 Mae'r thirio o'r cyd-dweud, rwy'n gwrs i'n ddweud yma, rwy'n gweithio'r ffastau. Rwy'n gweithio'n Rybechiru, rwy'n gyfrifio'r dyfodol. Rwy'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'r ddweud, Corting India, Ynglyn Mwglydd India i fynd i'r orygiadau i'r Nandini Dass a Soni Sing. Rwy'n gweithio, ac rwy'n gweithio'n gweithio, wrth gwrs, rwy'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio, ac rwy'n gweithio'n werth tspor auta chain. Mae'r ddweud o wybodaeth, rydw i, gweithio'r gweithio gwaith a bwynt iawn. Rydw i'n gwneud am hyn sydd gael ym mwyaf o'r panelist. Ffoe ychydig o ymddych chi'n dod a'u cyfrifio'r ar y cwmno i gweithio'r hyn sydd hender. Yn cyfrifio yma o'ch cyfrifio yn ymdwbl, ac mae'r cyfrifio i'r cyfrifio. Fawr, drwy'n cael ei wneud ar y cyfrifio. Mae'n sylwc. Ac mae'n dweud y gallwch yn online, rwy'n meddwl i ddigon nhw'n meddwl gan y Einstein. Mae'n meddwl i'r tâg rejoiceu sydd i'r Bookstore Brytys Aelbi Cymru. Mae'r fathau sydd y dyfodol yma yn Ystrydd Gall Chesnidog... ... yn ddiddordei i'r eicol, etwatio a fydd ei wneud o'ch meddwl i'r meddwl am ystrydd. Dyma'r eich rymes i'r meddwl i ddiddordei'r meddwl, nid y gallwch yn eu fwy o pwysig. Mae'r dweud. Mae'r dweud, Sunny Singh. Sunny is a Professor of Creative Writing and Inclusion in the Arts at London Metropolitan University and an expert on Bollywood. She's the founder of the Jalak Prize, first awarded in March 2017 and its sister award, the Jalak Children's and Young Adult Prize, which was founded in 2021, which celebrates books by British or British resident writers of colour. She's the author of the critically-acclaimed novels and award-winning novel Nanny's Book of Suicides with Krishna's Eyes and Hotel Arcadia. She's recently completed a selection of stories linked by the theme of war and a personal study of the Indian film industry titled A Bollywood State of Mind, which is coming in October this year. Nandini Das, we have another Professor here. Nandini Das is the Professor of Early Modern English, English Literature and Culture and a Fellow of Exeter College at the University of Oxford. She's a scholar of Renaissance literature, travel, migration and cross-cultural encounters and has published widely on these topics and published widely on these topics. Her works include, I had to check the pronunciation of this, so forgive me if I mispronounce it again, Robert Green's Planet of Machia, yes, Renaissance Romance, the Transformation of English Pro's Fiction 1570-1620 and her latest book, Caught in India, England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire, which she's here to talk to us about today. Sunny Nandini, over to you. Thank you, and thank you for being here. Before I kick off, I can't recommend this book highly enough. So please go get it when you leave. And I promise you that's not just a sales pitch. I spent much of the last few weeks reading it and going back and taking notes. And I will be reading it again quite soon. So it is really quite a necessary book. It's a very important book and it fills a gap in our understanding of the period, both for India and for Britain, that I think is not only needed right now for multiple reasons, but also quite urgent. So Nandini, thank you for being here. I didn't even have to bribe her to say that. We're going to talk about the bribes later. I'm not talking about it now. But you said something earlier when we were preparing or we were sitting in the green room about how it's nearly a decade's work. And I think I want to start off with that. Tell us, because this book is so incredibly researched. There's so much archival material in there. I think every page I was making a note of like, I didn't know that. Oh, wow. And there are all these points of extraordinary bits of information that you've woven together. So tell us about this 10-year research project. Well, it started off as a conversation, as books quite often do. It started off as a conversation between myself and a senior colleague in the US who wanted to invite me to do an essay on something of my choice about encounters between cultures in the 16th and 17th century. And I was knee-deep in writing my previous book at that point, which was very much about European intellectual history. And I thought, well, I'll do something that is slightly lighter, maybe, and I can do it quickly. So I started off by writing an article about that painting. It's called The Emperor Jahangir referring a Sufi shake to kings. And if you notice in the corner over there, that grumpy face pearing out at us, that's the face of a man who's been waiting far too long for a bus, isn't it? That, we suspect, is a copy from a portrait of James I. We know that Thomas Roe, the first English ambassador to India, had taken multiple portraits with him. And that man in the red turban in the corner is the artist. We know that because he's holding a painting in his hand. He's called Busser One. And he copied James's grumpy face into this particular painting where the Mughal Emperor turns his face away. So the article was all about imitation European ideas and Islamic and Asian ideas of what in Latin among Thomas Roe's contemporaries would be known as imitatio, and how this is both a competition but also an act of hospitality. When you're imitating something, you're welcoming it into your own space. But at the same time, you're marking out that space as your own territory. So I worked on that for ages. And then there was a moment where over the lockdown, again, not a good decision. I'm not putting this across very well here. This is a string of terrible decisions, really. Over the lockdown, I decided, well, what better time than to do something that is really terribly archive heavy when you can't go to the archives. But I had done a lot of work on Thomas Roe's journal, and we might talk about the journals themselves later already. So I had a wealth of, thankfully, transcriptions and photographs that I could pour over and the help of multiple friends who very