Economic Diplomacy of the English Ambassador Thomas Roe

“Courting India: England, Mughal India and the origins of empire” by Nandini Das (published in May 2023) is a fascinating read for those interested in the history of the British entry into India. 

As a former diplomat, I enjoyed reading about the experience of Sir Thomas Roe, the first British ambassador to India to the Mughal court of Emperor Jahangir. His mission is a case study for Economic Diplomacy.

 

When East India company started exploring India for business in India in the late sixteenth century, they needed approvals and favours from Emperor Jahangir. They sent to the Mughal court some merchants but they were not taken seriously. So the British decided to send an ambassador to reach out to the emperor. They nominated Sir Thomas Roe, a 35-year old,  as ambassador of King James I. His diplomatic Instructions clarified that while he represented his king’s ‘honour and dignity’, he had to use all means possible ‘to advance the trade of the East India Company’. Roe’s salary was paid by the East India company. He got 600 pounds as annual salary. He took some advance from which he spent over one hundred pounds to buy dress for himself and livery for his servants. 
 
Roe set out on his voyage on 2 February 1615 and reached Surat after six months of voyage. He had brought fifteen people in his retinue which included a chaplain, a doctor, cook, secretary and even a couple of musicians. 
 
His first challenge was to establish his authority as ambassador and get special privileges and protocol respect. He had to fight for these starting with the landing in Surat. When he reached Surat on 25 december 1615, they made an announcement to the local authorities about the arrival of an ambassador. But the locals laughed at the title and did not take it seriously. The customs authorities wanted to search his luggage. Roe put his foot down and refused to allow the search claiming special privilege as ambassador. He wrote to Zulfiqar Khan, the governor of the Surat area. Khan replied that customs search was standard procedure but he would make an exception in recognition of Roe’s status
 
The ambassador set foot for the first time on Indian soil, welcomed by a volley of shots from the cavalry. But there was another diplomatic tussle. The thirty cavalry men who were to lead the procession to his place of stay were sitting under an open tent and did not rise to greet him. Roe said he would not go until they stood up and did the honours. 
 
The governor invited Roe to pay him a visit. But Roe declined the invitation saying that according to protocol ambassadors could not visit a foreign official first before presenting themselves to the King. Then the governor wanted to meet the commander of the English ship. Roe wrote to commander Keeling, forbidding him from receiving the governor. Finally, Zulfiqar Khan visited Roe at the latter’s residence.
 
On 30 October 1615, Roe received Emperor Jahangir’s farmān acknowledging him as ambassador and inviting him to the court as well as commanding Mughal governors on the route to offer all assistance to the ambassador. On the way, Roe stopped in Burhanpur ruled by Parvez, the second son of Jehangir.  When he went to see him, the courtiers asked him to bow and offer the customary kurnish (ritual salute) or sijda (full ceremonial prostration).  Roe refused. Then they asked him to stand but he demanded a chair to sit. The courtiers then told him politely that ‘as a courtesy’, the prince granted him permission to lean against a nearby pillar.
  

Roe's biggest challenge was that the powerful, large and wealthy Mughal emperor and his court did not take England, the English King and his ambassador seriously. Emperor Jahangir was far more broadminded and progressive in his outlook in comparison to the protestant ambassador who was belittling the catholic Portuguese. 

Roe had brought gifts for the Emperor and the Mughal dignitaries. But these were looked down as insignificant and poor in comparison. Jahangir’s own ambassador to Shah Abbas, the ruler of Persia, had given gifts of elephants, gold and silver. The Persian ambassador gave gifts of horses and camels besides precious stones to Emperor Jahangir. Roe’s only gifts Emperor Jahangir and his son Prince Khurram (later..Shajahan) enjoyed were the wines.

During his posting for three years as ambassador, Roe had managed to get some trade concessions from the Mughals for East India company. Roe had attended Jehangir’s court regularly and cultivated some senior advisors and family members of the Emperor. He tried hard to advance the English interests at the expense of Portuguese and Dutch but the Mughals were ahead in the game. They made the Europeans to compete with each other for favours. 

 
Roe wrote about his daily activities, success and failures in his diaries as well as in his letters to the Company and to his friends. Some of these, reproduced in the book, are interesting.
 
 
 

My life as a comrade - Malayali Marxist Shilaja’s book

During my Latin America lectures in the Kerala University in Trivandrum in recent months, I found the students knowledgeable about the Pink Tide, Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez and Gabriel Boric. It is not surprising given the Marxist roots in the state, which had made history by electing the first Marxist government in the world in 1957. Since then, the state has elected Marxists to power many times including in the last elections in 2021. During interactions with the students, I realized that Marxism in Kerala is more than a political ideology. It has become a way of life, good or bad. This is confirmed by Shilaja’s book, “My life as a comrade: The Story of an Extraordinary Politician and the World That Shaped Her”. Shailaja became famous as the health minister of the state who managed the covid crisis successfully setting an example for other states. 

