Courting India, page 21
Now, with Nowruz upon him, and Khurram’s opposition grinding all movement on the Surat trading licence to a halt, Roe was out of ideas, and out of gifts. He had no option but to take matters into his own hands. Out of his own possessions, he retrieved an ornamental purse that had cost him 24 shillings in England. Inside it, he put ‘a little boxe of cristall, made by arte like a rubie, and cut into the stone in curious workes, which was all inameld and inlayde with fine gould’. In the running account of expenditure he maintained for the East India Company, he could not put a price on this, because it had been given to him as a gift, but he added a note saying that the emperor, who was amazed by the exquisite workmanship, was willing to pay up to 5,000 rupees for it. Inside this, he put a fine gold chain. Attached to the chain was a white emerald seal, with a delicate engraving, about the size of an old penny, of Cupid drawing his bow. He had bought the stone uncut in the West Indies during his Guiana voyage and got it polished and engraved in London, he noted in the accounts: ‘it cost me no great matter rough’.19
On 12 March, the second day of the Nowruz festivities, Roe was admitted to the emperor’s presence. He had attended the court the night before, getting his first view of durbar in its full festive opulence, the emperor’s throne at its centre, overhung with a valence of pearls, and decorated with a fringe of hollow gold pomegranates, apples, pears and other fruits. For once, Roe’s disastrous American voyage had come to his rescue. His gift was received with ‘extraordinary content’.20 It would have been the matter of some relief for Roe, who was trying very hard to show that he was not impressed by the glitter of the court. In his journal, reserved for the eyes of his English readers, his rhetoric turns predictably dismissive. The court displayed its magnificence too blatantly and indiscriminately, he commented, like a lady displaying the collection of plate in her cupboard along with her ‘imbrodered slippers’.21 But as he watched Karan Singh, son of the Rana of Udaipur, present two large ornamental dishes overflowing with silver and gold, he could at least relax in the reassurance that Jahangir appeared to like his small crystal-and-emerald curiosity.
Roe was lucky. His gift hit the right note also because this was precisely the kind of curiosity that Jahangir appreciated. He liked the idea of the gradual unfolding of a gift within a gift, and was impressed by the seal despite its lack of value as a jewel, ‘being a curiositie not easilie matched, and esteemed by the King for excellent worke’.22 As early as August 1609, one of the East India Company’s correspondents from Surat had advised them that the emperor was much more interested in rarity than in monetary value, ‘insomuch that some pretty newfangled toys would give him high content, though their value were small, for he wants no worldly wealth or riches, possessing an inestimable treasury’.23 That advice had been largely unheeded. Roe himself had advised the Company, after reporting Jahangir’s supposed comment to the Jesuits about the ‘small value’ of James I’s gifts, that they would be better off sourcing ‘rarieties’. If they could send a man annually to the Frankfurt fairs, ‘where are all knacks and new devises’, he thought, ‘£100 would go farther than £500 laid out in England, and here better acceptable’.24 Even if the Company ignored such advice, the English observers on the ground at least were beginning to understand Mughal tastes.
Historians have often argued that the English in India struggled to identify gifts that would be appreciated, with difficulties in communication and internal tensions sometimes getting in the way. But the English struggle with gift-giving was not new. It had haunted their dealings with the Ottoman Sultans, and equally troubled their fledgling relationship with Safavid Iran. The problem was that English merchants who undertook or financially supported diplomatic presentations such as Roe’s rarely had the expendable capital required to keep up with local practices of gifting. Yet gifts were treated as signs of both the magnificence of the giver and the honour and prestige of the recipient, so an unsuitable or insufficient gift was a diplomatic headache in the making. Roe’s mentor, Sir Thomas Smythe, knew this from experience. The extravagance of the gifts he carried with him to Russia had been influenced by several previous English embassies whose gifts had been dismissed, and on one occasion returned, by irritated Russian tsars. Ivan IV Vasilyevich, or ‘Ivan the Terrible’, had complained in 1583 that ‘the English merchants did bring him nothing that was good’, and when Elizabeth I complained about the unceremonious rejection of her gifts, Tsar Feodor I wrote back that the gifts ‘were not such as they should be, and we for our part when we send our ambassador will likewise abate of ours’.25 There was also a form of cultural resistance at play here. It allowed the English to dismiss Jahangir’s curiosity as an undignified, unfathomable interest in ‘toys’, and refused to see in it any resemblance to the kind of curiosity that was filling up the wunderkammer of the rich and the powerful in Europe, from Rudolph II’s renowned collection in Prague Castle, to James I’s own steadily growing menagerie of exotic animals at the Tower of London and in St James’s Park, which included everything from crocodiles, camels and lions to cassowaries and flying squirrels.
