A tale of highway robberies

A juicy anecdote, set in 1656 (during the reign of Shah Jahan), of two dacoits waylaying a teenager near Delhi, sets the brisk tone for Jonathan Gil Harris&rsquo book. Highway robberies may have been a common-enough occurrence in the badlands, but what lends this instance a curious twist, which goes to the core of Harris&rsquo book, is the fact that all three dramatis personae&mdashthe two bandits and the young victim&mdashwere foreign migrants to India. The dacoits were Englishmen who were, in fact, in the employ of Shah Jahan as mercenaries, and the teenager was a Venice-born manservant of an Englishman who had only recently arrived in India.

All three men were strands in a larger story of migrants to India in the 16th and 17th century&mdashfrom Portugal, England, Russia, Malacca, Flanders, among other places&mdashwho came either to escape poverty or religious persecution back home. In that sense, they were unlike the British &lsquoWhite Mughals&rsquo who came to India two centuries later, who hailed from privileged backgrounds and were here to &ldquoconquer and command&rdquo. Many other pre-Raj migrants came as slaves or indentured labour, and nearly all of them served an Indian master, and &lsquobecame Indian&rsquo, so to speak, in the way they dressed, in the food they ate, and in the language they spoke. They were the first &lsquofirangis&rsquo, which term Harris points out wasn&rsquot just a generic name for a foreigner, but someone who had &lsquobecome Indian&rsquo and yet continued to be marked as foreign.

A firangi himself, Harris then lets us into the lives of an odd-ball cast of characters a Portuguese physician who came to Goa to escape the Inquisition and wrote a treatise on tropical medicine based on his knowledge of Arabic and Indo-Islamic practices and his dialogues with hakeems an English priest who too came to Goa and wrote an 11,000-stanza Marathi poem on the life of Christ an inmate in Akbar&rsquos harem who was either from Armenia or Portugal (it&rsquos not clear), who had been captured by pirates and dumped in India an English fakir who performed an oration to Jahangir in Farsi and a Russian slave-turned-admiral who, along with a Flemish war-captive-turned-general, devised fortifications to protect Diu and Travancore. There are several others, and in a curious twist, Harris reveals that the Italian victim of the Shah Jahan-era mercenaries later became a traditional Siddha doctor in faraway Chennai.

Harris&rsquo book is a work of forensic ethnography. Unlike with the &lsquoWhite Mughals&rsquo, there isn&rsquot voluminous archival material about these &lsquoWhite Subalterns&rsquo, and yet he ferrets out a fair bit of interesting anecdotage (even if it requires some heavy-duty plodding to get to it), and elaborate details of how the subjects of his study may have dressed or what they may have eaten. He also brings a curious physiological perspective to the entire narrative, showing how the firangis&rsquo bodies &lsquotransformed&rsquo to adapt to the heat, the dust, the smells, the microbes, and countless such realities of living in India.

The First Firangis is a scholarly, yet enchanting, work that frames migration patterns to India against a larger global history. It explores what happens when foreign elements and local traditions engage in a dialogue. In the end, you&rsquore left with new ways to think of what it means to &lsquobe Indian&rsquo.