Courting India, page 35
Terry, unfortunately, had been caught up in that uncomfortable exchange at his very first audience with Jahangir. The emperor had spotted him among Roe’s retinue at the ghuslkhana, and sent one of his courtiers to assure him ‘that the King bad me welcome thither, that I should have a free access to him whenever I pleased, and if I would ask him anything, he would give it me (though I never did ask, nor he give)’. But then Jahangir had asked him what the painting meant. He had not been satisfied when Terry pleaded ignorance. Why had he ‘brought up to him an invention wherein he was ignorant’? Roe had to intervene to explain ‘that he was a preacher, and medled not with such matters, nor had charge of them’.58
Terry’s own opinion of the Mughal state itself, and of Jahangir as its sovereign ruler, oscillated between fascination and fear. He was pleased and flattered by Jahangir’s recognition of him: ‘very many times afterward (when waiting upon my Lord Ambassadour) I appeared before him, he would still shew tokens of Civility and respect unto me’, he admitted, ‘and I never went abroad amongst that people; but those that met me upon this consideration, that I was a Padrae (for so they call’d me) a Father or Minister, they would manifest in their behaviour towards me much esteem unto me.’59 Much of what he had learned about the Mughal emperor corroborated his Christian and English prejudices about Islamic demonstrations of power. The violence of Jahangir’s punishments reminded him of the Roman emperor Nero.
At the same time, he found it hard to reconcile it with the equally conspicuous acts of charity and piety. ‘For his good actions he did relieve continually many poor people; and not seldom would shew many expressions of duty and strong affection to his Mother.’60 Thomas Coryate, who shared living quarters with Terry in Mandu, wrote similarly about the respect that Akbar showed to his mother, but for Terry, this complicated the easy association between Islamic sovereignty and tyranny that he had expected to be able to use, because ‘in this he did exceedingly differ from that most unnatural and cruel Nero, who most barbarously killed his own Mother Agrippina’.
There were, however, other everyday, uncomplicated pleasures, a visceral experience of India through the senses. Beyond the court, Terry spent his time taking copious notes about local life and customs, little glimpses of which glimmer through his pages of his recollections even half a century later. Itinerant barbers on the street held up shiny convex mirrors made of polished metal in front of prospective customers, to show them that their stubble or hair needed attention. On hot summer afternoons, people slept on cool polished floors or simple wooden cots, pillowless and covered head to foot with thin white calico sheets ‘spread all over them, which makes them to appear like so many dead corpse laid forth for burial’.61 Terry had a theory that ‘lying so even, and at length with their bodyes thus extended, may be one reason why the people there are all so streight lim’d’.62 The other reason was the complete absence of lacing or girdling in their clothes, which he thought contributed to the misalignment of bodies in the name of fashion in Europe.63
There was also the food. We get disappointingly little on that from Roe, which is not surprising, since by now the acute pain of the ‘bloody flux’ or amoebic dysentery had become his constant companion. Terry, however, waxed eloquent about the gastronomical delights of Mughal India. His account of a dinner with Asaf Khan, which he would attend along with Roe later in November that year, is the best description we have of a Mughal banquet from an English writer of the period. The Mughals, like the English, took their hospitality seriously. There was a code of etiquette associated with the serving and eating of food in the company of guests, and both the food and the dishes in which they were served had distinct prestige values associated with them. Food was important enough for Abu’l-Fazl to devote more than a few pages to it in his chronicle of Emperor Akbar, describing not only the careful organisation of the imperial kitchen, but also some recipes, from vegetarian ‘sufiyana’ dishes like zard birinj, a pilau bejewelled with raisins, almonds and pistachios and flavoured with ginger, saffron and cinnamon, to silky, slow-cooked lamb haleem, in a rich sauce of nut pastes, mint and coriander leaves, and thickened with cracked wheat.64
