La Bourdonnais even seized Madras for a time. In the nalanalysis, however, the English Company was the real winner. By the mid-1740s, theirpreferred candidate at Arcot, Anwar-ud-Din Khan of Gopamau, had been installed

rather than the alternatives supported by the French; and even if he was killed in battlein 1749, it was his son Muhammad ‘Ali Walajah who took his place to form a stabledispensation. English inuence came to extend deeper and deeper into the Arcotcourt, and they also managed over time to gain the upper hand over the Maratha rajasof Tanjavur using a mixture of military and nancial means, some ofcial and someprivate.

It was from this position of growing condence and strength that the Companyembarked on its celebrated Bengal adventure of 1757. Its forces were led there byRobert Clive, who had cut his teeth in the Karnatak wars and been briey captured

34Records of Fort St George, Letters to Fort St. George, 1711, p. 114, Robert Raworth and

Council at Fort St David, 25 October 1711, to Edward Harrison etc. at Fort St George. Forthe larger context of this quarrel, see Alam and Subrahmanyam, Writing the Mughal World: Studieson Culture and Politics , New York, 2012, pp. 339–95.

35 There is a substantial, but largely dated, literature on the Arcot issue. See Henry H.Dodwell, Dupleix and Clive: The Beginning of Empire , London, 1920, and the more recent narrativein N.S. Ramaswami, Political History of Carnatic under the Nawabs , New Delhi, 1984.


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Introduction xxiii

when La Bourdonnais had seized Madras in 1746.36 To be sure, other factors—bothlocal and larger ones—must be taken into account to account for the enigmatic eventsof Bengal. The public humiliation of the Mughals by Nadir Shah in 1739–40 had madeit amply clear to several of the European powers that the imperial centre was no longera real player in the affairs of the provinces; in more senses than one, the coast wasclear.37 As in the Karnatak, British motives in Bengal always mixed the public and theprivate. Company ofcials more often than not had nancial and other dealings withboth local merchants and bankers like the well known Jagat Seths, and with privateEnglish traders with their own complex designs and interests. The events surroundingthe Battle of Palashi (Plassey) in June 1757 have been analysed by a number ofhistorians, both modern and antiquated, as have the larger train of events leading upto it.38 There was clearly no blueprint of conquest, even if the British did not stumble

upon Bengal as Hernán Cortés may be thought to have stumbled upon Mexico- Tenochtitlán in 1519. Nor indeed can we dene a simple line of teleology that willcarry us from the foundation of the Company in 1600 to 1757. But the conquest ofBengal, and then progressively of much of the rest of India from 1757 to 1820, wasobviously no absent-minded act either. It was for that reason that it was defended sostrenuously both then, in the eighteenth century, and then into the nineteenth and eventhe twentieth centuries. At the same time, it required a rather odd two-faced actor— neither sh nor fowl—to carry it out. It may not be too much to suggest that thepeculiar structure of the English Company—less centralized than the Dutch and thusmore structurally prone to acts of ‘sub-imperialism’—gave it the edge it required tocarry out this conquest. This conquest was done while the Company, we may recall,had increasingly begun to portray itself not as a coporate entity but as an

anthropomorphized one, an Indo-Persian creature called Kampani Bah " adur .

II

This takes us logically to a second question, namely the nature of the lines ofcommunication between the English East India Company and Indian society. This isnot a new question, but it is not one that has been adequately explored either.

36For an old fashioned narrative, see G.W. Forrest, ‘The Siege of Madras in 1746 andthe Action of La Bourdonnais’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , 3rd series, vol. 2, 1908,pp. 189–234; more recently, Philippe Haudrère, La Bourdonnais: Marin et aventurier , Paris, 1992.

37

Manjusha Kuruppath, ‘Casting Despots in Dutch Drama: The Case of Nadir Shah in Van Steenwyk’s Thamas Koelikan ’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review , vol. 48, no. 2,2011, pp. 241–86. For a classic statement, see William Bolts, Considerations on India Affairs;

particularly respecting the Present State of Bengal and its Dependencies , 2nd edn., London, 1772.38For the most recent reconsideration, see Partha Chatterjee, The Black Hole of Empire:

History of a Global Practice of Power , Princeton, 2012.