generously, when the lockdown lifted, would come in and take lots more photos for me. And that's all that went into that doorstopper for book. And you've nicely opened to my next question, which is, let's talk about Thomas Roe. Not just his journals, which are extensive and quite interesting, and at times amusing. I think it might be a quite sort of thing. Really? There's that moment of that hapless Englishman sort of straight out of the Indiana Jones movie where it's like, really, you don't know what you're doing, are you? But tell us about Thomas Roe and tell us about his ambassador, but more importantly, his journals, because I think that's one of the key resources we have. It is. I suppose to understand who Roe is, it's kind of useful to think of our mental kind of map in terms of timeline. So if you think about England in the 16th and 17th centuries, the people who come to our mind are Elizabeth I and James I. Across the oceans in India, in Mughal India, so northern India and a bit of central India, although the Mughals are still trying to make inroads there, the direct contemporaries among the monarchs is Akbar the Great and Emperor Jahangir. So Elizabeth I and Akbar the Great, who really establishes the Mughal Empire are direct contemporaries and then their successes. Similarly, Roe is someone who comes to the English court in the very last years of Elizabeth I's reign and he's one of those very typical mixtures, actually, among the new courtiers of the period. So on his father's side, he comes from very solid mercantile stock. So he has a string of Lord Mayor's of London among his father's family on that side of the family tree. And then his father, who's the third son, dies quite young, his mother remarries, into the Glitzir courtly circle. So that's where the glamour and glitz in his life comes from and he's really ambitious. Also by the point when he starts kind of hobnobbing with the Great and the Powerful in England is also quite cash-strained. And that has, you'll realise that this thing about tight wallets is a recurrent theme throughout the book in a way. So Roe is desperate to earn some money. So are the English merchants and they have a big problem on their hands because of course Elizabeth's straightened relationship with continental Europe meant that English trade had suffered. The one thing that English did really well was produce excellent wool. But all of a sudden the taxes on doing business with Europe, continental Europe had gone up. So the recurrent conversation among the trading merchants was a vent for our English wool. Where can we find an alternative market? Now let's face it, perhaps Northern India in the summer was not the right place to go to for that. But there was another reason which is the luxury goods market. England was very keen on eastern luxuries and till this point they were going through a third party, the Venetians and the Italians, through the land routes into the Ottoman Empire and then they would get all this fancy stuff that would all come back to London and be sold in the great shops of London. But they wanted an alternative cheaper route and East India Company was very keen on doing that. They were also very keen on sending someone they could depend on and the man was Thomas Roe. This young man, very promising, very keen would do his work and he would do his paperwork, faithfully. Yes, he's extremely keen on noting every possible interaction, every possible. It's quite marvellous that the level of detail he puts in there. It is. I had such a fabulous time just within, well not within this building exactly, just across the courtyard in the British Library looking at his journal, the manuscript copy, where he writes down everything. I mean, mind you, the man knew that his salary depended on it. The East India Company was quite kind of deliberate about insisting that their employees do their paperwork and have everything noted down. If you've ever grumbled about filing an expense receipt, have sympathy for Thomas Roe, who had to note down everything. But that is wonderful for us as historians. We know exactly what he spent his money on. Very true. I found that there are the parallels. I will not go in there perhaps because I shall say too much but the idea of not having access to European markets makes a little too close. Maybe that Empire 2.0 dream wasn't entirely unfounded. Back to your writing because you'd been working all of this and then somehow you decided to pull this book together. Now what struck me is that of course there's much of Roe in there but it's way beyond that. What it tries and I think very, very, you know, accomplishes very well and quite comprehensively is to give us an insight into what's happening in both these places. And I think sometimes when in this country, especially when people say, oh, we have shared history. It's a very dodgy way of phrasing, you know, a long history of murder and looting and so on. But I think here there is something really special going on because this is in a way a shared history because this embassy changes both Britain and India in ways that is not expected at the time. It's not even imaginable at the time. Talk us through that part because I found that so insightful and so fascinating. Oh, that's such a lovely question, Sonny. So one of my frustrations to some extent about our current historical narratives about British empire or the history of empire partly is to do with the fact that it goes to the bit where the empire actually exists in India and in Asia. And that means quite often this early period. So Roe goes out in 1614-15. This early period gets covered very quickly if it even appears before you go to Clive and the rest of that very familiar story. So partly I was interested in excavating that. But in doing that, one of the things that always fascinates me about cross-cultural contact in any given moment is the mechanisms of that contact. We quite often think about first meetings happening almost in a vacuum. But the thing