Visions of Mughal India: An Anthology of European Travel Writing

236 Pages·2007·21.876 MB·English

by  Michael H. Fisher, William Dalrymple (pref.)

Visions of Mughal India
To Paula, my toughest critic and greatest support
Visions of Mughal India
An Anthology of European Travel Writing
Edited by Michael H. Fisher
Preface by William Dalrymple
Published in 2007 by IB. Tauris & Co Ltd
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Copyright © Michael Fisher
The right of Michael Fisher to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988.
All rights reserved, Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be
reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
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ISBN: 978 1 84511 3544
A fall CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
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Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available
Printed and bound in India by Replika Press Pvt. Ltd
From camera-ready copy edited and supplied by the author
Contents
Proface by William Dalrymple
Introduction
1: Afanasy Nikitin
west and central India, 1471-73 15
2: Cesare Federici
central and south India, 1563-66 26
3: Father Antonio Monserrate
west and north India and Punjab, 1579-82 38
4: William Hawkins,
west and north India, 1608-13 59
5: Peter Mundy
north and west India, 1632-33 76
6: Friar Sebastien Manrique
east India, 1640 101
7: Niccolao Manucci
west and north India, 1655-56 116
8: Francois Bernier
north India, Punjab and Kashmir, 1664 134
9: Jean-Baptiste Tavernier
north and east India, 1665-66 164
10: Friar Domingo Fernandez de Navarrete
south and central India, 1670-71 182
Glossary 199
Index 205
Preface
by William Dalrymple
[ 1526, Zahir-ud-Din Babur, a young Turkish poet prince from Ferghana
in Central Asia, descended the Khyber Pass with a small army of hand
picked followers. Despite his fewer troops, he defeated the Delhi Sultan,
Ibrahim Lodhi, at the Battle of Panipat. He established his capital at Agra,
where he quickly began to build the first of a series of irrigated gardens.
Babur not only established the Mughal dynasty in India, he also wrote one
the most fascinating diaries ever written by a great ruler: the Babur Nama. In its
pages, he opens his soul with a frankness and lack of inhibition similar to
Samuel Pepys a century later, comparing the fruits and animals of India and
Afghanistan with as much inquisitiveness as he records his impressions of
falling for men or marrying women, or the differing pleasures of opium and
wine.
The Mughal dynasty’s own accounts of the India they ruled include some of
the greatest masterpieces of autobiographical prose: as well as Babut’s great
memoir, there is also the fabulously detailed diary-autobiography of his great-
grandson, Jahangir. Yet as Mughal rule reached its climax, it is easy to be
seduced by their own estimate of their civilisation. After all, by the accession
of Jahangir’s son, Shah Jahan, the city of Lahore had grown larger even than
Constantinople, and with its two million inhabitants dwarfed both London and
Paris. From the ramparts of his Red Fort, Shah Jahan ruled an empire that
covered most of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh and great chunks of
Afghanistan. Its army was all but invincible; its palaces unparalleled; the domes
of its many mosques quite literally glittered with gold.
Like all empires at their most self-confident, the Mughals were not slow to
celebrate their own power and magnificence, and the official Mughal chronicles
such as the Shah Jahan Nama, like the profile miniature portraits produced by
the Mughal court, can appear somewhat one dimensional. With their long
fawning lists of gifts, processions, durbars, uniforms and fine jewels, these
authorized court productions sometimes make one feel in danger of being
suffocated under landslides of silk, diamonds and lapis lazuli.
For this reason, the dissonant witness provided by European travellers to
the great Mughal court provide a perfect counterpoint to the Mughal court’s
own writings. Travel accounts like the ones collected in this book, for all their
flaws and errors and occasional fictions and tall stories, and despite the
prejudices and sometimes outright bigotry of their authors, do nevertheless
Preface
tend to provide sharper and certainly livelier pictures of the reality of Mughal
India than the fawning pages of Abu’l Fazl’s paean of praise to his paymaster,
the Emperor Akbar, or the even more unctuous pages of the Shab Jahan Nama,
Instead, the travel accounts so imaginatively selected here by Michael Fisher,
show the flaws in the Empire and the human reality of Mughal rule: as well as
the magnificence of the court we also see the famines and shortages—what
Peter Mundy calls ‘a tyme of scacitie-—and the monsoon floods; the corrupt
officials and the competing palace factions with their vials of ‘poyson’ and
plots for assassinating their rivals; the seas alive with pirates and roads beset by
robbers; the semi-independent noblemen who ‘every day’ take Cesare Federici
prisoner; the quarrelling camel drivers and hostile villagers, and the incessant
resistance to Mughal authority mounted by marginal tribal groups.
More enjoyably, these accounts of European travellers also demonstrate well
the full narrative pleasure travel writing can give. The accounts are full of
nuggets of fascination—of horses fed on peas, for example, or ‘the house of
the dumb’ where the Emperor Akbar (like the Emperor Frederick II Stmpor
Mundi before him) brought up children with mute nurses ‘to know what
language they could naturally speak’. There are moments of great beauty—
Father Antonio Monserrate’s evocation of the Narmada ‘full of fish, and its
water is so clear that the fish and turtles, and even the smallest pebbles, can be
counted. Its banks are covered with thick reed-beds, and with the health-
giving herb marjoram’; or Friar Sebastien Manrique’s description of the trees of
Bengal ‘full of most beautiful peacocks, of green screaming parrots, pure shy
doves, simple wood-loving pigeons’.
Ruins that we can visit today such as the great Deccani fortress of Bidar
spring back to life, their bazaars again buzzing with soldiers from Khorassan
and horse traders from the Persian Gulf; we see again the Sultan’s hunting
expedition accompanied by 10,000 cavalrymen, 50,000 foot soldiers, 200
elephants, 100 monkeys and an equal number of dancers. Portuguese
