Empire of Contingency: How Portugal Entered the Indo-Persian World [1 ed.] 1512826448, 9781512826449

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Empire of Contingency

Empire of Contingency How Portugal Entered the Indo-Persian World

Jorge Flores

U n i v e r si t y of Pe n ns y lva n i a Pr e ss Ph i l a de l ph i a

Copyright © 2024 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www.pennpress.org Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 A Cataloging-in-Publication record is available from the Library of Congress. Hardcover ISBN 978-1-5128-2644-9 Ebook ISBN 978-1-5128-2645-6

PARA A RITA Pel’ Os Olhos da Ásia, pelo que veio a seguir e pelo que ainda virá.

Contents

List of Illustrations

ix

Regnal Dates

xi

Note on Conventions

Introduction

xiii

1

PART I. SPYING, CONVERSING, KNOWING Chapter 1. Information and Documentary Regimes

19

Chapter 2. The Mughal Realm Under Portuguese Surveillance

36

Chapter 3. The Spy Ring of Viceroy Count of Linhares

60

Chapter 4. Intelligence and Ethnography at Linhares’s Desk

90

PART II. WRITING, TRANSLATING, PERFORMING Chapter 5. The Oficial de Unha

111

Chapter 6. The Língua do Estado

132

Chapter 7. Familiar Letters and Letter Dissections

154

viii

Contents

Chapter 8. “With the Letters Inserted Like Seed Pearls”: Epistolary Performances

174

Chapter 9. (Un)Staging the Farman

194

Conclusion

217

List of Abbreviations

225

Notes

227

Bibliography

275

Index

311

Acknowledgments

325

List of Illustrations

Figure 1. View of late sixteenth-century Goa, J. H. Linschoten, Itinerario, 1596

3

Figure 2. Page from a Portuguese–Hindustani–Persian vocabulary, Jerónimo Xavier (attrib.), early seventeenth century

27

Figure 3. Plans of Goa, Diu, Daman, Bassein, and Chaul, João Teixeira Albernaz, Taboas geraes de toda a navegação, 1630

39

Figure 4. Akbar presiding over religious discussions in the Ibadat Khana, Narsingh, 1603–1605

51

Figure 5. Viceroy Dom Miguel de Noronha (Count of Linhares), Pedro Barreto de Resende, Breve tratado ou epilogo de todos os visorreys, 1635

61

Figure 6. Emperor Shahjahan, Bichitr (attrib.), c. 1635

63

Figure 7. The route from Goa to Bijapur and from Bijapur to Dabul according to Mandeslo’s account (1638), Pierre Duval, Cartes des itineraires et voïages modernes, 1677

71

Figure 8. Detail of the viceregal palace of Goa from Linschoten’s plan of the city, 1596

114

Figure 9. Golkonda Vyapari Brahmans, anonymous, eighteenth century

152

Figure 10. Viceroy Dom Francisco da Gama (Count of Vidigueira), Pedro Barreto de Resende, Breve tratado ou epilogo de todos os visorreys, 1635

158

x

List of Illustrations

Figure 11. Persian text with Portuguese annotations of a farman of Shahjahan, 1635

185

Figure 12. Portuguese translation of a farman of Akbar with a depiction of the emperor’s seal, 1602

191

Figure 13. Drawing of Jahangir’s seal, Manuel Godinho de Erédia, 1611

192

Figure 14. Sultan Muhammad ‘Adil Shah and Ikhlas Khan, anonymous, c. 1670

204

Figure 15. Plan of the second floor of the Jesuit professed house of Goa, Alessandro Valignano (attrib.), 1586

208

Map 1. Persianate India and Portuguese India in the long seventeenth century

4

Map 2. The travels of Shahjahan and Muhammad ‘Adil Shah’s farmans (1630, 1653) through Goa

195

Chart 1. The Count of Linhares’s web of intelligence (1629–1635)

86

Chart 2. The línguas do Estado of the seventeenth century

146

Regnal Dates

Portugal

Manuel I John III Sebastian Henry Philip II Philip III Philip IV John IV Alfonso VI Peter II

1495–1521 1521–1557 1557–1578 1578–1580 1580–1598 1598–1621 1621–1640 1640–1656 1656–1683 1683–1706

Mughal Empire

Babur Humayun Sur interregnum Sher Shah Islam Shah Muhammad Shah Humayun Akbar Jahangir Shahjahan Aurangzeb

1526–1530 1530–1540 1540–1555 1540–1545 1545–1554 1554–1555 1555–1556 1556–1605 1605–1627 1627–1658 1658–1707

xii

Regnal Dates

‘Adil Shahi Sultanate

Yusuf Isma‘il Mallu Ibrahim I ‘Ali I Ibrahim II Muhammad ‘Ali II Sikandar

1490–1510 1510–1534 1534–1535 1535–1558 1558–1580 1580–1627 1627–1656 1656–1672 1672–1686

Nizam Shahi Sultanate

Ahmad Bahri Burhan I Husain I Murtaza I Husain II Isma‘il Burhan II Bahadur Murtaza II Burhan III Husain III Murtaza III

1496–1510 1510–1553 1553–1565 1565–1588 1588–1589 1589–1591 1591–1595 1595–1600 1600–1610 1610–1631 1631–1633 1633–1636

Note on Conventions

For the general reader’s convenience, I have not included diacritical marks when transcribing Perso-Arabic words but, for the sake of pronunciation, I have used the left single quotation mark (‘) and the right single quotation mark (’) for ain and hamza, respectively. As for plurals, I have indicated them by adding the letter s (e.g., subas, farmans). Quotations from primary sources in languages other than English are offered in English translation (all translations are mine unless otherwise stated). Due to word limits, the original text is included in the notes only in the most significant cases. The names of the kings of Portugal are written in their English form ( John IV, not João IV). I refer to the three Habsburg monarchs who reigned in Portugal between 1580 and 1640 by their commonly used Spanish titles, not the Portuguese ones (Philip II instead of Philip I). The book includes a list of the rulers of the main dynasties considered (the Kingdom of Portugal, the Mughal Empire, the sultanates of Ahmadnagar and Bijapur), although regencies are not indicated. The regnal dates of other rulers are signified by r., while government periods (of Portuguese viceroys, Mughal governors, Jesuit superior generals, and so on) are signified by g. Both are given in parentheses. The book renders dates in the Gregorian calendar, with the occasional use of the Julian and Islamic calendars. The bibliography section on printed primary sources also includes works, listed by author, that comprise the publication of an early modern text. Last, I employ terms such as “indigenous” and “native” exclusively when referring to an individual or community innate to a given geocultural space.

Introduction

How did an ill-equipped European empire, far away from “home,” effectively spy on an almighty Asian empire in the early modern age? To what extent could two unequal states, embodying diverse linguistic and cultural spheres, communicate in the political arena? These are the simple, interrelated questions that steer Empire of Contingency. The main but not sole actors of this story are the Portuguese and the Mughal empires. The stage they shared is sixteenth- and seventeenth-century India. Ultimately, the book is about distinct imperial formations cohabiting in the premodern period. It follows the underdog empire of the Portuguese traversing several boundaries in an effort to connect in critical ways to the Mughal political order and thus assure its own survival. In so doing, this work rejects preordained clashes of civilizations as well as uncritical dialogues of civilizations. The foundations of these two distinct empires were laid through military conquest. The Portuguese overseas ventures first began with the capture of the Moroccan city of Ceuta in 1415, a political manifesto from the new dynasty of Avis and its first representative, King John I (r. 1385–1433).1 The Mughal imperial enterprise came into being roughly a century later with the conquest of Delhi in 1526 by Babur, the ruler of Kabul, who thus established a new dynasty and a long-lasting polity. As the Portuguese Empire turned global, its monarchs lost direct touch with it; none of them traveled beyond North Africa. In contrast, all Mughal emperors took active part in territorial conquest as most of the subcontinent was brought under imperial rule before the dawn of the eighteenth century.2 In its unsteady beginnings, the Mughal Empire was one among many IndoPersian states, which is to say, one of the political formations of peninsular India which embraced Persian influence where language, power, and culture are concerned. When it reached its zenith, the Mughal Empire was the sole Indo-Persian polity; it had engulfed all the others and turned them into imperial provinces through conquest and compromise. The Mughals adopted Persian as their political idiom and developed a powerful imperial ideology which, with nuances over

2

Introduction

time, molded the inner life of the empire and its external relations. The Mughals became key players in the vast political canvas of South, Central, and even West Asia, shaped by two equally large Islamic states: the Ottomans and Safavids. Equally, the Mughals’ reputation went beyond territorial limits and claims, spreading as far as Southeast and East Asia. The Portuguese, for their part, used the sea to weave a worldwide empire of war, commerce, diplomacy, religion, and ideology. Like Persian in Mughal India, the Portuguese language enhanced imperial cohesion and contributed toward the interconnection of a horde of cities, fortresses, trading posts, settlements, and territories across the “Portuguese world.” The need to overcome distance led the crown to launch its own overseas avatars. Created as early as 1505, the Estado da Índia—a term not commonly employed before the second half of the sixteenth century—eventually opted for Goa as its capital; situated on the island of Tiswadi, on the Konkan coast of western India, the city was conquered by the Portuguese in 1510, only two decades later becoming the seat of power of successive governors and viceroys (Figure 1). Less impressive a state, the Estado do Brasil was founded in 1548 and had its political nerve in the city of Bahia. The pervasive use of metaphors to signify the body politic in the early modern period explains why Goa and Bahia were often portrayed as the heads, hearts, or keys of Portuguese Asia and America.3 From intermittent contact with the Mughals in the 1530s, the Portuguese came into close vicinity with them in the last third of the sixteenth century. The capture of the sultanates of Gujarat and Bengal in the 1570s, followed by the conquest of Sind and Orissa two decades later, brought Emperor Akbar into proximity with important Portuguese strongholds and interests in the subcontinent. Simultaneously, the Mughal military advances toward the south from around 1580 put the three Deccan sultanates at risk and posed a direct threat to the capital of the Estado da Índia. The Nizam Shahi kingdom of Ahmadnagar eventually fell in 1636. The imperial incorporation of the Deccan was brought to completion after Emperor Aurangzeb seized Bijapur and Golconda in 1686 and 1687, thus removing the ‘Adil Shahi and Qutb Shahi dynasties (Map 1). Goa survived, though. The city lived in anxiety about an ever-threatening Mogor (or Grão Mogor), the Portuguese term which designated the Mughal emperor as well as the Mughal state. The pressure eased as the eighteenth century approached, but other foes were to replace the Mughals. The talk of the town increasingly centered on the Marathas—o Marata, or the Maratha polity from Maharashtra (the western upland of the Deccan plateau)—and their rising prominence in the Indian subcontinent. In an earlier book, which serves as prelude for

Introduction

3

Figure 1. View of late sixteenth-century Goa, Jan Huygen van Linschoten, Itinerario (Amsterdam: Cornelis Claesz, 1596). Public domain. Image courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library, Providence, RI.

the present one, I studied the forging of several frontier zones between the Portuguese and the Mughals until major developments took place in Gujarat, Bengal, and the Deccan during the 1630s. Unable and unwilling to wage war against too powerful an enemy, the Estado da Índia adopted distinct strategies over time for these three different regions of the Indian Peninsula. All in all, the Estado resorted to dissimulation, negotiation, and caution, but also to some level of confrontation.4 The present book goes a step further, or rather a step back, by scratching beneath the surface and studying the bases of Portuguese actions vis-à-vis the Mughals. It seeks to dissect the clockwork mechanism proper, although this analogy might convey the misleading image of the Estado da Índia as a precise device. On the one hand, the Portuguese systematically endeavored to get ahead of the Mughals’ next move through surveillance. The main difficulty faced by Goa’s intelligence machinery in this regard was to make sense of geographies, peoples, conjunctures, and events which remained largely alien to the city’s decision makers. On the other, the Estado resorted to political communication to manage its relationship with the Mughal Empire and often accepted playing in accordance with its opponent’s cultural order. The challenge was to talk to one another, not past each other;

Map 1. Persianate India and Portuguese India in the long seventeenth century.

Introduction

5

some grasp of Mughal idioms, rituals, and practices of power therefore had to be achieved. Contingency played no small part in the process. Empire of Contingency investigates the ways in which a European empire participated in the Indo-Persian world from around 1570 to about 1690 or, roughly speaking, during Mughal India’s long seventeenth century. The book argues that the Portuguese were drawn in by the gravitational force of the Persianate sphere in view of their regular, if tense, relationship with the Indo-Persian polities of the time: the Mughal Empire, first and foremost, but also the sultanates of the Deccan before they succumbed to Pax Mughalica. I refer here to Ahmadnagar and especially Bijapur, the latter being the nearest neighbor of Goa and a more powerful state. Ruling over the eastern part of the Deccan plateau, the more distant sultans of Golconda were somewhat alien to this equation, and thus only occasionally considered by the viceroys of Goa in the context of the Mughal advances and the eventual subjugation of the region; hence, their absence from this study. The situation of the Portuguese vis-à-vis the Mughals was distinct from that of the English or the Dutch. The fundamental difference lies in the fact that the Estado da Índia maintained direct control over territory on the western fringes of the Mughal Empire—the “Northern Province” (Província do Norte), stretching from Chaul to Diu—and held its viceregal court in a city (Goa) that had been part of the Sultanate of Bijapur until 1510, whereas the English East India Company (EIC) and the Dutch East India Company (VOC), respectively founded in 1600 and 1602, resorted to factories situated in cities under imperial rule. Obviously, these chartered trading companies were more than commercial enterprises. The EIC has been rightly portrayed as “the CompanyState” and the VOC—with its Atlantic counterpart, the West India Company (WIC)—were recently coined as the “Eighth Province” of the Dutch Republic.5 Still, the EIC headquarters in Surat bore no comparison to Portuguese Goa; the Mughals did not allow the English to own houses in the city, just rent them.6 Only in the late seventeenth century, with the establishment of the presidencies of Bombay (1687) and Calcutta (1690), would the EIC count on political centers encroaching into Mughal lands. The same applies to the VOC and its capital city, located in distant Java since 1619; “the lord of Batavia” resonated in the courts of Southeast Asia (less so in the East Asian ones), yet meant little in the Mughal court.7 The scholarship on the East India companies has shifted in recent times from trading networks and economic history to cultural history and knowledge making.8 There is a new and emerging diplomatic history of the EIC and the VOC in Mughal India, but these organizations’ information and

6

Introduction

communication apparatuses in imperial territory remain largely in the shadow.9 Curiously enough, the period of British direct control over India from the late eighteenth century onwards might represent a more apt setting to compare and contrast with the Portuguese case. “The geography of empire in India,” Sunil Amrith suggestively reminds us, “was sculpted by wind and water.” The author of Unruly Waters goes on to note that, “until the nineteenth century, the only India that Europeans knew, the only India they were interested in, was the India that was wet.”10 The nineteenth-century imperial need to “know the country” farther from the ocean brings us inevitably to C. A. Bayly’s Empire and Information.11 In this transformative work, published a quarter of a century ago, the late historian of South Asia and imperial Britain analyzed the colonial intelligence system in north India between the 1780s and the 1860s, showing its crucial importance with regard to the British conquest. By studying, in a masterly way, the indigenous surveillance and communicational structures as well as the rich forms of their interpenetration with the colonial apparatus, Bayly put to proof Foucault’s power/knowledge association in a colonial context and strongly questioned the paradigms of Said’s Orientalism. As it happens, the Portuguese had systematically observed the India that was dry since the last third of the sixteenth century. Like the British two centuries later, the Portuguese looked well beyond the Western Ghats to grasp events unfolding in Kabul and Qandahar, and people’s actions in Delhi and Lahore. This book addresses a different reality and offers a different narrative from Bayly’s. It evokes a deeper past and therefore relates to a vastly dissimilar setting: in lieu of gaining from a situation of disaggregated political authority, as the British did, the Portuguese were confronted with a thriving Mughal Empire. Empire of Contingency is about survival, specifically, Portuguese survival in the Indo-Persian world through intelligence and interaction, not intelligence and war. It studies the collection of political and military information per se rather than examining such information through the lens of either success or failure. In so doing, I challenge teleological narratives of progress and accumulation of expertise that posit a correlation between colonial achievement and the quality of colonial intelligence. Recent works on British India and other imperial geographies rest on the idea of movement from point A to point B, the ultimate result being, if only implicitly, a “better” empire.12 In contrast, Empire of Contingency contends that there is no evidence for a real transformation in the case of the Portuguese Empire. Therefore, I will not be arguing that there was a road to somewhere or a quest to something. To put this into an organic

