Going Native: a review of The First Firangis By Jonathan Gil Harris

[augusto pinto]

There are many figures in this book like Garcia da Orta and Thomas Stevens who have a connection to Goa.
Augusto

The First Firangis: Remarkable Stories of Heroes, Healers, Charlatans, Courtesans & Other Foreigners who Became Indian
By Jonathan Gil Harris
Aleph Book Company, New Delhi, 2015, 318 pp., Rs 495 (HB)
ISBN 978-93-82277-63-7
AMAR FA R O O Q U I

This is a book about historical figures whom one would usually not expect to find under the same roof. More importantly, it is a profound
reflection on what it meant to be a ‘foreigner’ in early modern
India.

Through biographical sketches of a dozen men and two women, all of whom (except perhaps one, Juliana Dias da Costa) were born outside the Indian subcontinent but for some reason or the other spent
some time in India, Jonathan Gil Harris tries to come to terms with his own experience of ‘foreignness’. For this book is as much about the author, a New Zealander who has been a regular visitor
to India, as the fascinating characters he tells us about. These characters belong to the two centuries between the beginning
of the 16th century and the early 18th century. Some of them such as Garcia da Orta, Malik Ambar, Sarmad Kashani and
Niccolò Manucci are quite well known. A few others like Augustin Hiriart or Sebastião Gonçalves Tibau are rather obscure figures, while Mandu Firangi has left virtually no trace in the historical record barring a mention in the list of artists who executed drawings for the Persian translation of the Ramayana commissioned by Akbar.

At one level, what interests Harris is the ways in which the bodies of
these men and women responded to the climate, food and requirements of social interaction that they encountered in India. These he relates to his own efforts to cope with the heat, bacterial and viral invasion and customs of the country. The narrative is interspersed with musings on the transformation of his own body: diet, gestures, clothes/
clothing. Clothing, or rather re-clothing, makes possible the assumption of new identities while facilitating adaptation to local environments. The early 17th century English traveller (in the broadest sense of the term) Thomas Coryat lived for 14 months as a poor semi-clad mendicant, surviving on alms, at the shrine of Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti in Ajmer. He even managed to attract the attention of Jahangir who made to this firangi faqir an offering of a hundred silver coins. Ironically, when much later Coryat momentarily dispensed with the austere diet of mendicants amidst servants of the East India Company at its Surat factory, he perished instantly.

Harris remarks that “having opened up his body to so many Indian elements, both sustaining and sickening, Coryat was arguably killed instead by his reacqaintance with an English substance [cheap sherry] to which his body had become unaccustomed in Asia” (p 211). At a deeper level, First Firangis is concerned with the fluid identities that
its cast of characters represent. ‘Firangi’ is a label that Harris uses as a convenient shorthand for the outsider–insider status of the people he discusses. This is a status many of them had both in relation
to India as well as their respective places of origin. Their biographies collectively undermine stereotypical notions of ‘white’, ‘European’ and ‘Christian’. In the wake of Vasco da Gama’s successful journey to the Kerala coast and back via the all-sea route around the Cape of Good Hope, there was a steady flow of firangis from the Iberian Peninsula to India. From Garcia da Orta in the first half of the 16th century to
Juliana Dias da Costa in the first quarter of the 18th century, individuals with a direct or indirect Portuguese connection h i s t o r y left their imprint on the landscape of the subcontinent. Da Orta’s residence
and garden constituted the nucleus of the Fort in Bombay/Mumbai while
Juliana’s name survives in the locality known as ‘Sarai Jullena’ adjacent to Jamia Millia Islamia in Delhi. Moreover, the territories of the Portuguese Estado da Índia functioned as bases from which Jesuits, merchants and travellers from various parts of Europe ventured forth into the Mughal empire or the Deccani sultanats. Garcia da Orta spent some time at Ahmadnagar in the 1540s as a physician in the court of Burhan Nizam Shah. His stint at Ahmadnagar greatly enriched his knowledge of medicine,  something that was duly ackowledged in his major treatise on medicinal plants, Colloquies on the Simples and Drugs of India (1563). That he belonged to the Judaeo-Islamic intellectual tradition made him more receptive to ideas and practices based on Arabic Unani texts. In this context Harris reminds us of the “long age of multiculturalism in the area known as Al-Andalus or Andalusia, the ensemble of Muslim-ruled emirates that had been a vital part of Iberian culture for nearly eight centuries” (p35). This was the tradition da Orta had imbibed.

