THE FIRST FIRANGIS
Jonathan Gil Harris
Aleph Book Company;
318 pages; Rs 495
Flicking through the sumptuous catalogue of an exhibition on the Deccan currently on at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, I came across a striking 17th century portrait of a clearly powerful man, obviously of African descent, in gauzy white robes, identified as Malik Ambar. The few tantalising details given made me wish I knew more. Serendipitously, a few days later, I discovered another arresting portrait of this Abyssinian slave from Ethiopia who rose to become a kingmaker in the Deccani Sultanate of Ahmednagar and taught the Marathas secrets of guerrilla warfare. This time, it was drawn not by a painter but a writer, Jonathan Gil Harris.
By illuminating these little-known lives of foreigners who often came away from privations at home to serve Indian masters Mr Harris challenges stereotypes about the East-West encounter. This is especially impressive since some of his shadowy figures, skulking in the footnotes of pre-colonial history, have only left behind, as he puts it, "the archival equivalent of mere ripples and vapour trails". Certainly, with only a few wispy facts to draw upon, the narrative occasionally seems to struggle, as it does when Mr Harris writes about the largely invisible foreign women in Mughal Hindustan. But for the most part, Mr Harris creates riveting biographies out of these threads, by weaving in political, historical, literary and topographical detail, and moving between past and present. You have him fingering a Portuguese 200-escudo coin commemorating a national hero and the founder of tropical medicine, Garcia da Orta, and then surprising you by revealing, by stages, his inner life in India as a Sephardic Jew escaping the Portuguese Inquisition. Or after telling the racy tale of a Flemish sea captain who served the Travancore kings, showing you his grave, with its poignant inscription, in Tamil and Latin, that says: "For 37 years he served the king with utmost fidelity."
Intertwined with these stories are bigger ideas and two deserve special mention. The first is Mr Harris's radical thesis that the firangis "became Indian" through the process of adapting their bodies to an Indian environment. By eating Indian food, adjusting to Indian weather and mastering new languages, terrain, weapons, social rituals or dance-steps, they underwent "bodily transformation". Even if you don't buy this theory entirely, it does make you think about and question the fixed notions of racial identity and what Mr Harris calls "epidermal colour". The problem is that this theory pops up too often in the text, sometimes in ways that are so forced and pedantic that you regret that the academic in Mr Harris has got the better of the gifted storyteller.
Secondly, Mr Harris questions the fixity of Indian notions of identity. He asks what it really means to be authentically Indian on a subcontinent that "has always been a land of migrants". This may not be a new question, but it does acquire a special vividness at the end of a book that sets out for us the intoxicatingly transnational world of 16th and 17th century India, and flags the contributions of firangis to what are conventionally seen as "Indian" achievements. And at a time when monochromatic narratives of "Hindu nationhood" are being peddled, it is a good question to be asking.
Jonathan Gil Harris
Aleph Book Company;
318 pages; Rs 495
Flicking through the sumptuous catalogue of an exhibition on the Deccan currently on at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, I came across a striking 17th century portrait of a clearly powerful man, obviously of African descent, in gauzy white robes, identified as Malik Ambar. The few tantalising details given made me wish I knew more. Serendipitously, a few days later, I discovered another arresting portrait of this Abyssinian slave from Ethiopia who rose to become a kingmaker in the Deccani Sultanate of Ahmednagar and taught the Marathas secrets of guerrilla warfare. This time, it was drawn not by a painter but a writer, Jonathan Gil Harris.
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Malik Ambar is part of Mr Harris's book because his definition of a firangi is a capacious one: a migrant to India, born in the Christian world, often a Westerner but not necessarily so; a person who is transformed by India and "becomes Indian", yet continues to be marked as alien. The author, a New Zealand-born academic living in India, lays claim to being a firangi himself. He, too, is a character in this book, but his personal life, revealed in ironic interludes, seems pleasantly humdrum compared with that of his subjects. These are a disparate, and sometimes desperate, bunch knocking about in the "India" of the 16th and 17th centuries, with the Mughals looming large, other powers jostling for prominence and a certain East India Company struggling to make its mark. A dissident English priest, Thomas Stephens, ends up writing an 11,000-line Marathi epic poem on the life of Christ and becomes a champion of the Konkani language. His countryman and inveterate traveller Thomas Coryate, educated at the same elite public school, becomes a polyglot fakir and penniless mendicant at the court of Jahangir. Other figures swirling around these pages include a Basque jeweller who creates ingenious new designs, a mysterious European painter at the Mughal atelier, courtesans of European extraction in the Mughal harem, a Slavic slave-turned-general, a Portuguese salt-trader-turned-pirate king in the Sunderbans, an Armenian-Jewish yogi-sufi who is still venerated at a shrine in Delhi's Jama Masjid.
By illuminating these little-known lives of foreigners who often came away from privations at home to serve Indian masters Mr Harris challenges stereotypes about the East-West encounter. This is especially impressive since some of his shadowy figures, skulking in the footnotes of pre-colonial history, have only left behind, as he puts it, "the archival equivalent of mere ripples and vapour trails". Certainly, with only a few wispy facts to draw upon, the narrative occasionally seems to struggle, as it does when Mr Harris writes about the largely invisible foreign women in Mughal Hindustan. But for the most part, Mr Harris creates riveting biographies out of these threads, by weaving in political, historical, literary and topographical detail, and moving between past and present. You have him fingering a Portuguese 200-escudo coin commemorating a national hero and the founder of tropical medicine, Garcia da Orta, and then surprising you by revealing, by stages, his inner life in India as a Sephardic Jew escaping the Portuguese Inquisition. Or after telling the racy tale of a Flemish sea captain who served the Travancore kings, showing you his grave, with its poignant inscription, in Tamil and Latin, that says: "For 37 years he served the king with utmost fidelity."
Intertwined with these stories are bigger ideas and two deserve special mention. The first is Mr Harris's radical thesis that the firangis "became Indian" through the process of adapting their bodies to an Indian environment. By eating Indian food, adjusting to Indian weather and mastering new languages, terrain, weapons, social rituals or dance-steps, they underwent "bodily transformation". Even if you don't buy this theory entirely, it does make you think about and question the fixed notions of racial identity and what Mr Harris calls "epidermal colour". The problem is that this theory pops up too often in the text, sometimes in ways that are so forced and pedantic that you regret that the academic in Mr Harris has got the better of the gifted storyteller.
Secondly, Mr Harris questions the fixity of Indian notions of identity. He asks what it really means to be authentically Indian on a subcontinent that "has always been a land of migrants". This may not be a new question, but it does acquire a special vividness at the end of a book that sets out for us the intoxicatingly transnational world of 16th and 17th century India, and flags the contributions of firangis to what are conventionally seen as "Indian" achievements. And at a time when monochromatic narratives of "Hindu nationhood" are being peddled, it is a good question to be asking.