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xxiv Introduction

Compressed conquest narratives such as that of the Spaniards in Mexico or even Afonso de Albuquerque in Goa can make do with rudimentary forms of intermediation:the role played by la Malinche between Cortés and the Mexica, or of the freebooter Timoja between Albuquerque, Vijayanagara, and the ‘Adil Shahis in the case of Goa.Obviously, we will have to do rather better in the case of the East India Company andIndia, where a century and a half of cohabitation preceded actual conquest. This iseven more the case because the ten massive volumes of the Calendar of PersianCorrespondence, to which our text acts in part as a new introduction, were prepared andpublished under the aegis of the Imperial Records Department of the government ofBritish India, and deal with the circumstances and processes under which the EastIndia Company consolidated its hold upon Bengal in the eighteenth century followingthe Battle of Plassey. Of course, the volumes themselves were conceived to serve a

more or less explicit teleology, in which contemporary colonial rule was the inevitablehistorical result of these processes. Admittedly, after the end of colonial rule and inlight of the advances in South Asian historiography, such a teleology is untenable onboth political and intellectual grounds. Yet, by its very nature, this collection invitesthe historian of South Asia to reconsider questions of long-standing historiographicalconcern, many of which were intertwined with the colonial project itself.

Before the English established themselves along the shores of the Indian Oceanin the course of the seventeenth century, they had been preceded by other Europeans, whose experience had a signicant effect on their own. These other Europeansincluded the Italians, and to a very limited degree the French, but the most signicantpresence was that of the Iberian powers. When the Portuguese arrived in the IndianOcean at the close of the fteenth century, they encountered a situation of far greater

linguistic complexity than they could possibly have imagined. They themselves wereobviously capable of communicating as a collectivity at the very least in Portuguese,Spanish, Italian, and Latin, and they had also taken the precaution of bringing alongsome Arabic speakers with them (though this was usually the Arabic of North Africaand not that of the eastern Mediterranean). These languages served them well enoughat the start, especially in their written forms; much of the early written communicationthey had in both East Africa and western India seems to have been in Arabic. Veryquickly however, other languages became necessary, notably Malayalam for dealings inKerala, Persian for a wide swathe of the western Indian Ocean, and Malay (written in Arabic script naturally) for dealings in South-East Asia. Arabic, Persian, and Malayremained the vehicular or principal languages for them in the decades that followed,though they eventually added rst Chinese and then, to an extent, Japanese to these.

To be sure, by the mid-sixteenth century, some Portuguese also came to acquire other Asian languages depending on the needs, and circumstances, and these ranged from Tamil, Telugu, and Sanskrit, to Konkani and Marathi in India, to Thai, Khmer, andBurmese, and much beyond. Missionaries, for example, might need to learn a relativelylocalized language if it were indispensable for their ends. By 1600, it is highly probable


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Introduction xxv

that someone or other in the ofcial or missionary establishment of Portuguese Asiahad a certain level of prociency in one of thirty Asian languages, a vast change fromthe case in 1500.

We know this because of the collections in archives of dictionaries andglossaries, as well as letters, treatises, and other documents many of which arelinguistically hybrid. The chief single collection of letters in this respect is the CartasOrientais in the Lisbon National Archives, or Torre do Tombo, which contains close toa hundred letters in Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, and Ottoman Turkish, but other lettersin these languages as well as Malay and Chinese can equally be found dispersed acrossa variety of collections. From the late sixteenth century, the Goa archives also containa signicant number of letters from the so-called reis vizinhos (or ‘neighbouring kings’)of the Portuguese State of the Indies, in Persian, Marathi, and Kannada. In contrast,

the letters in the Cartas Orientais are very largely from the sixteenth century, that is tosay from the initial period of contact when the Portuguese, and their interlocutors wereonly beginning to establish what would later be stable conventions for communication. The Jesuit historian Georg Schurhammer in 1968 published an extensive list of these‘oriental letters’ from the rst half of the sixteenth century. Including all letters writtenby the Asian and East African interlocutors of the Portuguese, even those for whichonly the Portuguese version or translation existed, he accumulated a list of some 334documents from this period.39 This long essay-cum-catalogue was followed by a fardeeper and more analytical work by Jean Aubin, which—though it limited itself to thedocuments in Persian and Arabic from the Indian Ocean—carefully edited, translated,and published a certain number of these letters.40 In turn, some other historians(including the present authors) have subsequently edited and translated further letters

from the same collection, largely having to do with Gujarat, the Persian Gulf, andMelaka.41

A brief re-examination of some of the letters published by Aubin already makesclear some of the difculties posed by this type of correspondence. The rst of thesechronologically is a letter written in Arabic in September 1508 by Khwaja ‘Ata Sultani,the waz $ ır of the Persian Gulf state of Hurmuz to Afonso de Albuquerque, who wasyet to assume the post of governor of the Portuguese Estado da Índia . Albuquerque

39Georg Schurhammer, ‘Orientalische Briefe aus der Zeit des Hl. Franz Xaver (1500– 1552)’, Euntes docete , vol. 21, 1968, pp. 255–301.

