How the complexities of Hinduism and Indian society confused Europeans

In his 2011 book, Three Ways to be Alien, eminent historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam recounted, using myriad sources, the lives of three men who, in the period between 1500 CE and 1750 CE, were caught between “cultures” and “identities”. These included Meale, a “Persian” prince from Bijapur, caught in a Portuguese prison in Goa; the English traveller Anthony Sherley, who had a shrewd understanding of diplomacy and relationship management between the different world powers of the time; and Nicolo Manuzzi, a Venetian in the seventeenth century who served the Mughal emperor as well as in the foreign entrepots that came up in this period.

In his new book, Europe’s India, Subrahmanyam uses almost the same method, for a far more ambitious study: looking at several “border-crossers” who ventured into an alien world (the Indian subcontinent), over three centuries (1500-1800) in an endeavour to understand and interpret it.

Understanding in a time of chaos

In Surat in 1742, James Fraser, a Scotsman working for the East India Company, wrote his History of Nadir Shah. It was based on works Fraser had collected, and included Persian manuscripts in Surat, and personal letters from the Mughal emperor’s nobles. Fraser listed Mughal history from Timur to the emperor who then ruled, Mohammad Shah; the invasion of Nadir Shah in 1739 at the invitation of some rebel nobles, a summation of the Persian ruler himself, and a detailed chapter on what caused the massacre, on Nadir Shah’s orders, in Delhi.

It appears that the real antagonists were Nadir Shah – who does not appear fanatical and cruel in any way, despite the massacre – and the real villain, Nizam ul Mulk Asaf Jah, a noble who had fallen from favour at the Mughal court.

Subrahmanyam uses Fraser’s book to expand on Fraser’s own life and his motivations as one of the few Scotsmen who made a career in the East India Company. On a wider level, this exercise places in context the life of Fraser as collector, writer and factor in a time of flux – when there were many agents at play in the Indian subcontinent as central control withered and the two sides (foreign and native) attempted to size each other and the situation in India up.

Fraser’s own collection of works, now at Oxford University’s Bodleian Library, shows he was keen to understand the Indo-Persian milieu of his time. Fraser was clearly sympathetic to the Parsi merchants through whom he dealt with the Mughal subehdar (governor) at Surat. He also had an appreciable sense of what was fair in the context of his times, and had earlier helped expose the corruption of the British factor at Surat, Henry Lowther.

A before and after

Fraser’s motivations, and the time he lived in, appeared entirely different from those of a century earlier, when the French jeweller and trader Augustin Herryard tried to inveigle himself into Mughal Emperor Jahangir’s favours. Herryard boasted of making a fine throne for the emperor and wrote of transactions involving the despatch of several exotic animals such as elephants and a rhinoceros to Europe.

Only a few decades after Fraser, in the early 19th century, with the East India Company in control, attempts to interpret and understand India changed again, inevitably. There was an attitudinal change too, represented, for instance, by Alexander Walker, the army man who served in Baroda in the 1820s, and talked of sympathy towards – and a genuine desire to understand – the native. Walker worked to end the practice of female infanticide among the Jadejas of Kathiawar.

In a book as rich and ambitious in range as this one, raising a point of disagreement over a minor character isn’t truly important. But sympathy and creating of affective bonds, as in Walker’s case, arguably also came with a certain benevolent patronising. In his arguments against infanticide, Walker marshalled a range of opinions then prevalent.

He was influenced by Malthusian perspectives on population growth and believed that the Jadejas persisted with their old customs despite moving from a nomadic way of life to becoming landowners. But the post-1800 period comes with its own set of complexities – something beyond the frame of this very detailed work – anecdotally diverse and challenging in the many arguments it offers.

Subrahmanyam’s Europe’s India uncovers, in a period of quick power transitions, the processes of change in perception and representation; a process that was fluid, complex, and multidimensional. It is a history of how India was and had to be represented to Europe; of knowledge production about India. The related process of Indians seeking to take stock of Europe, takes up one chapter of the book – its conclusion. This doesn’t in any way make the book less rich in its pickings.

A whole host of interesting characters walk across the canvas of Subrahmanyam’s book, such as King Charles 1, who requested Shah Jahan for an original manuscript; Voltaire, the French intellectual who served as the ultimate “go to” person to authenticate manuscripts obtained and texts written; and the Dutch artist Rembrandt, who relied on sketches by the first Flemish visitors to get an idea of Oriental characters – for, to Rembrandt, they were ideal for depicting characters from ancient times. Then there were lesser known ones, like John Parker Boyd, an American who fought for Tukoji Rao Holkar in the early 19th century, and John of Cranagore, the first “proper” traveller from India, who sailed to Europe with the returning Portuguese fleet in 1501.