Introduction

7

perspective, it is as if the Estado da Índia was stuck between adolescence and adulthood, without ever truly achieving maturity in its long relationship with the surrounding Indo-Persian states. The Portuguese were no strangers to Islamic states and South Asian political landscapes. Yet one wonders what the cultural baggage at their disposal was when Emperor Akbar decisively entered the picture. Their old North African experience of war, observation, and communication might have mattered, and so probably did their direct and indirect interactions with the Ottomans. More relevantly, Portuguese knowledge of Safavid Iran and their possession of Hormuz (1515) translated into contact with Persian as a language of rule and, more broadly, with the heart of the Persianate world. Further south, on the subcontinent, the Estado da Índia’s intense relationship with the Deccan region following the conquest of Goa in 1510 was certainly key, for the local sultanates orbited around Iran and were important Indo-Persian states. It remains to be ascertained, though, whether these previous experiences resulted in enduring skills, transmissible from imperial scenario to imperial scenario. More to the point, were the Portuguese able to learn and retain political procedures and cultural conventions characteristic of an Indo-Persian world essentially molded by the Mughal Empire? Was this memory properly stored from the 1570s, and easily retrievable from the Portuguese Empire’s brain when action was needed? Empire of Contingency attempts to answer these questions. My book fosters conversations with new and pathbreaking historiographical trends. First and foremost, it embraces the work of an increasing number of scholars who have been exploring the connections between the last great Muslim empires—Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals—instead of approaching them separately. More broadly, the potential research range of political intelligence and political communication in the early modern period presently comprises several fields and methods which were either nonexistent or simply inchoate some decades ago: the new history of diplomacy, visual and material culture, the social history of archives, scribal cultures and communities, the history of emotions, global microhistory, and a renewed emphasis on textual hermeneutics. What is more, these developments cut across the study of diverse cultural zones of the early modern world and are incompatible with historiographical self-segregation. One is compelled to overcome “tribal” boundaries and explore connections with a growing corpus of work which tackles similar problems concerning, say, early America, Spanish America, sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury Europe, Ming-Qing China, and Tokugawa Japan.13 Research on

8

Introduction

Portuguese-Mughal interactions can no longer relate to a couple of segments, specifically the first imperial age of Europe and “medieval” India, and deal with a few, more or less (un)productive themes.14 This book seeks to engage with the concept of Persianate. First formulated by Marshall Hodgson over half a century ago, this notion is at the core of a blossoming debate.15 Persianate—world, age, zone, society, sphere, or ecumene— goes beyond Iran and Islam to signify the cultural nexus comprising the vast regions and diverse multi-ethnic and multi-religious communities under the umbrella of Persian from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century. By Persian, one means not only language and literature, but also bureaucracy and governance, as well as several other strands expressed in, and communicated through, Persian language or culture. In its definition and density, the temporal and geographical limits of the Persianate world vary considerably from proponent to proponent. Be that as it may, India indisputably lived through a long Persianate age, as recently shown by Richard Eaton. It started well before the Mughals— who endeavored to place Hindustan at the heart of the Persian ecumene—and became successively interlaced with an equally vibrant Sanskrit world.16 Needless to note, the reference here is to Sheldon Pollock’s pathbreaking conceptualization of the “Sanskrit cosmopolis,” which signifies the vitality of the Sanskrit language as a vehicle of literary and political expression in South and Southeast Asia for over a millennium (c. 300–1300).17 Eaton further elaborates on the existence of a similarly long-lasting Persian cosmopolis (c. 1000–1800), which became enmeshed in India and elsewhere with the mounting relevance of local languages with regard to literary culture and political practice, or Pollock’s “cosmopolitan vernacular.”18 Now, the provocative experiment here would be to conceive the Estado da Índia as the offspring of a European overseas empire in a Persianate mould. To form such a bold hypothesis, one must be willing in the first place to adopt a flexible and broad understanding of both the Persianate and the Portuguese. The image of the Estado da Índia as a porous surface, somewhat permeable to an adversarial political and cultural order, might clash with extant visions of the Portuguese Empire; received wisdom holds that comparisons and connections across European imperial powers can be established, whereas conversations and exchanges between Europeans and Asians or Christians and Muslims are deemed unnatural.19 The present work decenters the lenses used to observe the Portuguese Empire and sees these entanglements as normal. Besides, the study of the structures and techniques put in place by Goa to watch the Indo-Persian

Introduction

9

states and converse with them can tell us a great deal about the nature of the Portuguese Empire itself; by considering Mughal India, in fact, this book looks at the internals of the Estado da Índia. Such investigation likewise contributes to wider reflections about premodern political information and communication, areas that, as we have seen, are fairly absent from the study of European empires in South Asia prior to the end of the eighteenth century. On the other end of the spectrum, Nile Green urges us “to de-provincialize the Persianate world from its familiarly Indo-Iranian moorings by making a more robust case for a ‘world’ that encompassed the greater part of the Eurasian continent.”20 In Green’s view, the Persianate sphere extended “as far away as the British Isles and China,” the rationale for the inclusion of England —and continental Europe, for that matter—resting essentially on the fact that the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European trading companies (from the English and the Dutch to the French and the Danish) “further expanded the geographical frontiers of Persian correspondence.”21 True, the author ignores the Estado da Índia, which had dealt with Persian correspondence in an extensive way since the early sixteenth century, but what matters here is the opportunity for reconsidering early modern European entanglements with the Persianate sphere based on the concept of Persographia, which underscores the importance of “Persian as a tool . . . rather than an aesthetic.”22 In a similar vein, Fahad Ahmad Bishara and Nandini Chatterjee have recently stated their daring desire “to de-fetishize [Persian] language, and decouple it from its usual pairing with literary genealogies.” According to these two scholars, greater emphasis should instead be placed on “what language does at any moment in time and space; besides frequent and fluent users of Persian, we also include those that use only bits of it, or not at all, in the story of the Persianate, because it is that totality that makes the ‘multilingual local’ function.”23 In order to make the Estado da Índia part of India’s Persianate Age, indeed one has to first de-provincialize the Persianate world and de-fetishize the Persian language. Goa never truly went beyond the use of “bits” of the language, even if these constitute intriguing fragments. The Portuguese engagement with the Persianate was not one of true cultural intimacy, comparable to that of, say, the distant Burmese kingdom and its immersion in “a wider Indo-Persian Mughal imperium.”24 Rather, Portuguese engagement consisted of an eminently “hands-on” political experiment (not always a conscious one in all likelihood), tailored to assure the very existence of Portuguese Goa. It was an “opportunistic” move prompted by the need to surveil an omnivorous Mughal Empire and, what is more, to talk with its rulers and subjects via adherence to simplified and partial versions of its repertoire and idiom. Papers, be it in the form of ethnopolitical

10

Introduction

reports (Portuguese accounts, but also native ones under Portuguese mask), oral, fleeting stories put in writing, diverse correspondence, lexicons, or imperial mandates (both in their original language and in Portuguese translation), were critical to these endeavors. This book focuses on these and other overlooked pieces, as well as on the oftentimes invisible individuals who wrote, copied, archived, translated, transported, and displayed them between the Indo-Persian world and Portuguese India. These people and words were simultaneously “in and out of place,” as Finbarr Flood put it in his groundbreaking study on the complexities of the “medieval ‘Hindu-Muslim’ encounter.”25 The task ahead of us is to understand in what ways and to what extent Portuguese India blended in to its surroundings. Some would argue bluntly that the Estado went native. In my view, however, the mechanisms through which it morphed into some sort of Persianate entity are far more complex. The sections of this book dedicated to Goa’s intelligence and documentary systems in the IndoPersian context (Chapters 2 to 5) illustrate a patchwork of Portuguese and vernacular (not exclusively Persianate) elements where agents, tools, and techniques are concerned. Intriguing merging processes occurred and led, among other tangible outcomes, to the existence in the Goa archive of “uncooked” Indo-Persian intelligence reports written in Portuguese, like those examined in Chapter 4. As Portuguese India came face-to-face with Mughal India from about 1570 onwards, new technologies of power had to be acquired and new political practices adopted. Mastery of Persian, to the point of reading political correspondence in that language and grasping its subtlety, was one such skill. Goa also learned to render incoming letters into Portuguese as well as outgoing ones into Persian, thus adding a new language to the constellation of idioms with which Persian was interlaced on the Indian Peninsula. To be conversant with the ritual authority of an Indo-Persian royal letter on the move and upon reception was part of the game, too. Portuguese expertise in these matters is the subject of Chapters 6 to 9. Furthermore, I contend, Portuguese proficiency regarding information and communication on Persianate India was not continuous and cumulative, but rather segmented and “hiccupped,” mostly dependent on the life cycles of both persons and papers. The usefulness of an intelligence account on Hindustan or the western Deccan inevitably faded with time (ultimately evolving into something else), not to mention the document’s doubtful durability in the Portuguese archival context. Given the limitations of its institutional canvas, the Estado da Índia was largely reliant on singular individuals and was thus exposed to free will and contingency. I refer to flesh-and-blood people whose actions were also driven by particular agendas (individual, social, political), while also being constrained

Introduction

11

either by life expectancy or administrative impediment: an interpreter or a clerk did not work for more than twenty-five to thirty years, while a viceroy or a secretary of the Estado did not serve for more than three to six years. Goa provided weak long-term “stowage;” its knowledge of, and potential participation in, the Indo-Persian sphere was affected by regular gaps and “memory slips” over time. The Estado da Índia, we have seen, was not Persianate in the strict, literary sense. Persianization in this case was about political necessity and calculated mimicry. It did not translate into wholehearted cultural communion, which at any rate was out of Goa’s intellectual reach. Besides, the Portuguese “grid” between East Africa and East Asia was itself a political and cultural continuum, nourished by a lingua franca that some of the most distinguished sixteenth-century Portuguese writers, like Fernão de Oliveira, João de Barros, or Pero de Magalhães Gândavo, saw as a superior and innately imperial language.26 And Ásia Portuguesa was just one segment of a much larger unit—Portuguese, but also Iberian and Catholic— encompassing four continents in the early modern period.27 Next, the book inquires specifically about the Estado’s Persianate apparatus, which is not to say that this was its sole toolbox. The Portuguese in Asia had to cater to several cultural realms other than the Persianate, from the Swahili world to the Sinosphere. So, why a Persianate Estado da Índia and not, say, a Malay or Chinese one? Did the Portuguese Empire in Asia become a sort of hydra, each of its tentacles conforming to a given “local” nexus? I argue that even if it had to develop extensive competences concerning a broad set of states and their political orders, most of these challenges were largely addressed on the ground, in cities like Malacca and Macau. I also maintain that, from Goa and in Goa, the Portuguese became far more enmeshed in Persianate India—its linguistic landscape, social world, political skills, bureaucratic practices, and courtly environments—than in any other part of Asia. The documents the Estado generated, and the resources it mobilized (human, administrative) toward the Indo-Persian sphere, point in that direction. This book is organized into two parts, which correspond to its two fundamental axes: political information and political communication. Part I, “Spying, Conversing, Knowing,” examines the Portuguese intelligence apparatus in Hindustan and the western Deccan. The first four chapters investigate sites, features, methods, networks, and agents, while also occasionally considering the outcomes of the information-gathering system put in place by the Estado da Índia. Part II, “Writing, Translating, Performing,” moves from the local terrain to the palace and seeks to understand the mechanisms employed by Portuguese Goa to communicate in writing with the Mughal Empire and the Deccan sultanates.

12

Introduction

The five chapters therein explore a variety of political papers from, to, and about the Indo-Persian world; the emphasis is put on interpolity and the intercultural exchange of correspondence in its various stages, from letter composition (and preservation) to translation to reception. Chapter 1, “Information and Documentary Regimes,” prepares the ground by reflecting upon the array of themes that shape the first part of the book, as well as large sections of its later half, and discussing current avenues of inquiry. First, it endeavors to position early modern Portugal and the Estado da Índia across coeval intelligence and archival regimes stretching from the Iberian Peninsula to East Asia. The chapter then goes on to explore a similar grid of questions for the Mughal Empire during its high era, which is seldom approached from the viewpoint of information and its production, flow, and storage. Following this far-reaching overview, Chapter 2, “The Mughal Realm Under Portuguese Surveillance,” examines the nature and contours of the Estado da Índia’s intelligence system vis-à-vis Mughal India and is structured around observation posts. Chapter 2 first considers Portuguese-controlled spy locations, ranging from the city of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf to the four outposts that formed the “Northern Province” in the western coast of India and further south to Goa. Secondly, it investigates how and through whom the Portuguese amassed political news in Islamic lands, their two main hubs of information being the capital of the sultanate of Bijapur and the Mughal court cities. A mechanistic stance would consider Goa’s informants as inanimate cogs in an imperial machine. The chapter instead places these individuals and groups into a larger and richer context which only tangentially intersected with the Estado da Índia: the constant circulation of people and news—mainly, but not exclusively political—across the subcontinent and beyond, as well as the modes and spaces of sociability through which the interactions at play unfolded. Chapter 3, “The Spy Ring of Viceroy Count of Linhares,” zooms in on a specific Portuguese intelligence network, mounted in Goa to survey the IndoPersian states between 1629 and 1635. During his six-year-long term as viceroy of the Estado, Linhares was confronted with a particularly difficult political landscape, marked by internal turmoil in Mughal India at a time of dynastic succession, significant imperial inroads into the western Deccan, and acute instances of Luso-Mughal tension on the shores of Gujarat and Bengal. Close monitoring of the enemy’s movements was key to navigating through these disruptive times. Luckily, an unusually rich pool of source material—“the right constellation of sources” that historians sometimes have, as John-Paul Ghobrial put it—paves the way for an in-depth analysis of what the intelligence network of a

Introduction

13

seventeenth-century Portuguese viceroy looked like, from breadth to spread to texture.28 This experiment in histoire totale brings to life myriad agents and their actions across Hindustan and the western Deccan, many of them—Indian and Portuguese alike—low-status, opaque figures. Chapter 4, “Intelligence and Ethnography at Linhares’s Desk,” focuses on the vexed question of information transformed into knowledge, or on how political news circulating in oral and written forms on the Indian Peninsula eventually morphed into political ethnography in Portuguese Goa. This chapter is intimately tied to the previous one for it provides a minute discussion of two reports born out of the work of anonymous moles in the service of Linhares. The documents in question, possibly native reports penned in Portuguese, refer to distinct moments in this viceroy’s government and concern different spaces of the Indo-Persian world: the Mughal court in late 1629, troubled by the rebellion of a prominent Afghan imperial servant; the Bijapur court in the spring of 1634, afflicted by the Mughal military pressure on the sultanate and the imminent demise of the neighboring state of Ahmadnagar. Chapter 4 is tailored to soften the transition between the two parts of the book, since the aforementioned reports take the reader from the sites where shadowy boots-on-the-ground “intelligencers” operated to the offices of prominent Portuguese in Goa and, ultimately, to the varied deskwork performed in the city by a host of local penmen who ensured communication with the Indo-Persian states and beyond. Due to the scarcity of research on cultures of bureaucracy and translation in the context of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Goa (and the Estado da Índia, for that matter), one is compelled in the next two chapters—at the risk of making them slightly bidirectional—to delve into these key subjects so as to lay the groundwork for the specific study of how the Indo-Persian world fit into Portuguese imperial recording and communication practices. Chapter 5, “The Oficial de Unha,” offers a picture of scribal Goa. It seeks to assess the Estado’s ability to handle Indo-Persian documents and a variety of Portuguese written materials on the Indo-Persian world. To handle here means to copy, draft, collect, and archive, tasks that fell upon a few tottering administrative bodies located in the viceroy’s palace. Under the headship of some Portuguese high officials—with emphasis on the secretary of the Estado and the archive’s chief custodian, whose profiles I discuss—served myriad local, typically elusive amanuenses who had lengthy careers, cultivated family networks, and sought patronage. Religious affiliation and community belonging matter, but the fact that most of these men had Portuguese names and professed Catholicism shall not distract us from their deepest roots, namely their association with the rich South Asian communities of writing.

