An absolutely wonderful piece of nonfiction. Meticulously researched and written. It's really important that we learn more about countries that aren't in Europe in history and this is a standout piece of work

I found "Courting India" to be a compelling and engaging book. The author's writing is excellent, and the experiences of India provide a unique and insightful perspective on a fascinating country. I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in Indian culture, relationships, or politics. The writing is vivid and evocative, and the author has provided insightful observations about Indian culture and society.

The E-Book could be improved and more user-friendly, such as links to the chapters, no significant gaps between words some text written has been typed in red and a cover for the book would be better. It is very document-like instead of a book. A star has been deducted because of this.

This is a first for me by the author and one I enjoyed and I would read more of their work. The book cover is eye-catching and appealing and would spark my interest if in a bookshop. Thank you very much to the author, publisher and Netgalley for this ARC.

3.5/5.

I'd not come across Thomas Roe before but I'm glad to have encountered him in this book. Informative, educational and beautifully written, with hints of the absurdity of the merchant life, this has been one to savour.

Very enjoyable.

Review of Courting India by Nandini Das (Bloomsbury, 16 March 2023) by C.C. Corn - commissioned to feature in The Critic magazine (link tbc)

The late Sir Christopher Meyer, the closest thing modern British diplomacy has produced to a public representative, enjoyed comparing his trade to prostitution. Both are ancient trades; and neither enjoys a wholly favourable reputation.
Any modern diplomat will discreetly confirm that the profession is far from the anodyne, flag-emoji specked civility and coyly embarrassed glamour they to project on Twitter. And while none of our modern representatives are working in quite the same conditions as their predecessor Sir Thomas Roe, they may well find uncanny parallels with his unfortunate mission.
The fledgling and precarious East India Company, founded in 1600, had sent representatives to the Mughal court before, but they were only mere merchants and messengers – and the stern rebuff they received called for a formal representative of the King. After the Company persuaded James I of the necessity, Thomas Roe – a well-connected MP, friend to John Donne and Ben Jonson, and already an experienced traveller after an attempt to reach the legendary El Dorado – was dispatched to the court of Mughal Emperor Jahangir in 1615. He remained there until 1619, in an embassy that cultural historian Nandini Das describes in Courting India as ‘infuriatingly unproductive’, which produced ‘nothing particularly significant’.
Happily for the historian, however, the Company kept rigorous records, and Roe himself meticulously kept a daily diary. Professor Das uses these and the reports of other English travellers exhaustively to narrate Roe’s journey, as well as contemporary literature and other reports and, more importantly, their Indian equivalents. It is not so much the diplomatic success that fascinates Das about Roe’s embassy, but the mindset of the early modern encounter between England and India.
In a boom time for histories of British colonialism, this is an intelligent and gripping book with a deeply thoughtful awareness to human relationships and frailties, and a model approach to early modern cross-cultural encounters.
The privations suffered by Roe’s embassy are striking. Only three in ten people had a chance of coming home alive from the voyage to India, and Das’s recreation of the journey out is as intense and claustrophobic as Das Boot, with rotten medicine, cruel maritime punishments and untrained boys acting as surgeons. Dead bodies onboard would have their toes gnawed off by rats within hours.
In India itself, the English sailors excelled themselves as uncouth Brits abroad: drinking, fighting, and baiting local customs, such as killing a calf. A chaplain was notorious for ‘drunkenly dodging brothel-keepers and engaging in half-naked brawls’. For most of his time in India, Roe – seeking to keep the Company’s costs down - lived with merchants and factors already in India, in a cramped, filthy, dangerous house.
These merchants were so intensely thrust together that they carried deep and vicious resentments over the tiniest slights – not helped by the fact that English cloth sold poorly in India, a fact they took out on the locals.
Cost was an ever-present stress for Roe who had largely self-funded his embassy: ‘to supply the Company’s wants, I have wholly diminished myself’. This was in no small part down to the Mughal court customs of gift-giving. A gift at the Mughal court was a sign of the magnificence of the giver and honour of the recipient. But to Roe’s English eyes, this looked like an ‘insatiable appetite’ that gave no recompense, blurred the boundaries of commerce, patronage and diplomacy and made him deeply uncomfortable.
The gifts Roe brought for Jahangir – a virginal and a carriage which had barely survived the journey – were so meagre that the Mughal Emperor doubted whether the king of England ‘were a great king’. No wonder, given the presentation of gifts from other Indian princes resembled the entrance parade of Prince Ali Ababwa in Disney’s Aladdin.
And what magnificence there was at the Mughal court. The displays of wealth were eyewatering: Jahangir was ‘so rich in jewells that I must confess I never saw together so unvaluable wealth’, wrote Roe, who developed a reputation for swanning off from court in a dramatic huff, and ultimately tired of the alarming ostentation.
Das is particularly strong at tracing the fluid conceptualisation of ‘India’ that Roe and others would have had in their mind at this point: reports from early travellers, representations in romances like Orlando Furioso, floats at the Lord Mayor’s Parade and contemporary poetry and drama. It is no surprise that Roe, when confronted with the court of a real life oriental despot, harks back to the players in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine.
Roe himself was fascinated by the emperor’s harem, catching glimpses of them through ‘little holes in a grate of reed’. Das evocatively leans into the unreachable glamour of the harem, while also giving due recognition to the powerful Nur Jahan, effectively Jahangir’s co-regent, and going so far as to compare her with James I’s queen Anna of Denmark.
To Das’s great credit, she is not judgemental of these exoticising instincts amongst the English travellers, although she does detect a ‘self-righteous religious and cultural superiority’ in some. She finds them far more worthy of study than censure. Das is far more interested in the nebulousness and shifting realities of early modern cultural exchange, best exemplified by the moment where Jahangir’s son Khurram, the later Shah Jahan, builder of the Taj Mahal, presented Roe with a cloth-of-gold cloak in a common Mughal ritual. Khurram was playing politics, but this act made Roe deeply uncomfortable and resentful as he interpreted it through his experience of English customs.
Other European powers also loom large: the Dutch, those cousins in religion and rivals in trade, but especially the Spanish, whose flamboyant embassies and conniving officials set the example for displays of diplomatic power; and the Portuguese, already deeply embedded in India, running a naval protection racket and jealously guarding their knowledge of Asian trade.
The Company was desperate in the face of these Iberian incumbents and haughty, uninterested Mughals. But sheer chance combined with court politics ultimately played in Roe’s favour and, as a small success, he gained permission for a Company trading post at Surat: a toehold in India at last.
It is perhaps no surprise that Roe’s embassy has been superseded in the national memory by the derring-do of his contemporaries Drake and Raleigh, or the dramatic first diplomatic mission of Lord Macartney to China in 1793, or the later domination of the East India Company – why remember the embarrassing first steps of a giant? Das is confident enough to leave this implicit, and show us the nervous, anxious precariousness of Roe’s embassy in the face of a vastly more powerful and exuberant Mughal court.
The unfortunate Roe, glad to return to England in 1619, had precious little of his expense repaid by the Company, given the poor returns of the embassy. There would be no second embassy to India until 1699.

