Europeans came here via Silk Route: Jonathan Gil Harris
Jonathan Gil Harris' experience of learning to deal with India's climate, food and germs helped him to imaginatively connect with the 'first firangis'. The author, who has been living in India since 2011, talks to Gargi Gupta about his book and India's émigré history. Edited excerpts from an interview:
How did you chance upon these obscure émigré?I had stumbled across Niccolo Manucci's Storia do Mogor about 10 years ago. His own life is very interesting - a teenage runaway from Venice who came to India in the 1650s, found service in Dara Shikoh's army, became a doctor in Lahore, and then practised as a siddha vaidya near Madras. But my attention was caught by his account of meeting two Mughal bandits who turned out to be Englishmen.Prior to Vasco da Gama's discovery of the sea route, how did Europeans come to India?Overland, through the Silk Route. Most came via Turkey and Persia. Russian slaves were sold to Indian masters in the markets of Bukhara.What were the other trade and migratory routes with India? There was a huge Arabian Sea trade with the Middle East and East Africa, controlled in part by Gujarati sailors and the Mapilas of the Malabar Coast. Many slaves came to India from Ethiopia, for example. There was also the Bay of Bengal trading culture, which linked the Coromandel Coast, Orissa and Bengal to Burma and South East Asia.Was the India of those times more accepting of foreigners than now?India by and large continues to be very welcoming of foreigners. But in some quarters that acceptance has been complicated by increasingly narrow ideas of what it means to be 'Indian'.Do you know of any reverse migration - any 'Indian' who left for foreign shores and settled down abroad?An Indian woman of Armenian origin named Maryam came to England in 1612. Akbar had offered her hand in marriage to the first English ambassador to the Mughal court, William Hawkins, in 1609. Maryam accompanied Hawkins back to London, but he died during the trip home. In London, she married another English voyager, Gabriel Towerson, who - hoping to profit from her Indian connections - brought her back to Agra. But he abandoned her there. Maryam is the first Indian we know of to have migrated to England.Your 'embodied' approach to these migrants is novel - do you think the experience of becoming Indian can be compared over the centuries?There are obvious differences between my body's experiences in India and those of migrants from 500 years ago. They didn't have the luxuries of air conditioning or travel in jets and cars. But there are some unexpected points of affinity between their experiences and mine. Having to deal with India's climate, its food, its germs -- these are all challenges that my predecessors faced, and that resonate for me.