conquistadors and Venetian merchant adventurers once more make the
hazardous journey to the great city of Vijayanagar, whose temples and palaces
rise before us repopulated; the splendours of Akbar’s travelling army are seen
again in the plains of the Punjab, his hunting cheetahs once more let slip at
their prey.
S
If travel writing has in general had a fairly bad press from post-colonial writers
and thinkers, then European travel narratives of the colonial world have a very
bad press indeed.
Following the success of Edward Said’s groundbreaking 1978 work
Orientalism, the exploration of the East—its peoples, habits, customs and
past—by European travellers has become the target for what has effectively
become a major scholarly assault. ‘Orientalist’ has been transformed from a
vit
Vistons of Mughal India
simple descriptive label into a term of outright academic abuse, and men as
diverse as the sophisticated French jeweller and aesthete Jean-Baptiste
Tavernier, Cornish pilchard merchant’s son Peter Mundy and the grand British
judge and linguist Sir William Jones have all alike come to be seen as complicit
in the project of gathering ‘colonial knowledge’—and accused of being agents
of colonialism, attempting to ‘appropriate’ Eastern learning and demonstrate
the superiority of Western ways by ‘imagining’ the East as decayed, degenerate
and ‘picturesque’, fit only to be colonised and ‘civilised’.
Yet as Colin Thubron has pointed out in an important article in the TLS (30
July 1999), it is ridiculously simplistic to see all attempts at studying, observing
and empathising with another culture necessarily ‘as an act of domination—
rather than of understanding, respect or even catharsis... If even the attempt to
understand is seen as aggression or appropriation, then all human contact
declines into paranoia.’
The point is strongly made. As Michael Fisher’s wonderful compilation well
demonstrates, travellers are individuals whose responses, motives, aims and
enthusiasms vary from petson to petson; indeed travellers are often by their
nature non-conformist, people who seek out the edge, and are often driven
mote by a fascination to see than by motives of power or profit—certainly the
great English walker Thomas Coryate, who went on foot from Somerset to the
court of Jahangir, attributed his ‘exoticke wanderings’ to his ‘insatiable
greedinesse of seeing strange countries, which exercise is indeed the Queene of
all pleasures in the world’.
So any generalisation made about Jean-Baptiste Tavernier may or may not
be true about his Russian horse-trading predecessor, Afanasy Nikitin, or indeed
his pious successor, Friar Domingo Fernandez de Navarrete. And while the
buccaneering Elizabethan trader William Hawkins, an official emissary of the
East India Company, was certainly out to increase his country’s influence in
India, the same cannot possibly be said about Niccolao Manucci, a Venetian
stowaway who ran away from home aged fourteen, and who grew up to be a
self-confessed con-artist and charlatan who used his ‘nimbleness of wit’ to set
himself up as a quack doctor and exorcist. Indeed in his memoirs Manucci
revelled in the audacity of his fraud:
Not only was I famed as a doctor, but it was rumoured I had the
power of expelling demons from the bodies of the possessed... Being
credulous in matters of sorcery, they [the people of Delhi] began to
put about that the Frank doctor not only had the power of expelling
demons but had domination over them. This was enough to make
many come, and among them they brought before me many women
who pretended to be possessed, as is there habit when they want to
leave their houses and meet with their lovers. My usual treatment was
bullying, tricks, emetics, evil-smelling fumigations with filthy things.
Nor did I desist until the patients were worn out, and said that now
vit
Preface
the devil had fled. In this manner I restored many to their senses,
with great increase in reputation, and still greater diversion to myself.
Then again, Manucci was himself a completely different man to the
wonderfully French gourmand, aesthete and admirer of female beauty,
Francois Bernier. Bernier was an educated and aristocratic French doctor who
became much sought after as a physician by the Mughal royal family. Bernier
constantly contrasts Mughal India and seventeenth century France: the Jumna
River compares favourably with the Loire, he thinks; adultery is easier in Paris
than it is in Delhi: ‘In France it excites only merriment, but in this part of the
world there are few instances where it is not followed by some tragical
catastrophe.’ But Indian naan, he regrets, can never be compared with a good
Parisian baguette,
Bakers are numerous, but their ovens are, unlike our own, very
defective. The bread, therefore, is neither well made nor properly
baked, [although] that sold in the Fort is tolerably good [yet] it can
never be compared with the Pain de Gonesse and other delicious
varieties to be met with in Paris.
On the other hand, he loved Mughal architecture:
I have sometimes been astonished to hear the contemptuous manner
in which Europeans in the Indies speak of [Mughal architecture]... I
grant that [the Delhi Jama Masjid] is not constructed according to
those rules of architecture which we seem to think ought to be
implicitly followed; yet I can see no fault that offends taste. I am
satisfied that even in Paris a church erected after the model of this
temple would be admired, if only for its singular style of architecture,
and its extraordinary appearance.
When reading travel accounts by these very early visitors to the East we should
certainly try to resist the temptation, felt by so many historians, to project back
onto it the stereotypes of Victorian and Edwardian behaviour and attitudes
with which we are so familiar. For these attitudes were clearly entirely at odds
with the actual fears and hopes, anxieties and aspirations of these vulnerable
early travellers in India, who did not look at South Asia with the hauteur of the
high colonial, as much as with the anxiety and occasionally the suspicion of the
weak and defenceless wanderer.
Note the fear and helplessness experienced by Afanasy Nikitin threatened
with death or conversion by a local ruler; or Cesare Federici robbed and beaten
by dacoits; see how craven and grateful William Hawkins was when finally
gtanted an audience by the Emperor Jahangir. Although the early European
travellers were sometimes surprised or even disgusted by what they found in