Fascinating and comprehensive account of Thomas Roe’s embassy from the impoverished James I to the opulent Mughal Court of Jahangir. Courting India provides great insight into the political and economic context. It also highlights the complex relationships and power structures at Jahangir’s court, and the open way he conducted much government business, as well as sharing court gossip and intrigue.

There are some great anecdotes about the discomforts and indignities suffered by Roe, in part self-inflicted (such as refusing to learn the language or give up wearing British-style clothes in the extreme heat) but also due to the penny-pinching ways of the East India Company. In the face of a lavish court where relationships were built on exchange of gifts, Roe had to resort to handing over his most prized personal possessions to get a hearing.

Roe’s time in India apparently had little impact on the Mughals (he is barely mentioned in Jahangir’s own comprehensive writings). It’s a useful reframing of the beginnings of British colonisation in India.

This is a well researched and informative book that made me travel in time and space, visit Jacobean London and India in XVII century.
There's so much to learn, so many wonderful things.
It's a history book but the good storytelling makes it fascinating and never dry.
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher for this arc, all opinions are mine

Fascinating account of the early encounters between Britain and Mughal Empire. Thomas Roe was James I first ambassador to India where he spent four years (1616-19) at the court of Jahangir. He went on to have a successful diplomatic career as ambassador to the Ottoman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire but here he is quite the fish out of water, trying to establish relationships and obtain better trading arrangements without the proper means to do so. Unable to match the lavishness of the Persian embassy for example or to make much headway against the Portuguese, already by this time better established on the subcontinent, he is forever complaining about lack of funds. The gifts and bribes that periodically arrive on the East India Company ships often spoil on the long voyage or rot in the climate. His health suffers and his embassy is badly understaffed. From such beginnings, it makes you wander, how on earth did Britain end up having an empire at all?

Das has done a phenomenal amount of research and gives us a fantastic insight into the Mughal court, its culture, customs, society, politics and power relationships between major players. And while Roe kept a journal and wrote letters, I didn’t get the impression that he was particularly interested in any of this, unless it pertained to him obtaining privileges for British traders. I personally found him quite dull especially compared to Jahangir and his family. Still, a fascinating read.

My thanks to Bloomsbury Publishing and Netgalley for the opportunity to read Courting India.

Courting India is an interesting account of the British arrival in India in the early 1600's from the perspective of Thomas Roe, James I’s first ambassador to the Mughal Empire, who arrived there in 1616.It explored the beginning of Britain's imperial and colonial as well as the goings on and culture of Elizabethan England.

Courting India is a beautifully written book that immerses you in Jacobean England and Mughal India before the British East India Company. This era is not normally written about, the information and stories in this book were new to me. Nandini Das immerses you in the story with wonderful descriptions of the times and makes London and India come alive. The book is full of information, but is not dry or boring. It is a vibrant and page turning account of a little-known era of history. I loved this book and will be rereading it because it was so interesting.

Unfortunately the kindle digital version I had left a lot to be desired, where the formatting made it annoying to read. A+ subject matter, well argued, but not easy to follow.