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three ways to be alien Travails & Encounters in the Early Modern World Sanjay Subrahmanyam Subrahmanyam_coverfront7.indd 1 2/9/11 9:28:33 AM Three Ways to Be Alien • The Menahem Stern Jerusalem Lectures Sponsored by the Historical Society of Israel and published for Brandeis University Press by University Press of New England Editorial Board: Prof. Yosef Kaplan, Senior Editor, Department of the History of the Jewish People, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, former Chairman of the Historical Society of Israel Prof. Michael Heyd, Department of History, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, former Chairman of the Historical Society of Israel Prof. Shulamit Shahar, professor emeritus, Department of History, Tel-Aviv University, member of the Board of Directors of the Historical Society of Israel For a complete list of books in this series, please visit www.upne.com Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Three Ways to Be Alien: Travails and Encounters in the Early Modern World Jürgen Kocka, Civil Society and Dictatorship in Modern German History Heinz Schilling, Early Modern European Civilization and Its Political and Cultural Dynamism Brian Stock, Ethics through Literature: Ascetic and Aesthetic Reading in Western Culture Fergus Millar, The Roman Republic in Political Thought Peter Brown, Poverty and Leadership in the Later Roman Empire Anthony D. Smith, The Nation in History: Historiographical Debates about Ethnicity and Nationalism Carlo Ginzburg, History Rhetoric, and Proof Three Ways to Be Alien • Travails & Encounters in the Early Modern World Sanjay Subrahmanyam Brandeis The University Menahem Press Stern Jerusalem Lectures Historical Society of Israel Brandeis University Press Waltham, Massachusetts For Ashok Yeshwant Kotwal Brandeis University Press / Historical Society of Israel An imprint of University Press of New England www.upne.com © 2011 Historical Society of Israel All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Designed and typeset in Arno Pro by Michelle Grald University Press of New England is a member of the Green Press Initiative. The paper used in this book meets their minimum requirement for recycled paper. For permission to reproduce any of the material in this book, contact Permissions, University Press of New England, One Court Street, Suite 250, Lebanon NH 03766; or visit www.upne.com Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book. 5 4 3 2 1 Contents List of Illustrations • viii Foreword by David Shulman • ix Preface • xv 1 Introduction: Three (and More) Ways to Be Alien • 1 2 A Muslim Prince in Counter-Reformation Goa • 23 3 The Perils of Realpolitik • 73 4 Unmasking the Mughals • 133 5 By Way of Conclusion • 173 Notes • 179 Index • 213 Illustrations Maps The world of the Iberian Empires in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries • 16 Anthony Sherley’s travels • 103 The India of Nicolò Manuzzi • 143 Figures Public display of the ambassador of the ruler of Bijapur in Goa • 65 Portrait of Anthony Sherley • 105 Nicolò Manuzzi as physician • 145 Emperor Jahangir on an elephant • 153 An ascetic or penitent • 164 “Deplorable events,” or, a Hindu cremation gone awry 166 The Tirupati temple • 167 Foreword • David Shulman There was a time, some five centuries ago, when restless Europeans headed east, as did many enterprising Iranians, and curious North Indians set out either for Central Asia or for the wild and barbarous lands of the Marathas, Tamils, and Telugus to the south. Most of them were men, though there were also some colorful, adventurous, polyglot women like Nicolò Manuzzi’s English-Portuguese wife, Elisabetta Hardeli (or Elizabeth Hartley). The ma- jority of the Europeans were driven — let’s face it — by sheer greed, some- times masked by an assumed missionary zeal or a taste for political intrigue. Some, however, were genuinely curious about the exotic cultures into which they had wandered, although even among this latter group there were figures like Manuzzi who, having miraculously survived some six decades in India, came to detest the place and its peoples. Homesickness, the intimate shadow of wanderlust, affected all of them to some degree and became a predictable topos in their records and letters. Pravara, the prototypical, middle-Indian hero of the sixteenth-century Telugu poet Peddana’s novel The Story of Man, though consumed by a burning desire to see the remote places he has heard about, is unable to get through even a few hours in the Himalayas before des- perately looking for a safe route home. For most adventurers of the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, home was a place very far away. Every one of these individuals carried with him or her a set of mental maps, usually fuzzy and unsystematic and full of gaps, often also dogmatic and condescending, about the outlandish cultural worlds to be encountered. In the works they have left us — travelogues, memoirs, endless letters, his- tories and pseudo-histories, rudimentary ethnologies, diaries — we find the not unreasonable presupposition that people back home are dying to hear the often self-aggrandizing account of the would-be hero’s adventures and more than eager to learn about the peculiar ways of the distant East or North or South. In any case, the urge to report is a staple feature of this vast literature, in which a host of tricksters, charlatans, and operators try, usually unsuccess- fully, to hide the true nature of their careers, and the borderline psychotics generally sound, well, insane.
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