14

Introduction

The scribes and clerks of Goa give way in Chapter 6, “The Língua do Estado,” to the interpreters and translators who rendered Persian documents accessible to Portuguese decision makers in the same city, maxime to the viceroy. Obviously, these language mediators were also political brokers who guided an “illiterate” Estado da Índia through the intricacies of the Persian language and thereby contributed to making Goa at least moderately conversant with Persianate political practice. The Portuguese employed specialists of diverse backgrounds (ethnic, religious) and with different profiles throughout the sixteenth century, relying mostly on Hindu Brahmans until the turn of the following century. Like for those who populated the previous chapter, family strategy, career longevity, and political backing mattered; hence the success of a Brahman family that secured the important position of chief interpreter of Portuguese Goa during the 1600s. Here, too, there is an opportunity to cast a wider net and go beyond the imperial logic to consider these experts as polyglot intellectuals eager to keep their positions in a competitive transregional market of skills. Chapter 7, “Familiar Letters and Letter Dissections,” seeks to deepen some of the questions posed in Chapter 6 by exploring two sets of sources that provide crucial insights about these Brahmans’ lives and actions. The first cluster of materials dates mainly from the second quarter of the seventeenth century and consists of a fascinating exchange of correspondence between two interpreter-translators from Goa and two Portuguese nobles based in Lisbon. From this tiny corpus one realizes that these familiar letters were nourished by fresh news from the Indo-Persian world and constituted the backbone of an unequal friendship through which the two Hindu Brahmans sought protection while their Portuguese patrons received useful politico-ethnographic information. The second group of documents corresponds to several seventeenth-century Indo-Persian political letters in Portuguese translation. This offers a privileged window into the processes that transformed one into another in Goa, with particular emphasis on the mesmerizing workings of collaborative translation involving Hindus, Muslims, and Christians. The last section of the book explores the performative power of Indo-Persian documents in Portuguese and Jesuit settings. At its core are those Mughal and Deccani royal edicts (farmans) and similar political letters which either have survived in coeval Portuguese translations or which merited lengthy discussions in Portuguese and missionary sources of the time. The two final chapters hone in on the ways in which such papers were perceived, handled, appropriated, twisted, or feared by viceroys and priests. Chapter 8, “‘With the Letters Inserted Like Seed Pearls’: Epistolary Performances,” characterizes these imposing objects as kingly holograms and elaborates on how officials of the Estado da Índia and

Introduction

15

members of the Society of Jesus dealt with their content, style, and materiality. This will ultimately enlighten these farmans’ fascinating journeys and uses across vast spaces, from Hindustan and the Deccan to Portuguese India and Catholic Europe. Chapter 9, “(Un)Staging the Farman,” precisely tracks these documents as they moved and goes on to offer a thorough study of two ceremonies surrounding the acceptance of Indo-Persian farmans held in Goa in 1630 and 1653, which respectively embodied the Emperor Shahjahan and Sultan Muhammad. The ultimate purpose is to understand the battles of authority which unfolded around these documents as they entered the Portuguese city in processions, thereby interacting with other equally loaded objects, trespassing upon several symbolic locations, and triggering human action. Empire of Contingency is arranged thematically and is structured, hopefully, to mirror a logical chain of questions. Most of the chapters work in tandem (Chapters 3 and 4, 6 and 7, 8 and 9), the second element of the pair consisting of a case study. Chronology, as noted earlier, plays little role in this work, for it shies away from making a teleological argument: the Portuguese experience of the Indo-Persian world was not necessarily one of the persistent accumulation of expertise. In contrast, spatial horizons and their chains—people, news in oral form, and documentary flows—are given full consideration. By linking these elements, the book moves back and forth between open country, cities (and parts of cities), buildings (and parts of buildings), and desks. The source material at the basis of this volume is considerable and often intricate. European accounts and archival documents other than Portuguese ones are obviously considered. Together with images (drawings, paintings, and maps), objects (golden keys, cloth pouches, royal portraits) and their political uses are given their share of attention. Due to my lack of the linguistic skills needed to explore Indo-Persian materials directly, such sources are used only when accessible in modern English translation. Of course, I am fully conscious of the limitations this situation entails. Hopefully, though, the book’s angle smooths out my flaw: Empire of Contingency is not about Persianate India per se, but rather about the tools and mechanisms employed by Portuguese India to access Persianate India. The focus, thus, rests on sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury Portuguese documents: official and private correspondence exchanged between Goa and Lisbon, within India, and even within Goa; royal orders and grants; secular and religious chronicles; viceregal diaries and State Council minutes; instructions to diplomats and treaties; petitions and their resolutions; judicial and financial documents; and inquisitorial records. Scholars of the early modern Portuguese Empire often lament (and rightly so) the paucity of primary

16

Introduction

sources at their disposal when compared to those available for the study of other European empires. And yet much can be accomplished with the extant records. The Jesuit sources—typically letters and accounts, but also multilingual dictionaries—are explored at length, and sometimes in novel ways. Nevertheless, the Jesuits of this book played several often-conflicting roles, their texts mirroring such tense plurality. In the Mughal imperial capitals, Jesuits were courtiers, favored by some and contested by many. In Rome, the priests of the Mogor were seen as ingenious Catholic agents deforesting wild Muslim lands. In Lisbon (or Madrid, when Portugal was under the Hispanic Monarchy, 1580–1640) and Goa, they were valued primarily as mediators in the service of the empire, and so they often got dragged into the Portuguese political agenda. But, of course, Jesuit texts are not strictly Portuguese and Jesuit missionaries did not strictly represent the Estado da Índia. Last but not least, this book gives serious consideration to an unusual, or rather unspotted, kind of documents: texts written in Portuguese and kept in the Portuguese archive that are not necessarily Portuguese texts.29 These are homeless texts, to adopt and adapt Tavakoli-Targhi’s formulation concerning Persian texts, “rendered ‘homeless’ by their lack of inclusion into either Indian or Iranian nationalist accounts of modernity.”30 My homeless texts are the “shape-shifter” accounts studied in Chapter 4, the cross-cultural letters examined in Chapter 7, and the farmans in Portuguese translation discussed in Chapters 8 and 9. Instead of simply extracting information from such “displaced” materials, I put them at the core of my analysis and promote a thick but contextual reading of them so that their multitextured character and broad reach surfaces. To these I add other elusive documents, such as coeval Portuguese descriptions of missing South Asian texts, traces of oral discourse in written form, textual pieces embedded in larger documentary units of a different nature, and vernacular stories and rumors that survived thanks to the Portuguese record. Altogether, these fragments, echoes, and clues complicate the binary classification of sources by empires (Portuguese, Mughal), beliefs (Christian, Muslim), or geographic entities (Western Europe, South Asia; Iberian Peninsula, Indian Peninsula). Despite the considerable methodological challenges they pose, the engagement with such materials throughout the present book was essential. It is my hope that “the alchemy that turns stacks of disparate notes into graceful prose,” to borrow Sarah Maza’s suggestive description of how a history book comes into being, has been successful.31

Chapter 1

Information and Documentary Regimes

Ataíde and Azevedo During Bijapur’s assault on Goa in 1570, the besieged needed to gather intelligence on the besiegers. The moment was one of intense struggle in the Deccan; the pressure over the city was sign of a novel geopolitical situation, marked by the coalition of four of the five local sultanates. Such an alliance had led to the fall of the Hindu empire of Vijayanagara in 1565 and was then threatening the Estado da Índia, with simultaneous sieges laid to Goa and Chaul by Bijapur and Ahmadnagar in 1570–1571.1 Viceroy Dom Luís de Ataíde (g. 1568–1571) made use of several resources in order to unearth what was being discussed at the ‘Adil Shahi court, and even went as far as to employ a certain Manuel de Azevedo—a former resident of Goa who had fled the city in the company of a married woman—as a spy. Once in Bijapur, Azevedo converted to Islam and apparently gained access to the inner circles of Sultan ‘Ali I. To test his new informant’s loyalty, the viceroy of the Estado assigned Azevedo minor missions before escalating to riskier, more disruptive ones, like poisoning the water supply of Bijapur. The Portuguese renegade seems to have delivered and thus gradually won the viceroy’s trust. Consequently, news on the politico-military situation of the neighboring sultanate started to pour into Goa through diverse channels and means. The Portuguese chronicler António Pinto Pereira offers a lively portrait of how Azevedo’s frequent news dispatches (avisos) reached Ataíde: “So, [Azevedo] kept writing many news dispatches and used to bring them in person. There were boats to pick him up in hidden areas and put him back there again later, without the Moors noticing anything. . . . Sometimes the viceroy himself would come into his presence aboard a very small boat. Oftentimes Manuel Azevedo would write to him through a Chinese who was

20

Spying, Conversing, Knowing

the slave of a Christian that fled [Goa to Bijapur]. [The Chinese] carried many letters, written with a lead pencil and covered in balls of wax, back and forth, by whatever means he could, including by swimming.”2 Azevedo no doubt constituted an important piece of Ataíde’s intelligencegathering web in Bijapur. Most likely, the viceroy counted on similar expertise in Ahmadnagar.3 One might argue that such networks rested on half a century of Portuguese experience on the Indian subcontinent and were part of a system of surveillance and political communication put in place after the capture of Goa in 1510. But this would be falling into the trap of cumulative knowledge. True, there were significant precedents to Ataíde’s informational apparatus in the region. Consider Governor Dom João de Castro (g. 1545–1548, viceroy from 1547) and his political entente with the Surs, the Afghan dynasty that forced the Mughal Emperor Humayun into a fifteen-year-long Iranian exile (1540–1555).4 What Castro knew about the political developments of the Deccan, Gujarat, and even distant Agra was in part the work of a web of spies and couriers woven in Chaul that extended as far as the Pashtuns’ headquarters. It was organized partially by the local captain, António de Sousa, but chiefly by an influential resident of the city called Diogo Lopes de Aguião (or Aguiar).5 These were the channels employed to circulate the two letters addressed by Castro to Islam Shah, “the most potent king of the Pashtuns,” in 1546–1547.6 The first letter, dated July 4, 1546, traveled from Goa to Chaul, where it was passed on to two peons (peões) whom António de Sousa trusted. The peons then entered the lands of Balaghat and headed to Daulatabad and Burhanpur before reaching Mandu; it was a twenty-day journey along a “safe path.” Once in Mandu, they were supposed to hand in letters specifically addressed to the “lords of Cambay.”7 The addressees were, in turn, expected to select “a man of their trust to accompany them [i.e., the peons] to the king, who is in Agra, roughly two hundred leagues of distance ahead.”8 Castro’s letter eventually reached Islam Shah, the Afghan’s ruler response entered Chaul in early January 1547, and the Portuguese governor wrote back the following month.9 But did Dom Luís de Ataíde take stock of such Portuguese experiences of information and communication in Balaghat and Hindustan, or did he start from scratch upon his arrival to Goa in 1568? The continuity and “self-regeneration” of networks of intelligence collection in the service of the Estado da Índia remain largely ignored matters. At any rate, it is highly doubtful that the viceroy, or any of his successors for that matter, relied on a single, unified surveillance system under constant refinement or on an ever-growing informational baggage made accessible to him through systematic document preservation in Goa.

Information and Documentary Regimes

21

Azevedo’s intelligence activities and his mysterious meetings with the viceroy speak to the core questions of the first part of this book, which explores the nature and features of intelligence-gathering networks and surveillance mechanisms organized by Goa since the 1570s in order to understand the Mughal Empire and to try to stall the latter’s expansion and consolidation southwards and seawards. With this in mind, I aim at identifying nodes of information and circuits of news circulation, discussing the profile and diversity of those involved, as well as investigating the practices and tools that shaped the collection and flow of information between Mughal India and Portuguese India. Bijapur, where Azevedo lived, was a privileged center of information for the Estado da Índia not only regarding the Deccan itself, but also past the limits of the region; a great deal of the news on the Mughals accessible in Goa after the imperial conquest of Gujarat in 1572–1573 was obtained in the ‘Adil Shahi sultanate. The anecdote recounted by Pereira also helps make sense of the political and social fabric of the capital of the Estado da Índia and the modalities of its everyday relations with the closest of the “neighboring kings.” Azevedo embodies the figure of the Portuguese adventurer—an apostate adventurer, in his case—as Goa’s informant, who represents an unstable balance between order and transgression.10 The unnamed Chinese character, enslaved by an equally anonymous “Christian” rebel (alevantado) likewise living in Bijapur, is no less intriguing and speaks volumes of Azevedo’s social network in the sultanate. The bizarre modes of contact between the viceroy and his informant not only underline the importance of orality with regards to the circulation of political information in the region, but also reveal the ingenuity of the techniques that people employed for written communication. Azevedo, in 1570, sent letters “written with a lead pencil and covered in balls of wax,” to his high-level interlocutor, a device also employed in other regions of the Portuguese Empire to circulate secret letters and keep them dry.11 Half a century later, in 1621, the Flemish Jacques de Coutre ( Jacobus van de Koutere, d. 1640) was kept under arrest by Bijapur officials in Ponda and communicated with his brother Joseph, based in the not-too-distant Goa, through letters written in invisible ink. Coutre would explain his method in a book he wrote almost twenty years later in Madrid: “I used to write at night . . . using white paper with white letters so that nothing could be read in case a letter was seized. I have in this manner exchanged letters with my brother; the notes [villetes] came and went secretly, and the guards themselves would bring me paper and quills.”12 Azevedo and Coutre are just two of myriad individuals who linked the western Deccan and Goa throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They did so by constantly circulating news—political, military,

22

Spying, Conversing, Knowing

and commercial information, or just family and personal updates—verbally or textually. These rich exchanges also lay at the heart of the Indian experience of the famed Portuguese doctor Garcia de Orta (d. 1568) and his scientific work, published in Goa around Azevedo’s time.13 Lastly, Azevedo’s intriguing story conveys the image of a Portuguese viceroy of the Estado da Índia—none other than the famed Dom Luís de Ataíde, third Count of Atouguia—cruising furtively along the rivers that cross the territory of Goa on board a small vessel in order to obtain news about the plans and actions of the sultan of Bijapur from the mouth of an obscure informant.14 This image reveals a crude reality: Goa’s intelligence system was small and “simple,” with limited (if ingenious) resources. The Fortress Palace, the seat of power of the Portuguese viceroy of the Estado da Índia, was a pale shadow of the Council of Ten of the Republic of Venice. Conversely, to keep with the Italian parallel, Goa resembled in this regard some of the small states of Renaissance Italy, such as Mantova or Modena.15

Goa and the World of Early Modern Information Dom Luís de Ataíde and his several successors—in fact, all the viceroys of the Estado engaged in monitoring the movements of the Mogor, the Idalxá, and the Melique in the following decades—worked in Goa at the crossroads of several intelligence and archival regimes.16 Interacting, if superficially in many instances, with a multitude of states and societies in the vast space stretching from West to East Asia, it is likely that they retained something from such experience as far as idioms and practices of information, communication, and document preservation are concerned. On one extreme of this long geographic arch, there were the Ottomans, who relied upon large-scale systems and methods of intelligence gathering.17 Concurrently, the Ottoman state was invested in archiving records, while their society gradually developed a tangible “archival consciousness.”18 At the other end of the arch, Ming-Qing China mirrored a long tradition of surveillance, communication, and recording.19 Tokugawa Japan resorted to an intelligence system directed toward watching its neighbors, close neighbors, like China and Korea, but also more distant ones, such as the Estado da Índia or the Mughal Empire.20 Intelligence collection and archiving was a priority of the Tokugawa state, if left mostly in the hands of local and regional structures before the late eighteenth century.21 Simultaneously, early modern Japanese society was boosted

Information and Documentary Regimes

23

by the massive production and circulation of printed matter on virtually every possible topic.22 This “library of public information,” as Mary Elizabeth Berry labels it, included the wide dissemination of the two subject matters that shaped what Kiri Paramore calls the dominant “Sinosphere archive of knowledge” in East Asia: Confucianism and Chinese literature.23 At any rate, one should not assume that archives and archival methods across the several societies of premodern Asia must conform with European paradigms of archivality, which were themselves often more ideal than real.24 Document production, materiality, utility, and preservation varied enormously between the Middle East and East Asia. What makes a document and a documentary repository in these, as in other geographies of the early modern world (Europe included), is often distant from the Western narrative of state control and efficiency, a tale that directs our imagination toward the assemblage of information in normalized ways with a view to transforming it into knowledge. What is more, different ways of knowing and storing conversed across space and time, as this book demonstrates; it is no longer possible to think in terms of rigid divides and ontological distinctions that can be addressed exclusively by way of comparison.25 The city of Lisbon, whence all viceroys departed to Asia, was part of an urban Europe experiencing an explosion of information. From Italy to Scandinavia, news—different genres of news—spread widely in manuscript and print through myriad arteries, networks, groups, and individuals.26 There was a real commodification of news, accessible to almost everyone, which went hand in hand with the rise of the public—or, rather, numerous and varied publics—in early modern Europe.27 The kinds of news pertinent to this book are political in essence. These were obviously crucial to governments but not necessarily beyond the reach of ordinary people.28 It is reasonable to argue that the internal robustness and the external projection of the main European powers of this period—from Tudor and Stuart England through Colbert and Louis XIV’s France to the Republic of Venice—was partly anchored in the efficacy of their systems of information and communication.29 The same can be said of the overseas empires that some of these states generated, even if we probably know more about the usually neglected Russian Empire in this regard than about the main European commercial companies before the late eighteenth century.30 The informational state label also applies to religious orders founded during this high tide of information, especially the Society of Jesus.31 More than any Jesuit archive or collection of the time, the letter from the Catalan missionary Antonio Monserrate (Antoni Montserrat, d. 1600) to the superior general, in Rome (Claudio Acquaviva, g. 1581–1615), dated January 7, 1591, illustrates this