is, first meetings are never entirely new. They're always framed by our assumptions, our preconceptions. So one of the things that I really wanted to excavate from Roe's side and from the English side was the kind of lenses through which he was looking at this court that he was encountering. The Mughal court is immensely powerful. This annual revenue is about ten times the national revenue of England in this period. It's huge in some ways. So what does a man do when he lands in Surat and makes his way to Ajmer and looks at the grandeur of this court? What kind of lenses does he use? So that was one aspect, I think, where that parallel comes in. But for me the other really important thing was that sometimes when we are thinking about these grand histories of empire we think of them in the abstract, as abstract concepts and machinery. We think of the East India Company as this huge corporation and the ordinary people, the everyday lives, get lost within that. Particularly the everyday lives of people who only appear in historical fragments. Because let's face it, you can't whip out an entire book out of half a line in a court record perhaps. But the thing is, those people were there and their lives were touched by what happened perhaps across the seas somewhere else. So for me there are glimmers of those figures which I really wanted to accommodate. Right from people like Eleanor Rho, the woman who falls in love with Thomas Rho and marries him two months before he has to leave for India. So there are characters like that, but on the other hand there are other characters like Rho's interpreter, a man called Jadu, or Jadu perhaps, we don't know how his name might have been pronounced. Who interprets for Thomas Rho and for the East India Company we suspect for about 12 years almost and he comes up in little exchanges. We know little glimpses of him. We know that he wasn't ever happy with the salary he got. In fact he was drastically underpaid. Again we come back to money. We know that there was a moment where his son got married and he needed to take leave. And for me I find those really important as well as those huge movements of ships and huge profits and the grand narratives of colonial movement and violence. So this book is to some extent, in fact to a large extent, not simply the story of Rho but of all those lives. You've just opened up a question that I was going to ask you afterwards but I might as well ask you now. That name Jadu stayed with me and not only because of the Bollywood movie Extraterrestrial is called Jadu but it means magic. And I kept wondering, is that a name that he's given? Is that a pseudonym? Is that something that he's, you know, because it's a very strange name but there's something really lovely and quite magical about it. Did you have any sense of what that may be with anything else that you didn't put in the book that might give us a sense of who he is? That's really interesting. I was fascinated with Jadu and I spent far too long, I think, trying to track him down to some extent because of exactly those questions. Now, Jadu in Hindi means magic. There's a possibility that it could be Jadu which is a name of Vishnu so that gives us a different angle into him. He might be from the Hindu mercantile community in Surat where Roe and the East India Company settled for quite a long time but we don't really know much about him apart from those traces and in that sense I think for me people like him become in some ways symbols of that wider picture of quite interesting negotiations that were going on in this period which is not, which is very different actually from the later colonial governance structures and relationships within that. Roe's relationship with Jadu or Jadu is very different from the master-servant relationships that happened later on because Roe is so dependent on him. He's terrible at languages and he does not want to learn Persian so he's entirely dependent on this Indian man to get his point across. There's a moment where Jadu, as ever, goes off in a huff. He asks for a raise, he doesn't get a raise partly because Roe himself is broke. Roe doesn't want to admit that to him because, you know, slightly awkward but so Jadu leaves him and goes away and as the universe would have it the very next week Roe gets a rare chance to talk to the emperor while the emperor is out and about and you have that moment in his diaries where he's going, if only I had my Jadu with me I could have said something apart from the broken bits of Persian and then the emperor laughed at me and I don't know whether he just thought I was hilarious or he was laughing at me or with me it's all just terrible, going terribly. There's something so interesting about this figure about the translator and I kept thinking of course of other not only English attempts to make contact but also European attempts and the role of the translator in that and of course we think of people like Malenche in Mexico who is deeply reviled by the Mexicans for having played a part in the colonisation and the destruction of the Aztec empire but here it's a very strange space that Jadu or Jadu occupies and the reason that we're coming up with two translations is because there isn't a diacritical mark to figure out how this word is pronounced but I think what struck me while I was reading it is that we get some glimpse of that but there are even smaller glimpses of lives that we don't often talk about curiously enough given that Elizabeth is on the throne here the women on both sides. That's right and children of course and people whose lives are going to be transformed not just in that moment but for generations centuries onwards are not really visible or talked about or told and you've somehow managed to find these little glimmers so tell us about this because this was really fascinating for me how you found these little traces. Well for me the most striking point you know when you're writing a book quite often you come to a point where you suddenly despite