The dinner with Asaf Khan was one of the most memorable moments in Terry’s experience in India. Scents perfumed the air of the elaborate tent where they were greeted by their host. There were priceless carpets underfoot, covered with pure white sheets of calico. They sat on the floor in a triangle facing each other, with Roe in the place of honour on Asaf Khan’s right. Then the food appeared, in a seemingly endless succession of silver platters with gilt edges. Terry noticed that Indian cooks prized variety over volume, so unlike English banquets, there were ‘no kinde of flesh in great peeces, or whole joynts’.65 Mughal etiquette demanded that the chief guest had the best selection, so Roe had seventy dishes served before him, sixty for the host, and fifty for Terry himself. ‘They were all set before us at once, and little paths left betwixt them, that our entertainer’s servants (for only they waited) might come and reach them to us one after another, and so they did.’66
There was rice dyed in different colours: saffron yellow, green and purple. Terry was already an enthusiastic convert to the pilau or birinj, ‘a very excellent, and a very well-tasted food’.67 The bread was ‘very good excellent wheat, made up very white and light, in round Cakes’. There would be a range of those, multi-layered naan-i waraqi stuffed with pistachios, and tissue-thin parathas that could almost double as napkins. There were potatoes, ‘excellently well dressed’, and different kinds of meat. The dish he liked best was one which he named in the first version of his travel account as ‘Deu Pario’ (possibly Dopiaza). It consisted of venison cut into slices, ‘to which they put Onions and Herbs and Roots, and Ginger (which they take there Green out of earth) and other Spices, with some Butter, which ingredients when as they are well proportioned, make a food that is exceedingly pleasing to all Palates’.68 It is ironic, perhaps, that it reminded Terry of the ‘most savoury meat’ that the Bible mentions in Genesis 27, which Jacob cooked for his father Isaac to cheat his brother, the first-born Esau, out of his birthright.69 But he was soon distracted by other dishes, like the one that ‘the Portugals call Mangee Real, Food for a King’.70 Made of broiled chicken pounded with rice and almond flour, scented with rose water and the superbly expensive ambergris, it was the muhallabiyya, which the Mughals had borrowed from Persian cuisine, and Europe had adapted as mammonia or blancmange from the Middle East since the thirteenth century. Fresh and candied fruit followed, along with sweet cakes of wheat flour which were probably different kinds of halva. No wine was served, but even the water, Terry thought, was exceptional: ‘it is very sweet, and allayes thirst better than any other liquor can, and therefore better pleaseth, and agreeth better with every man, that comes and lives there, than any other drink.’71 It was difficult to remember that he was meant to be protecting his flock against the influence of barbarous peoples when faced with such delights.
16
Factors
Roe was in a terrible mood. After the cool months of winter, the temperature had begun to rise again, making the strict rule of wearing full English clothing which he imposed on himself and on his retinue increasingly unbearable. It was now April 1617, six months since he had left Ajmer on the trail of Jahangir’s lashkar. He was still in Mandu, scratching pen across paper on his makeshift table in the makeshift home he had made in the deserted tomb of some long-forgotten Indian nobleman. Trying to keep up with what his countrymen were up to in other cities scattered across western India was difficult at the best of times. Even in Ajmer in the previous summer, he had grumbled in his journal that the letters he received from Surat were ‘nothing but a bundle of contradictions’.1 The factors were quicker to argue with his advice than do what served the interests of the Company. Nothing had changed in the intervening year. In fact, things had got worse.
In curt, clipped sentences that barely conceal his anger, he informed the East India Company factors in Surat that the letters he had received recently from them brought him ‘no news wherein among many discontents I can receive comfort’.2 Roe’s relationship with English factors and their headstrong chief, Thomas Kerridge, had been strained from the start. But the spring and early summer of 1617 was particularly fraught. In the traces that have survived in Roe’s correspondence, the desperation and the mistrust sketch out the outlines of something which is far from the well-oiled juggernaut that the East India Company was to become.
