Venetian at the Mughal Court , livre ebook

Marco Moneta

A VENETIAN AT THE MUGHAL COURT
The Life and Adventures of Nicol Manucci
Translated from the Italian byElisabetta Gnecchi Ruscone
PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
Introduction
Part One: 1638-1686
Prologue
1. At the Service of Dara Shukoh: 1656-1659
2. In Delhi: 1659-1662
3. Journey to Bengal: 1663
4. The Deccan with Jai Singh and Shivaji: 1664-1665
5. In Goa: May 1666-July 1667
6. From Goa to Delhi: July 1667-1668
7. In Lahore:
8. Leaving Lahore, Losing His Capital and Taking Up Service with Shah Alam: 1676-1678
9. Physician at the Court of Prince Shah Alam: 1678-1679
10. In the Deccan with Shah Alam: 1679-1682
11. Again in Goa: 1683-1684
12. Flight from Shah Alam: 1685-1686
Part Two: 1686-1720
13. In Madras: 1686-1696
14. In Big Mount and Storia do Mogor
15. The Libro Rosso and the Libro Nero
16. The New Century: Go-between in Madras between the English and the Mughals
17. Capuchins and Jesuits
18. Moors and Gentiles
19. Aurangzeb: 1704-1707
20. Last Years: 1706-1720
Illustrations
Notes
Note to the Reader
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
Copyright
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR THE BOOK
Even though Marco Moneta s A Venetian at the Mughal Court is based on solid historical research, it reads like a wildly inventive picaresque novel. Through the eyes of Nicol Manucci we see seventeenth-century India as a richly varied, cosmopolitan world, filled with adventurers and saints; emperors and rebels; doctors and rogues. This is an absorbing account of an almost unbelievably colourful life - Amitav Ghosh , author
The adventures of the Italian Nicol Manucci, traveller, court doctor and diplomat in seventeenth-century India, are irresistible. This remarkable book recounts in an accessible and gripping manner the dazzling life of a European during the reigns of the great Mughal emperors Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb - Giorgio Riello , professor, early modern global history, European University Institute, Italy, and professor, global history and culture, University of Warwick, UK
Anyone interested in Mughal India will find this volume to be a rich and accessible resource. The unexpected Indian experiences of Nicol Manucci-who found himself witness to critical events of the day-are explained with precision and clarity, providing a much-needed context for modern readers - Amin Jaffer , author and curator
An extraordinary character leaps off the pages of Marco Moneta s book: Nicol Manucci, the Venetian who spent over sixty years in India between 1656 and 1720. Moneta s book skilfully interweaves extracts from the narrative Manucci has left us, known as Storia do Mogor , with an overview of the varied matters that Manucci found himself a part of-from the changing politics of the Mughal court and the transformation of the European presence in the subcontinent, to the advancement of medical treatments. The result is a rich history of India in a fascinating period of time - Marika Sardar , curator, Aga Khan Museum, Toronto
To Simona and Sonu
Introduction
On 20 May 1498, Vasco da Gama, the hero of Luis Vaz de Cam es The Lusiads , after rounding the Cape of Good Hope, sailing along the African coast to Malindi and crossing the Indian Ocean, dropped anchor north of Calicut, on the Malabar coast. His was the first European ship to reach the Indian subcontinent, inaugurating a seaway that gave direct access to the Indies. The effect of Vasco da Gama s voyage was revolutionary. Indeed, Adam Smith considered this to be one of the most important events in world history, of the same import as the discovery of America, which had occurred only a few years earlier. Up to that moment, westerners had a fragmentary and often incorrect knowledge of East Asia. Except for a few individual medieval travellers who journeyed into the region-Marco Polo in the thirteenth century, Odorico da Pordenone in the fourteenth century, Afanasy Nikitin in the fifteenth century and a few others-the trading relations between Europe and the Far East mostly occurred indirectly, through the interposition of the Arabs and Ottomans, whether by land (the caravan routes) or by sea and then land (by way of the harbours of Bandar Abbas in the Persian Gulf and of Jeddah on the Red Sea). No Venetian tartane (a boat carrying goods) or great European sail ship had ever before ventured across the Indian Ocean. After the route opened, a large number of Europeans-merchants, soldiers, colonials, officials, adventurers and missionaries-streamed into India and settled there, setting up more or less legitimate commercial enclaves , generally fortified. However, unlike what had happened in the New World, where they had been met by savage tribes, naked bodies and innocent minds , the Europeans who landed in the Orient encountered ancient and sophisticated civilisations. These were in no way inferior to the European ones in terms of power, age and splendour. Indeed, premonitory signs of these societies level of development could already be perceived during Vasco da Gama s first journey. When he first reached Calicut, he was surprised and disappointed to discover that the objects he had brought as gifts for the Governor-cloth, hats, furs, jugs, butter, honey and coral-were ridiculed by the local inhabitants and sneered at by the courtiers, who mockingly informed him that their Lord would accept only gold or, at the most, silver! 1
Moreover, the crossing of the Indian Ocean, unlike Christopher Columbus crossing of the Atlantic, is not defined as a passage to the unknown, but as an itinerary along existing and well-tested routes. In fact, in order to cross the ocean from Malindi, on the African coast, to the great pepper market on the Malabar coast, Vasco da Gama availed himself of an indigenous pilot, Ahmad ibn Majid, and of the pilot books produced by Arab hydrographers for pilgrims to Mecca.