the fact that you've got a looming deadline and you have an increasing tendency to question your decision to write the book in the first place you suddenly come to a moment where you think actually this is not half bad I'm glad I'm doing this here and now for me one of those moments was pouring over an early 16th century map of London and there's a moment in around 1614, 1615 where I was trying to make a case in a very early chapter about the ways in which English voyagers and English global encounters were intricately interconnected so their agency, their kind of travels to North America their travels to the Spice Islands Indonesia basically and their travels in Asia and the Middle East to the Ottoman empires are all very very closely linked both in terms of material but also in terms of people and I don't mean just people who are going out of England but the people who are coming in so that moment in late 1614, 15 early 1616 in England is a moment where there's a man from western Africa called Corey again we don't know what the original pronunciation of his name would have been whether he was called Corey at all but that's what the English called him one particular English ship which had kind of stopped near his village kidnapped him and brought him back with them to London to Philpert Lane in the city where the East India Company had their headquarters at the time and he became one of their kind of examples their kind of PR tools essentially except that Corey was homesick and he wanted to go home so his is one of the very early voices we have of people from western Africa who have spoken voices we hear in historical records and it's a voice which says Corey go home and that's all we hear about him and I found that hugely moving for myself but then you start triangulating and within about five miles of where Corey was there was another woman who had been brought in by Virginia Company East India Company is doing its own little PR Virginia Company would also be doing its own little PR and the woman this time a woman who's brought in is a name that is much more familiar to all of us Pocahontas so there's Pocahontas there's Corey the Saldanian and then there's an Indian woman so stepping back in the story a little bit and she goes to India to the Mughal court before Thomas Roe, a man called William Hawkins a chancer and an adventurer and a slightly tricky figure he gets married off by the Mughal Emperor Jahangir to an Armenian Christian woman called Mariam Begham so for that glimpse for those Englishmen walking the streets of London in around 1615 within about five miles of them would have been a man from Western Africa a very equally homesick woman from Mughal India and a woman from Northern America with them living and breathing the same air and I think it's hugely important to acknowledge that and bring that into the story of cultural encounters of the emergence of imperial and colonial ambition but also in the stories of engagement with the wider world that England was going through in this period and of course that opens up a whole Pandora's box around erotic and sexual encounters as well and what that may entail for not just the people involved but of course us who all trace our lineages back in different ways to indirectly or indirectly to the same these people I want to shift a little bit and I want to just talk about your writing and the reason I want to talk about it because I think a lot of us who work in academia or work in writing books or do anything found the lockdown immensely disorientating and here you were you produced a book and an enormous incredibly information fact insightful book how this is me looking and this is my cheat sheet I'm going to use these ideas It's amazing what having an editor who makes pointed calls reminding you of deadlines can do but seriously I think it's partly because it's a story that I wanted to tell it's also significantly due to the enormous patience of one's family and that cannot be said enough particularly since said family is present in this crowd but apart from that I think it's also because it's a story that was absolutely crying out for the telling and having the journals not only rose journal which we've talked about a little bit his daily records but then from the other side it's very rare that you get multiple almost day to day accounts of a series of events that you can juxtapose against each other and to my shock and horror I realised that I was actually using Excel spreadsheets that was traumatic that realisation and liking that experience but it is one of those cases where you could see what was happening on a given day and there is something I think particularly wonderful about being able to drill down to a single day in a distant past juxtapose two very different voices the voice of a dysentri stuck exhausted Englishman in the heat of Ajmer who refuses to wear anything but English wool in August and the voice of the Mughal Emperor Jahangir who is tracking the progress of the nesting of his pet cranes and keeping a day to day deeply interesting naturalists kind of account of the way that nesting process works and there was something really wonderful about it so I think it's entirely thanks to that material to some extent and of course Jahangir is wearing muslins the lightest and most glorious of muslins for him, not in August There's a moment where one of the East India Company factors or merchants writes back saying we've brought a lot of wool and you've kept sending us more wool this is the moment where you stop sending us any more wool I have to say just this book is in addition to being a doorstop insightful informative is also a lot of fun there's lots of these brilliant moments where you suddenly feel that maybe 1600s people weren't that different in their concepts I'm so glad you said that because that's the kind of experience I kept coming across reading these records so there's one moment where an East India Company man writes back to the company in London and