In theory, the Company had always had the potential to wield significant power. When the East India Company received its first charter from Elizabeth I in 1600, she had described the ‘Governor and Merchants of London trading into the East Indies’ as ‘one body corporate and politic in deed and in name really and fully’.3 As descriptions go, this was an act loaded with meaning. Elizabeth I had essentially exercised her sovereign power to create what legal experts then and now would identify as a persona ficta, a ‘legal person’ or entity. This was the fundamental act of incorporation, by which multiple individuals could act together as if they were a single corpus (body), but that body was distinct from any of the individuals constituting it. The East India Company, through the royal charter, had acquired a corporate identity.
That idea of incorporation would be crucial for the Company’s future, both in Roe’s lifetime and beyond. Historically, it was a clever legal wrangle brought into Christian Europe in various forms from Roman law. In the thirteenth century, it had helped Pope Innocent IV to justify why, despite the potentially inconvenient vow of poverty taken by their members, monasteries and universities could own wealth and property.4 The institutions were a separate entity in the eyes of the law, he argued. They did not have to obey the vows undertaken by their individual members, and neither could they be held liable for members’ actions. In other words, while an individual monk in an association or universitas could be excommunicated, the universitas as a whole was not responsible for his actions. The monarch was a ‘legal person’ too, although of a different kind. The king, as the distinguished Tudor legal scholar Edmund Plowden had argued, had two bodies. There was the mortal, natural body that aged, sickened, got injured and died, and a ‘body politic’ that was immune to all such changes, that constituted of ‘Policy and Government, and [was] constituted for the Direction of the People, and the Management of the public weal’.5 It was the body politic that was the dominant, that worked its mystical influence at the moment of incorporation when an individual was crowned monarch.
Among the secular bodies that received the status of incorporation, some, such as many of the London guilds, pre-existed any recognition by state or Crown. Others, such as the East India Company, were brought into being through a top-down exercise of power when the state granted it the concession to exist. Either way, the rights and liabilities of corporations were different from those of individuals. As the legal expert, Sir Edward Coke, explained when the rights of another corporation called Sutton’s Hospital was disputed in court, a corporation could not be held to the same standards as an individual. This meant that they could not be deemed to have committed treason, ‘nor be outlawed, nor excommunicate, for they have no souls, neither can they appear in person, but by attorney. A corporation aggregate of many cannot do fealty, for an invisible body can neither be in person nor swear.’6
The East India Company would always be defensive of its rights and privileges as a corporation, which were crucial for its ability to operate as more than a sum of its parts. The face it presented to the world as an institution has been powerful enough to be accepted as a given, but it hides a part of the reality that Roe’s exchanges with the factors reveals. While it might have been a single legal entity, the Company was hardly ever as unified in practice. There were always multiple interests and investments at stake, and the threat of violence was always present. This many-headed community of traders, merchants and adventurers was the reason for Roe’s presence in India, but the greatest challenges Roe faced, it seems, were as much from his countrymen as from his encounter with the Mughal state.