24

Spying, Conversing, Knowing

in a nutshell. Penned from prison in the city of Sanaa, in Yemen, and written by way of an introduction to Monserrate’s own account of the first Jesuit mission to Akbar in 1580–1583, the letter begins by praising the “rule of the Society of Jesus that a record should be kept of all events.” The author goes on to state that “in this daily task of conscientious record-keeping, I embraced every new experience or fact which the day’s journey or events had brought before my notice.”32 While it is tempting to associate the ability to collect, manage, and keep these materials—political information in particular—with the efficiency of the early modern state, and thus with its presumed modernity, the reality is far different. There is no straight line between acquiring information, handling it, storing it, and eventually making (wise) political decisions. Institutions were “reckless” and “imperfect” with regard to intelligence gathering and record keeping. Regional asymmetries and inner conflicts, multipolarity and social dynamics, as well as the multiplicity of actors involved and their agency, are all factors that come into play. Early modern information was much more than a tool through which states planned action. In Europe, the weight of information linked to the state led to the emergence of loci for the collection and classification of documents, as well as for knowledge production and memory preservation. The library as an institution became associated with prestige buildings destined to leave an imprint on the spatial and political landscape of one’s realm, as was the case with the imperial library of Vienna.33 The same holds true for the grounds of an embassy on foreign soil; it gradually moved from a “mobile,” rented palace to a permanent location.34 To be sure, the chancellery and the archive were seldom housed in specialized buildings in this period, but the well-ordered archive prevailed as an ideal.35 Concurrently, the prominence of these new sites went hand in hand with the rise (or refashioning in some instances) of professional groups such as the secretary, the archivist, the librarian, and the historian.36 The ambassador embodies a curious mixture of visibility and opacity. On the one hand, he emerged as a public figure in Europe at the time.37 On the other, the diplomat was a spy, a character that achieved a marked presence in contemporary European texts and images.38 Secrecy, political secrecy in this case, had a crucial importance in early modern Europe. The emphasis put on the epistolary genre, from the specific idioms of politico-diplomatic correspondence to the fast evolving technologies of ciphered language, show the centrality of writing as far as intelligence gathering is concerned.39 Hence, the importance of cryptography, which was amply employed and theorized in the period.40

Information and Documentary Regimes

25

Habsburg Spain was fully entrenched in this European landscape. Information and communication were at the heart of a large Spanish empire, one that was simultaneously continental and maritime, European and overseas.41 Such a colossal political body could not function without a dense postal network and a crowd of spies.42 A sophisticated secret writing apparatus was also key, and people like Tomás Tamayo de Vargas (d. 1641), cronista mayor among other professional occupations, devoted some of their time to cryptography.43 Through Juan de Vera y Figueroa, the Hispanic monarchy took active part in the European debate on the figure of the ambassador and the art of diplomacy.44 As to physical sites of knowledge and information, Philip II marked new ground with the foundation of the library of the El Escorial and the “relaunching” of the archive of Simancas, even if neither were situated at court.45 Theoretically, Luís de Ataíde and those who followed him as viceroys of the Estado da Índia were acquainted with this world, or at least some strands of it. Several of these men—beginning with Ataíde, who had spent time at the court of Charles V in 1547 as ambassador extraordinary and found himself in Goa for the second time as viceroy (g. 1578–1581) when Philip II became king of Portugal—even operated under the political roof of Habsburg Spain. But we know very little about how much of this the viceroys actually “carried” to India. Most of them consumed news from Europe and elsewhere, practiced the (European) epistolary art on a regular basis, knew how closely knitted with intelligence and diplomacy state power was, and cared for books and libraries. Their social status and aristocratic education ensured a kind of background, specifically, a learned understanding of politics, law, ritual, social practices, and required readings.46 Notwithstanding, Portugal was less “exuberant” on many of these fronts than other contemporary European societies, including Spain, despite the connected nature of early modern Iberian societies. In fact, a brief comparison with Spain is quite illustrative in this regard. Of course, news circulated widely in Portugal, but with no real equivalent to the massive Spanish relaciones de sucesos.47 The Portuguese elites were surely acquainted with the art of diplomacy, the relevance of secrecy, and the handling of political information.48 However, there is no doctrinal thinking on legates before the 1650s, and what we find then is an “inward” reflection at a moment of thriving Portuguese diplomatic activity in Europe, far from the sort of European impact that ambassadorial handbooks like Vera’s represent.49 Encoded correspondence was introduced into Portugal at a late stage; there was little familiarity with ciphers before 1516.50 Conversely,

26

Spying, Conversing, Knowing

even the private correspondence exchanged between the New World and Spain was often ciphered by then.51 As far as record keeping and empire is concerned, the Spanish Casa de la Contratación (1503) was modeled after the Portuguese Casa da Índia (1500), and Portugal was early in addressing the challenge of managing its imperial papers. Nevertheless, the 1755 Lisbon earthquake destroyed the archive of the India House, leaving us primarily with regulations and scanty information on the actual efficacy of the institution.52 One is left wondering if the Casa da Índia was the Portuguese counterpart of Simancas in this regard, a place where documents were “incarcerated” rather than utilized.53

Mughal Spies and Records How did the Portuguese viceroys based in Goa perceive the structures, practices, and characters of information, communication, and record keeping in Mughal India? In their letters and reports, the viceroys repeatedly describe the Mogor (empire) as mighty and menacing but do not typically reflect on how the Mogor (emperor) managed spies, secrets, and documents. One viceroy, the Count of Linhares (g. 1629–1635), portrays Shahjahan as an emperor-bureaucrat—a “great administrator” (grande papelista)54—which matches some contemporary Mughal impressions.55 This constitutes, however, a rare remark from the viceregal court. Further north, observing and writing from the imperial court proper, Jesuit missionaries did pay some attention to intelligence gathering and document production in the Mughal Empire. Their correspondence often includes echoes and filaments of that world, traces that we seek to explore throughout this book. Consider for now a different kind of Jesuit material, namely an early seventeenth-century Portuguese–Hindi–Persian dictionary attributed to the Spanish missionary Jerónimo Xavier (d. 1617) (Figure 2).56 Particular attention is devoted there to the semantic fields of surveillance, intelligence, and secrecy. Indeed, the lexicon lists “spy” (espia), “to spy” (espiar), “spy doing rounds” (espia em ronda).57 “Intelligence” (inteligencia), “intelligent” (inteligente), and “to give intelligence” (falar inteligencias) are also included, along with “to tell news” (contar novas), “uncover a secret” (descobrir o segredo), and “man of secrets” (homem de segredo).58 A related cluster of words concerns vigilance: “to watch” (vigiar), “to watch” as an equivalent of “to roam” (vigiar–rondar), and “watchman” as a synonym for spy (vigia–espia), among others.59 Another group relates to masked forms of oral communication, like “rumor” (rumor), “whisperer” (murmurador), and several variations of “murmuration.”60 The circulation of information

Information and Documentary Regimes

27

Figure 2. Portuguese– Hindustani–Persian vocabulary, attributed to Father Jerónimo Xavier, early seventeenth century. School of Oriental and African Studies, Ms. 11952, f. 141v. © School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

is not neglected, since the manuscript contemplates “courier” (correo), “message” (mensagem), and “messenger” (mensageiro).61 Xavier’s dictionary seems to ignore archive-related vocabulary, although he might have had access to the imperial archive; a contemporary text likewise attributed to him—the Tratado da Corte e Caza de Iamguir Pachá Rey dos Mogores (1610–1611)—shows that it was possible for a Jesuit at the court of Jahangir to make his way inside.62 In compensation, the dictionary pays attention to history and history writing, tales and tale-tellers. In fact, Xavier’s lexicon breaks down the word “tale” (conto) so that the distinction between tale as story or fable (conto–historia) and tale as “true story” or event (conto–historia verdadeira) is clear. Additionally, the dictionary includes “man of parables” (homem de parábolas), “history” (historia), “historian” (historiador), and “historian-chronicler” (historiador coronista).63 The political and administrative framework of Mughal India rested to a great extent on the efficacy of its postal network (dak). A crowd of couriers and

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runners—the harkaras, among other designations—made possible the dissemination of imperial orders, the interaction between the court and the provinces, the exchange of correspondence, and the circulation of political information.64 As in other imperial settings, namely China, these invisible experts of territory and movement should make us think in more elaborate ways about the relationship between the political system and the social body.65 In Qing China, runners were state functionaries, but in Mughal India they were not; the latter’s customary itineraries would take them well beyond Mughal imperial boundaries, and they could be employed by anyone, Europeans included. The EIC largely depended on this native structure of communication until a later decision to create its own apparatus.66 The viceroys of the Estado could not do without these men. For their part, the Jesuits noticed the runners’ efficiency as soon as they arrived at the Mughal court in 1580 and would resort to using them frequently in the following decades in order to correspond within India.67 Monserrate marveled at their running techniques and training methods (which are said to have included the use of “leaden shoes”), while stressing how much Akbar depended on the runners to “regularly obtain news or send orders.”68 Runners in Mughal India often carried political messages and secrets on paper, or were themselves runner-spies. Their services were vital to both the internal management and the external affairs of the state.69 News reports (waqai) were penned by myriad news writers (waqainawis) across the empire’s domains and sent regularly to the imperial center, while the court also produced and disseminated its own newsletters (akhbarat).70 Building on precedents, Akbar was to put in place the institutional structure that eased intelligence gathering and record keeping in the empire. Abu’l Fazl (d. 1602), the emperor’s ideologue and chronicler, provides its outline: those appointed as waqainawis in the court and throughout the empire had an extensive job description to meet, while the establishment of a record office aimed at systematizing registration and preserving courtly orders.71 In his Ain-i Akbari, Abu’l Fazl exalts the wonders of document conservation and notes that it should not be exclusive to the state: “keeping records is an excellent thing for a government; it is even necessary for every rank of society.”72 Conceptual views on the links between empire and information were also expressed in Indo-Persian advice literature, namely in Muhammad Baqir Najm-i Sani’s Mau’izah-i Jahangiri (1612–1613), a text offered to Emperor Jahangir. Baqir (d. 1637) considers “trustworthy reporters”—those “who continuously make faithful and independent reports to the ruler”—to be the fourth pillar of “the citadel of empire.” He further admonishes Jahangir that “when the ruler is uninformed, various kinds of disturbances arise all around and rock the

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foundations of the empire.”73 Baqir is concerned with intelligence gathering but, unlike Abu’l Fazl, says nothing about record keeping. Jesuit sources are of little use for grasping Jahangir’s stance about the imperial paper trail, yet the picture that emerges from their letters and reports concerning Akbar is one of obsession with the written record. Monserrate explains how the emperor’s decisions and actions were immediately translated into imperial bureaucracy. Selected daily from a larger pool of “scribes,” four or five “secretaries” were expected to write down everything. They were exceedingly diligent, as if their intention was, in the missionary’s beautiful image, “to catch and preserve his [Akbar’s] words before they can fall to the ground and be lost.”74 In Akbar’s court, Jerónimo Xavier confirmed from Lahore in 1596, “everything is put in writing” (tudo se escreve).75 But was everything archived? The available scholarship on these topics largely takes up the old debate about the nature of the Mughal state and the efficiency of its bureaucracy.76 It has mostly offered a static characterization of the imperial system of information, one that pays little attention to spatial and chronological variations concerning an empire that was far from being immutable and monolithic.77 One is left with a predominantly institutional, state-centered view that overlooks society and the role of private intelligence networks, that fails to engage with a true social history of Mughal espionage, and that neglects the relationship between the extant material evidence of intelligence and the empire’s cultures of orality and archivality. But another picture will emerge if we explore, as we do in this chapter and the first part of this book, the murky links between intelligence and record keeping in the Mughal empire, and the form and substance of the information produced in privileged loci of intelligence gathering in Mughal India. To do so, and to help us make sense of the surviving written fragments of the Mughal intelligence in the Portuguese context, we might ask —borrowing James Pickett and Paolo Sartori’s phrase with respect to the wider Islamic world—“where, then, are the documents?” Pickett and Sartori rightly argue that this might be too Western, too “modern” a question to pose, one that “can obscure insight into cultures of documentation on their own terms.”78 From the medieval Middle East to nineteenth-century Central Asia, the “Islamic archive” has been the object of considerable discussion in recent years. Thanks to these historiographical developments, we have seriously revisited the question of abundance versus scarcity of written records and the motives beneath.79 In addition, a civilizational and confessional notion of the Islamic archives—a perspective that forces varied documentary repositories into uniformity, immobility, and enclosure in their “natural” world—has become highly contentious.80 It is now evident that, more than

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on archival sites, one needs to focus on archival practices in order to understand the rationale for what was kept, destroyed, or reused in each case.81 So, where and how, then, should one search for the wealth of intelligence documents that the well-oiled system of political surveillance in the Mughal Empire supposedly generated? Spies and their work are often mentioned in the imperial chronicles and other texts, yet we ignore whether written reports were kept and, if they were, what the emperors did with them. In sum, was the Mughal record office an effective body, and what exactly was it for? To preserve and lock, or to preserve and use? And, if the latter, what did it mean to use? In the Mughal Empire, like in any other early modern imperial formation, chronological fluctuations and regional disparities matter. As Muzaffar Alam put it, the “Mughal state rather than being a structure perfected at a given point of time, could be seen as a process, which incorporated and adjusted to the traditions and customs of the peoples as well as to the regions that were integrated into the empire over the years.”82 Regional specificities can explain the likely existence of different modes of collecting and archiving information in different provinces, done independently of guidelines emanating from the imperial center. Change over time is particularly significant, since the Mughal information system did not become truly formalized before Aurangzeb, who was keen on ruling a paper-dependent empire.83 An overquoted sentence by this emperor—“the main pillar of government is to be well informed in the news of the kingdom. Negligence for a single moment becomes the cause of disgrace for long years”—is in line with Baqir’s view more than half a century earlier.84 But Aurangzeb’s concern with information, combined with his centralization policy, might have taken him further than Jahangir in this respect, and consequently explains the existence of a body of contemporary texts that are hard to find for the previous reigns.85 The downside, for Aurangzeb and his immediate successors, is that critical voices arose, and news reports began to be viewed as red tape. In Mughal Delhi, poets like ‘Ali and Zatali parodied these texts and their writers, very much like Chinese literati criticized the excess and artificiality of bureaucracy during the Ming–Qing transition.86 This satirical stance might ultimately mean that people in earlier decades were exposed to (or at least perceived it as such) less imperial “paper pressure.” Society seems to have understood when the state was exaggerating. With this in mind, one can legitimately ask whether written intelligence records, from full-fledged reports to scribbled notes, were always destined to last in Mughal India. A couple of quite different sources provide telling insights on how key figures—none other than the celebrated warrior-scholar ‘Abdur Rahim Khan-i Khanan (d. 1627) and Emperor Jahangir himself—dealt with intelligence

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materials. In his massive eighteenth-century collection of the biographies of Mughal nobles, Shah Nawaz Khan states that the Khan-i Khanan resorted to his own system of information and surveillance and goes on to describe how it operated: “they say that he had a great avidity for court-news, so that every day two or three persons sent him journals by relays of couriers. There were spies appointed in the court-houses, and offices and terraces [cabutra], and even in the market-places and streets, who wrote every popular rumour. In the evening he read them all and then burnt them.”87 This intriguing picture raises three important issues. First, the Khan-i Khanan had waqainawis at his service. In fact, there were many petty bureaucrats working for individual Mughal nobles, nurturing expectations for good stipends and shining careers.88 ‘Abdur Rahim recruited some of these bureaucrats to condense into daily reports the information amassed by spies and to send him political news in a timely fashion. In sum, the Mughal nobles organized parallel, autonomous intelligence networks that did not fall under state control. The second topic concerns the sites of intelligence; one identifies closed settings, such as courthouses and offices, combined with open spaces like marketplaces and streets. Terraces, as we will argue later, were probably ajar, half open, half closed. The third observation relates to the ephemeral character of news, or the facile erosion of its newsness; once read, ‘Abdur Rahim set news reports on fire. A Flemish contemporary points out that Jahangir had a similar habit. According to Jacques de Coutre, the emperor was keen on prying into the houses of his nobles—both those living inside and outside the court—and was aware of every detail of their lives and households thanks to the work of a horde of spies (espías) and informers (soplones). Jahangir’s costly but effective scheme allowed him to collect intelligence in curious ways: “He had some porters in his palace to whom the informers secretly handed a note [billete], and one porter passed it on to the next until it reached the king’s hands. He himself would read them and destroy them [los léya y rompía].”89 What these two testimonies show is that not all Mughal intelligence records were inevitably archivable pieces. In fact, some of them (perhaps many?) were not supposed to be kept at all.90 This is one reason for the “fragility” of the Mughal archive. In addition, one can assume that both Jahangir and the Khan-i Khanan had good memories: their aims were not simply to read and destroy, but rather to read, retain, and destroy. As we know, the art of memory had a long tradition in early modern Europe and was even put into conversation with Chinese mnemonic methods in the late sixteenth century by the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci (d. 1610).91 There were no imperial examinations for Mughal officers and