he says well you know this business with wool not quite working out you've asked me to find rarities in India I've just tasted the most wonderful thing they have a fruit called a mango and what they do is that they dry it and then you can keep it for longer do you think that would sell if I managed to send you some of that and that moment of a man enjoying and discovering the delights of dried mango is such a human moment that it's utterly wonderful I think it's quite funny that you picked that particular moment because I've been working in a collection of short stories and one of the things I found in my research was some of the Sikh soldiers who were serving in Europe would often carry dried mango with them he was not wrong and in fact I had to build it into a short story because it was this amazing moment of carrying dried mango which is you know it happens it's important I know that we will be moving towards audience questions so there will be time but I actually want to ask you something about memory and the role of memory I think historians I think always struggle with it because memory in itself tends to be quite slippery and it slides and slips and it lides and yet it continues and it perseveres and it's resilient and it's transformative in different ways and how does that play out and I want to connect it back to some of these ideas that you said about cross cultural encounters these first meetings how does memory play out in these spaces in these strange encounters not just the mango can there be a memory of a mango but really beyond the facetiousness I really want to ask you because it's something that you it's a through thread the idea of memory and how it continues to impact us now would you let us know about it for me I think it's not only a through thread in this book but it's part of the methodology behind the book in the sense that one of the things that I really wanted to excavate is the way in which certain assumptions and certain narratives about India and about the Mughals and the Mughal Empire develops and the long shadow that leaves for the next couple of centuries or even longer within British perceptions of India particularly as the British begin to consolidate their power in South Asia and one of the things that keep cropping up for historians in historical debates about these early years when historians have looked at Thomas Rose journals is his response for instance to the very powerful female presences at the court particularly to Jahangir's favourite 20th wife Nur Jahan had just been crowned Empress alongside him Nur Jahan is immensely powerful Thomas Rose feels very strongly about Nur Jahan's influence on Jahangir so he creates this image in his journal about a kind of Mughal male effeminacy that allows the Mughal Emperor to be driven by women to be heckled by women and he imagines this kind of he in fact uses this phrase of a pit of vipers in the harem who are negotiating and machinating if you take it in isolation it seems a particularly strong reaction but in some ways I suppose for me as someone who had specialised for a long time on 16th and 17th century English cultural history and literature the thing that fascinated me was the very clear resonances it sets up with public discourse around James I in England and his relationship with his wife Anna of Denmark for instance they had a fraught relationship Anna herself had an alternative court that was set up around her so in some ways what I was keen to excavate is what happens when you have to decode a different political or social structure what tools do you use in order to open that particular can of worms usually what happens is the tool you use is memory you use the framework you have so for Rho his constant emphasis on the monarch being open to manipulation in India taken in a vacuum is a judgement on the Mughal Empire and on the Mughal Emperor taken alongside the discourse around and the deep anxiety around royal scandals in early 17th century London it becomes something completely different it becomes an anxiety about political power about tyranny about the way in which in England at that same time the parliament for instance was negotiating with the monarch so I think for me that becomes the through thread in a way that kind of constant juxtaposition of what was happening in England when Rho left what the letters that he was getting and the way in which those crop up as resonances in his engagement with this completely different court it's quite interesting because I don't think he ever manages to see the Mughal court for itself he's constantly interpreting everything and I think if you know the other side then you keep going oh you silly man I wanted to shake him and go bring something go talk to somebody there's so much you're missing but I think that sort of lack of understanding or lost in translation however we want to I don't know whether it's even lost in translation sometimes I think it's quite deliberate on his part so you get the sense where there is a moment of understanding or connection or whatever you might call it a moment with an aging court here at the Mughal court at one point he has that moment with Jahangir himself but at the same time there is a deep weight I think and deep anxiety about his own powerlessness and the powerlessness of the English which he's constantly trying to balance by negating the power of the Mughal court there's a wonderful moment where he sits through of gifts being presented to Jahangir which includes things like 30 elephants with platters of gold coins on their backs and there is Ro himself saying I don't really have a good gift for Jahangir for his birthday this time so I looked into what I had and I've got a couple of miniatures I put it in a pretty box and hopefully that'll do so he does that he explains all of that and then he puts in a throwaway comment which says well it's all very ostentatious and it's a bit like a rich merchant's wife in Shoreditch displaying her fancy velvet slippers in