Like the encounter with the New World, that with India was also an encounter with the other . But the other , in this case, had a different appearance. I say India because this was the first country that the Portuguese ships encountered after leaving behind the African coast, and because it is the focus of this book, but I should say the Orient since a similar argument could be made for China, Indonesia or Japan. Unlike the New World of which there were no previous images, the Indian subcontinent had produced a rich and ambivalent imaginary since antiquity. On the one hand it attracted and invited with its mirabilia (marvels), while on the other it dismayed and intimidated with its hidden mysteries. 2 It was, therefore, an elsewhere of which a representation already existed, however contrived and stereotyped. Consequently, the other that Europeans encountered in the East was a very far figure from the coarse savage, with fierce customs and permanently at war with his neighbours -or the natural man , as Anthony Pagden had called him-that Europeans had encountered to the West.
It was clear from the first landings that these were not primitives , but people belonging to a different civilisation, and not an inferior one from the perspective of its richness in symbolic forms (religion, literature, philosophy, architecture, music, painting and so on); its level of technological development (suffice it to consider the advanced ship-building industry); its complex social organization; and its commercial development. It is in fact historically established that mercantile sophistication and commercial dynamism predated the arrival of European traders. 3 It is true that the Europeans were not inclined or able to decipher the contents and values of this civilisation-or, rather, of this complex of different civilisations-and, failing in their attempts to impose their own ideas, they (especially the missionaries) soon developed a superior attitude and ended up classifying them with the hasty epithet of barbarity , as testified in the travel literature of the day. Not, mind, a barbarity born of backwardness like that of the New World, but a barbarity resulting from prejudice, especially of a religious nature. To their eyes, Indian civilisation did not seem barbaric because it was coarse and primitive, but because it was superstitious and idolatrous-in a word, pagan. In their eyes, then, Indians were barbaric due to error, not backwardness.
On closer inspection it was, after all, a re-proposition of the same rigidly binary scheme that the Europeans applied to the Muslim Ottoman world with which they already had well-established contacts. With an important distinction, though: In the narratives of early modernity, such judgement was limited, at least initially, to a generic feeling of superiority that did not translate into the presumption of a crushing ethnic and moral supremacy. It was only in the nineteenth century that evolutionist, colonialist and racist anthropology would address ethnography to conceive of barbarity according to a strictly temporal model, measurable in terms of chronological distance from the civilized world, intended as the highest (and final) point of mankind s progress. On the other hand, returning to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there was a certain degree of reciprocity on the part of the Hindustanis, both Hindus and Muslims, who were horrified at the sight of Europeans eating cow or pig meat, and referred to them as firangi . The coming of Europeans, in any case, does not excite too much curiosity on their part. For centuries they had been used to living in a highly globalized and interconnected world, in which the most varied peoples acted and lived together: Arabs, Africans, Armenians, Persians, Uzbeks, Afghans, Nepalis, Burmese and Chinese. A society in which, then as now, there was an extraordinary stratification of cultures, traditions, languages, political realities and religious beliefs; a place in which the term global had a very precise meaning, and fully deserving of th