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there was no Ricci among the Jesuits of the Mughal court, but memory was no less important in early modern India. Memorization techniques that included use of lexicons for language learning purposes were practiced by multilingual communities of scribes similar to the ones we will encounter in Chapter 5.92 Literary works like the tazkiras have been characterized as “memorative, relying on memory and remembrance to communicate,” even if the composition of these biographical compendiums did not require mnemonic abilities.93 And memory, more than books (or rather, making particular uses of books), was central to knowledge creation and transmission in Sufi lodges.94 If one moves from these diverse knowledge circles to governing circles, it is clear that memory was ever-present at the imperial palace. We speak of community memory, as shown by Sunil Sharma for Jahangir’s court, but also of the personal mnemonic abilities of given emperors.95 Akbar, a dyslexic “illiterate genius” (to adopt the evocative title of Ellen Smart’s classic article), surely had the ability to recollect.96 He “has . . . a good memory, and has attained to a considerable knowledge of many subjects by means of constant and patient listening to such discussions,” Antonio Monserrate remarked.97 These words were to be emphatically corroborated years later by a fellow Jesuit. On more than on one occasion, Jerónimo Xavier witnessed Akbar listening at night to two men reading rosters of Mughal officials—their rents, posts, and ranks (mansabs)—and was amazed at the emperor knowing all the nobles by name.98 Akbar, Xavier emphasized, “knew everything, remembered everything.” The monthly news coming from different provinces (subas) was likewise communicated to Akbar verbally, either when he was free or “when he sought to sleep.”99 Indeed, the emperor had people to read aloud to him. Besides news reports, courtiers read him books and told him stories, especially at night.100 Such a practice, however, had little to do with Akbar’s dyslexia or illiteracy. Amid other state affairs, Jahangir read “letters from his captains and others in his service” daily between eight and ten in the evening. After that, Jahangir would admit to his sleeping quarters “some good historians and tellers of tales who recount stories that happened throughout the world until he falls asleep.”101 The Khan-i-Khanan spied like Jahangir and went to bed like Jahangir—storytellers used to narrate him tales and stories in diverse languages before sleep.102 Written and spoken words fused in intriguing ways at the Mughal court. Jahangir and ‘Abdur Rahim read (letters, reports) but were equally read to (books, stories). The same holds true for Philip II, Akbar’s contemporary; less prone to making oral decisions (despacho a boca) than the Mughal emperor, “the paper king” (el rey papelero) liked having someone read to him at night, at least when he “was not feeling

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well” (estando indispuesto).103 Night reading in the ruler’s bedroom equaled socializing. In the same vein, and as we shall explore further in Chapters 4 and 7, political and ethnographic information could be transmitted in the guise of pastime or entertainment. The powerful interplay of oral and written information at the Mughal court and across the empire brings us to the sites of intelligence and the ways in which these locales might have shaped the content of intelligence itself and its modalities of transmission. In his description, Shah Nawaz Khan enumerates the closed and open spaces where “popular rumor” could be seized. The challenge to be addressed when trying to grasp the contours of a Mughal public sphere is to tell if and where fundamentally different social environments intersected. At first glance, there is on the one side a quasi-secluded elite, moving around inside the imperial palace (and the palaces of provincial governors, or subadars, across the empire), circulating between princely and mansabdar households, and frequenting administrative and judicial spaces in the major urban centers of Mughal India.104 In this relatively closed circuit, religion and politics, poetry and history were discussed behind closed doors, but not necessarily always indoors, in assemblies and salons. Think of the night sessions held at the Hall of Private Audience (diwan-i khass) of Jahangir’s palace between 1608 and 1611 as recorded by ‘Abdus-Sattar (d. after 1619). Almost indifferent to political matters, ‘AbdusSattar’s Majalis-i Jahangiri represents “a highly oral work which gives pride of place to literary (especially poetic), religious, historical, and scientific subjects.”105 As another example, consider the conversations between Jahangir and the Samarqandi scholar Mutribi in 1626 in the context of the evening royal assemblies held at the court in Lahore.106 Obviously, courtly news leaked out to the common folk. Among a set of typical Hindustani phrases inserted into a late eighteenth-century Gramatica indostana in Portuguese, one comes across an intriguing interrogative sentence: “What news do you have from the Darbar?” (Que novas tendes do Darbar?).107 The people who asked this sort of questions chatted and gossiped in relatively unruled spaces: places like the coffeehouse, if apparently less relevant for the Mughals than for the Ottomans and Safavids, but especially the “marginal” bazaar and street, where unique conversations took place and unique objects were made.108 Recent scholarship, however, has stressed the ways in which high and low actually intersected in the Mughal context. It is obvious that in the imperial capital, similarly to what Filippo de Vivo noted for sixteenth-century Venice, “the members of the political arena . . . never operated in a social vacuum,” as they “often met in public or semi-public spaces, where little shielded

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their words from the ears of ordinary bystanders.”109 But on top of tracing commoners listening to the conversations of influential characters in relatively open settings, one should seek to identify instances and spaces in which some social groups interacted with the political elite, thus contributing to the blurring of the boundaries between courtly and non-courtly. The terraces, mentioned by Shah Nawaz Khan as one of the loci for ‘Abdur Rahim’s informants to look for news, may well be one such intermediate place. We have the chabutras of Mughal palaces, where the emperor and members of the ruling elite used to socialize. Europeans were not barred from joining such meetings; the Jesuits were admitted to the gatherings that Akbar used to organize in “his house’s terrace” (terrado de sua caza) during the hot summer nights of Lahore, while Anthony Sherley would chat some years later with Shah ‘Abbas I (r. 1588–1629) on a similar terrace in the city of Qazvin.110 There were also more exposed elevated platforms, like balconies and rooftops. Halfway between public and private, such structures were privileged sites of observation, talk, and gossip in any major urban center of this period.111 From a balcony in Agra, dressed as Muslims, the Jesuits António Botelho and Francesco Morandi observed an imperial procession over the course of five hours in April 1648. “There were infinite people on the rooftops” to watch Shahjahan heading to his new capital—Shahjahanabad (today’s Old Delhi)—and a local inhabitant had suggested that the priests join this once-in-a-lifetime spectacle.112 A century earlier, a Galician resident of Diu called Pero Fernandes used a rooftop (eirado alto) to communicate rather unconventionally with the other residents of the fortressed city. The episode is recounted by the Portuguese chronicler Diogo do Couto (d. 1616), who characterizes Fernandes as a “free-speaking man” (homem solto e fallador). From that rooftop, “like a Moor on top of a minaret,” every morning Pero Fernandes would either call the officers to work or point out who was sleeping with whom.113 Fernandes was a homem de baixa sorte, meaning that he belonged to the lower echelons of Portuguese society. And yet, he used to correspond directly with King John III. Likewise, marginalized elements were more present in the lives of the Mughal ruling elite than previously thought.114 Poetry gatherings (musha‘iras) and the literary circles associated with such meetings were much more popular than we imagined.115 Poets, very much like story-tellers, could be at ease both on the street and in the palace.116 To these one should add a number of intermediate groups that embody what Bayly defined as “affective knowledge,” such as “holy men, seers, astrologers and physicians.”117 Such individuals and groups circulated extensively and were innate boundary crossers. Think of Sufi shaykhs, talking to people and recounting anecdotes as they wandered around.118

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The mid-seventeenth-century image of an infantilized Dara Shekuh (d. 1659), which contrasts with the more dignified portrait that came to prevail of Shahjahan’s eldest son, might have been forged at the many junctions of the two domains: “partly in court chronicles, but also in literary texts that were themselves informed by the gossip and chatter in the bazaars, coffeehouses (qahwakhanas), huqqa stalls, literary salons (musha‘iras) and other sites of urban mingling in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century North India.”119 The same can be said of the circulation of a story—of quite a different nature—about a prophesying ape at the court of Jahangir in the early 1610s, recounted by the Jesuits and others.120 The processes of transmission cannot be substantiated in full as it is hard to trace the concrete trajectories of certain stories and rumors between bazaar and text.121 Some of the information generated orally in these spaces and instances was poured into waqai and mixed with other materials before becoming formalized written news and intelligence. Other news moved around endlessly by word of mouth without leaving a trace in the imperial record. Both one and the other, however, might have found their way into the Estado’s domains and archive(s). Later in this book we will identify fleeting Mughal and Deccani voices embedded in Portuguese texts. Of course, it can be argued that this is another fragility of the Mughal archive. In contrast, however, I argue that this ability to “fuse” with European materials was one of the Mughal archive’s strengths. But, in order to grasp how threads of Persianate India were incorporated into the Portuguese tapestry, one needs to first look at the knitting needles, that is, where, how, and through whom did the Estado da Índia amass intelligence on the IndoPersian political sphere.

Chapter 2

The Mughal Realm Under Portuguese Surveillance

The information on Hindustan and the western Deccan that reached Goa mostly sprouted in, and circulated between, cities. The several imperial capitals, as well as the capitals of the different subas and other regional urban centers of Mughal India, were the loci of most of the news, its creators, and transmitters. The royal centers of Bijapur and Ahmadnagar, together with the many forts that shaped these sultanates’ domains, were no less significant. The port cities situated between the Persian Gulf and the Konkan coast, some of which were under Portuguese rule, did the rest. All these dots were linked in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by road systems.1 Along with Mughal political news, news pertaining to other genres and geographies was also generated, disseminated, and transformed in these nodes and through these arteries. Information knew no boundaries, and the Estado da Índia formed part of its grid. What reached Goa about the Mogor, the Idalcão, and the Melique was the result of a ball of thread made of people, movement, locales, languages, interactions, ways of observing, and narrative modes, exceeding the geographic limits and political authority of the states themselves. Looking through a Portuguese lens, all this activity seems to have revolved around the Estado da Índia. And yet, nothing could be further removed from the truth.

The View from the Walled Cities In their regular correspondence with the kings of Portugal, the viceroys of Goa often alluded to the spies they maintained on the ground to track the Mughals.

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With Akbar holding court in Burhanpur, the old capital of the Sultanate of Khandesh, located on the northwestern corner of the Deccan plateau, Aires de Saldanha (g. 1600–1605) claimed to have received word about the emperor’s actions from the spies “that I have permanently in Balaghat and next to the Mogor.” This Aires de Saldanha complemented—like any other viceroy of the Estado, past and future—with intelligence gathered both by the captains of the fortresses of the Província do Norte and Jesuit missionaries from the Mughal court.2 Two decades later, faced with a serious Mughal military offensive southward led by Prince Khurram (the future Emperor Shahjahan), João Coutinho (g. 1617–1619) recounted in minute detail to Philip III the geopolitical situation of Hindustan and the Deccan on the basis of what his spies and “intelligencers” (inteligências) saw and heard.3 But to whom did viceroys Saldanha and Coutinho refer specifically? Who were the moles working for them in 1600 and 1619, and what did the apparatus behind these invisible hands look like? Consider the information and the informants available in the chain of cities controlled by the Estado between Hormuz and Chaul. Due to its location, Hormuz had access to intelligence on the Mughals and the Safavids, as well as on the Uzbeks and the Ottomans.4 It was likewise the place to search for linguistic expertise, namely mastery of the Persian language, an essential device for navigating the political arena of the Indo-Persian world. Local converts (either Iranians or Armenians) and Catholic missionaries (especially Augustinians) often served the Estado da Índia as interpreters and translators, couriers and spies, people we will cross paths with later in this chapter and throughout the book. For now, it suffices to focus on the figure of Francisco Henriques, an Iranian educated in Hormuz who, as a Catholic priest, went to the city of Fatehpur Sikri in 1580 as a member of the first Jesuit mission to the Mughal court. Henriques was seen as someone “rather well-versed in the Persian language, in its civility, and forms of address,” meaning that he could speak the language as well as write it elegantly and according to codes of politesse.5 Hormuz was also the right city in which to look for rare books, the kind that an erudite governor of the Estado like Dom João de Castro sought to possess: the lives of famed conquerors such as Alexander and Timur, two figures that held a true transcultural appeal in the early modern era. One Garcia de la Peña—or de la Penha, probably a Spaniard said to be proficient in Persian and Latin who worked as interpreter for the Portuguese and the King of Hormuz in the 1540s—had experience in hunting for such manuscripts. Not without some hardship, Garcia de la Peña managed to find “a book . . . of the deeds of Alexander and of other illustrious figures” and sent it to Castro in Goa; at the same

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time, he also tried to secure “a chronicle of the deeds of the great Timur Lang.”6 Portuguese authors as diverse as the Dominican friar Gaspar da Cruz or the converso (baptized Jew) merchant Pedro Teixeira would later have access in the city to a late fourteenth-century copy of Firdausi’s Shahnama (“Book of Kings”) and offer fragmentary translations of this work in their own accounts, respectively the Tratado (1570) and Relaciones (1610).7 In Hormuz, one could buy books, find translations of books, and listen to books. Among the “many entertainments” (muitos desenfadamentos) available in the city, António Tenreiro notes in his Itinerario (1560), twice a day older, learned Muslims read aloud from a porch (alpendre) the “ancient chronicles” of Alexander and other illustrious figures. Public readings were frequent in the Islamic world.8 In the case of Hormuz, Tenreiro informs us that these aural readings were meant for the “instruction of the youngest ones,” yet “men, curious about the ancient deeds,” could also profit.9 The city was a cultured place at the crossroads of written and oral knowledge, the junction where information, translation, and erudition often mingled. Amply depicted by sixteenth- to eighteenth-century Portuguese painters and cartographers, the four fortressed cities of the Província do Norte—Chaul, Bassein, Diu, and Daman—were culturally less refined places than Hormuz (Figure 3 and Map 4).10 Notwithstanding, they were favored sites of surveillance and information on the Mughal Empire and the Deccan sultanates. Their captains resorted to locally organized, small-scale intelligence networks.11 Such webs were somewhat tailored to managing the tense quotidian of heavy militarized transborder relations. Yet much of the “big” information on the Mogor available to the viceroys in Goa depended on these structures too. What people knew in the Estado’s capital about Jahangir’s journey to Gujarat in 1617–1618 (an unexpected and threatening visit in the eyes of the Portuguese) was in part intelligence obtained by spies working for the Captain of Diu, Lourenço de Souto Maior, who presumably made use of the extant rubric for espionage in his budget.12 Other captains of the Norte took advantage of the concealed nature of the spies’ activity (and existence) and simply pocketed the money without ever recruiting them: it being unwise to register nominal payments to spies, some officials felt free to appropriate for themselves the amount allocated to intelligence work.13 Portuguese Chaul—Chaul de Baixo (“Lower Chaul”)—profited from a gifted location to gather intelligence on Ahmadnagar and the western Deccan. Just a league up the Kundalika river, there was Chaul de Cima (“Upper Chaul”), or the Muslim city, which constituted the perfect window into the Nizam Shahi kingdom. A set of letters penned in 1587–1588 by the Portuguese captain of the

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Figure 3. Plans of the cities of Goa, Diu, Daman, Bassein, and Chaul. Detail of Image 9 (right-hand page) of João Teixeira Albernaz, Taboas geraes de toda a navegação . . . com todos os portos principaes das conquistas de Portugal, 1630. Library of Congress, G1015. T4 1630. Public domain. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

city, Manuel de Lacerda Pereira, allows us to understand the nature of the political information available at Chaul de Baixo. Pereira was conscious of the chaotic situation in the Nizam Shahi court: Sultan Murtaza I’s madness and long confinement, his crush on a dancer called Fath Shah, and his eventual assassination; the rise and fall of an influent Persian called Salabat Khan; Sultan Ibrahim II’s maneuvering and Bijapur’s attempts to checkmate Ahmadnagar; and the transitory character of Sultan Husain II’s reign and his addiction to wine and other “vices.”14 Pereira’s letters are an exercise in observation and political ethnography, one that calls for comparison with visions from within, namely those of Firishta and Tabatabai.15 Equally telling are the contemporary views on Mughal geopolitics espoused by Luís de Mendonça, Captain of Diu. From his writing desk on the northern tip of the Província do Norte, looking inland but also viewing the Arabian Sea, Mendonça was in a privileged situation to provide Goa and Madrid with a true political x-ray of Hindustan and the Deccan. Rebellions were still sprouting in

