A book titled “Courting India: England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire” by Nandini Das

“Courting India: England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire”: “Courting India: England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire” is a book written by Nandini Das, a professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool. The book delves into the early modern period’s complex relationship between England and Mughal India, focusing on cultural and literary exchanges between these two worlds.

April 2023 Current Affairs Quiz

The essence of the book:

In 1589, Richard Hakluyt published The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, And Discoveries Of The English Nation, a seminal collection of all English travel writings of the time. He had done so, he confessed, to counter the insulting notion in Europe that the English were inferior and laggardly naval explorers. His weighty tome and the advice he offered to trading companies galvanised seafaring activity, and, according to academic and author Nandini Das, “is the foundation on which Britain’s view of itself as a heroic seafaring nation would be established for centuries to come”.

This energising fervour came at an opportune time, because following Elizabeth I’s excommunication by Pope Pius V in 1570, the English were struggling to trade with Catholic Europe and desperate to find new markets. In the trade winds of these reinventions, we find Thomas Roe in 1615, setting off on his four-year mission as English ambassador to the court of the Mughal emperor in India, Jahangir.

Das walks us through the dark, wood-paneled rooms, gunmetal skies, and corruption of Jacobean England, into the wide courtyards and light-filled spaces of Mughal India, where Roe is confronted by a world that is both familiar and deeply, unsettlingly, foreign in her sumptuous new book, Courting India: England, Mughal India, And The Origins Of Empire. Roe carried with him a precious English coach, a marvel of engineering and style in Europe, as a gift for the Mughal emperor. And the fate of this coach is almost caricatural in the loaded symbolism it represents of the fears that poison the early English encounters with Mughal India.