ENGLISHMEN, INDIANS,
AND OTHERS
Throughout the year 1688 the English East India Company was in a state of formal, declared war with the Mughal Empire. One is tempted by metaphors of a demented mongoose nipping at the leg of a war elephant, and certainly the English did not distract the emperor and his court and army from the pursuit of Sambhaji and the imposition of Mughal rule on Golconda, but a few regional officials were seriously annoyed. The English had attacked ships carrying pilgrims from the Mughal realms to Mecca. Muslim sea warriors in the Mughal service had attacked the English at Bombay. Also, early in 1688, in the waterlogged delta of Bengal, a few hundred fever-ridden Englishmen who had with-drawn from untenable positions farther inland were hanging on and hoping the political storm would blow over.
Down to the 1680s the directors in London had consistently rejected proposals to build forts and increase the company’s military and political presence in Asia. But in 1681–82 the company came under the control of forces led by Sir Josiah Child, who believed that “profit and power must go hand in hand.” So the directors were ready to take a forceful line when the next occasion presented itself. But no one experienced in the Indian Ocean would have grasped at their casus belli or devised the plan they sent out in 1686. Bengal was rising in importance as a source of cloth imports to Europe. The English, holding nothing but an unfortified trading post, had many disputes with the Mughal governor concerning the interpretation of the trading privileges they had been granted. But any old Asia hand knew that such matters were personal, had their ups and downs, and that force should be used judiciously, as a last resort, and with local allies firmly in place. The directors had none of this in hand in January 1686, when they dispatched ten ships with six companies of infantry to sail directly to Bengal, occupy a port, ally with the king of Arakan (now part of Myanmar), declare war on the Mughal Empire, and march on its provincial capital. It was assumed that the Mughal governor would flee from this fearsome assault and then would be agreeable to a restoration of peace and all the privileges previously granted.
By the time this fleet reached Bengal, the endless local disputes over terms of trade had reached such a pitch that the company’s merchants there had been forced to withdraw from the big cities. Their leader, Job Charnock, was the first of the great “old India hands” in the history of British power in India. He had been in India for more than thirty years. He had a Hindu wife; some people said he had saved her from her husband’s funeral pyre. In 1687 his band of a few hundred sickly refugees had lodged near the mouth of the Ganges but then had managed to get a tolerated foothold farther upstream, at a place called Kalikata. There they clung to life through the hot season and the monsoon rains of 1688. In November of that year the captain of a company ship insisted that they board it and join in a misconceived expedition farther east. In separate theaters of these farcical hostilities, English threats to pilgrim ships bound for Mecca and the willingness of the company to pay a stiff indemnity led to peace with the Mughal Empire in 1690. Charnock returned to Kalikata with the permission of more friendly provincial authorities and began building up a trading center there. He died in 1693. He knew the advantages of Kalikata: a high bank, a wide patch of river, not too close to the centers of Mughal power in Bengal. The English spelled its name Calcutta. Tenacious old Job Charnock was buried in its churchyard and memorialized as the founder of the great colonial city.
The farce in Bengal had little effect on the English at their oldest settlement, Fort St. George at Madras on the Coromandel (southeast) Coast of India. There, on February 3, 1688, the English ship Moulsford arrived from Xiamen (Amoy) on the south coast of China. Among its passengers were three Chinese sent by “the General of Emoy [Amoy], to treat with us of a mutual trade to those parts.” After some inconclusive discussions with the English, the Chinese expressed a desire to go inland to “Conjeveron . . . to see a pagoda built by their ancestors” and report on it to their “King and Master.” The English, anxious to build up goodwill for their trade at Xiamen, did all they could to assist them. The Chinese probably went back to Xiamen on ships that went there from Madras late in 1688, but there is no further record of them. We already have met Shi Lang, the “general” of Xiamen who had sent them to Madras, kneeling in the court of the Kangxi emperor in August 1688, being honored for his commanding role in the conquest of Taiwan for the Qing Dynasty in 1683.