Whether disparaged as mere greed or criticised as an endemic culture of corruption and bribery, gift-giving at the Mughal court continued oblivious to the disapproval of the smattering of ‘Frankish’ or firangi onlookers. In the pages of Jahangir’s memoir, that Nowruz of 1616 is a complex give-and-take of reciprocal sociability. The emperor received gifts – diamonds and rare pearls, elephants, camels and horses, Chinese porcelain, hundreds of bolts of precious fabrics, a jewelled wine-cup shaped like a fish, and nine narwhal tusks, which Jahangir describes as ‘striated fish teeth’.26 Few offered actual cash, but Jahangir’s keen appraisal put a value on all the gifts received, that recognition being an intrinsic part of Mughal civility. The venerable I’timad ud-Daulah, father to Nur Mahal and Asaf Khan, entertained the emperor on one of the days of the festival and presented him with jewels ‘worth a total of a hundred ten thousand rupees’, Jahangir notes. A week later, Asaf Khan himself pulled out all the stops for his turn to host a royal visit. ‘From the palace to his house was approximately a kos. From halfway there he had spread the road with velvets and brocades I was told were worth ten thousand rupees.’ Not to be satisfied with that, Asaf Khan also presented one hundred thousand rupees’ worth of jewels, gold vessels and precious fabrics, along with four horses and a camel.At the same time, Jahangir himself gifted promotions and honours. Gifts, too, were redistributed, often back to the givers themselves. ‘On the ninth [18 March], Khwaja Abu’l-Hasan’s offering was viewed. Forty thousand rupees’ worth of gems, jewelled vessels, and textiles was accepted. I gave the rest back to him.’ ‘On the sixteenth [25 March], the offering of I’timad ud-Daulah son I’tiqad Khan was viewed. I took thirty-two thousand rupees’ worth and gave the rest back to him.’ Others received gifts as marks of recognition, from elephants to the governors of various Mughal subahs or provinces on 5 April, to a jewelled khapwa or curved dagger for a new ally. Most striking, perhaps, is Jahangir’s gesture at the very beginning of the festival, recording that ‘since Hafiz Nadi-Ali the singer was an old servant, I ordered all cash and gifts offered [on the day] to go to him as a reward’.27
Ambassadors, as Roe knew, were caught up particularly in practices of gift-exchange, not only because they had to carry the gifts from the monarch they represented, but also because they expected to be paid at least partly in gifts themselves, both from their own masters and from the foreign monarchs whose courts they attended. While Roe had been at the English court, however, Cecil’s cost-cutting measures under James I had changed those dynamics to some extent. At the beginning of his reign, keen to establish his reputation as a major European monarch, James had been strikingly generous to foreign representatives, showering them with gifts, from horses and dogs, to ceremonial gold and silver tankards, dishes, elaborate covered cups and salt cellars, all of which came under the general description of ‘plate’. This, James was soon to discover, raised expectations rather inconveniently. When the French ambassador, Beaumont, was getting ready to leave England in 1605, for example, he argued that he should be given 900 ounces of plate in addition to the 2,000 he had received, ‘having seen a president [precedent] of the like’. He then proceeded to request further gifts, including sixty tuns of wine that he had allegedly ‘sold to French merchants for threescore pounds’.28 By Christmas of 1615, however, when Roe had just arrived at the Mughal court in Ajmer, the new Venetian ambassador Gregorio Barbarigo was reporting back to the Doge and Venetian senate that his predecessor Antonio Foscarini’s farewell gifts from James I had been severely curtailed because of ‘the excess to which the royal expenditure had arrived’. As a result, the value of gifts given to ambassadors had been ‘reduced to one-half of what they were before, and, in conformity, it is said, with what was customary here before His Majesty came to the throne’.29