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Mughal Gujarat, while a factional Sind was on the verge of being captured by Akbar; Ahmadnagar’s whirlpool continued with the elimination of Husain II and his replacement by Isma‘il in 1591; Mughal-Uzbek tension was high and had forced the Mughal emperor to travel from Lahore to Kashmir.16 In all probability, Mendonça might have also heard and conveyed an intriguing bazaar rumor about Akbar being murdered in a bathhouse by a woman loyal to the Uzbek ruler, ‘Abdullah Khan (r. 1583–1598).17 The wealth of information on Mughal India and the western Deccan transmitted in the late 1580s to Madrid via Goa mirrors the good intelligence work overseen by Manuel de Lacerda Pereira and Luís de Mendonça. The latter’s deep knowledge of a vast area stretching west as far the Red Sea and Ethiopia would later be praised by Viceroy Matias de Albuquerque (g. 1591– 1597), who depicted Pereira as a “very knowledgeable man . . . whose diligence had often been beneficial to viceroys.” Albuquerque further stressed that Mendonça mostly counted on the information provided by merchants doing business in those lands, with whom he built bonds by way of gifts.18 Indian merchants were an excellent intelligence resource. The baniya network on the subcontinent, for instance, was of great help to Portuguese viceroys and Jesuit missionaries alike when it came to accessing news and carrying letters.19 The network was wide ranging since, as they noted in one of their seventeenth-century petitions to the Portuguese Crown, the baniyas (baneanes) from the seaports of Gujarat and the cities of the Província do Norte nurtured ties with those who lived in Goa, served as “business partners and factors of others of the kingdom of the Mogor,” and constantly moved around (de huma parte pera a outra).20 Besides the baniyas and other indigenous mediators, one could resort to Portuguese go-betweens like Dinis Álvares, sent as a spy from Chaul to Balaghat on the eve of the Portuguese conquest of the Korlai fort (situated at the top of the Morro de Chaul) to Ahmadnagar in 1594.21 Álvares represented a much-needed asset for the Estado: he spoke Persian and Dakhani and could therefore safely cross the lands of the Deccan in Muslim costume, listening and inquiring. Neither a rebel nor a renegade, he was the perfect intermediary.22 Others, like Álvares’s contemporary Francisco de Ulhoa, took risky steps forward and their relationship with Estado was certainly more convoluted. Ulhoa lived with his several wives and young children in the city of Ahmadnagar in 1586, was favored by Murtaza I, and dressed permanently—not occasionally, like Álvares did for intelligence purposes—as a Muslim (em trajos de Mouro). Ulhoa then decided to turn himself in and promised to travel to the fortress of Chaul with his numerous family members, where he was expected at any moment in December that year.23

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The View from the Capital City We don’t know whether Ulhoa actually came to Chaul or if he ever became a Portuguese mole at the court of Ahmadnagar. Regardless, his figure recalls that of Manuel de Azevedo, the Portuguese renegade spy at the ‘Adil Shahi court in 1570–1571 who opened the previous chapter. Trust and loyalty should have been in the viceroys’ minds when dealing with individuals like Azevedo and Ulhoa, who were at once precious and dangerous. On the one hand, such individuals chose to break—politically, socially, religiously—with their community of origin. On the other, their deep Indo-Persian experience turned them into valuable border crossers. Choices had to be made in the viceregal palace when it came to recruiting Portuguese spies who truly lived on the fringes in Hindustan and the Deccan. In October 1597, Francisco da Gama (g. 1597–1600) was taking his first steps as the new viceroy of the Estado, but he already counted on his own spies in Akbar’s court, whose reports diverged from those of the Jesuits.24 One such spy was Duarte Borges, or Duarte Borges de Miranda, a former ouvidor (judge) of Malacca who had taken refuge in Mughal India after murdering his wife. Duarte Borges committed a serious crime and was an outlaw in the eyes of Goa; this type of homicide justified capital punishment under civil law unless the wife had committed adultery (Borges, being a judge, knew this well).25 But from Akbar’s domains—possibly from the imperial capital, but definitely from Gujarat where his presence is documented—Duarte Borges sent news dispatches to the capital of the Estado.26 Such cooperation quickly translated into rehabilitation, since Borges started to circulate freely among Portuguese circles in South Asia and Philip III was willing to reward him for his services as early as 1603.27 Duarte Borges crossed paths with individuals from several walks of life who had knowledge of Mughal India and the western Deccan but who were also runaways in a Catholic Estado da Índia. The Armenian Sebastião Dias, a Christian-turned-Muslim whom Borges advised in Gujarat to return to Goa and present himself to the Inquisition, is an exemplary case.28 Borges was also a contemporary of several New Christians who moved constantly around the Indian Peninsula. The missionaries of the Mogor and the inquisitors of Goa must have likewise tracked many of the New Christians following a general pardon issued in 1599 to all those who, leading unruly religious living “in Akbar’s lands” and the Deccan region (especially in Burhanpur), were prepared to present themselves to the Goa Inquisition within a year.29 Still, the viceroys surely preferred to rely on people like Dinis Álvares, and these too were available in the capital of the Estado. An inquiry led in early 1620 by the Inquisitor João Delgado Figueira on

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the meaning of the linha (i.e., the upavita, or the sacred thread worn by the Brahmans) is most revealing in this respect.30 The inquisitor’s questions, as well as the depositions recorded by the notary, provide information on the identities and profiles of several residents who were acquainted with the Indo-Persian world and beyond. They were all men in their thirties, forties, and fifties. Several were born in Portugal but had been living in Goa for quite some time and had traveled extensively to several parts of the Mughal Empire and elsewhere in India. Duarte Brandão, Salvador Fernandes Serpa, and Crespim Gomes are cases in point.31 Others, like Jerónimo Rodrigues, were born in India; a casado (married settler) of Goa, Rodrigues “had crossed the lands of the Mogor, and Dialcão, and spent a long time in Diu as well.”32 The notary also registered statements from a couple of European dwellers of Goa. Born in Cartagena de Indias around 1590, Francisco Suárez (Francisco Soares) arrived a decade prior to his testimony and had made some “journeys to the Mogor.”33 Another foreigner, a Tuscan called Francesco Paolsanti (Francisco Paulo Sancti), is a particularly interesting figure. In his late twenties at the time of his deposition, he had left Florence for India via Lisbon roughly ten years earlier and had lived in Goa and Gujarat (Khambayat and Ahmedabad) since then. Paolsanti had journeyed extensively in India, for he claimed in front of the inquisitor to have mastered “the language(s) of all these Gentiles of the eastern region.”34 An expert in jewels in the service of the Medici, he was given a fitting nickname once back to Tuscany: l’Indiano.35 One is left wondering what this pool of individuals tells us about the average Portuguese (and European) resident (morador) of Goa and their knowledge of India. Some used to chat (they had conversação and comércio) with Brahmans. Several noted more or less explicitly that travel, curiosity, and mastery of the language(s) were useful tools to understand the Brahmans and their rites. Were they the rule, or rather the exception? Paolsanti and several others certainly recall the kind of local interlocutors that polymaths like the French Nicolas Fabri de Peiresc (d. 1637) counted on to access India from a distance through letters and reports.36 They likewise bring to mind some of Isaac Netwon’s informants, later in the same century.37 The point is that among those Europeans who spied, or could have spied, for the Estado da Índia in the lands of Persianate India, we recognize merchants and travelers that effectively linked different cultural and social worlds. One day—to borrow from Peter Miller—they were “intellectual partners” of European savants, the next day they served as political partners of Portuguese viceroys.38 Obviously, not all those who gave depositions at the Goa Inquisition between January 25 and February 3, 1620, engaged in espionage activities. Still,

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their knowledge must have circulated in the city. The inquisitors consulted with them about the meanings of the Brahmans’ religious practices. The viceroys surely learned from them about Mughal India and the Deccan sultanates, as three of the witnesses interrogated then—Vicente Ribeiro, Manuel de Paiva, and Gaspar Pacheco de Mesquita, all born in Portugal—would become regular informants of the Viceroy Count of Linhares a decade later.39 Certainly telling but almost impossible to recover today, were the informal conversations that these individuals maintained with friends and family in the city. Like Venice, Goa was probably a systemic, large-scale circulatory system in which information often overflowed into the domain of public discussion.40 The anonymous author of Primor e honra lamented the fact that sensitive letters were read aloud to gatherings of people who sat in front of their houses (se lião pellas portas em ajuntamento de cadeiras), or otherwise circulated from house to house (de casa em casa).41 Bijapur was no different in this regard; writing more as a Portuguese spy of Goa than as a Jesuit priest, António Botelho remarked in 1655 that there was news in the sultanate upon which even “the street children” (os meninos da rua) commented.42 Apparently, none of those questioned by Figueira in 1620 came under suspicion for religious deviation or political betrayal. Despite their diverse origins and trajectories, the Inquisition seems to have acknowledged these individuals as seasoned citizens. Research on groupings and communities in early modern Europe has been warning us in recent years against the perils of static and clear-cut identity demarcations, while simultaneously underlining “the unexpected flexibility of community definitions and boundaries.”43 Both inner understandings and outer perceptions contribute to the making and remaking of a community; religion and allegiance, geography and ethnicity, language and dress, manners and practices, rights and duties are just some of the most significant components of that process. Goa—Portuguese and Catholic—was surely no exception. Often, the need for political and cultural brokerage led the Estado to rely on people who belonged to groups that were deemed hostile to the community. As we see in the case of Coge Abraham, to employ Jews in order to access Persianate India was an option that any viceroy would consider.44 For at least four decades, between 1554 and 1594, Coge Abraham worked as a spy, political broker, and language mediator for the Portuguese. His first documented assignments were in Gujarat in the aftermath of Sultan Muhammad’s death in 1554 and during the reign of his successor, Sultan Ahmad III (r. 1554–1561).45 In 1575, Coge Abraham accompanied the Ambassador of Bijapur to Portugal as interpreter and secretary and facilitated his audience with King Sebastian.46 Some years later, in 1582, one finds Coge Abraham in Goa among those who witnessed the signing of a treaty

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between Bijapur and the Estado.47 The last phase of his Portuguese career was one of intense diplomatic and intelligence activity in Ahmadnagar in the context of growing Mughal influence in the sultanate and the region. Highly praised by Viceroy Matias de Albuquerque, Coge Abraham was still on the payroll of the Estado and profited from royal grants as late as 1594.48 He then vanishes from the Portuguese registers, but a later Jesuit text contends that Coge Abraham converted to Islam in his old age and married a rich Muslim woman.49 It is uncertain whether Coge Abraham eventually adhered to Islam, but we likewise do not know whether he experimented with his Jewishness beforehand or if he ever felt pressed in Counter-Reformation Goa to embrace Catholicism. Be that as it may, he found himself at the intersection of the three religions of the book and this surely was a condition common to most of the Jews and New Christians living under the umbrella of Portuguese Asia. Members of other equally important early modern diaspora communities—or circulation societies, in Sebouh Aslanian’s expression—might have been faced with the same situation.50 For example, Armenians, in all likelihood, shared the Jews’ anxieties in Goa. The Armenians’ ability to bridge geographical distances and cultural gaps was at once advantageous and hazardous for the Estado da Índia.51 True, they were Christians. Seen from Goa, though, Armenians seemed closer to heretic Eastern Christians than to devout Roman Catholics. What is more, Armenians were in dangerous vicinity with Muslims and Jews; as a Jesuit priest put it in 1600, appalled with the messy religious life of the aforementioned Sebastião Dias, “these Armenians are rather imperfect Christians [imperfeitissimos cristãos], born and raised in the heartlands of Turks, Muslims, and Jews, with no clue whatsoever about the Catholic doctrine.”52 Nonetheless, the Society of Jesus often recruited them as language brokers and couriers in the Mughal context. The first interpreters employed by the missionaries to communicate in the imperial court were Armenians. Emperor Akbar met at least two of them: a certain João Garcês (Fatehpur Sikri, 1579) and one Domingos Pires (Lahore, 1595).53 Jahangir, Akbar’s son and successor, conversed with the Franciscan Manuel Tobias in Ajmer in 1623 through the linguistic mediation of an Armenian of Goa called Gaspar Gomes.54 Otherwise, the Estado da Índia frequently relied on Armenians as spies and messengers in the Indo-Persian world. It was a Christian Armenian who, on one occasion, brought letters from Akbar in Lahore to Matias de Albuquerque in Goa. Once in the presence of the viceroy, the Armenian “gave him [i.e., the Portuguese viceroy] an account about the power of this king and of all matters related to him [i.e., the Mughal ruler] and argued that the [empire’s] current

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prosperity would end upon his death.”55 Maybe this was the same Armenian mole that Viceroy Francisco da Gama employed soon after to collect news in Akbar’s court: a man called Belchior Dias da Cruz, sent overland to Agra in a merchant disguise.56 The most fascinating case, though, is that of António Jorge, or António Jorge da Cruz. Born in Goa around 1560 and educated in Hormuz under Jesuit influence, António Jorge apparently had solid command of several languages. Besides Armenian and Portuguese, he was said to have mastered Latin, Chaldean, Persian, Turkish, Greek, Italian, and Spanish. He probably also knew a couple of regional Indian languages, like Dakhani (moresca) and Konkani (lingua Indiana sua naturale). António Jorge’s linguistic talents allowed him to circulate extensively. Indeed, he traveled twice overland between Goa and Madrid carrying official letters ingeniously hidden inside bread loaves. In his first journey, he left the capital of the Estado in late 1590 and reached Messina in August 1591 on his way to Genoa after calling at Istanbul, Tripoli, and Malta. To the Jesuit provincial of Sicily, António Jorge gave somewhat confusing news on Akbar and the two Jesuit missions to the Mughal court (1580, 1590). The Armenian claimed to have joined the first mission as an interpreter, which no other source confirms, and further noted that he was carrying with him a copy of a letter from Akbar to the viceroy of the Estado.57 The second journey happened in 1608. It took António Jorge two months to travel from Goa to Hormuz, Isfahan (where he met with Shah ‘Abbas I), and Istanbul, always dressing accordingly—per la Persia vestiva da Persiano, et per la Turchia da Turco—and selling precious stones on the way to cover his expenses. From Istanbul he journeyed to Malta, Palermo, Naples, Rome (being granted an audience with Pope Paul V), and Genoa. On the doge’s orders, António Jorge eventually told his tale, which we must take with a pinch of salt.58 In between the two long trips to Madrid, in 1602, António Jorge sought royal reward for his services as a spy: seven years spent in prison after being caught with letters from the captain of Hormuz in his possession certainly accounted for something.59

At the ‘Adil Shahi Court António Jorge would have been a safe pair of hands if employed by the Estado to surveil the sultanates of the western Deccan and to mediate with their courts. Silvestre Gonçalves Pereira, António Jorge’s contemporary and bearing a rather similar profile (not an Armenian, though), was chosen in 1624 to take a letter

