You say many of the earliest Europeans came to India after fleeing their home countries.
Many of them who came in the 16th and 17th centuries were lone wolves and not a part of organizations like the British East India Company or the Portguese Estado da India. They came here because they were escaping bad situations at home. Some of them were religious dissidents: this period was a time of massive religious upheaval in Europe. And it wasn't a deliberate decision to come to India. They were often completely at the mercy of whatever accidents might have blown them here. Some of them ended up here because there were merchant ships headed this way that they were able to hitch a ride on. Others were trying to escape economic hardship.
What was the relationship between Indians and Europeans at the time?
You find extremes of response to these firangis. On the one hand, they were regarded as absolutely beyond the pale by caste Hinduism. In Muslim communities, they stood a better chance, in particular if they converted into Islam. But there were all sorts of local trans-cultural communities that they could be integrated into like the Firangian troops in the Deccan Sultanate. There were also communities of travelling physicians which were very multicultural, with not only Europeans but Arabs, Turks, Muslim hakims and Hindu Siddhavaidyas. There were Europeans in the harems as well. Some fakirs outside the shrine of Moinuddin Chishti in Ajmer were foreigners.
Were there many such European migrants?
There were lots of them. There number was enormous in the Mughal army. Akbar had made this a policy, and it was a shrewd one, because the Europeans knew something about how to handle artillery. Also in the Deccan sultanates, there were entire divisions called the Firangian, comprising European and in some places African, Georgian and Armenian soldiers. They were reputed to be particularly good soldiers, but they also got into trouble a lot -- you'll find reports of how these firangis misbehaved and din't take orders and were drunk the first thing in the morning. Many of them found employment as physicians. And even at more humble levels, you find firangis finding service with Indian masters. Which completely turns everything on its head - you think traditionally of firangis like in Dalrymple's White Mughals being lords expecting to be served by Indians. It was the other way around often in this period.
How exactly are the Europeans you describe different from Dalrymple's White Mughals?
The power dynamic is different. I loved Dalrymple's book -- the tales of these British men who came to India and fell in love with India and Indian women, and to a certain extent became Indians. But their positions of power were never compromised. These people who went native nonetheless retained high offices in the machinery of the British colonialism. But that's not the tale of the firangis I describe, who came very poor. Whose experience was in some ways not unlike the experience of Bangladeshi refugees to India now looking to escape poverty and persecution. Most of these firangis were very much in the lower echelons of society here. They probably did better than they would have done in Europe, but they were struggling all the time.
How did you come across these stories?
One has to read the archives somewhat obliquely. Because the stories of these foreigners weren't written in traditional form - they didn't write diaries or have biographers. Often they are just traces, ripples, in other narratives. So you've got to read these other narratives in the hope that you might find a sort of disturbance, the vapour trail of the story of one of these people. One such vapour trail, for example, exists in the history of the Mughals written by Niccolo Manucci. As a teenager, he was accosted by two bandits on the road to Delhi dressed in Indian clothes who said they were in Shah Jahan's army. And it turned out that they were in fact a pair of Englishmen named Thomas Roch and Raben Simitt, or probably Reuben Smith.
Your idea differs from what people generally think of the relationship between Indians and Europeans, which was one of colonial masters and their subjects.
I've encountered a bit of resistance from some people who find it very hard to give up the notion that any European who was in India was basically laying the foundations for the empire. And while we can't deny the history of colonialism and need to be critical of it, to read history proleptically and to assume what happens in 1500 is necessarily laying the foundations for what happens in 1750 and 1857 I think is a mistake. There are certain things that happen in 1500 that might contribute to what will happen in the future, but not everything does. To a certain extent, I see what I am doing as a kind of subaltern history of the firangi. There's been this great movement here in India called subaltern studies. But I think there's also this subaltern history we can have not just of Europe but also European-Indian contact, that doesn't quite align with the dominant colonial-imperial trajectories.
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