Those Chinese envoys who wanted to go to “Conjeveron” to see a “pagoda built by their ancestors” were following a lead in the writings of the most famous pilgrim-traveler in all Chinese history, the Buddhist monk Xuanzang, who made an epic overland journey from China to India between 629 and 645 and brought back many important Buddhist Scriptures. Xuanzang mentions a city named Jianzhibuluo located at the point farthest south of his travels in India. Although difficult to identify, we know that any stranger arriving at Madras in the 1600s and wanting to make a pilgrimage to something sounding a little like “Kanchipulo” would have been sent off inland toward the gate towers and riotous profusion of images of the temples of “Conjeveron”—that is, Kancheepuram, still a great Hindu pilgrimage center, about fifty miles from Madras. It is not too surprising that the envoys were following a lead in a text from the seventh century; Xuanzang’s Record of Western Regions is a famous book, some Chinese seafarers were quite well read, and there was an important Buddhist monastery at Xiamen whose monks or lay devotees may have suggested the investigation.
The last of the improbably world-encircling connections of this little story involves the governor of Fort St. George in 1688 and one of the leading instigators of English efforts to trade with China in the 1680s, Elihu Yale. Governor Yale and his brother Thomas were growing rich on private trade, some of it permitted by the company and some of it not, all of it contributing to the rise of Madras as a commercial center. Born in Connecticut, taken to England when he was two years old, Yale had kept in touch with relatives in New England and had a certain sentimental attachment to his native land. He returned from India to England in 1699, with one of the first of those Anglo-Indian fortunes that made “nabob” part of the language. Beginning in 1713, he made several gifts to a new college in Connecticut. The total value of all his gifts was about £1,162 (perhaps $100,000 at prices in 2000), comparable to John Harvard’s gift to the college in Massachusetts, but not much in relation to Yale’s considerable fortune. In recognition of his generosity the college was named after him. Yale University is proud of its long-standing China connections and its great distinction in scholarship on China; not many Yale people know that the connection goes back to old Elihu himself.
In the midst of all these confusions Bengal and the Coromandel Coast were emerging in the 1680s as the greatest frontiers of opportunity and growth for Europeans trading in Asia. Parisians, Londoners, Amsterdammers, and some of their country cousins acquired a whole new vocabulary and set of tastes in cloth goods. English men and women, even some seamen and ordinary workers, wore undergarments of calico. Chintzes were especially in demand among wealthy ladies in the Netherlands. Merchants hoped to have new patterns in flowered silks available every year, “for English ladies and they say the French and other Europeans will give twice as much for a new thing not seen in Europe before, though worse, than they will give for a better silk [of] the same fashion worn the former years.” Words like “chintz,” “calico,” “muslin,” and a bewildering variety of others that have not remained current down to our own times came into the English language from India, along with the great variety of goods they named. Textiles were forming a larger and larger part of the English and Dutch companies’ investments in Asian goods. The year 1688 was one of plague and famine in India, and the English war with the Mughal Empire temporarily stopped the trade in Bengal. The cloth exports from India of both companies dropped off sharply; the English in 1688 exported less than one-fourth of their 1687 quantity, less than one-tenth of the peak year of the Indian cloth boom in 1684. The companies’ trade in Indian textiles did not fully recover until the late 1690s but then remained strong throughout the early 1700s.
The agents of the two great companies in their Indian forts and trading posts found that their demand for textiles was welcome but scarcely essential to the survival of a sophisticated world of production and trade that had been there long before them. The weavers of western India had big markets in Central Asia—Persia, Bokhara, Samarkand—and the countries around the Red Sea. The textile industry of the Coromandel Coast exported huge quantities to Southeast Asia; Dutch access to a share in these exports was vital to their trade in the spice-producing areas. Production was intricately specialized; different groups of people occupying different niches in local caste systems grew the cotton, spun it, wove it, and dyed it. At each point merchants were involved in the transmission of the goods from each stage to the next, and frequently had to advance money to the producers before they could plant, spin, weave, or dye. The surroundings might seem primitive—everywhere in southern India weavers worked outdoors, under trees—but the quality of the best products, like the famous “flowing water” transparent muslin, was far beyond the competence of European craftsmen. Highly detailed knowledge of production procedures for certain kinds of goods was passed down through particular groups of families tied to specific places. Procedures for the fixing of vegetable dyes through a complex series of chemical treatments were triumphs of folk technology. The southern Indian weaver family with its looms in the shade of a great tree and the dyer family washing its cloth in a river especially known for the qualities of its water, feeding their goods into a vast network of trade and passing their skills on to their children, were remarkably important and effective pieces of the world of 1688.