The Company’s operations were too far from the centre, and its ability to monitor its people never quite as robust as its official mechanisms suggested. On the surface, the Company had stringent rules of employment. But global trade was dangerous and uncertain business with a high turnover of people, which attracted the adventurers, the would-be entrepreneurs and the risk-takers, both English and foreign. Controlling what the Company called ‘private trade’ was an ever-present challenge. When Jahangir had offered William Hawkins an allowance, he did not have to think twice before accepting it. As he brashly informed the directors later, there was no reason why he should not both ‘feather my nest and do you service’.7 Adventurers like Hawkins aside, every man on an incoming fleet, from the ordinary sailors to the ships’ officers and the merchants and factors, tried to raise some cash or carry goods to trade for private profit. The Company had tried its best to stamp down on this practice long before Roe even arrived in India. In 1614, they recorded their frustration that they had often forbidden their factors in Bantam from undertaking ‘all private trade by our writing’. As nothing changed, their warnings turned to stark threats. Those who have so blatantly disregarded their orders, the factors were told, ‘shall find it unpleasant unto them in the end, insomuch that peradventure they will wish they had not’.8
Predictably, no one was ready to admit their fault. The factors pointed their fingers at the ordinary sailors. Kerridge and the other merchants at Surat complained that the mariners on Pepwell’s fleet had brought such quantities of unauthorised sword-blades and other goods, and sold them to the locals through such ‘shameful’ door-to-door haggling and bartering, that it had seriously affected the Company’s trade: ‘we have not sold a blade since their arrival, nor are likely in many years to come to the wonted price’.9 Roe thought the factors were equally to blame. Their decisions about where to trade were based on their own interests, he told Sir Thomas Smythe in January 1617, because they used Company transport to move their personal merchandise: ‘private ends sway them; they pay not for any carriage, and fit themselves by variety of places of that you shall never see.’10 Both sides ultimately held the Company responsible. ‘Private trade is too common to be reformed by us,’ Kerridge and the Surat merchants told the Company. The only way to control it was for those in power in London to ‘order restraint at home’.11 ‘Men profess they come not out for bare wages,’ Roe advised. If the Company wanted to resolve the situation, the solution was in its hands. The men risking their lives in these long voyages needed to be paid fairer wages. The Company could ‘take away the plea [for private trade] if you resolve to give very good to men’s content’.12
Roe’s suggestion might have seemed naive and impractical to the Company merchants, but it was based on truth. The salaries that the Company offered really did not help matters. Many of the Company’s leading factors like William Biddulph and John Jourdain were men with years of experience, but their wages were generally poor. Biddulph, writing to the Company in December 1616, had pleaded, ‘May it please your Worships, in divers of my formers I have entreated for augmentation of my wages, but hitherto never heard your Worships’ pleasures; so still continue my humble suit for the same, for that this my small means is not sufficient for my maintenance; hoping your Worships will in your goodnesses and wisdoms think of a poor young man who hath done your Worships service with his best endeavours so many years in a foreign country.’13 He was not the only one frustrated by this. Salaries were anything between £40 and £200 per year, and the factors, who were expected to invest their own money in the Company at appointment to guarantee their loyal service, were predictably on the lookout for extra income.14 The Company did not think increasing wages would solve the issue. They were answerable to their investors and higher wages would eat into the profit margins. And in any case, they doubted whether the prospect of legitimate earnings would be enough to keep people from indulging in their own little private gamble in global trade, particularly when they were so far from home and surrounded by merchandise. By 1620, the Surat factors would write home that ‘if some tolleration for private trade be not permitted none but desperate men will sail our ships’.15 Ultimately a degree of private trade would be allowed, with the proviso that the Company’s trade would take priority.
None of this was helped by the Company’s day-to-day operations, and the paperwork it involved. The governors of the East India Company, as the protracted negotiations around Roe’s own appointment shows, did not trust its employees. Deeply aware that they had no actual direct control on what was taking place in India, they attempted to circumscribe it through formal reporting. The Company’s insistence on it is invaluable for insights into their operations, without which this book and others like it could never be written, but that volume of paperwork was as confusing as it was useful. There were minutes of meetings, commissions and instructions, letters exchanged with employees and representatives posted abroad, account books, ships’ logs, journals kept by factors and by ships’ officers.16 The sheer amount of material led to uncertainty, with crucial information and advice being overlooked, or worse still, wilfully neglected or countermanded. The inevitable delays in letters reaching the intended recipients only compounded the confusion. Their pages are full of dutiful respect paid to ‘our masters at home’ and paternalistic references to ‘our men in the Indies’, but they conceal a very real strain of frustration, anxiety and mistrust both at home and abroad. Focusing on them turns the East India Company into something like those ambiguous rabbit-or-duck optical illusions, fragmented and united at once.