40 Jean Aubin, ‘Les documents arabes, persans, et turcs de la Torre do Tombo’, in Le Latinet l’Astrolabe: Recherches sur le Portugal de la Renaissance, son expansion en Asie et les relations

internationales , vol. 2, ed. Françoise Aubin, Paris, 2000, pp. 417–52.41Dejanirah Couto, ‘Trois documents sur une demande de secours ormouzi à la Porteottomane’, Anais de História de Além-Mar , vol. 3, 2002, pp. 469–93; Jorge M. dos Santos Alvesand Nader Nasiri-Moghaddam, ‘Une lettre en persan de 1519 sur la situation à Malacca’, Archipel , no. 75, 2008, pp. 145–66; Alam and Subrahmanyam, Writing the Mughal World ,pp. 79–87.


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had attempted in the previous year on his own initiative to seize control of Hurmuz,but was obliged to abandon his attempt since the other captains under his command would not agree with him. By the time of his return to Hurmuz in late 1508, Khwaja‘Ata had taken the precaution of contacting his hierarchical superior, the viceroy DomFrancisco de Almeida. In this letter, he thus plays one off against the other. The letterruns as follows:

He [In His Name]Great Captain Afonso de Albuquerque, know that the envoy of Dom Francisco the viceroycame to us from Cochin, and he brought a letter on which there is the seal of Portugal. Theletter with the seal is addressed to us, and also there is a letter for you and for the captains whoare with you. Look at it. The original is for you. We know what it contains. Read the letter ofyour sultan. Listen and take the proper path. If you come [to us], you will see the seal of your

sultan of Portugal. Let the captains come near the shore, so that we can send the envoy fromPortugal to you and the seal that is on the letter addressed to us, you will see it. The prisoners who were with you, and whom you sent to the lord of Cochin, [namely] Nakhuda ‘Ali Mubarizand his companions, have been sent back to us and he treated them well. Know this.Salutations.42

The letter is written in a fair hand, but as Aubin notes it was certainly dictatedand not written by Khwaja ‘Ata himself. It is characterized moreover (to quote theFrench scholar) by its strange informality, and ‘confused and dialectal style’, perhapsowing to the fact that Khwaja ‘Ata was an eunuch of Bengali origin. Albuquerque isaddressed by name, and also as the n " akhuda kab $ ır ; and the term ‘viceroy’ is nottranslated (say) as n " a’ib but simply rendered as ab " u zurray from the Portuguese vice-rei

or visorei . Interestingly, we have a sixteenth-century translation into Portuguese of thisletter, which we may also translate quite literally, to obtain a sense of the distinctionbetween original and contemporary rendering:

Captain-Major Afonso de Albuquerque. You should know that a messenger from DomFrancisco, the viceroy at Cochin, came here, and brought a letter with his sign, written to you,and that letter is with you, and written to you and to all the captains who have come with youand principally to you. And I know what is in it; so read it, listen to it, and obey it, [for] it hasthe seal of the King of Portugal. Send one of your people ashore, and he will see the letter

with the seal of the King of Portugal, and the messenger who brought it. And the captives whom you had who you sent to Cochin, Negodaquiçar and his companions, were all sent tome and they are with me.43

42 Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, Lisbon, Cartas Orientais, no. 10; text andFrench translation in Aubin, ‘Les documents arabes, persans, et turcs’, pp. 424–5.

43Brás [Afonso] de Albuquerque, Commentarios de Afonso Dalboquerque capitão geral e governador da Índia (…), Lisbon, 1557, fol. lxxxvii. (a). The letter does not appear in subsequenteditions of the text and their reprints.


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Introduction xxvii

This translation quite closely approximates many—but not all—elements ofours in more or less the same sequence. The name of the chief prisoner sent backfrom Cochin is rendered as Nakhuda Qaisar. Some small details are left out, such asthe fact that the Cochin ruler ( s " ahib al-K " uj $ ı ) had treated them well. But what is ofinterest is how, already at this early date, new hybrid terms such as ab " u zurray havebegun to enter the vocabulary. They would be followed in the Persian correspondenceof the 1530s by such other terms as kapt " an-m " ur for ‘captain-major’ and warand " ul a‘zam for ‘Great Governor’. The exchange of letters immediately following this one is alsointeresting. Albuquerque attempted in these to question the authenticity of thePortuguese letters he was sent from Hurmuz, claiming for example that the wax onone of the seals looked suspicious. Khwaja ‘Ata responded indignantly that he wouldnever have forged a letter from the viceroy, and that Albuquerque was merely using

