Courting India: England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire

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Roe entered the court of Jahangir, “conqueror of the world,” one of immense wealth, power, and culture that looked askance at the representative of a precarious and distant island nation.

It is a story of palace intrigue and scandal, lotteries and wagers that unfolds as global trade begins to stretch from Russia to Virginia, from West Africa to the Spice Islands of Indonesia. By using contemporary sources by Indian and by British political figures, officials and merchants she has given the story an unparalleled immediacy that brings to life these early encounters and the misunderstandings that sometimes threatened to wreck the whole endeavour. Courting India is ostensibly a study of Sir Thomas Roe's time as the East India Company's representative to the Mughal court from 1615 to 1619, but it is so much more than that .In this genuinely ground-breaking work, Indian-raised Das challenges our understanding of this pivotal pre-colonial period. Fascinating and comprehensive account of Thomas Roe’s embassy from the impoverished James I to the opulent Mughal Court of Jahangir.

This book does just that, drawing on the best of the academic and the literary traditions to shed light on how we are today. Though London was at the height of the Renaissance—the era of Shakespeare, Jonson, and Donne—financial strife and fragile powerbases presented risk and uncertainty at every turn. He went on to have a successful diplomatic career as ambassador to the Ottoman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire but here he is quite the fish out of water, trying to establish relationships and obtain better trading arrangements without the proper means to do so. Roe was representing a kingdom that was beset by financial woes and deeply conflicted about its identity as a unified 'Great Britain' under the Stuart monarchy.Traditional interpretations to the British Empire’s emerging success and expansion has long overshadowed the deep uncertainty that marked its initial entanglement with India. Using an incisive blend of Indian and British records, and exploring the art, literature, sights, and sounds of Elizabethan London and Imperial India, Das portrays the nuances of cultural and national collision on an individual and human level. The youthful ambassador was hindered by his perfect ignorance of any Indian languages, entangled in bitter rivalries with other English officials and undercut by the behavior of his own staff: On the very day of his arrival, Roe’s personal chef drunkenly attacked a Mughal nobleman in the streets of the city. In this remarkable debut, Nandini Das – Professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture in the English faculty at the University of Oxford – presents an important new perspective on the origins of empire through the story of the arrival of the first English ambassador in India, Sir Thomas Roe, in the early 17th century. This is something of a micro history, focusing as it does on a three year period from 1616 to 1619; the years of the ambassadorship of Thomas Roe from the Court of King James 1 of England to Mughal India.

Courting India is an interesting account of the British arrival in India in the early 1600's from the perspective of Thomas Roe, James I’s first ambassador to the Mughal Empire, who arrived there in 1616.

The power of good writing and a well-told story in getting people to understand each other should not be underestimated. Moreover, we were reminded through this story of the first ambassadorial mission of the value of international diplomacy, but also of the cultural minefields that surround it in ways that still have resonance today.