the same cupboard as her fancy new Chinese porcelain isn't it so you have that kind of tension which is both deliberate and sometimes subconscious perhaps hoping to cut things down to a place where you can engage with it I think it's just too big for him I think one of the words you use the costing of the long shadow of these narratives we're in a very strange moment because just as I was reading this book the news has come out that the Mughals have been removed that may be a little too extreme but they've been definitely whittled away from the Indian curriculum and I think that's such a bizarre thing to do with any kind of history but I think it also made me realise just how much of our anxieties around the past are about today and the future rather than the past but here is a strange problem what happens when we remove the memory because it's not as if removing the Mughals from the curriculum will remove the Mughals from history and yet there is this very strange process of trying to create a narrative I think that comes down to some extent to perhaps an increasing perception that history somehow has a limited capacity it's like a little box and you can only pack this much in to it and if you have to put something in, something else has to go out and we think of a complete understanding being somehow confused with erasure which is not the case and that happens in discourses around our understanding of Mughal history it happens around our discourses of understanding of British history of English history I think what I hope Caught in India helps to show is that actually history is pretty capacious perhaps more than we give it credit for there are multiple voices within it and erasing some of them simply leaves a lacunae in our understanding of language history in any sense it just makes us less capable of understanding what the past was and that is always a sad thing to be aiming towards a limitation of knowledge I think so in most of these cases I think recovery and extension and enrichment is probably what as historians and as scholars we need to be aiming towards rather than this limiting of the lens I completely agree I also think that this book goes a long ways in deepening and widening our understanding of both Britain and India in that period so I think it would be a shame that if we try to limit it and put it in a box we should have lots of questions I've just been given the sign that we should be moving towards them I'm going to try and go through this with the iPad as well as you know, hands in the crowd so I believe there's a mic that goes around, ah perfect there is a mic and there's a hand right there the gentleman blue shirt I will try and take as many questions as possible Thank you, that was fascinating Could you tell us a bit more about the Indian sources that you were comparing the journal and the English records with where are they, what are they? So the major source that I was using to juxtapose with Thomas Rose Journal was Jahangir's memoirs, day to day memoirs The Jahangir Nama, he starts writing it fairly early in his reign, he continues it for a fairly long period before it gets handed over and in a way he's copying the example of his great grandfather, the founder of the Mughal Empire, Babur in doing it and it's an astonishing literary text I think, it's very rare that we get the voice, unmediated voice of a Mughal monarch in exactly or monarch or sovereign of any country in exactly the same way, but alongside that I had multiple other sources, I was particularly drawn to recovering where I could voices of ordinary people outside the courtly circles so sometimes that happens through there's a wonderful early example of autobiography called the Adha Katanaq the Half-Life Story by a merchant who's a direct contemporary of Roe and Jahangir so that gives us glimpses into someone who's very much on the margins of power, observing these otherwise what sounds like two malters changes at court but there are multiple other Sanskrit epics various Dohe by Abdullah Rahim who is one of Jahangir's courtiers who writes wonderfully and wittily and sharply about the terrible balancing act that one has to do as an intellectual and a politician in any political scenario so all of that comes into this particular narrative I think I'm just going to try and take a couple of questions from here partly because this one's really interesting were there any particular protocols for greeting and presenting representatives of a new country for the first time I assume this is for the Mughal court and did they have to observe any particular preparations for homage to the attack at the court? Oh, that's such a wonderful question and the short answer is yes, many but in that sense the Mughal court is no different from say the Ottoman court or indeed from James I's court diplomatic tussles about how many times you doff your hat and whether you doff it at all is always always a critical point, a sticking point Rho adopts that as a part of his diplomatic tussle with the Mughals and that is particularly fascinating I spent a lot of time juxtaposing what he was doing and in a way when 19th century editors of Rho took his journal and those early days where he's thinking about decoding Mughal diplomatic procedure they interpreted as this is an Englishman being terribly English and look how strong he is and strong minded he will bow for nobody but interestingly the kind of terms of phrases he uses the kind of negotiations he uses are lifted straight from the notebook of the great bugbear of the English in this period the Spanish ambassador Gondomar who is the man you would love to hate if you were a 17th century early 17th century Englishman in London in this period but he was also great at these diplomatic power plays and Rho who had been on the corners of James I's court watching this Spanish man essentially twirl the court around his little finger uses exactly the same tricks when he goes to Soorat I know there were, oh there are two questions