this as an excuse to be a ‘traitor to the King of Portugal’ ( har "

am-khw "

ar-i p"

adsh "

ah-iBurtuk" al , which the contemporary Portuguese translation baldly renders as tu es tredora el Rey de Portugal ). Besides, he pointed out that the letters carried the signatures of thePortuguese viceroy and the ofcial secretary ( naw $ ısinda ). He also suggested that thetranslator or ‘reader ( khw " ananda )’ whom Albuquerque employed to deal with Persianand Arabic correspondence was incompetent, and had created pointless confusion. This may have been a reference to a certain Gaspar Rodrigues, who is mentioned inPortuguese chronicles as the lingua or interpreter, and who appears in Khwaja ‘Ata’sown letters with the title of kalamch $ ı .

The place of these linguas in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Portuguese Asia has attracted some welcome attention in recent years. Schematically, we maydistinguish different types of linguas , corresponding to particular periods and regions

but also to changing situations in regard to diplomacy. In the early years of Almeidaand Albuquerque, several converted Jews played this role, of whom the most celebratedare Gaspar da Gama and Francisco de Albuquerque.44 Their familiarity with theromance languages—Portuguese, Castilian, and Italian—and with Hebrew, Arabic, andPersian, was the result of their diverse commercial and political experience in both theMediterranean and the western Indian Ocean. Though these Jewish interpreters neverdisappeared over the sixteenth century, with the passage of time a more complex gureof the interpreter-cum-renegade emerges in the middle decades of the sixteenthcentury, of whom a good early example is João de Borba, a Portuguese who irted with Islam and played a role in the Husain Shahi Sultanate of Bengal around 1520. Tothese we can add cases of Muslims of North African, Indian, or Iranian origin, whooften converted and became bilingual, and even some who were allowed to inhabit the

fringes of the Portuguese empire without actually converting from Islam. As we enter

44For an overview, see Dejanirah Couto, ‘The Role of Interpreters, or Linguas, in thePortuguese Empire during the Sixteenth Century’, e-Journal of Portuguese History , vol. 1, no. 2,2003.


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xxviii Introduction

the later decades of the sixteenth century, however, new gures and groups enter thelists. These include Armenians, who were used by the Portuguese viceroys andgovernors in regard to the Indo-Persian world; those missionaries who acquired Asianlanguages and were then willing to aid the Estado in matters of diplomacy; a variety ofmembers of convert communities, who were often acculturated through their contact with the same missionaries; and nally gures of mixed descent, or mestiços , theoffspring of the alliances between Portuguese men and Asian women, and whoretained something of both cultures. This last category appear sometimes in Portuguese writings by 1600 under the denomination of topasses , itself an adaptation of the termdubh " ash $ ı or dub " ash $ ı , meaning bilingual.

The central problem posed by the term lingua is however that it covered both written and oral functions. Many of those who claimed this role were really oral

interpreters, who could carry messages, or intervene in conversations with ambassadorsor envoys, but could not necessarily read or translate diplomatic missives. By 1600, wecan imagine that the body of such orally bilingual or trilingual characters was notnegligible in size. However, there was some distance between them and those who were able to handle written materials, especially the often codied and formulaiclanguage of diplomatic correspondence. The following perspicacious remarks of Aubin are worth citing on the question:

It is interesting to compare the [Persian and Arabic] originals to the Portuguese translations ofthe period, which are obviously uneven, in accordance with the quality of the translator or theimportance given to the subject at hand. More often than not, we are dealing with adapted orsummarized versions rather than a literal rendering of the content (and it seems that this wasparticularly the case with the translations done in Portugal, which have a poorer grasp of the

text or a more careless attitude to being faithful to what is set out when compared to thosedone on the spot in the East).45

Nonetheless, a marked evolution is visible by the late sixteenth and earlyseventeenth centuries, with the emergence in Goa of veritable dynasties of interpreters, who were very often Saraswat Brahmins who had converted to Catholicism. Oftenusing the surname Sinai (from Shenvi), the precursor of these Saraswats was a gurelike Krishna, a well known go-between gure of the decades leading from the 1520sto the 1540s both in dealings in Goa itself, and in the diplomatic negotiations with the‘Adil Shahi Sultanate of Bijapur, the closest neighbours of Portuguese Goa. Suchinterpreter dynasties, which have been recently studied by Jorge Flores, primarily worked across three languages: Portuguese, Persian, Marathi, and at times they also

worked with Kannada. Some of their members grew close to the great Portuguese

45 Aubin, Le Latin et l’Astrolabe , vol. 2, p. 420.


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Introduction xxix

families that dominated the post of viceroy in these years, such as the Gamas or theNoronhas.46