He came from a family of émigré Spanish Jews in Portugal who had
nominally converted to Catholicism to escape persecution and was thus a New Christian (Cristão-novo). Nevertheless, .da Orta and his family did not entirely repudiate their Jewish roots; his sister Catarina was burnt at the stake in Goa (1569).

Persecution might also have shaped the intellectual preferences of Thomas Stephens, a Catholic from England who had sought refuge in Rome due the growing religious intolerance of the State under Elizabeth from c.1574 onwards. He subsequently became a  Jesuit priest, was sent out to Goa and spent nearly 40 years in the remote parish of Rachol. Here he learnt the languages and dialects of the area Stephens, or Pâtri Guru as he came to be known, wrote a Konkani primer but is much better known for his Marathi epic Kristapurana. In this he demonstrated
his command over literary Marathi, using the ovi poetic metre of the
Dyneshwari. The popular 16th-century saint-poet Eknath, a  near-contemporary of Stephens, too used a variant of this ovi for his compositions which might  have influenced the choice of metre for the Kristapurana. The epic was a labour of love revealing the poet’s fascination with the language, its sounds, its lilt, its rhythm. ‘Going native’ did not, in this case, amount to “a cultural degeneration from a European norm” (p 13), but implied a creative engagement with the Orient. The atypical eclecticism of Stephens is likely to have been the product of the fuzziness of his identity as an English Jesuit (itself an anomaly in the late Elizabethan era) living in virtual exile in India, in Portuguese Goa.

The careers of some of the other firangis discussed by Harris also make
sense only when placed in similar contexts. Augustin Hiriart, a Basque
jeweller from Bordeaux and a wanderer, managed to impress the discerning Jahangir such that he was made part of the team constituted by the emperor to manufacture a new royal takht for him in 1616. The throne was embellished with a large number of jewels, the special skill of Hiriart who is identified with the skilled European mentioned in Tuzuk-i Jahangiri on whom the emperor bestowed the title Hunarmand. What is significant is the ease with which Hiriart/Hunarmand adapted himself to his new home. This is indicated by his involvement in court intrigues which
might have been the cause of his death (by poisoning?) during the early years of Shah Jahan’s reign. The Basques were targets of persecution in both Spain and France due to their ethnicity and Protestantism. “It is striking”, Harris observes, “that many firangi migrants to India ... were, like Hiriart, members of a persecuted minority community in their places of birth. In each case, this seems to have generated a sense of not quite
belonging that prompted them to keep crossing borders.”(p 137)

The Portuguese Estado da Índia had a prominent non-official counterpart
which was not subject to and usually in defiance of its authority. This was the underbelly of the Portuguese Indian Ocean empire. Pirates, smugglers, adventurers, mercenaries, slave-traders, swindlers, and run-away convicts constituted what has been referred to by George Winius rather charitably as the “shadow empire”. Harris is not
really concerned with what this informal realm meant to the Estado da Índia and focuses instead on the multiple identities of the creators and inhabitants of this empire. These included the ‘Arakaners’ of Sandwip in the Chittagong area of the Bay of Bengal who were “Portuguese by name, Arakan by communal identification, Bengali by language” (p 250). The story of the ‘raja’ of Sandwip in the first quarter of the 17th century,
Sebastião Gonçalves Tibau, is as much about the Portuguese as it is about the Arakaners. Sandwip and the surrounding area became home to communities whose identities elude neat classification, a source of much trouble for later ethnographers.

Harris seeks to question and destabilise the commonsensical notion
of the firangi. The firangi’s ‘whiteness’ is crucial to this notion. His inclusion of Malik Ambar, the Kambaatissata- speaking slave of Ethiopian origin who rose to be de facto ruler of Ahmadnagar in the early 17th century, deepens and broadens the definition of firangi. Using
Malik Ambar’s initial name (Chapu) as a clue, Richard Eaton has traced his birth to the remote Kambata region of Ethiopia from which a large number of slaves were captured in the period. Malik Ambar became part of a numerically substantial African–Indian community. These were East Africans who had ‘gone native’ (in a non-pejorative sense) and
conform to Harris’s understanding of firangi. Some readers might consider
this understanding too general, but the ideological statement that the book
makes is particularly relevant for our times when identities are sought to be demarcated in absurdly rigid ways.