There were also the gifts that ambassadors themselves were regularly expected to give, not just to their royal host, but also to buy favour and information from others within the court. The English court, in particular, had a reputation for its routine acceptance, even solicitation, of such payments. In 1604, Niccolo Molin, one of the Venetian ambassadors, wrote bitterly about the welcome that the Spanish embassy received from James I’s court during the negotiation of the Anglo-Spanish treaty. ‘The Spaniards are lauded to the skies,’ he complained, ‘for in fact this is a country where only those that are lavish are held in account; and since my arrival in this Court ten months ago, I have heard of nothing so often as presents. All the representatives of foreign Princes have made more or less liberal gifts; nor do the great nobles and members of the Privy Council make any scruple about accepting them, and scoff at those who hold a different view.’30
There were always risks associated with such gift-exchange. In Roe’s contemporary England, major legal figures like Sir Edward Coke connected it to what they saw as endemic corruption that spread beyond the world of diplomacy and tainted legal and royal courts alike. It is a mark of changing times that by 1619, charges of corruption would be tried in the Star Chamber against someone who until recently before had been one of the highest and most influential noblemen in the country – Frances Howard’s father, the Lord Treasurer Thomas Howard, Earl of Suffolk. At his trial, Sir Edward Coke, who had led an unrelenting campaign against corruption for years, would declare that ‘the king’s treasure was the soul of the commonwealth’.31 Suffolk’s corruption and the acceptance of bribes, Coke alleged, was ‘civil murder’ of the stability of the state as a whole. It was guaranteed to resonate with those for whom the memory of Frances’s sensational trial for Overbury’s murder, with its own murky narrative of greed, bribery and poison, was still fresh. The Lord Chancellor Francis Bacon, who summed up for the prosecution, would be equally damning in his description of the role played by Howard’s wife, the Countess of Suffolk, and the couple’s accomplice in the Exchequer, Sir John Bingley. Corruption had turned the court into the marketplace, he told the court: ‘my lady kept the shop, Bingley was the prentice that cried “What do you lack?”, but all went into my lord’s cash.’32
That context goes some way to explain Roe’s repeated and strident criticism of the custom of gift-exchange at the Mughal court. Through the lens of Stuart practice, the intricate dynamics of obligation and reciprocity codified in Mughal practice inevitably became something darker and more familiar – an insatiable ‘appetite’ that demanded and exploited constantly without giving recompense. But there were other factors too, and Roe’s own complicated position as a dual employee of state and trade was one of them. Bacon might denounce the Suffolks for blurring the boundaries between the marketplace and the nobility of the royal court, but the truth was that the market had always been complicit. At home, the trading companies had an established practice of using the traditional New Year’s gifts and what were primly denoted as cash ‘gratifications’ to influence the powerful at court. Abroad, the fact that diplomatic gifts sent to non-European nations more often than not came from these companies’ funds led to its own problems. The gifts that the merchants and factors of the English trading companies carried with them to foreign courts occupied an uncomfortable space, functioning as tools of both diplomacy and trade transaction.