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from the Portuguese viceroy to the Sultan of Bijapur for “he is an experienced man and speaks the Persian language.”60 Two years earlier, the Estado had relied on another Portuguese with solid experience of Bijapur as a letter bearer between Goa and the ‘Adil Shahi court. A local morador, João Álvares was trustworthy and had extensive “practice and knowledge of the Moors.”61 It is obvious that neither Pereira nor Álvares limited themselves to moving letters; they were certainly asked to amass intelligence. Pereira had done so earlier by bringing avisos from the Persian Gulf in 1618.62 Like António Jorge, he was used to long voyages and hazardous situations; Pereira also traveled twice by land from Goa to Madrid and back as a letter bearer (1608–1610, 1612–1615), which required knowledge of languages and survival skills.63 He was taken captive during the first of these journeys, but never lost sight of the correspondence he carried and was commended for that in Portugal.64 Pereira and Álvares entered the court of Sultan Ibrahim II as emissaries, not as full-fledged ambassadors. Ambassadors were typically nobles, and often members of the royal household (fidalgos da Casa Real): people like António de Azeredo—thrice ambassador to Bijapur between 1594 and 1601—and his son Baltasar de Azeredo, whom we will encounter in the next chapter.65 Noble lineage, knowledge of India, and familial reputation acquired at the ‘Adil Shahi court seem to have prevailed when selecting the Estado’s ambassadors to Bijapur. These men obviously built their contacts on the ground and fostered connections among members of the sultanate’s elite, yet it is unlikely they knew Persian or had a profound understanding of the political etiquette and social conventions of the Indo-Persian world. To overcome this weakness, the Portuguese resorted to people who could speak the language, gather information, give advice, and ultimately decode the ‘Adil Shahi court. Catholic missionaries, Brahman experts, and Goa residents like Pereira or Álvares usually accompanied the ambassadors to the royal citadel of Bijapur. The human layer below, as we will see in Chapter 3, corresponds to an army of Indian spies and couriers devoted to intelligence production and transmission. Oftentimes, political information—either in written or oral form, but at any rate fitted to quasi-immediate consumption and therefore quickly rendered obsolete—ran through the exact same channels as somewhat more permanent “honorable” textual materials. Consider the following two cases that took place in the western Deccan at the turn of the seventeenth century. In the seventh Decade of his Ásia, completed in Goa between 1601 and 1603 and published in Lisbon in 1616, Diogo do Couto decided to include a chapter about the Sultanate of Ahmadnagar in the context of Sultan Burhan I’s death and succession

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(1553). To write such a chapter, the Portuguese chronicler apparently made use of a lembrança (i.e., a report) “extracted from the registers (tombos) of that king’s court sent by one António de Aguiar, or Islam Khan (Islancan).” Couto goes on to portray Aguiar and expand on the contours of their relationship: “He is a smart man who masters many languages and has been living for a long time in that court as a Moor. We used to exchange letters and he always gave me reliable information concerning the matters of that court.”66 It remains unknown whether this is the man with the same surname who lived in the capital of Ahmadnagar in 1595 and who was then regarded in Goa as an open enemy. If so, Aguiar apparently took advantage of being rather close to Burhan II to turn the sultan against the Portuguese, which makes him an even more intriguing figure: someone keen to harm the Estado’s strategy for the western Deccan, and yet ready to diligently copy (and translate?) documents from the sultanate’s chancellery so that the Estado’s chronicler and archivist could fulfil his duties.67 True, Couto’s explanations about his non-European sources and his access to them require caution. But if Aguiar’s lembrança really existed, it certainly was a “messy” document, similar to the Luso-Mughal and Luso-Deccani materials that we will discuss later in the book. A second case, contemporary to Couto’s textual interactions with Aguiar, takes us from the Nizam Shahi chancellery to the ‘Adil Shahi library. An unnamed character who probably used to send Viceroy Francisco da Gama political news on and from Bijapur (perhaps a Brahman called Ajju Nayak, whom we will encounter in Chapters 6 and 7), identified at Sultan Ibrahim’s court “some books in Persian that, it was said, dealt with the history of the world since its creation until the government of this king who now rules in Persia [i.e., Shah ‘Abbas I].”68 Gama apparently ordered these books to be bought with an eye to sending them to the “library of San Lorenzo.” Philip II’s successor would soon after assume that the volumes were on their way to Madrid. Nevertheless, Philip III hoped for more and asked the Archbishop of Goa, Dom Aleixo de Meneses (g.  1595–1612), to arrange a translation in Goa—something easier to prepare there than in Madrid, the new king reasoned—from a possible copy made locally. We wonder whether Philip III’s request was taken seriously, or if a copy was at all made. At any rate, these books—either Persian copies of them or their Portuguese (Castilian?) translations—probably never made it to El Escorial. Maybe Sultan Ibrahim II, who truly valued the contents of his library, did not wish to sell the books after all.69 In Ibrahim II’s cosmopolitan court, based in the city of Nauraspur since 1599, the Portuguese ambassadors and their opaque aids shared space with a

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crowd of other Europeans. Some, like the Dutch painter Cornelis Claesz Heda (d. 1622), entered the sultanate from Portuguese India. Others, like the German soldier Georg Krieger, had friends in Goa and exchanged letters, in early 1616, with a Syrian Christian from Aleppo called Michel Angelo Corai.70 There were, of course, national alignments and national antagonisms, as “patriotism” went hand in hand with “xenophobia.”71 Being German, Krieger housed the German traveler Henrich von Poser (d. 1661) in 1622.72 Heda, whose standing in Bijapur derived from the sultan’s patronage, became a magnet for the small Dutch community of Nauraspur; pronouncedly anti-Portuguese, Heda helped “victims” of Catholic Goa find a niche at the ‘Adil Shahi court.73 The Flemish jeweler Jacques de Coutre is a quite different case since he was not only a frequent visitor of Bijapur, but also a resident of Goa. He spent most of his time among the Portuguese after 1591, especially in the capital of the Estado with his brother Joseph from 1603; both were forced to return to Spain twenty years later under the accusation of spying for the Dutch.74 When Jacques came to Bijapur for the first time in 1604, he could not speak the language(s) and consequently relied on a Catholic Armenian called Francisco Gonçalves as his interpreter and message bearer. Jacques would return a year later in the company of three Portuguese and seemed more integrated; he was now friends with several Bijapuri nobles and closer to Ibrahim himself, as well as having nurtured ties with many “gentile merchants.” When he visited Bijapur in 1616 for the third time, on his way to Golconda and Agra, Jacques was probably conversant in Persian and Dakhani. He then claimed to have helped ambassador António Monteiro Corte Real, in whose house he stayed, by serving as his interpreter in discussions with Bijapuri courtiers.75 Bijapur—sultanate, capital, and citadel—was a key center of information not only on the Deccan region itself, but also on Mughal India and beyond. Bijapur was intensively frequented during Sultan Ibrahim II’s reign (but not exclusively in that period) by a “cascade” of Europeans engaged in war, diplomacy, espionage, trade, travel, and art. Their interactions likely went in every possible direction, from friendship and partnership to rivalry and enmity. At any rate, these men integrated into a deeply multiethnic society and political fabric in the sultanate, further enriched by the regular visits of Mughal, Safavid, and other Deccani ambassadors and their impressive escorts. For instance, Hakim Kushal was in Bijapur in 1619 as Jahangir’s ambassador to Ibrahim II and corresponded then with the Portuguese governor of the Estado via the mediation of one Francisco Soares.76 The latter might have been the Spaniard of the same name questioned in the following year by Inquisitor Figueira about the Brahman’s upavita.

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From Shahpur, Soares also brokered between Goa and Malik Ambar (d. 1626), the former Habshi (Ethiopian) slave turned kingmaker in Ahmadnagar.77

At the Mughal Court Up north, in the major Mughal cities, the coexistence of a variety of European dwellers was no less challenging. Take the following incident, which occurred in Agra in 1604. An unnamed Portuguese said out loud that, although they ate Akbar’s salt, the Jesuits did not hesitate to spy on the emperor and betray him.78 The Jesuit missionaries had been a regular presence in the imperial capitals since 1580.79 But, in spite of their favored position at the Mughal court before Shahjahan’s rule, the Catholic priests competed with a host of other foreigners who likewise fought for their share of the emperor’s attention; Portuguese and other Europeans, but also Armenians and Jews often mingled in the imperial capital regardless of origin, ethnicity, or belief. Think of André de Sousa, a Portuguese born in Goa who fled to the “lands of the Moors” and lived a “scandalous” life in Agra in the mid-1620s.80 Sousa was no different from the rebels and renegades who populated the Deccan sultanates in the same period. Expectedly, he and many others alike were considered personae non gratae in the Estado da Índia and perceived the priests as their adversaries in the Mughal court.81 The faceless man who affirmed that the Jesuits ate Akbar’s salt was obviously acquainted with the deep meaning of the expression he shouted in Hindi across the city’s streets amidst several insults ( Jerónimo Xavier stresses that he mastered the language): to eat the Mughal emperor’s salt meant to be under his patronage, be loyal, and acknowledge subordination.82 In fact, the Jesuits were in many ways imperial attendants, much like the Dutch representatives in Japan fashioned themselves as vassals of the shogun after 1630.83 To eat the salt of the emperor translated into following him everywhere and being available whenever he desired. This the Jesuits did, moving ceaselessly in the shadows of Akbar and Jahangir. Whenever the emperor decided to hold court in a different city, or go on a military expedition or a hunting excursion, the missionaries were usually requested to follow him. When Jahangir was about to travel from Lahore to Agra in February 1608, Xavier assured the emperor that he would not fail to attend him and so the Jesuit embarked on a challenging five-week journey which he described minutely some months later.84 In the inner logic of a Jesuit text, such trips do not reach the heights of a description of the maritime voyage between Lisbon and Goa.85 Notwithstanding,

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the missionaries elaborated frequently on their overland journeys in India made in the company of Mughal rulers. Francesco Corsi (d. 1635) proved to be one of the most seasoned Jesuit travelers in the Mughal Empire. He spent considerable time on the road with Jahangir, a full decade of long and harsh itineraries that took him from Agra to Ajmer, the Deccan, Gujarat, Agra again, and Kashmir, before finally returning to Agra. “In all these travels that he [i.e., the emperor] did every year to one of these kingdoms,” Corsi bitterly complained toward the end of Jahangir’s reign, “I was the only one from the Society [Companhia] escorting him, and it is hard to imagine what kind of life this can be without actually experiencing it.” In his own judgment, the Florentine missionary morphed into a homo do matto, or a rustic man.86 Jesuits like Corsi knew the portable Mughal courts as well as they did the immovable ones. Inside a capital, be it Agra, Lahore, or any other imperial city, the Jesuits likewise circulated intensively; when one reads the letters they penned from those cities with an eye to tracing their daily activities, movement cannot go unnoticed. The missionaries walked in the streets, recording what they saw and to whom they talked. They walked between their houses or churches and the imperial palace compound. Once inside the citadel, they moved daily at the emperor’s discretion between public settings and the inner sphere. Several Mughal artists captured the priests’ presence at the imperial capitals, showing them as courtiers among courtiers (Figure 4).87 The constant movement between various cities of Mughal India and inside several imperial capitals and palaces provided the Jesuits with ample opportunities for conversations, even tense ones with a crowd of eclectic people, be they permanent or itinerant residents. There were Hindus and Armenians (also Jews and Muslims, if to a lesser extent), whom the priests sought to convert, as well as the Portuguese and many Europeans from all walks of life with whom they often clashed but whose faith they aspired to secure. Beneath these one identifies a deeper, “native” layer comprising darshaniyas and the like, with whom the missionaries often had theological discussions.88 But the missionaries could equally come to the doors of the “women’s houses” and lobby with eunuchs they knew in order to gather information from women who lived in the harem or even to gain access to none other than Empress Nur Jahan (d. 1627).89 As quasi-Mughal courtiers, the Catholic priests met and conversed with other courtiers, including erudite Muslims with whom they felt intellectually affiliated, religious clashes aside. Jerónimo Xavier was very much at the center of these learned exchanges during his two decades at the Mughal court (1595–1615). Many of the learned Muslim men were scholar-diplomats and personified the

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Figure 4. Akbar presiding over religious discussions in the Ibadat Khana. Folio from Abu’l Fazl’s Akbarnama, by Narsingh, Mughal India (Agra), 1603–1605. The Chester Beatty Library, CBL In 03.263v. © The Trustees of the Chester Library, Dublin.

flows of literate knowledge and courtly skills between Safavid Iran and Mughal India.90 During his early years in the imperial capital, Xavier made acquaintance with an erudite Persian from Qazvin called Naqib Khan. This was the “king’s scholar” (lente do rei) whom Jahangir would later present as an unrivaled historian.91 Naqib Khan had been about to travel to the court of Philip III as Jahangir’s ambassador in 1606, which left Xavier truly excited since he considered the Persian to be “an excellent Muslim literate and chronicler, and not an enemy of the Portuguese.”92 Another telling case is that of Hakim ‘Ali Gilani (d. 1609), a Persian doctor and expert Avicenna scholar who served Akbar for many years and visited the ‘Adil Shahi court in 1579 as ambassador. Xavier identifies Hakim

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‘Ali Gilani as a “physician, eminent literate” (físico grande letrado) and portrays him as “a rather serious, learned, and venerated man.”93 Xavier’s familiarity with these and other characters at the Mughal court made him a privileged eyewitness of political intrigues and power games. When he listed phrases like “to lose royal favor” (descair da privança) or “to uncover treason” (descobrir traição) in his Portuguese–Hindi–Persian dictionary, Xavier probably had in mind the many individuals who fell from grace before his very eyes.94 These included Hakim ‘Ali Gilani himself, the Turani Mirza ‘Aziz Koka (d. 1624)—Akbar’s foster brother whose long imperial career was full of twists and turns—and the Persian Sharif Khan (d. 1612), who grew up with Jahangir but would live to see “the love [in which] the king nurtured him gradually fade.” Xavier’s lively portrayal of the political and personal downfall of these three figures constitutes an impressive, modern embodiment of the human costs of nasty palace politics.95 The Jesuits amassed considerable information on things political at the crossroads of palace conversations and bazaar rumors. They were able to minutely describe and assess the movable property of some of the most eminent members of the imperial elite, such as Zain Khan Koka (d. 1601), another of Akbar’s foster brothers, or I’timad ud-Daula (d. 1622), Jahangir’s father-in-law.96 The missionaries frequented the palace of the all-powerful Asaf Khan ( Jahangir’s brother-inlaw) and went as far as estimating the impressive number of people in his service: 30,000 men in 1623, according to an updated roster (resenha da gente que tem) that Father António de Andrade either saw or, more likely, heard about.97 They likewise knew the content and value of the gifts made to the emperor, from the present of a inattentive mansabdar from Bengal in 1596 who had neglected to attend Akbar’s court in recent years to the gift offered to Jahangir by the ambassador of Bijapur in 1615.98 Somewhat surprisingly, the Jesuit gaze on the Mughals is often directed to numbers; the missionaries seem to have enjoyed quantifying the lives and deaths of Mughal nobles. Several of these nobles were present at the evening and night assemblies promoted by Akbar and Jahangir. Such meetings mirrored the diversity of the empire itself, since learned people from every corner of Mughal India took part. Xavier provides intriguing descriptions of these gentlemanly sessions, their format and substance. Besides the Jesuits, indistinct newcomers from the world beyond the imperial domains were also welcomed. The emperor socialized intensively every night at the crossroads of diverse literate and oral traditions: “as soon as the candles were lit, he sat in a large room where some well-read individuals coming from different lands were admitted. One by one they were asked

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to speak and tell stories, and whenever a newcomer was around, he was brought in and asked about his king, land, customs, trade, etc. . . . When such people were not in town, he had someone read him books of diverse stories.”99 Anecdotes were told, books were read, and ethnography was discussed. The Jesuits became active participants in this regular practice of reading texts and telling tales to the emperor. When their knowledge of the language was insufficient, they resorted to brokers. In one example Akbar ordered ‘Aziz Koka to listen to the Jesuits’ stories in Xavier’s broken Persian (minha meia lingoa) and recount them later to him in “very good Persian” (muito bom parcio).100 Once Xavier’s language skills improved, ‘Aziz Koka’s mediation was no longer needed. Interestingly enough, the priests put it as if they worked in tandem with the emperor and no one else was in the room: “We used to tell our stories and he would tell us theirs. He was particularly interested that we listened to one of his, on Brahmans, . . . and he himself played the role of historian.”101 In their letters, the Jesuits recount several of the dialogues held with Akbar and often reproduce the emperor’s words in direct speech. They talked about books, maps, and especially images, but also maintained ordinary conversations on, say, Christian monogamy, priestly celibacy, or simply how people in Europe were expected to sit in front of their kings.102 There was some common ground, but no real possibility of engaging in “brush talk,” like Korean envoys to the Tokugawa Shogunate did with their Japanese hosts on the basis of—as Rebekah Clements put it—“a shared storehouse of civilized learning.”103 To the missionaries’ despair, conversation on “unimportant things” (cousas indiferentes) often prevailed over discussions about “God and religion” (Dios y de ley).104 The former included military events and political affairs, such as the Portuguese conquest of the Morro de Chaul in 1594, the death of King Sebastian in 1578, and a “thousand things concerning Europe and the king of Portugal.”105 The arrival in Lahore of a bundle of letters sent from Goa in 1596 made a sick Akbar request the priests’ presence in his chambers in order to read him all the letters, including the private ones. The meeting lasted for more than two hours, with myriad questions being asked as the letters were read. Whenever the news contained in the letters differed from the news available to the emperor, he would call his informers in and confront them.106 Sessions of this kind might have led the Jesuits to be quite pessimistic about Akbar’s real motivation towards them: “In truth, it seems that he wants us in his court just to have Christian merchants coming and going and that we have communication with the viceroy and the Portuguese.”107 This disenchanted comment by Xavier from Srinagar probably had some truth to it. What was worse, it

