Nandini Das, a Professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture at the University of Oxford, has been shortlisted for the British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding for her work "Courting India: England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire."
The prize, which is worth £25,000, recognises research-based non-fiction works that contribute significantly to the public's understanding of global cultures and their interconnections. Das, who hails from India and has been educated both in India and England, has also co-edited books like 'The Cambridge History of Travel Writing' and is known for her contributions as a BBC New Generation Thinker, hosting television and radio programs.
Speaking to Asian Voice, Nandini discussed her writing style, book and the inspiration behind it.
How would you describe your writing and how has it evolved over the course of your career?
I am a literary scholar of the 16th and 17th centuries by training, so rigorous reading and underpinning every part of my argument with evidence is very much part of my writing. What writing Courting India for a wider non-specialist readership allowed me to do is to show how that research can fill in the gaps of what we think is a familiar story - of the East India Company, and the early days of its contact with India. In the process, I was able to explore ways of story-telling that don't usually find a home within academic journals and monographs - little fragmentary pieces of information about Indian presence in 16th century England for instance, which are too fleeting and too sketchy to claim a central space in an academic publication. But they deserve a voice too, and I’ve tried to acknowledge that in my book.
Can you provide an overview of some key historical events and interactions covered in your book?
Courting India began at a point of great economic crisis for England in the early 1600s, when the East India Company, which at this point had only been in business for a few years, managed to convince the new king, James I to send an official ambassador to the Mughal court in order to negotiate the all-important ‘firman’ or permission to trade. The power difference between the two nations is stark, and essentially nothing that we take for granted later is a certainty for Sir Thomas Roe, the man chosen by both the Company and the King to become England's first ambassador to the court of the wealthy and cultured ‘Great Mogol,’ whose dominion was widely considered to be one of the greatest and richest empires of the world. I wanted to understand that encounter, and I wanted to understand not just what Roe saw in India, but how and why he responded in certain ways, and how it shaped both Britain and India in the centuries to come.
What inspired you to write 'Courting India,' and what specific aspects of the relationship between England and Mughal India motivated your research?
The history of the British in India is often told in proleptic terms, with an eye to what the British Empire was to become in the future, assuming that how that history turned out was always what was meant to be. When I came across Roe’s journal from his embassy, and the accounts of his embassy by other contemporaries and fellow travellers, I was struck by how counter-intuitive that story was in comparison to our understanding of the British Empire in India. I wanted to find out more.
Could you elaborate on some of the lesser-known facts about the Mughal and British empires that have been explored in your book?
The counterintuitive imbalance of power between the two empires runs throughout the story I tell in Courting India, and it is something that I have tried to highlight throughout, because so much of the behaviour of Roe and his contemporary English merchants depended on it, and so much of the latter has just been absorbed into received history as objective 'facts', rather than subjective evaluations. I have also very deliberately tried to bring both English and non-English into play from a huge range -- Mughal, Sanskrit, Marathi, Portuguese, Dutch, and Latin, among others. That helps to illuminate multiple things which we often tend to ignore. One small example, for instance, involves how the emperor Jahangir's favourite wife Nur Jahan's past history in Bengal (she spent a formative period there with her first husband, Sher Afgan Khan) may have alerted Roe to the possibility of the English setting up trade there. His contemporary English merchants thought it was impractical, but over a hundred years later, their successors would think otherwise when Kolkata (Calcutta) became the centre of operations for the entire British Empire in India.
What authors or literary works have influenced or inspired you with their distinctive voices?
There is no specific writer whom I consciously emulated, but there are innumerable writers, both academic and non-academic, historical and literary, whose voice and style and humanity have I hope helped to shape my own style.
What advice would you offer to aspiring writers looking to find their style?
This is more what works for me, than advice, perhaps - but to read as widely and as curiously as possible, and not to limit myself simply to the subject on which I am writing, has always been helpful for me.
