Review: What a visiting Brit thought of early 1600s India
,” does not take a historian’s view so much as that of a literary biographer. Das offers a close reading of Roe’s journal and fleshes out the character of the man within the context of the sociopolitical forces that shaped him. She examines the politics and literature of Jacobean England, where Roe felt at home, and the personalities and intrigues of the Mughal court, where he felt hopelessly lost.
His diaries reflect his classical education and his aristocratic upbringing. His view of the world was refracted by the presumed superiorities of his faith, nationality and skin color: Muslims were infidels, Hindus idolaters, India ungovernable, and Indians, well, they were the fallen descendants of Shem or Ham.
Yet, if Roe’s journals remain valuable today, it is less, I think, as a historical source than as an instance of how such sources can be used to rewrite history. When, in the 18th and 19th centuries, the British Empire grew in power and extent, Britain found it expedient to justify colonialism and conquest as inevitable steps in the march of history and the progress of humanity. To that end, Roe’s journals, almost forgotten for 200 years, suddenly found new purpose.
Such revisionism was far from unsuccessful. Even today, within the great dome of the Victoria Memorial in Kolkata — one of the most famous landmarks in the city — a series of panels commemorates the most significant moments in British Indian history. One of them shows a man emerging from an English carriage, in splendid Jacobean clothing, received by a reverential crowd of Mughal officers and nobles.
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