The European latecomers to Asia, such as the English and the Dutch, potentiallyhad the advantage of being able to benet from the rich Portuguese experience ofdiplomacy and translation after the 1490s.47 But the early realities were rather moreuncomfortable than that. For instance, the English Muscovy Company sought in theearly 1560s to open diplomatic relations with Safavid Iran, sending the merchant Anthony Jenkinson overland via Russia to Qazwin in 1562. But Jenkinson was givena somewhat peculiar letter from Queen Elizabeth to the Safavid monarch in English, with copies in Hebrew and Italian, addressed to the ‘Great Sophie [Su] of Persia’,and treating him as the ‘Emperour of the Persian, Medes, Parthians, Hyrcanes,Carmanarians, Margians, of the people on this side, and beyond the River of Tygris,

and of all men, and nations, between the Caspian sea, and the gulph of Persia’. Theletter ended with the warm sentiment that ‘neither the earth, the seas, nor the heavens,have so much force to separate us, as the godly disposition of naturall humanitie, andmutuall benevolence, have to joyne us strongly together’.48 Still Jenkinson’s experiencein Iran turned out in reality to be a somewhat fraught one. He arrived at a moment when the Safavids and the Ottomans were preparing to make peace after longhostilities, and the Qazwin court was not that concerned with an obscure tradingpartner from the far north-west. Further, he was profoundly destabilized when he wastreated in the Safavid court with the Persian term g " awur , which he himself paraphrasedas ‘unbeliever, and uncleane: [they] esteeming all to bee indels and Pagans which doenot believe as they doe, in their false lthie prophets Mahomet and Murtezallie’. Hisdescription of a rather disastrous interview with Shah Tahmasp in late November 1562

is worth recalling. Jenkinson began by delivering Queen Elizabeth’s letter andannouncing that he ‘was of the famous Citie of London within the noble realme ofEngland’. His purpose, he apparently declared, was ‘to repaire and trafque within his[Tahmasp’s] dominions … to the honour of both princes, the mutual commoditie ofboth realms, and wealth of the subjects’. But the fact that the letter was in three

46 Jorge Flores, ‘How Cosmopolitan were the Hindu Interpreters of Early Modern Goa?’,paper presented to a conference on Cosmopolitanism in the Early Modern World: The Case of South

Asia (16th–18th centuries). Sources, Itineraries, Languages , CEIAS, École des Hautes Études enSciences Sociales, Paris, 24–5 May 2012. For an earlier analysis, see Jorge Flores, ‘Firangist " an eHindust " an : O Estado da Índia e os conns meridionais do Império Mogol (1572–1636)’, Ph.D.dissertation, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 2004, pp. 488–510.

47

It is less clear to what extent they were familiar with the specics of Venetian dealings with, for example, the Ottomans and Safavids, which could also have been useful to them. See,for example, Guglielmo Berchet, La Repubblica di Venezia e la Persia , Turin, 1865; and E. NatalieRothman, Brokering Empire: Trans-Imperial Subjects between Venice and Istanbul , Ithaca, NY, 2012.

48E. Delmar Morgan and C.H. Coote, eds., Early Voyages and Travels to Russia and Persiaby Anthony Jenkinson and Other Englishmen , London, 1886, pp. 112–14.


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unfamiliar languages—none of them Persian, Ottoman Turkish, or Arabic—apparentlydid not please the Shah. The exchange then continued as follows:

Then he questioned with me of the state of our countries, and of the power of the Emperourof Almaine, King Philip, and the great Turke, and which of them was of most power: whomI answered to his contentation, not dispraysing the great Turke, their late concluded friendshipconsidered. Then he reasoned with me much of religion, demaunding whether I were a Gower ,that is to say, an unbeleever, or a Muselman , that is of Mahomets lawe. Unto whom I answered,that I was neither unbeleever nor Mahometan, but a Christian. What is that, sayd hee unto theking of Georgians sonne, who being a Christian was ed unto the sayd Sophie, and heeanswered that a Christian was he that beleeveth in Jesus Christus, afrming him to bee thesonne of God, and the greatest prophet: Doest thou believe so sayd the Sophie unto mee: Yeathat I doe sayd I: Oh thou unbeleever sayd he, we have no neede to have friendship with the

unbeleevers, and so willed mee to depart. I being glad thereof did reverence and went my way.49