Europeans coming by way of the Cape of Good Hope were by no means the only outsiders trading in the Indian subcontinent. From the sixteenth-century Portuguese down to our own times, the Europeans had found Armenians spread out on the land and sea trade routes of Asia. One of them, Hovhannes Joughayetsi (John of Julfa), spent 1688 in Lhasa, the largest town in Tibet. He had set out in 1682 from New Julfa outside Isfahan in Persia, the most important Armenian center outside the homeland in those times, with goods provided to him by one of the leading Armenian merchant families, the Guerak. A branch of the Guerak family is known to have lived in Venice and to have used as its personal emblem a beehive with a swarm of bees heading straight for it, perhaps alluding to the wealth that accumulated in the family’s storehouses as a result of the far-flung journeys of its agents. Hovhannes was to sell his masters’ goods in India and remit to them three-fourths of the profit on the transaction. Educated in the careful commercial methods taught in the special school for merchants in New Julfa, he was obliged to keep a record of his movements and transactions for his masters. His willingness to undertake such a long and hazardous voyage on such terms becomes more comprehensible when we learn that his masters did not object to his buying and selling on his own account or entering other partnerships on his own and that in every major commercial center in India he found a little colony of Armenians and an Armenian church.
Hovhannes moved from Surat to Agra and back again, buying and selling textiles and indigo in partnership with other Armenian merchants. The Armenians, who knew the country and its trade better than the Dutch and the English, could avoid some of the Indian intermediaries and buy textiles 30 percent cheaper than the English East India Company. In 1686 Hovhannes went to Bengal, bought cloth to sell in Tibet, and made the arduous trek up through Nepal, over a 15,000-foot pass, and on to Lhasa, more than 12,000 feet above sea level. There he lived for almost five years. There too he found a little colony of Armenians, some of them settled and raising families there. He traded directly with the Tibetans or with the other Armenians, some of whom regularly made an appalling journey of more than 900 miles through largely uninhabited mountain country, almost entirely above 13,000 feet, down to Xining in the Qinghai basin on the far northwest frontier of China. He entrusted to his fellow countrymen amber to be sold to the Chinese and silver to be exchanged for Chinese gold, since the price of gold in terms of silver was much lower in China than in India. Disputes among the Armenian residents of Lhasa were settled as far as possible in meetings of the little community, without recourse to the Tibetan authorities. Hovhannes mourned when they died and gave small presents on festive occasions. When another employee of the Gueraks died on February 10, 1688, he had to take charge of the dead man’s goods and personal effects. On his way down through Nepal in 1693 he noted at one point, “The entire track is obliterated by flood waters; it is the road to Hell; you have to cross a hair’s bridge.”
Tibetan culture was steeped in “Lamaist” Buddhism, in which the basic Buddhist beliefs in reincarnation and in the spiritual powers that result from meditation became extraordinarily highly developed; the various great lamas of the monasteries were believed to be reincarnations of their predecessors, and there were endless reports, right down to our own times, of demonstrations of precognition, out-of-body travel, and other manifestations of spiritual power. In the 1680s the prestige of the Dalai Lamas, based in Lhasa, had just been brought to a high point by the “Great Fifth” Dalai Lama, supported by the military power of the Khosot Mongols and the distant approval of the Qing emperors in Beijing. The fifth Dalai Lama had died in 1682, and real power was in the hands of a regent nominally subordinate to the Khosots. The regent was keeping the death secret, claiming that the “Great Fifth” was in meditative seclusion and could not be disturbed. Not until 1696 was the secret revealed and the Sixth Dalai Lama enthroned. The huge fortress-monastery-palace of the Potala, shining with red and white plaster and ornamented with gold leaf, was nearing completion, glittering in the thin air above the town where the caravans came and went and Hovhannes visited, argued, and made deals with his fellow countrymen.