Bombay Castle
Late 1695
After Khafi Khan had completed his interviews with the Gunsway survivors at Surat, he continued on his original mission, porting goods for Abdur Razzak, the commander of Rahiri. Khan followed the coastal route south from Surat, and sometime in the late fall of 1695, he found himself on the outskirts of Bombay. Razzak turned out to have an old connection with John Gayer, and he had taken the liberty to write the East India Company governor to alert him that his emissary would be in the region. Perhaps the two men could meet and attempt to reach some kind of resolution to the current standoff, Razzak suggested. Barricaded in Bombay Castle, waiting for Aurangzeb to launch his inevitable attack on the company headquarters, Gayer leapt at the opportunity to make his case directly to Khan. He sent word to the brother of his chief of staff, who delivered an invitation to Khan in person, proposing a summit between the two men on the grounds of Bombay Castle.
Reading Khan’s epic history of the Aurangzeb era now, his antipathy toward the British traders jumps off the page. (“During these troubles,” he writes of his entente with Gayer, “I, the writer of this work, had the misfortune of seeing the English of Bombay.”) But the contempt he felt for the company did not compromise his characteristically perceptive reporting skills. The account he left behind of his visit with Gayer gives us an unparalleled glimpse of the negotiations between the British and Mughals at the very height of the crisis.
Khan’s first sight, on entering the Castle grounds, was an imposing display of the company’s military guards standing at attention in full dress:
Every step I advanced, young men with sprouting beards, handsome and well clothed, with fine muskets in their hands, were visible on every side. As I went onwards, I found Englishmen standing, with long beards, of similar age, with the same accouterments and dress. After that I saw musketeers, young men well dressed and arranged, drawn up in ranks. Further on, I saw Englishmen with white beards, clothed in brocade, with muskets on their shoulders, drawn up in two ranks, and in perfect array. Next I saw some English children, handsome and wearing pearls on the borders of their hats.
In all, Khan estimated that he passed seven thousand musketeers, a number that seems high given the scale of the British operation at that moment in history. After passing through the gauntlet, Khan was ushered directly to Gayer’s offices, where the governor greeted him with an embrace and offered him a chair. (Presumably they had a translator between them, but Khan makes no mention of it.) The two men chatted for a few minutes about their mutual acquaintance Abdur Razzak; Gayer tried to establish a civil tone by singing Razzak’s praises to his emissary. Before long, though, the conversation turned to the more urgent—and contentious—issues of the day. Why, Gayer asked his guest, were his factors in Surat still in irons?
Khan replied, poetically, “Although you do not acknowledge that shameful action, worthy of the reprobation of all sensible men, which was perpetrated by your wicked men, this question you have put to me is as if a wise man should ask where the sun is when all the world is filled with its rays.”
Gayer pushed back. “Those who have an ill-feeling against me cast upon me the game for the fault of others,” he said. “How do you know that this deed was the work of my men? By what satisfactory proof will you establish this?”
Here Khan was on firm ground, at least in terms of his access to the participants. “In that ship I had a number of wealthy acquaintances, and two or three poor ones, destitute of all worldly wealth,” he explained. “I heard from them that when the ship was plundered, and they were taken prisons, some men, in the dress and with the looks of Englishmen, and on whose hands and bodies there were marks, wounds and scars, said in their own language, ‘We got these scars at the time of the siege of Sidi Yakut, but today the scars have been removed from our hearts.’ A person who was with them knew Hindi and Persian, and he translated their words to my friends.”
Gayer laughed openly at the accusation, but he did not deny the facts as Khan presented them. “It is true they may have said so,” he conceded. “They are a party of Englishmen, who, having received wounds in the siege of Yakut Khan, were taken prisoners by him.” But they were not employees of the East India Company, Gayer explained, and the company itself had repudiated their actions in the strongest terms.
Initially, Khafi Khan countered with flattery, smiling at Gayer and saying, “What I have heard about your readiness of reply and your wisdom, I have [now] seen. All praise to your ability for giving off-hand, and without consideration, such an exculpatory and sensible answer!” But then, beneath the smile, Khan delivered a threat, referencing the fact that the company had printed coins with the English king’s face on them: “But you must recall to mind that the hereditary Kings of Bijapur and Haidarabad and the good-for-nothing Sambha have not escaped the hands of King Aurangzeb. Is the island of Bombay a sure refuge? What a manifest declaration of rebellion you have shown in coining rupees!”
Here as well, Gayer chose not to dispute the facts of Khan’s brief. Instead, he turned the tables by casting blame on the Hindustan currency. “We have to send every year a large sum of money, the profits of our commerce, to our country, and the coins of the King of Hindustan are taken at a loss,” he explained. “Besides the coins of Hindustan are of short weight, and much debased; and in this island, in the course of buying and selling them, great disputes arise. Consequently we have placed our own names on the counts, and have made them current in our own jurisdiction.” The British had nothing against Aurangzeb as a sovereign, Gayer argued. They just needed a stable currency, as businessmen.
The conversation appears to have ended in a stalemate. But at least the two sides were talking. Gayer may have hoped for a more extended visit, but Khan decided it was best to keep the exchange professional: “[The Englishman] offered me entertainment in their fashion,” he wrote, “but I accepted only air . . . and was glad to escape.”