here so I think maybe first in the back and then yes and then I'm keeping an eye oh hi you have to excuse me I'm not like a very educated person in regards to Mughal India but I am like a new history teacher and I'm actually teaching this to my year 7s and currently our like enquiry our historical enquiry is you know how significant was Nora Jahan in regards to Mughal India and we're comparing her to for example the Tudors and women in the UK at the time so in regards to I'm hoping you can help me help educate these kids because I have no clue what I'm doing right now I really don't I'm just 26 years old I'm just lying my way through it but this will really really help me just understand more so obviously we're going at this point where we're concentrating on the women especially Nora Jahan so in your opinion how influential was she and how influential were women in the courts and economically compared to the UK at the time that is a wonderful question I think thank you for asking that so I would probably start by comparing some of the preconceptions people have about women within Islamic worlds and women in Tudor England we talk a lot about Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots, Mary Tudor all of those powerful figures but here's the thing if you think about legal rights of women if you happen to be a woman in 16th, 17th century England you were technically and legally a femme cuvette, a covered woman covered essentially by the male presences around you either by your father or by your husband so your economic power only came to the forefront as an independent individual if you were fortunate enough to be widowed and that does happen because the plague unfortunately took away many of the men first so the printing world and there's a lot of research around this at the moment the printing world in early modern England is run oddly enough by a lot of women in this period who are still publishing under the names of their dead husbands in Islamic law women could retain a portion of wealth under their own name and a lot of women did this is not to say that women who followed Islam had endless freedom, we know that did not happen either in Tudor England, Protestant England or in Mughal India but it did mean that people like Noor Jahan were not alone in handling and being able to kind of manage huge amounts of resources Jahangir's mother herself ran one of the biggest ships of in Mughal trade in fact it's a huge ship and the Portuguese get into great trouble with the Mughals at one point because they capture that particular ship and their trade licenses are almost immediately withdrawn so I think it would be really useful perhaps and interesting for your students to think about just those economic assumptions we make or larger assumptions we make about women's lives and then to see where Noor Jahan sits within that one of the things that I had great fun doing in the book is juxtaposing images of Noor Jahan a portrait of Noor Jahan with a portrait of Anna of Denmark changed the first of England's wife Noor Jahan has shown kind of cleaning her and holding her rifle she was a great hunter, a great sharpshooter and Jahangir is inordinately proud of her there are repeated instances in his memoirs where he writes about how wonderful Noor Jahan was at hunting James the first? Not quite he is not pleased in fact with a large part of his court he was not pleased of this newfangled fashion that women had of wearing high hats that made them look taller for instance Anna of Denmark has her portrait painted wearing, guess what and she positions her arm in a way which makes it very clear that this is a solitary portrait it's a portrait that could not be hung next to a portrait of her husband so that juxtaposition might be an interesting one visual things always work really well I think if you want to get a point across That's just interesting the shade that was going on there so you kind of might have half answered my question because I work on the Ottoman Empire and the minute you started talking about the influence of Noor Jahan I thought ooh Horem Sultan, Sultanate of Women and I wondered if this was maybe part of a larger phenomena within the Mughal Empire kind of like we have in the Ottoman Empire where you actually had this maybe string or collection of very politically influential women who had a type of influence maybe over the governing of the empire that some people might have been very concerned about Yes I think again there is very clearly a resonance there not simply with the Ottomans but also perhaps with the Safavids in Persia, modern day Iran and in each of these cases I think partly the problem is because of certain historical assumptions that are made from the 18th century onwards about the Horem being actually quite a different kind of place from what it really was the Horem structure was not simply about sexual licentiousness or essentially about a sovereign having a lot of women that has beckoned call it was a city within a city in each of these empires and it was a city within a city most importantly governed largely by the women themselves and I think that parallel is really interesting because of course the other unspoken thing in this huge global network is the close network between those three Islamic superpowers essentially in this period I know that we've got lots of hands but I know that the lady there in the blue has been through you've had your hand up for quite a while I'm sorry about that. I'm trying to get as many people as I can. I should give shorter answers Hopefully this is a very quick question I find it very interesting that you've chosen this particular piece because I don't know a lot about India but everything I've read about the origin of the empire doesn't have this story it doesn't have that. My question is you've chosen it very well why do you think not many people have chosen to write about this particular part because it doesn't fit the narrative of empire very very simply see I'm following