Shailaja says, “I was – and still am – definitely an idealist, extremely interested in the theory of politics. I’ve always been curious about the systems that brought our society to where it is. I had skated over the principles of Marx but I thought I needed to understand those better. He spoke about dialectic materialism, where the pursuit of material wants causes conflict between opposing forces of nature. He believed we need to be catalysts for good. Marx said we must struggle for rights; it was right to do so”.
 
She asserts, “the spiritual guidance for my work, and indeed my life, has been provided by communist ideology. It has helped me work through doubt and indecision repeatedly during more than thirty years of public service. Having a philosophy or a belief that is larger than us helps us deal with the minute disappointments that pepper our lives.
In 2018, on my very first trip to London, I was asked what I wanted to see. The answer was simple: Karl Marx’s cemetery in Highgate Park. It had been a long-held dream, and the experience was perfect”.
 
To start with, she was dragged into politics because of her family. She says, “ I come from a family in politics but not a family of politicians. My life story is built on the history of many people, including my grandmother and my uncles. I stand on their legacy. It is they who taught me about politics – what it means, why it’s important”.
 
She says, “My journey into politics was made possible because of the socio-political milieu I was part of. I come from a family of people who get involved in problems, in struggles, who believe in working for change. But we had no clout, no connections, except for those forged on public battlefields. However, the structure of the communist Party, which has been our mainstay for generations, was rise of a dedicated Party worker, one rank at a time. Along the way, opportunities and encouragement from others, coupled with my tenacity and a belief that we can make a difference, have pushed me forward. This is my story. But it is also the story of the Malabar, and the growth of communism in Kerala.
 
She took to politics seriously after her family members and friends were subjected to harassment and suffering during the Emergency period.  She says, “Watching the injustice of many intellectuals, writers, politicians and others being incarcerated, the attack on India’s democratic and federalist ideals, made me aware of how fragile our system was. Observing the events of that year, especially my uncle’s ordeal during that time, and becoming more aware of the inequity of power and resources around me, communism and Marxian thought started to make even more sense. The unfairness of it hit hard. Deciding at that moment that politics was going to be my way forward, I became a member of the Madathil CPI(M) branch in 1977”.
 
She started from the bottom, working her way up through the disciplined hierarchy of the CPI(M). She started with organization of women’s groups in her area. It was a challenging assignment to get the women out of their patriarchal houses and educate and empower them. 
 
Shailaja extends her personal conviction to her state itself with a bold statement, “most Malayalis are socialists at heart and that is what makes Kerala exemplary. Socialism has made its way into our collective psyche through popular culture and literature”.
 
However, she admits, “I am not a scholar, and I don’t have high educational qualifications. I have a basic degree, and I am a schoolteacher, that is all. I studied Marxist philosophy and accepted it deeply, and that is what has impacted my life”.

Her husband, also a comrade, was a generous soul who took a back seat and let the wife shine.
 
Shailaja was dropped from the new cabinet formed after the 2021 elections by Chief Minister Pinayari Vijayan who saw her as a rival for his chair, especially after the popularity she had earned in India and the world during covid.

While Shailaja sees the world through Marxism, she is pragmatic and realistic. She respects the democratic rules and the opponents. She believes in working with civil servants and the existing system to get the best for the society.
 
She ends the book saying, “So, my life as a comrade continues”. future chief minister, for sure..

I guess, Shailaja’s story is typical of the life stories of millions of Malayalis who have embraced Marxism as a way of life.
 
 

Victory City – novel by Salman Rushdie

Victory City is the latest novel of Salman Rushdie. He jumps straight into ‘magical realism’ with the opening line itself: “On the last day of her life, when she was two hundred and forty-seven years old, the blind poet, miracle worker and prophetess Pampa Kam-pana completed her immense narrative poem about Bisnaga and buried it in a clay pot sealed with wax in the heart of the ruined Royal Enclosure, as a message to the future. Four and a half centuries later we found that pot and read for the first time the immortal masterpiece named the Jayaparajaya, meaning ‘Victory and Defeat’, written in the Sanskrit language, as long as the Ramayana, made up of twenty-four thousand verses, and we learned the secrets of the empire she had concealed from history for more than one hundred and sixty thousand days”.

Rushdie takes the reader on an eventful journey through the three hundred years (1336-1646) history of Vijayanagara empire in which he has woven magic imaginatively and entertainingly. Kampana, the protoganist, throws seeds which become the Vijaynagara (Bisnaga) empire with cities, palaces, walls and markets. She then whispers into the ears of the rulers and the people who come alive in the new empire. At the end, when she is blinded by emperor Krishnadevaraya and the empire is ending, the descendants of the original inhabitants start whispering their lives into her ears helping her to complete the writing of history. Things go into reverse, as if rivers had started flowing upstream. 
 