At the most fundamental level, this led to a deep confusion over the status of both the gifts and the people who presented them. This was not simply a matter of merchants like Mildenhall or Hawkins being welcomed at the Mughal court on the premise of their supposed diplomatic status, or Edwards and others being treated dismissively for their association with trade. Neither was it just a matter of the English having to offer gifts as diplomatic presents. What complicated matters was the English assumption that while the objects they presented were diplomatic gifts, they also continued to function like commodities in a commercial transaction, with each act of giving resulting in the granting of a reciprocal trading privilege. In Roe’s case, we get frequent glimpses of yet another product of this confusion in his frustration with gifts received, as well as gifts given. Repeatedly, he grumbles about being given gifts with no commercial value: ‘they suppose our felicity lies in our palate, for all that ever I received was eatable and drinkable’, he writes, when Asaf Khan sent him musk melons as a gift.33 In a letter to the Surat factors, he jokes that ‘hog’s flesh, deer, a thief, and a whore’ are all the gifts he had received from Jahangir.34 What he refuses to acknowledge, however, is that the Mughals, deeply familiar with the dynamics of gift-exchange, were treating him exactly as he hoped, offering diplomatic hospitality through gifts of food and servants, rather than commercial recompense. The gifts of food in this case worked exactly as they did in London a decade earlier, when during the ratification of the Anglo-Spanish peace treaty, King James had offered Juan Fernández de Velasco, the Spanish representative, a melon and half a dozen oranges from the royal gardens. Their symbolic value was significantly higher than their commercial worth, and Spanish observers then had recognised the act for exactly what it was: an offer of diplomatic hospitality signalled by a gift of ‘the fruits of Spain transplanted on English soil’.35
For Roe, that persistent headache of giving and receiving gifts gets caught up in his anxiety about assimilation – into corporate practices of state and trade, and into India in general. Travel was problematic. It had a tendency to ‘translate’ not just languages, but also people. William Shakespeare, who had died in the spring that year, had written a play not very long before in which village handymen wander into a forest. In a world shaken by the Fairy Queen and Fairy King’s feud over the possession of a little Indian boy, Bottom the Weaver is turned into an ass-headed buffoon, making his friend Peter Quince cry out in horror: ‘Bless thee, Bottom, bless thee. Thou art translated!’
Even as English travellers set out for the wider world to transform their fortunes, contemporary critics of travel feared that like Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, innocent Englishmen would be turned into strange beasts under the influence of foreign nations. ‘Went you to conquer? And have you so much lost / Yourself?’ Roe’s friend John Donne asked Sir Henry Wotton in a poem.36 In their youth, Wotton had been one of their tight-knit circle of friends who had gone to Ireland with the Earl of Essex for his disastrous campaign of 1599, keen to stamp down Irish insurgency in England’s closest colony once and for all. But Donne saw the journey as something that threatened to erase not just their friendship, but Wotton’s own identity. ‘Let not your soul’, he had implored, ‘itself unto the Irish negligence submit.’ The gamble of travel could pay well, but it could also erase identities as easily as it could make them. On the English stage, play after play did brisk business selling the stories of Englishmen ‘turning Turk’ in the Ottoman empire, seduced by Ottoman wealth and Ottoman women. At the same time, the highly publicised, carefully orchestrated baptism of the young Bengali convert Peter Pope, whom we have met already, reveals the flip side to that exchange. English trading companies were banking on utilising England’s vision of itself as a civilising Protestant nation-state, both to fight back against accusations of profiteering, and to justify much of their nascent colonial ambition. How you saw the effect of travel, it seemed, depended on whether you saw yourself as the translator or the translated.
In Ajmer, Roe was doing his best to resist translation. His carefully planned outfits and servants’ livery in English wool and silk with their pleats and padding were not best suited to the sweltering heat of the Indian summer, but Roe ordered them all to keep to their English clothes anyway, ‘made as light and coole as possibly we could have them’, his chaplain Edward Terry would later remember.37 One document among Roe’s papers offers a revealing list of ‘Clothes made since my comminge into the Indies’. It lists over twenty items, from an olive-coloured suit with a crimson taffeta cloak picked out with gold trimmings, to doublets of yellow satin and cloth-of-gold cloaks made by the excellent local craftsmen and tailors, who were reputed to be able to copy any article of clothing by sight.38 It was an investment Roe could hardly afford to make. ‘Every thing that I can weare is dearer than at the Beare in Cheapside,’ he would grumble to Sir Thomas Smythe, nostalgia seeping into his memories of the fashionable shop of Sir Baptist Hicks at the sign of the White Bear in Cheapside, where men of discerning tastes sourced the latest luxury textiles from the continent.39 But it was important to ensure that among the colours of the Mughal court, he and his retinue did not blend in: ‘the Colours and fashion of our garments were so different from theirs, that we needed not, wheresoever we were, to invite spectators to take notice of us.’40
