Outlook, India
Jan 24 2015
India, The Firangi Mahal
For over 500 years, migrants have settled down in India and
contributed to a splendiferous intermingling of ideas
Jonathan Gil Harris
It is sometimes hard for us to think of Westerners who lived in India
prior to independence as anything other than agents of invasion,
conquest, colonialism and imperialism. This is not surprising, given
the history of the subcontinent. The spectre of the British Raj still
casts an understandably long shadow. But it’s a mistake to assume that
every Eur-opean who came to India before 1947 was a would-be
colonialist–or that Westerners who had been arriving to live in India
before the East India Comp-any came here were setting the stage for
their more powerful descendants.
A large number of foreign migrants to India during the 16th and 17th
centuries came not to conquer and command, but with much humbler
ambitions: to escape poverty and persecution. Much of Europe,
including England, was at this time an economic backwater. Global
economic power was still largely concentrated in Asian empires–Ottoman
Turkey, Safavid Persia, Mughal Hindustan, Ming and Qing China. The
glamour of Eastern power is partly why many less well-off Europeans
settled in India.
Most of these poor migrants were simply economic refugees. But some
were criminals; some were religious dissidents; some were even what we
might call sexual dissidents. Many others had no choice at all in the
matter of their migration, having arrived in India as slaves,
indentured servants, or possessions of their lords, fathers and
husbands. Nearly all of them served an Indian master, and in a way
that necessitated submitting to local languages and customs. In the
process, these migrants became Indian. They ate Indian food, wore
Indian clothes, fought in Indian armies, converted to Indian
religions, performed Indian rituals, acquired Indian knowledge, made
Indian friends and enemies, fell in love with Indians, and had Indian
children.
To become Indian in the 16th and 17th centuries was not to become one
monolithic thing. What migrants became depended on their environmental
as much as cultural and economic locations. To become Indian in the
coconut-rich hinterland of the Konkan coast meant something quite
different from what it meant in the typhoon-drenched, mosquito- and
tiger-dominated terrain of the Sundarbans or in the arid hills of the
Deccan plateau. Likewise, to become Indian in the fakir-congested
galis of Ajmer meant something quite different from what it meant in
the luxurious havelis of Agra or in the Mughal harem of Lahore. Each
location prompted different bodily transformations.
In the 16th or 17th century, for a migrant to ‘become’ Indian meant
different things in different places. It meant one thing in the
Konkan, another in Ajmer.
For all their diversity, however, these locations did have one thing
in common. To lesser and greater extents, and for different reasons,
each were multicultural spaces. The Konkan coast was the home of many
religious refugees, including undercover Jews escaping the Inquisition
in the Iberian peninsula and Catholics escaping Protestant persecution
in England. The Sundarbans provided river and island hideouts to
pirate communities comprised of Bengalis, Burmese and Europeans. The
Deccan sultanates were ruled by Persian and Turkish elites who brought
foreign merchants, physicians and soldiers–including enslaved
Ethiopian Africans or Hab-shis–into cities such as Aurangabad,
Ahmednagar and Hyderabad. In addition to installing Persians and
Central Asians as courtiers and retaining mercenary soldiers from
Europe, the Mughals also welcomed Christian artisans, traders and
priests into their main cities–Fatehpur Sikri, Agra, Lahore, Delhi and
Ajmer.
Each of these different multicultural spaces asked migrants to
cultivate distinctive new bodily skills and habits. Which is to say:
these spaces not only offered migrants new homes. They also
functioned as engines of bodily transformation. The foreigners who
settled in them altered their bodies by eating Indian spices,
weathering Indian heat, and succumbing to Indian illnesses. Just as
importantly, their bodies were also transformed by the acquisition of
new skills specific to the spaces.
Those who joined local armies often brought with them knowledge of how
to handle firearms–a new yet devastatingly effective technology
introduced to the subcontinent in the 16th century. But they also had
to master new bodily techniques: enduring mil-itary manoeuvres in the
heat and moving efficiently through intimidating terrain such as the
rocky highlands of the Deccan, the parched deserts of Rajasthan, or
the Ghats of south India. Migrant warrior sailors in Kerala, such as
the Malaccan slave Chinali, who joined a rogue Malabari navy and
became the scourge of the Portuguese, may have developed sea legs
before coming to India. But in their new subcontinental locations,
they also had to adapt their bodily reflexes to tropical cyclones,
Arabian Sea curre-nts, and the predations of mosquitoes. Foreigners
who joined communities of itinerants in Ajmer or Delhi, such as the
English eccentric Thomas Cory-ate, had to train their bodies to
perf-orm rituals of prostration, to be satisfied with a meagre diet of
rice and dal, and to endure extremes of weather in little or no
clothing. And foreign women living in Mughal harems, such as the
Armenian Bibi Juliana Firangi and the Portuguese slave-turned-courtier
Julenna Dias da Costa, were expected to acquire an ensemble of new
bodily techniques–dancing, singing, wearing robes, beco-ming human
chess pie-ces, even bearing weapons, depe-nding upon their rank and
vocation.
