For those studying the enormous cast of characters that populate Indian history of the 16th and 17th centuries, there are further reasons to worry. The field now threatens to implode, with a fascinating group of foreigners masquerading as Indians coming to light. The vicissitudes of their struggle to exist in India simultaneously as insiders and outsiders, as foreign and native, is the focus of Jonathan Gil Harris’s tour de force, the verbosely titled The First Firangis: Remarkable stories of heroes, healers, charlatans, courtesans & other foreigners who became Indian.
The word ‘firangi’ has several connotations. This book articulates its many possibilities, from its past derisory context to a more nuanced understanding of the wonderful imprecision the term offers. Allowing people of varied nationalities to inhabit multiple identities and myriad coterminous worlds, we now view them through another present-day filter—that of ‘time’ in the 21st century.
The period under discussion was largely ruled by Asiatic powers, with the Mughals arriving in the 16th century. Following the empire’s expansion during Akbar, Mughal India ranged from Gujarat to east Bengal, with present-day Pakistan and regions of modern Afghanistan forming its western extremities. The Deccan, under the five Bahmani sultanates and their successor states, was to come under the Mughal sphere by the end of the 17th century. What was left were the smaller Hindu kingdoms on the Malabar coast, besides tiny pockets of European rule with the establishment of the Portuguese Estado da India in Goa, Daman and Diu; parts of Malabar, including Cochin, Hooghly in Bengal; and the island of Bombay, which they ceded to the English in 1668. The English were still far from being a major power.
It is against this backdrop that the book asks questions about becoming Indian, though India was more a state of mind spread over several “empires, sultanates, kingdoms, smaller colonial dominions and tribal areas” than a territorial reality in these two centuries. For the firangis, to become Indian was to adapt to their new homes, thereby transforming themselves “by eating Indian food, wearing Indian clothes, succumbing to Indian illness and learning Indian languages...their bodies were also transformed by the acquisition of new skills specific to the spaces”.
The liminal lives of firangis whose accounts have survived and been painstakingly pieced together provide us with the book’s bulk. The author punctuates their experiences with a series of brief 21st century interludes of his own experience in becoming Indian. These episodes remind us of the obstacles of place, foreignness, culture, language, dress, and food that all of us invisibly encounter and surmount every day as we travel through India and the world. It is the experience of seeing the other that makes us see ourselves and that is perhaps the key to understanding the importance of this book, and how it helps us understand who we are.
The extraordinary characters in the book include names that are more familiar, like that of the Portuguese physician Garcia da Orta and the African general Malik Ambar of Ahmednagar, while other memorable names include relative unknowns like the English-Goan priest Thomas Stephens, Russian slave-turned-admiral Malik Ayaz, the mysterious European painter called Mandu Firangi, Basque jeweler Augustin Hiriart and the Armenian Juliana Firangi at the Mughal zenana, amongst others. Their dialogues with the world they came from, the world they inhabited, to the world they created was a constant renegotiation; perhaps not different from our position today as we travel, encounter and live within the multiple Indias of our minds. Perhaps we are all firangis!
The author indicates his homage to the subaltern studies group and deliberately departs from our propensity to discuss history as only a study of the elite by looking at people inhabiting the margins. The smorgasbord of subaltern characters that populate this book are a welcome relief and crucial for understanding India and her past. They reassert the primacy of human experience in creating an India that is more than just ossified material objects on museum shelves or a timeline of successive dynasties.
In a welcome departure, details of meticulous and exhaustive research sources, as outlined in the notes section of the book, will provide fresh leads for scholars embarking on newer areas of study. The varied nature of references and sources in multiple languages from across India and the world are a constant reminder of the firangis whose travels and travails make them, and therefore, us.