Initial Portuguese efforts

The early Portuguese works were on cartography, such as those by Joao de Castro, which detailed the places on the Indian coast they were familiar with. Another work by Garcia da Orta, on the medicinal plants of the Deccan, soon became well-known in Europe.

Most of the Portuguese efforts that followed this, Subrahmanyam suggests, reflected their many attempts to understand Indian society. The Portuguese classified the people they encountered into “moors” (those who practised the Islamic faith – it was a bit later that they figured out the differences between the Shias and the Sunnis) and “gentiles”.

The process of understanding began with what the gentiles were not – they were different from the moors. In the ethnographical works of Duarte Barbosa, Tome Pires, and Diogo Couto from the early 16th century, we get a glimpse of the categories that divided gentile society, as seen by the Portuguese. The term most often used was “lei” or law (used interchangeably with religion), which defined the system of regulations governing any category of society. “Casta” – a word first used by the Portuguese in this same period, was more rarely used. It became more common towards the end of the 16th century, as the Portuguese realised the usefulness in classifying its subjects of study.

Lei and Casta

Barbosa wrote about various regions of India and detailed the different social formations in each. Gujarat, a kingdom known for its many towns and cities., had a large merchant population and an abundance of goods. Its social divisions, according to Barbosa, included the Rajputs (“Reshutos”), followed by Baniyas, the “Bramenes” and finally the Bhats (“Pateles”). Barbosa goes on to describe them in detail – the Rajputs were warriors, who ate meat and fish, unlike the Banias who were vegetarian “as per their idolatry”.

In Vijaynagar, on the other hand, there were three separate laws for the different kind of gentiles. And while the merchants were mentioned in Gujarat, in the case of Vijaynagar, there were just the “cavaliers” (warriors) and the priests – the rest, the third “lei”, remained ill-defined. And in Malabar, there were eighteen laws (lei) of gentiles, each one distinct from the rest to the point that “one does not touch the other under pain of death or loss of goods, so that each one has laws, customs and idolatries for itself.”

The term “casta” was only one among several other used in accounts of this period (pre-1530s), such as gentile, Rajput, bania, etc. After Barbosa, “caste” in Diogo de Couto’s work refers to a community in general – for instance, the Abyssinian caste. Only some decades later, toward the end 16th century, was Agostinho de Azevedo more specific.

He wrote of the difficulty of converting the gentiles, because of the “superstition that they maintain in their castes, without being able to touch or mix with others who are not of their profession and of the same caste…they are so abominable in this matter that…many have reached the end of their lives rather than touch the food of another or their affairs, for fear of losing caste and becoming unclean.”

A forced “monotheism”

As to religion, the Portuguese recognised early the multitude of gods and customs that existed. This complex amalgam however came to be interpreted gradually in a monotheistic way, as elucidated in Subrahmanyam’s overview of a magisterial work by Bernard Picart and Jean Frederic Bernard, written between 1723 and 1737, on the ceremonies and religions of Asia.

In a cumulative process of trial and error and repeated error, there were attempts, as in this work by Picart and Bernard, to locate similarities of the gentile religion with, first, the Jews, and then others. Another account considered them “monotheists by instinct” and still another, later, labelled them “lost Christians”, based on the Venetian Nicolo Manuzzi’s work.

Over time, three main gods were identified, along with an assortment of various others, depending on the region where the chroniclers came from. What was in fact a complex socio-religious amalgam came to be called Hinduism only from the early 19th century onward.

Attitudes towards the “natives”

In almost the same way, there were serious attempts to understand the native mind. Subrahmanyam states there was a difference between the Portuguese arrivistés and those who came later. The former included very many Jesuits, which gave them a missionary focus. The latter, among them the Dutch, the English and the French, came ostensibly as traders and fortune-makers. They were also the more serious collectors, unlike the Portuguese whose textual efforts made up the first translation exercises.

And while there appear to be clear characteristics and differences among the Europeans themselves, Subramanyam does not attribute these to the possession of any national stereotypes, apart from his wonderful speculation on the Scotsmen who chose to join the East India Company. Even so, the term “national” was indeed nebulous for this time.