If indeed some version of this conversation took place, and was not simply agment of Jenkinson’s imagination, we must ask ourselves what its linguistic registerscould have been. In all likelihood, the Shah would have spoken in Persian or Turkish, while Jenkinson could only have acceded to his remarks through a translator; and itseems probable that Portuguese would have played a role in the proceedings. At anyrate, we gather that in March 1563, Jenkinson was allowed at last to depart fromQazwin after the intervention of some of the inuential members of the court, who were favourable to trade and afraid that ‘there would few straungers resort into hiscountrey’, had ensured that he was treated with some degree of courtesy. FurtherEnglish trade missions to Iran then followed in the 1560s, notably those of ArthurEdwards and Thomas Bannister, which eventually resulted in a partial thawing and thegrant by Shah Tahmasp of some farm " ans for trade, which were ‘all written in Azureand gold letters, and delivered unto the Lord Keeper of the Sophie his great seale’.However, there remains the question of whether such diplomatic documents wereactually translated in Elizabethan England. It is unclear who could have read andinterpreted them, since it is unlikely that any Persian-speaking merchants were residentin London at this time. Still, none of these ventures resulted in prots of anysignicance, and the death of Shah Tahmasp in 1576 seems to have dampened Englishenthusiasm. A letter written by Queen Elizabeth to Shah Muhammad Khudabanda in1579 attempting to pursue relations was apparently unable to reach its intendeddestination.

The founding of the East India Company in 1600 had of course been precededby further English contacts with the Persian-speaking world, including Mughal India. These contacts were the affair of gures like Ralph Fitch, William Leedes, and John

49Morgan and Coote, eds., Early Voyages and Travels by Anthony Jenkinson , pp. 145–7.


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Newberry. All were associated with the English Levant Company, and were part of anexploratory venture that set out via the eastern Mediterranean and Aleppo to Baghdadand Basra in 1583. Arriving in the Portuguese fort of Hurmuz, the Englishmen werearrested and transported to Goa, from where they managed to leave thanks to theintervention of an inuential English Jesuit, Thomas Stevens. Fitch and the others were eventually to make their way to Akbar’s court in Agra, where they went theirseparate ways: Newberry attempted to return to England and died soon after, and thejeweller William Leedes was employed by the Mughals; Fitch himself pushed on via Allahabad down the Gangetic valley to Bengal, then to Burma, and eventually evenmade his way as far as Melaka in 1588. He would then return using the familiarPortuguese routes to Cochin, Goa, and Hurmuz, travel overland to Aleppo, andgradually make his way back to London in 1591. Since a very large part of his itinerary

was conducted using Portuguese networks, it is obvious that there was a great deal ofcontinuity between his perception of the trading networks and high political cultureof Asia and what the Portuguese saw of the same. The advice he gave to the edglingEast India Company, which consulted him after his return to England, must have beenconceived in those very terms.50

It is interesting to analyse the diplomatic skills and resources available to the rstgeneration of East India Company servants who dealt with the Mughals. From theirpast in the Atlantic, especially in their raids on the Caribbean ports, many brought asmattering of Castilian or Portuguese. Others who had been engaged with the LevantCompany had some grasp of Ottoman Turkish, or more rarely of Arabic. These wereprecisely the sorts of skills that Fitch and his companions had possessed, and they were usually oral rather than written. The complicated and eventually fruitless

negotiations of Sir Thomas Roe’s embassy in the 1610s proved how inadequate suchresources in fact were. The more enigmatic case of the Company employee WilliamHawkins, who spent some two-and-a-half years between April 1609 and November1611 at the Mughal court in Agra, married an Armenian bride, and claimed to be ableto communicate with Jahangir after a fashion in Turkish, also suggested that thecultural frontier of Persian was one that needed eventually to be crossed.51 We areaware that Company employees were also concerned with the fact that, in the absenceof Persian skills of their own, their dependence on Jesuit intermediation with theMughals in this early phase was excessive. Therefore, we see the rst signs already inthe 1610s of efforts in this direction; for example, we possess the glossary and workbook that the minor artist and Company employee Robert Hughes (d. 1623), used while at Jahangir’s court in Ajmer in the period to learn the rudiments of Persian from

50 J. Horton Ryley, ed., Ralph Fitch, England’s Pioneer to India and Burma: His Companions andContemporaries, with his Remarkable Narrative told in his own Words , London, 1899.

51Richmond Barbour, ‘Power and Distant Display: Early English “Ambassadors” inMoghul India’, Huntington Library Quarterly , vol. 61, nos. 3–4, 1998, pp. 343–68.