Faraway links A Portuguese family in Bombay, 1880
The migrants were foreign yet not foreign: they came from elsewhere,
yet they and their bodies also became Indian. Indeed, unlike other
European travellers who retu-rned to their homes, all of them left
their bones in the subcontinent. They were emb-raced as locals. Yet
they were still often referred to as outsiders, and in a variety of
ways. The most common term for these migrants was firangi, a Persian
word derived from the Arabic farenji. The latter was itself a medieval
rendering of ‘Frank’ or Frenchman; after all, Franks dominated the
ranks of the Christian Crusad-ers from Europe, a land often known in
the subcontinent as Firangistan.
The subcontinent’s nurturing medium of tolerance has brewed a benign
Babelism that still inspires creativity in Indian arts and ideas.
In pre-British Raj India, however, the firangi was not always a
European. The term was applied variously to Christian migrants from
non-European nations, such as Armenia and Georgia; to migrants who
were native Christian converts from Portuguese Asian colonies such as
Malacca; and to migrants who were Christian slaves from African
territories. And ‘firangi’ was not applied exclusively to Christians.
It was used also of Jewish migrants from Christian nations and even of
some Muslim migrants who had once served Christian masters.
As this suggests, ‘firangi’ in its pre-Raj currency was something of
an indeterminate term. It was not just a generic name for a foreigner.
It referred more precisely to a migrant from a Christian land who had
become Indian yet continued, in fundamental ways, to be marked as
foreign. At times, this liminal status could be a source of
discomf-ort and alienation, not least in loc-ations where the
prevailing religious cultures, especially caste Hindu-ism, valued
pur-ity of body and belief. Yet it could also be a spur to
extraordinary creativity. A remarkable number migrants from humble
backgrounds engaged in innovative thought-experiments–be they
scient-i-fic, literary, military, artistic, artisanal, architectural
or spirit-ual–that could not have happened anywhere but in India, yet
could not have been produced by anyone but a migrant.
Here is a shortlist of such experime-nts. The Portuguese physician and
undercover Jew Garcia da Orta, pers-o-nal doctor to the Sultan of
Ahm-ed-nagar in the 1540-50s, wrote a rather radical treatise on
tropical med-icine based on his knowledge of Arabic and Indo-Islamic
practice as well as his dialogues with local hakims. The dissident
Eng-lish Catholic Tho-mas Stephens, who migr-ated to Rachol, on the
border of Goa and Karnataka, in the late 1570s, and became known as
‘Patri Guru’, authored an 11,000-stanza Marathi purana about Christ
and the transfor-mative power of coconuts. The Russian
slave–turned-admiral Malik Ayaz devised ingenious fortifications to
protect the Gujarati port city of Diu aga-inst the Portuguese in the
early 1500s. Mandu Firangi, a mysterious Euro-pean painter who lived
in Fate-hpur Sikri and Lahore in the 1580s, combined elements of
western and Mug-hal styles to render a blond Ram and Sita. Augu-stin
Hiri-art, a Bas-que jew-eller known to the Mughals as Hun-a-rmand,
created many ingeni-ous devices in Agra from 1614 to 1635, including a
remote device to tame a wild elephant. And the Jewish Armenian
yogi-qalandar Sa’id Sarmad Kashani, Dara Shik-oh’s spiri-tual advisor,
who gave up wearing clot-hes and cutting his hair after falling for
his Hindu lover Abhai Chand in the 1630s, wrote 321 Persian rubaiyyat,
a veritable homoerotic manifesto for religious pluralism.
Even as they transformed their bod-ies, each of these migrants also
helped transform ‘India’ into something more complex and plural than
what we might usually understand by that term. They are a reminder
that India has always been multicultural, and that the presence of
Westerners in India is as Indian a tradition as any. Let us not forget
that Ashoka, the emperor who supposedly united the Indian subcontinent
nearly 2,500 years ago, had a Graeco-Persian step-grandmo-ther and
ordered that his edicts be inscribed not just in ‘native’ Prakrit but
also in ‘foreign’ Aramaic and Greek.
(Jonathan Gil Harris is Professor of English at Ashoka University; he
is the author of The First Firangis: Remark-able Stories of Heroes,
Healers, Charl-atans, Courtesans & Other Foreigners Who Became India
by Aleph Books.)
http://www.outlookindia.com/article/India-The-Firangi-Mahal/293191