In depicting the transition to shaping colonial knowledge – different in every way from figuring out the religion of the locals as was the Portuguese’s early concern – Subrahmanyam uses the careers of four officials-cum-soldiers and their understanding of the natives. There is the indifferent superciliousness of the Portuguese Dom Antonio Jose de Noronha, who wrote about Hyder Ali of Mysore and belittled the warrior abilities of the Asiatics. There is the disdain evinced by the French commander Charles de Bussy as he made his schemes to secure control of Hyderabad and the Deccan in the 1750s, when he referred to the scheming, duplicitous Asiatik.

There is the Franco-Swiss Antoine Polier who, in the late 18th century, adapted himself several times to the new milieu, working via his changing patrons in the East India Company, and succeeded in becoming a keen, shapeshifting knowledge-gatherer himself. And finally, Alexander Walker, who helped end female infanticide.

But the period after 1800 is indubitably a more complex period – beyond the scope of this book. Over these three centuries, Subrahmanyam tells us, this knowledge collection was linked to representation, and the search for ways to describe an alien land and developing a kind of knowledge system in the process.

Motives behind knowledge-gathering

This European effort to gather knowledge has itself seen some scholarly interpretations and arguments in the last century. From being viewed as just a factual collection of sources and interpreting them, such initiatives, were from the 1970s onward seen with suspicion.

There was clear bias – the most famous example, as Subrahmanyam suggests, enunciated by Edward Said in his Orientalism – in how such attempts of representation were used and presented to show European superiority vis-a-vis eastern decadence. In recent decades, there has been a sort of revisionism; an effort to resurrect heroic European adventurers and knowledge-gatherers who acted in a free spirit of enquiry.

But as this book shows, it was a fluid and ever-changing process, influenced by the changing situation in India and in Europe. It changed not merely the natives, but the knowledge-gatherers too – in ways that are still being understood.

India’s view of Europe

In India, apparently, there was little curiosity as to where the Europeans had come from. At first, the people from Europe were called Franks (“firangi”) or hat wearers (“kulab pashan”). Zain Uddin Mabari’s work from around 1570, A Gift to the Holy Warriors in the Form of Some Tales from the Portuguese, talks of the Franks arriving in Calicut and leaving without any satisfying trading endeavours. His account was later used by the Persian writer Mohammad Qasim Hindushahi aka “Firishta”, who talked of the Portuguese building forts on the western coast.

As Subrahmanyam writes, there was knowledge of Europeans but without Europe. In the Mughal court, some of the new artefacts did arouse curiosity and even led to debate, such as when a Mughal noble returned from Goa to present an elaborate receptacle for smoking tobacco to the Mughal emperor Akbar. Thomas Roe, the globetrotting English diplomat who visited India, presented a globe and a copy of Mercator’s map to Jahangir.

There were also accounts by Tahir Mohammad Sabzwari in the early 17th century of parts of the world outside the subcontinent, such as Pegu and Aceh. The fanciful descriptions here are evidence that little was indeed known of things beyond known borders. Subrahmanyam also mentions the Kerala priest Tommakattanar’s account, written in Malayalam in the late 18th century, following his visit to Lisbon, Genoa and Rome. It is a work almost surprisingly modern in the ways it talks of alienation and clear recognition of the “other”.

Revisiting colonialism

Europe’s India comes at a time when there is a renewed critique of British rule in India, especially of the rapacity and violence that accompanied it. This is a revision from an earlier view that sees British colonialism as more “genteel” and enlightened than other colonialisms. But British colonialism’s many after-effects, as the later critique continues, include the many unaddressed aspects of despoliation and destruction of the Indian economy – via neglect, greed and the phenomenon called “deindustrialization”.

The figures who feature in Subrahmanyam’s book touch on many corrupt aspects of native society, highlighting, for instance, the peculiar strain of “Oriental despotism” they witnessed during the reign of Jahangir. There was also the tyranny of Tipu Sultan of Mysore, and the greed of the Mughal amirs. On the other hand, as James Fraser wrote, there was the corruption induced by private trading rights granted to the East India Company’s employees. As with changing notions about society and religion in this period, notions of corruption, of gift-making and bribery changed as well. Perhaps all of this needs as magisterial a study as Subrahmanyam’s present book.

Europe’s India: Words, People and Empires 1500-1800, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Harvard University Press.