Rushdie revels in magical realism with passages like this: “In the city of Zerelda, time flies. Every day the citizens, who know that life is short, rush about with large nets trying to capture the minutes and hours that float around just above their heads like brightly coloured butterflies. The lucky ones who capture a little time and gulp it down – it’s easily edible, and quite delicious – have their lives elongated. But time is elusive, and many fail”.
 
Rushdie teases the readers saying, “This is that story, retold in plainer language by the present author, who is neither a scholar nor a poet but merely a spinner of yarns, and who offers this version for the simple entertainment and possible edification of today’s readers, the old and the young, the educated and the not so educated, those in search of wisdom and those amused by folly, northerners and southerners, followers of different gods and of no gods, the broad-minded and the narrow-minded, men and women and members of the genders beyond and in between, scions of the nobility and rank commoners, good people and rogues, charlatans and foreigners, humble sages, and egotistical fools”.
 
Rushdie pronounces and provokes on contemporary political and social issues of India. While describing the conflicts between the Hindu empire of Vijayanagar and the Muslim sultanates he dives into religious intolerance, puritanism and fanaticism. He has made references to the stories of Mahabharath and Ramayana. But after having learnt his lesson from the reaction to Satanic Verses, Rushdie has avoided danger this time by his subtle narratives and subdued language.   
  
Throughout the novel, he has thrown pearls of wisdom thrown here and there:
-History is the consequence not only of people’s actions, but also of their forgetfulness.’
-The miraculous and the everyday are two halves of a single whole, and that we ourselves are the gods we seek to worship, and capable of mighty deeds.
-The truth of the world is that people act according to their natures, and that is what will happen.
 
Here is the memorable ending of the novel...
 
She was two hundred and forty-seven years old. These were her last words. 
I, Pampa Kampana, am the author of this book. I have lived to see an empire rise and fall. How are they remembered now, these kings, these queens? They exist now only in words. While they lived, they were victors, or vanquished, or both. Now they are neither. Words are the only victors. What they did, or thought, or felt, no longer exists. Only these words describing those things remain. They will be remembered in the way I have chosen to remember them. Their deeds will only be known in the way they have been set down. They will mean what I wish them to mean. I myself am nothing now. All that remains is this city of words. Words are the only victors.
 
I enjoyed this book in the way as I did in the case of most of his other novels. I admire Rushdie’s extraordinary talents as a writer and story-teller. I believe he deserves Nobel Prize. 
 

Thiyagaraja Aradhana, a unique musical experience...

Yesterday I went to the annual Thiyagaraja Aradhana (worship)  Music Festival at Thiruvaiyaru, 25 kms from my village. 

I had been to this festival in 2019. But this time it is bigger with 294 concerts (242 last time) packed into six days from 6 to 11 January. This is the 176th year of organisation of the festival

Every day, the festival starts off in the morning and ends in the night with Nadhaswaram concerts. In the 2023 edition, there are a total of 80 Nadhaswaram concerts. This is interesting in view of the fact that Nadhaswaram and the accompanying drum instrument Thavil are not considered as part of classical Carnatic Music. But no marriage is conducted or temple procession held without the accompaniment of the auspicious music of Nadhaswaram. 

There are some Veena, and Violin concerts too although most are vocal performances.  

This festival should be one of the most efficiently organised events in India with strict adherence to punctuality. Each artiste is given slot of 20 or 15 or 10 minutes. 

This is a typical page from the program booklet..

But a few minutes before the end of each performance, the next group has to sit on the second stage and be ready to start in time. This is how 60 concerts are organised each day from 9 am to 1020 pm. 

The artistes perform not for money but as payment of tribute to Thiyagaraja, the most famous composer of Carnatic music who lived from 1767 to 1847. The stage faces on the other side the samadhi (tomb) of Thiyagaraja where his body was cremated.

Although the audience is very small in the mornings and afternoon, the crowd increases in the evening when the famous artistes like Sudha Ragunathan perform. The audience has to sit on the sand floor and enjoy the breeze coming from the Cauvery river on one side and the aroma of the filter coffee made on the other side of the venue.

The residents of Thiruvaiyaru can listen to the music from the loud speakers put up in the main streets of the town.

The festival is open to the public free of cost. There are no tickets. 

There are people who travel from Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka to watch this concert. Many compositions of the composer Thiyagaraja are in Telugu language.

Here is a colorful member of the audience enjoying himself while putting up a show of his own..

Here is a blog I wrote on the 2019 Aradhana with the title Carnatic music flowing into Cauvery river

https://floatingweed.blogspot.com/2019/01/carnatic-music-flowing-into-cauvery.html

The Thiyagaraja Aradhana is certainly one of the largest, most unusual and interesting classical music festivals in the world. It is a unique and memorable musical experience