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an Armenian teacher by the name of Tumajan.52 The manuscript work, about 90 folioslong, includes a Persian version of the Lord’s Prayer, a short outline of Persiangrammar, and then a vocabulary with English words, Persian equivalents transliteratedinto Roman script, and then in Persian script.53 Again, in 1624, we learn of anEnglishman (whose name is unfortunately not communicated to us), who contactedthe French entrepreneur Augustin de Beaulieu in Rome, and offered his services toopen French trade with the Mughals. This man, writes Beaulieu, ‘has been employedby the Company of England in the court of the said Prince [Jahangir], where heremained for about two years and was very well-known there, even by the GreatMughal, with whom he had the honour of speaking several times’; he then adds that‘he is English by nation, and has seen a great deal, and travelled in the Indies by seaand by land, he speaks good Persian ( parle bon persan ) and will provide you an opening

for the trafc in silks of the said country’.54

In a similar vein, by the 1620s, the rstfactors of the Dutch East India Company in Agra such as Francisco Pelsaert obviouscame to have a reasonable level of comprehension of Persian.55 The collection of thefactor Wollebrandt Geleynssen de Jongh in the late 1630s contains a ‘letter-book withdiverse received and dispatched letters and formannen , written in Persian and translatedinto Dutch’, making it clear that by this time the Dutch factors operating in Gujaratand Hindustan had the means to deal with Persian correspondence with imperial andprovincial ofcials.56

In the course of the seventeenth century, all the other Europeans—the English,the Dutch, and later the French—joined the Portuguese in having a translating staffavailable to them in their factories for their incoming and outgoing correspondence. These men ranged over the scribal hierarchy, from lowly copyists to powerful men like

the Armenian go-between Alexandre de l’Estoile, who the French Company sent in1699 to Burhanpur to negotiate with Aurangzeb’s court. De l’Estoile was the thirdgeneration of a dynasty that had served the French in this role, and he obviously had

52Susan Stronge, “‘Far from the Arte of Painting”: An English Amateur Artist at theCourt of Jahangir’, in Arts of Mughal India: Studies in Honour of Robert Skelton , ed. Rosemary Crill,Susan Stronge and Andrew Topseld, London, 2004, pp. 129–37.

53Bodleian Library, Oxford, Bodl. Or. 492 (Sachau-Ethé No. 1915).54 Anne Lombard-Jourdan, ‘À propos d’Augustin de Beaulieu: Quelques documents

inédits’, Archipel , no. 56, 1998, pp. 145–56, citation on p. 150.55On Pelsaert, see D.H.A. Kolff and H.W. van Santen, eds., De Geschriften van Francisco

Pelsaert over Mughal Indië, 1627: Kroniek en Remonstrantie , The Hague, 1979.56Nationaal Archief, The Hague, 1.10.30 Collectie Geleynssen de Jongh, Nr. 100,‘Briefboek van verscheyde soo becoomen als versonde brieven als formannen int Persiaensgeschreven ende int Nederlands getranslateert begonnen anno 1639 in Agra’. On this interestinggure, see Hans W. van Santen, VOC-dienaar in India: Geleynssen de Jongh in het land van de Groot-

Mogol , Franeker, 2001.


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a degree of autonomy that was not afforded to the simple translator.57 The proliferationof this type of personnel, who would generically have been known as munsh $ ıs innorthern India and as karanams (or other similar terms) in the southern factories ofthe Companies, can be veried through an examination of factory payrolls, and similardocuments. It is obvious that elaborate distinctions existed between them, in terms offunctions as well as status. The simple scribe or copyist, or the translator of elementarydocuments for day-to-day use was not at all the same as the great merchant-broker,often with social pretensions of an elevated variety. But the terminology in use wasoften blurred, as we see from the quite promiscuous use of a word like banian innorthern and eastern India and dub " ash $ ı in the ports of the Coromandel coast.58 Initiallyused even for humble, half-caste translators and go-betweens, by the mid-eighteenthcentury, the term dub " ash $ ı or dub " ash was being used in Madras or Pondicherry to

designate powerful magnate gures such as Ananda Ranga Pillai (1709–61), who evenhad encomia composed for himself in Telugu and Sanskrit.59 One of his roles was tobe the factotum and go-between to the French governor Joseph-François Dupleix, buthe also had a signicant number of other social roles, and was one of the notablebourgeois pillars of the Pondicherry society of his time.

The question of the place of networks of communication in the transition tothe colonial period is thus a complex one, which requires further thought and analysis. The employees and factors of the East India Company were never entirely able to freethemselves from the suspicion that even as they were exploiting the resources of theIndian subcontinent, they themselves were the dupes of those on whom they dependedfor information and knowledge. They never quite mastered the typical scribal scripts,such as shikasta (used for Persian) or modi (used for Marathi), or the accounting

practices on which both their public administration and their private proteeringdepended.60 The image that was often cited in testimony—of a Company structurethat was undermined and hollowed out by scribal ‘termites’ from the inside—was one

57See Anne Kroell, ‘Alexandre de Lestoille, dernier agent de la Compagnie royale desIndes en Perse’, Moyen-Orient et Océan Indien , no. 1, 1984, pp. 65–72.