my ruler for short answer there Ro does not get much success that's the thing and this story of waiting in a queue for the attention of an emperor who is studiously ignoring you does not fit that story of a great empire where the sun never sets I know that we've got two questions and I know that we've had a hand up there was a gentleman there with the dog and then there's a hand up here that I'd like to just come to as well but go ahead please Thank you that was a very insightful conversation so contrary to Django's reign down south there was Deccan sultanates as well was there any interaction between them and the English or was there an ambassador from England? No there wasn't at that point because the Portuguese were focusing on the south at this particular point and the Dutch so there are moments where Ro has meetings with his Dutch contemporary and his Dutch counterpart and he writes about the Dutch going down to Masulipatam for instance and he is aware to some extent about the possibilities in southern India he's aware of other political structures but let's face it England at this point is a very very small power within south Asia so they had to focus their energies somewhere they were already cash constrained constrained in terms of people so they thought they would put their focus on northern India particularly on the Mughal Empire in fact the East India Company was very unwilling to take Ro's advice which now in hindsight sounds actually something terribly kind of prescient in some ways of going to Bengal which is what they'd end up doing later on they simply the East India Company in England decided that was too far to go their resources just wouldn't stretch and I think we've got time for one last question so Do you hear me? Hi very interesting session so far thank you very much and I haven't read the book and I'm looking forward to reading it soon actually you answered the question partially but I was really curious to know so Sir Thomas Ro I mean I was curious to know as to how was he perceived I mean you mentioned that the Jahangir Nama was one of your sources from what I can remember I don't think he was mentioned much in that it was a footnote in history the fact that he and the English expression went there at that point of time but I'm curious to see from your research how was he perceived both in India at that point of time and how was he perceived here in England because I know there's a painting of him approaching the court in the houses of parliament I think there's a painting out there so I suspect all of that is fairly recent but at that point of time how was he perceived you were very generous and kind in saying that he might have been a footnote in the Indian accounts he does not appear in fact none of the English appear in Jahangir's accounts there are wonderful moments where Roe expends 10 pages on a meeting his had with the emperor the emperor talks about Hindi poems about trapping the bee within a lotus flower and the English ambassador doesn't appear and that is a telling example of I suppose an indication of the really marginal role that the English played for the Mughals the western European forces they recognized were the Portuguese they were quite interested in these newcomers because they knew that the Portuguese naval power was a threat and they were quite deliberately I argue in the book both Nur Jahan and Curram the later Shah Jahan were playing the Portuguese and the English against each other in their negotiations throughout this period something that Roe did not realize the mural you talk about again is something that I talk about in the book Roe enters English historiography around the late 19th early 20th century so that mural was commissioned in 1925 it's just after the first world war Britain decides that it needs to have something that should I say it? make Britain great again and they commissioned the series of murals in the houses of parliament and Roe is one of the features there interestingly however the person who paints it Rothstein is himself a second generation immigrant and I loved this moment where I discovered that his father had come over to England guess what to deal in wool I'm going to quote Riz Ahmad and say immigrants we get things done well thank you for that I do have one question that was sent in that I just want to know because it's a very short answer it may not actually apply to your period but it's a good one what's the weirdest thing that the British stole from Mughal India I have to ask that oh goodness you know in this particular period perhaps the weirdest thing is the do piasa okay you have to explain that so this is the thing there was something that is inordinately long and it's taking a long time during the lockdown you get distracted so I got distracted by recipes there's a lot of talk about food Roe suffers from dysentery throughout history he sits through numerous banquets where there are 60 courses sailing past in front of me in front of him and the poor man is just sitting there but I one of the things that keep cropping up in these descriptions by Roe and by his contemporaries is this dish that they all adore and they say it's a dish of meat and onions and then only one account by Roe's chaplain Edward Terry actually allowed me to identify what it is where he says he found out how this was cooked and you get the sense that their own cook would probably somehow get this recipe and he says they call it the do piasa so there you have it do piasa is my vote that wasn't something I would have thought of thank you so much please get the book it's really lots of fun that was really loud thank you Nandini and Sonny fascinating discussion as Sonny said the book is on sale outside and if you would like to have a copy signed please purchase one first and then there will be a little cue and Nandini sat on a table ready to sign also I just want to take this opportunity to thank the sign language interpreters who have done a fantastic job thank you thanks everyone