58Susan Neild-Basu, ‘The Dubashes of Madras’, Modern Asian Studies , vol. 18, no. 1, 1984,pp. 1–31. Peter J. Marshall, ‘Masters and Banians in Eighteenth-Century Calcutta’, in The Ageof Partnership: Europeans in Asia before Dominion , ed. Blair B. Kling and M.N. Pearson, Honolulu,1979, pp. 191–213.

59David Shulman, ‘Cowherd or King? The Sanskrit Biography of Ananda Ranga Pillai’,in Telling Lives in India: Biography, Autobiography and Life History , ed. David Arnold and Stuart

Blackburn, Delhi, 2004, pp. 175–202; R. Alalasundaram, The Colonial World of Ananda RangaPillai, 1736–61, Pondicherry, 1998.60On these issues, also see the important essay by Bernard S. Cohn, ‘The Command of

Language and the Language of Command’, in Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: TheBritish in India , ed. Nicholas B. Dirks, Princeton, 1996, pp. 16–56. Cohn’s own interesting, butsomewhat problematic, discussion of the place of Persian may be found on pp. 16–25.


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that reected this situation of paranoia and dependence.61 Yet communication was anecessity, and it did happen on a pragmatic and day-to-day basis. We see this in theaccumulating ‘country correspondence’ of all the presidency capitals from the lateseventeenth century onwards, which was conducted in a variety of languages, butespecially in Persian and Marathi. We nd important traces of it in the exceptionalcareer of a Company servant like James Fraser (1713–54), who had managed by about1740 to build a signicant collection of Persian texts on history, poetry, and othersubjects while working in Surat and the surrounding region.62 We discern it equally inother forms of document, be it the Mayor’s Court records of Madras and Calcutta, orthe notarial records of Pondicherry, where Indian and European mercantile and scalinterests came together and, at times, collided violently. The Calendar of PersianCorrespondence presents us with a further opportunity to look into such materials.

III

In the following pages, we will turn from the long-term view that has been our centralpreoccupation so far, in order to address some questions and issues that pertain to the very rst years of Company rule, roughly 1757 to 1772, covered in some of the initial volumes of the Calendar . The period represented a very critical phase of later Mughalhistory, when the court that was aficted with several daunting problems eventuallylost even the thin veneer that remained of its earlier aura. A century and a half afterthe arrival of the English and Dutch Companies in Indian waters, the splendid politicaltheatre at the imperial centre of Jahangir’s or Shahjahan’s rule was simply no longer

possible. The contentious nature in political succession in the post-Aurangzeb periodhad witnessed the rise of new elites from eastern India, most prominently the Sayyidbrothers who functioned as kingmakers in the earlier part of the eighteenth century. When the emperor Muhammad Shah nally established a reign of some stability inthe 1720s, it was only at the cost of a complete purge of this political class, a matter which appeared to drain all his political will and energy, ushering in an essentially

61See Bhavani Raman, Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial South India ,Chicago, 2012; this work nuances and modies the earlier view in Robert Eric Frykenberg,Guntur District, 1788–1848: A History of Local Inuence and Central Authority in South India , Oxford,1965.

62See A Catalogue of Manuscripts in the Persic, Arabic, and Sanskerrit Languages Collected in the East by James Fraser , London, 1742. Fraser studied Persian in Surat with a certain Mulla Fakhr-ud-Din, and then in Khambayat with Shaikh Muhammad Murad.


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stagnant period for Mughal rule. In this context, the Mughal empire was ill-equippedto deal with the burgeoning ambitions of various new groups.63

In particular, the rise of new polities at the provincial and sub-imperial level inthe post-Aurangzeb period had underlined the inability of the imperial centre toprevent the devolution of power. This included groups which had traditionally existeduncomfortably and often conictually at the outer edges of the Mughal fold, such asthe Sikhs, the Jats and, most importantly, the Marathas. However, it also included those whom the Mughal system had been unable to either mollify or maintain within itscontrol, such as provincial functionaries whose increasing desire for autonomy led tothe rise of such semi-independent polities as in Awadh and Bengal. Hyderabad,founded by the great Turani noble Nizam-ul-Mulk Asaf Jah who had left Delhi indisgust at the perceived denigration of the position of the traditional nobility at the

court, represented another variation on this theme. Externally too, the eig

introduction calendar of persian corresp

Documents