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was not something that would only cross the mind of a Muslim ruler. Thousands of miles westward, the Catholic Philip II thought of the Jesuits of the Mogor in the exact same way; no matter the scarce number of conversions to their (dis) credit at the Mughal court, the King of Portugal openly admitted, it was crucial to assure the Jesuits’ presence “so that they keep informing about everything related to that king.”108 In Lisbon, as in Goa, the missionaries of the Mughal court were primarily seen as political actors. More than priests, they were indispensable bystanders, informants, and advisors. The situation was somewhat uncomfortable for the Society of Jesus, and the discomfort went well beyond any implied assessment of its members’ talent as missionaries. As it happens, it was controversial and not without risk for a Jesuit to involve himself in worldly matters. To be sure, writing to fellow priests, one’s patrons, or family members about the political landscape on the ground was a common practice among the Jesuits.109 Likewise, their institutional letters and reports invariably pondered the spiritual and the temporal conditions of any given mission. However, the Jesuits’ close involvement in state affairs, to the point of participating in power politics, was a much-debated matter in Europe at the time. Think of the Thirty Years War (1618–1648) and the dangerous mixture of spiritual guidance and political advice that Jesuit royal confessors embraced in Vienna, Munich, Paris, and Madrid.110 Well before that contentious experience, Claudio Acquaviva had already set guidelines concerning the need to separate spiritual endeavors from secular business in Jesuit missions; not by chance, Acquaviva had in mind particularly the priests of the Mogor.111 One is left wondering if certain Jesuit writings from and about the Mughal Empire, like the Tratado da Corte e Caza de Iamguir Pachá Rey dos Mogores by Jerónimo Xavier, mentioned in the previous chapter, would merit Acquaviva’s approval.112 Religion is virtually absent from Xavier’s account and the “geo-ethnographic mode”—which has its place in the economy of Jesuit letter writing—seems to have been taken too far in this case.113 Indeed, the Tratado is primarily an exercise in political ethnography. It focuses on the emperor’s persona, household, court, and nobility. The information it conveys was certainly of more use to the viceroy of the Estado than to the provincial of the Companhia. The same applies to the many Jesuit missionaries of the Mogor who entered the viceregal palace essentially as oral “intelligencers.” Bento de Góis (d. 1607), who traveled from Burhanpur in 1601 in the company of Akbar’s ambassador to Goa, is just one such individual. Upon arrival, Góis rushed to meet with Viceroy Aires de Saldanha and tell him about the several thousand Mughal cavalrymen he had seen heading to the lands of the Portuguese Northern Province.114

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Walk and Talk We return by way of a conclusion to the fascinating figure of the Armenian Sebastião Dias and his adventurous life in India over the last two decades of the sixteenth century.115 Apparently Dias never served as an informant of the Estado, but any pragmatic viceroy—capable of distancing himself from the sectarian judgment of the Inquisition—would certainly have recruited him with an eye to learning about the Mughal Empire. A Christian, Yosep (Isupo) was born around 1550 in Mardin, a city in southeastern Turkey that became part of the Ottoman Empire in 1574 and where a Chaldean eparchy had been erected in 1553. We wonder at what point Yosep left Mardin and which paths led him to Goa, where he presumably became Sebastião Dias during the time of Viceroy Francisco de Mascarenhas (g. 1581–1584), or probably earlier. Soon he found himself on the “mainland” (terra firme), ready to flee to Bijapur and later to Mughal India. Still, the transgression would be brief. Dias returned to Goa to face the Inquisition in May 1590. He confessed his sins and accepted punishment, but the inner changes had been profound: Dias became a “Moor” in Ahmedabad, forced by none other than the subadar of Gujarat ‘Abdur Rahim Khan-i Khanan (g. 1584–1589), who kept him under close watch.116 (It is hard to picture the cosmopolitan ‘Abdur Rahim pushing Dias to convert, and thus more likely to imagine the Armenian blaming someone else for his adherence to Islam during a harsh interrogation.) Sebastião Dias would leave Goa once more, and once more he departed from Catholicism. He accompanied Governor Manuel de Sousa Coutinho (g. 1588–1591) to the Norte, but several difficulties awaited him in Diu, and so he decided to cross the “border” to Mughal Gujarat. Soon he was again a Muslim, keen to be called by his original name, Yosep. From the suba he moved to the imperial capital, Lahore, and entered the service of a Habshi captain who, Dias recounts, made him frequent the mosque. Four months later, Sebastião Dias was in Agra, married to a Muslim woman. From Agra he traveled to Ahmedabad and would remain several years in Gujarat, fighting as a Mughal soldier in the Deccan, namely against the Melique. On one occasion, Dias met Duarte Borges in Gujarat, who enticed him to return to Goa. Yosep was tempted to turn into Sebastião again, and so he attempted to lure his sick wife to accompany him and convert to Christianity. She declined and they split. Now on his own, Dias journeyed by sea to Chaul where another Armenian brought him into the presence of a Jesuit priest who spoke Arabic. He then took a ship to Goa and went to see Duarte Borges, now in the capital of the Estado, who brought him to the Inquisition. Sebastião Dias was arrested on February 21, 1600.

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The complexity of Dias’s life choices, namely his religious options, should be put on a broader canvas. We could in this respect contrast his inquisitorial deposition with the self-account of an Armenian convert to Islam in the 1670s and elaborate on how early modern Armenians navigated belief systems.117 We could additionally focus on Dias’s individual dilemmas and the extreme volatility of one’s personal and professional choices. Take the example of Simão de Melo, a Portuguese alevantado who tried to join the service of Sultan Ibrahim II of Bijapur but, being rejected, decided to travel to Coromandel, build a hermitage near Nagapattinam, and lock himself away.118 For another, and more significant concerning the scope of this chapter, there is Sebastião Dias’s experience in the Indian Peninsula as a highly mobile person. Dias embodies another of those “moving stories” of the early modern world, which as John-Paul Ghobrial has shown, are key for substantiating the links between microhistory and global history.119 But it also speaks volumes about the vitality of human itinerancy in South Asia.120 What we seek to underscore are the possible meanings and results of the almost two decades Dias spent on the move in Hindustan and the Deccan with regard to the history of political information and social communication. Between the early 1580s and the year 1600, Sebastião Dias walked and talked considerably. As he wandered, he met people, very diverse people: Muslim women, Armenian Christians, Catholic priests, Portuguese individuals, Mughal officials. He likewise socialized with devout Muslims and soothsayer Brahmans. Once, on his way to Ahmadnagar, Dias stopped in a village to have lunch at the house of a Muslim. Right before the meal, the man asked him whether he believed in Shah Madar, the warrior saint buried in Makanpur whose tomb (dargah) Emperor Aurangzeb would visit decades later.121 The Armenian responded affirmatively—out of courtesy, he stated later in Goa—and thus gained his host’s heart, who subsequently embraced him and gave him meat and rice. On another occasion, Dias went to see a Brahman said to have divinatory powers (bramane adevinhador) and asked him two things: when would he be rich and where should he head. To be able to respond, the Brahman consulted a book and studied his interlocutor’s hand. The inquisitors got one thing right in 1600: Sebastião Dias had spent the last twenty years not only “dealing and conversing with Muslims,” but also with Christians and Hindus.122 Such extensive interactions were likely facilitated by his probable knowledge of several idioms: Chaldean, Armenian, Portuguese, Arabic, and some of the languages spoken in Hindustan and the Deccan (Gujarati, Deccani, Hindi, and Persian are all strong possibilities considering the places where Dias lived). Viceroy Aires de Saldanha would have profited

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immensely from listening to Dias. The Armenian had considerable Mughal experience: he had lived in Lahore, Ahmedabad, and Agra; participated in the imperial expansion in the Deccan; and battled under the orders of some of the emperor’s mansabdars, especially the prominent ‘Abdur Rahim Khan-i Khanan. Simultaneously, he became close to the Portuguese Duarte Borges, one of Goa’s lay spies for the Mogor. It would prove challenging to find a better expert in the city on Akbar and his designs. Dias would have made a peerless informant of the Estado da Índia. Walking in Persianate India, most of the Mughal and Deccan operatives of the Estado da Índia did so extensively. This was not literally and solely walking, like one understandably had to do in contemporary Venice, but rather circulating by any means in larger spaces and, in so doing, observing, conversing, and narrating.123 That is the story of most individuals who have populated this chapter, from the Armenians Sebastião Dias and António Jorge to the handful of moradores of Goa around 1620 that had traveled widely in India, particularly in Hindustan. Constant journeys were likewise the source of Father António Botelho’s accumulated knowledge on Mughal India and the Deccan. But it caused the Jesuit missionary incontinence, as he lamented in 1652: when traveling on horse or by cart, Botelho had to stop every half hour to urinate.124 In other instances, conversations stemmed from somewhat more “sedentary” experiences, at home or around a table. Conversation became an art in early modern Europe, theorized in manuals and practiced in salons.125 Some of these conversations happened to focus on the Mughals, like the ones held at Marguerite de La Sablière’s salon in Paris, which counted the well-known François Bernier (d. 1688) as a dominant figure.126 Yet early modern social, performative gatherings based on learned conversations, it goes without saying, did not take place exclusively in Europe. The Deccan sultanates and the Ottoman Empire are intriguing venues in this respect.127 The Portuguese seem to have found their way into Deccani conversations. There were serendipitous dialogues grounded on simple acquaintance, like Dias’s exchange about Shah Madar with a Muslim over lunch, but many more conversations were anchored in kinship and friendship. These could well contribute to solving political tensions and informational gaps. In December 1656, for example, the Viceroy Count of Sarzedas (g. 1655–1656) chose a particular Abyssinian Catholic priest, Pero da Costa de Brito, as diplomatic envoy to Bijapur because he was a relative of Sidi Raihan—the Habshi favorite of Sultan Muhammad, also known by his two titles (Ikhlas Khan, Khan-i Khanan)—and well regarded at the ‘Adil Shahi court.128 Several years prior, in the early 1630s, Portuguese-Bijapur relations were often discussed between two improbable

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friends in an amicable tone: Manuel Dinis, whom we will encounter in Chapter 5, and Muhammad Raza, the ‘Adil Shahi ambassador to Goa. Their meetings usually took place at the latter’s house, located on the terra firme. One time it was late in the evening and Dinis had to stay overnight. Raza lodged him in a Portuguese-style noble house and, the guest remarked, “we spent the night with questions and answers.”129 Other conversations helped bind strangers or acquaintances through shared interests and common experiences. Take the textual conversations held in Agra between the Jesuit Jerónimo Xavier and Giovanni Battista Vecchietti (d. 1619), an intriguing Italian who likewise acted as the papacy’s informant on the Mughals during the early years of the seventeenth century.130 The central ingredients of Xavier and Vecchietti’s “brush talk” (to again employ Clements’s expression) were translations of holy and religious books, either printed or in manuscript form. But other themes inevitably pointed toward dead ends with regard to Jesuit-Mughal conversations. When one day in 1611 Nicolau Pimenta paid a visit to Muqarrab Khan in his house in Goa, the Jesuit visitor found the Mughal ambassador to the Estado “quite busy making gold.”131 Muqarrab Khan tried to engage his guest in a conversation around alchemical books, but Pimenta cut it short by noting that his preferred books were “about how one should despise it [i.e., gold].”132 A Jesuit chronicle obviously would not acknowledge that some members of the Society, like the famed “gold priest” of Brazil, practiced alchemy. The “gold priest,” or António de Gouveia, would have been Muqarrab Khan’s perfect interlocutor that day.133 The range of cases explored in these last paragraphs and throughout the chapter show how conversations mirrored varying types of interpersonal relationships. For the Estado in particular, the individual and social connections of both subjects and non-subjects translated into effective instruments to collect political information and untie political conundrums in Hindustan and the Deccan. Conversation, or better yet, people in motion and conversation, often resulted in news, tales, texts, and knowledge. Some oral and written strands of this body of evidence were eventually available in Goa and theoretically eased the decisionmaking process in the viceregal palace, while others continued to flow across political and social spaces in Mughal India, the Deccan, and beyond. The intelligence the Estado da Índia searched and paid for stemmed from a rich and complex amalgamation of people and materials in constant movement on the Indian Peninsula. Goa did not rest on a fundamental Portuguese brand of certified spies and regulated espionage geared towards the Mughals,

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the ‘Adil Shahis, and the Nizam Shahis. In fact, the sociological profile of those who passed, or could have passed, information to successive viceroys about these states uncovers a rather different reality. Persianate India weighed more than Portuguese India in their lives, and their actions went well beyond what the viceroys knew about them and wanted from them. The news they amassed and the stories they heard were closely laced to their life experiences, which often were itinerant ones. Marriage and family, language and naming, law and religion, business and war, dress and food, curiosity and craftiness, all counted towards the cursus honorum of an informant on Hindustan and the western Deccan. This will become more apparent in the next chapter when we zoom in on the intelligence web of a particular viceroy.

Chapter 3

The Spy Ring of Viceroy Count of Linhares

The Setting If there was ever someone in Goa aware of the need to closely watch the Mughals and prepared to spend money on such an undertaking, it was Dom Miguel de Noronha (1588–1656), the fourth Count of Linhares and Viceroy of the Estado da Índia (g. 1629–1635) (Figure 5). In December 1630, at the height of Mughal pressure on the sultanate of Ahmadnagar, he stated: “to gather intelligence in order to be aware of the plans of our enemies is the primary duty of a general who knows what war is; consequently, I pay careful attention to this issue.”1 Linhares was then in his early forties. His political and military career had been distinguished by several years of war experience in North Africa, especially as governor and captain general of Tangier (g. 1624–1628).2 The viceroy was quite familiar with the duties of a general, especially those of a military chief responsible for Christian fortress cities entrenched in Muslim territory. This was also the situation of the four cities of the Província do Norte. Portuguese Goa, however, found itself closer to the urban centers of colonial Spanish America: it was a city with limited fortifications, even though strong spiritual walls had been erected since its conquest.3 Linhares’s term as viceroy of the Estado is well documented, and includes rich evidence on the intelligence-gathering practices and agents he employed in the Indian Peninsula. The Mughal Empire has a significant share in the correspondence he exchanged with Philip IV, and the same holds true concerning the minutes (assentos) of the State Council meetings held in Goa during his time in office. An even more noteworthy document, albeit incomplete, is Linhares’s diary.4 The writing of viceregal diaries had been required by the crown in 1628, and he was the only viceroy to comply with royal policy during Portugal’s

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Figure 5. Dom Miguel de Noronha (d. 1647), fourth Count of Linhares and forty-fifth viceroy of India (g. 1629–1635), Pedro Barreto de Resende, Breve tratado ou epilogo de todos os visorreys que tem havido no estado da India. . . , 1635. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des Manuscrits, Portugais 1, f. 65r. Public domain. Image courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

incorporation into the Hispanic Monarchy in this regard.5 In a clear strategy of self-fashioning, Linhares used his journal to promote an image of himself as the perfect viceroy. The portrait that emerges from a cursory reading of this document is that of a virtuous man who confronts daily corrupt functionaries, dissolute clergymen, and myriad external threats, spending countless hours in service to the king. “I work as much as I possibly can, I am exhausted, and I die,” he wrote in theatrical mode on December 1, 1631.6 This remarkable text shows how its author conceived of information and communication as essential tools for facing a menacing Mughal emperor, helping to anticipate his movements, and thereby mitigating the consequences of his military actions. The journal Linhares penned reveals the nature and frequency of the reports received in Goa, and allows us to reconstruct the mechanisms at play in the acquisition and transmission of political intelligence on Mughal India. What is more, it helps to identify the informants in the viceroy’s service and delve into their trajectories and profiles. There was practically no week during which Linhares did not register news about the emperor and imperial family. The viceroy also noted down details about the most influential nobles of the court and their conflicts, the turbulence felt in some provinces, and the

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main threats to the empire. More importantly, his journal mirrors a constant worry with the imperial conquest of the south, for the Mughal project of expansion into the Deccan directly endangered Goa and put the very existence of the Estado da Índia at risk. Linhares’s diary likewise makes it clear that, for him, the Mogor meant politics, not economics. The viceroy was interested in power struggles and factionalism, horsemen and armies, but paid little attention to commodities, markets, and prices, even when what was at stake—as was often the case in Gujarat and Bengal—were commercial and financial matters. When Linhares disembarked in Goa in October 1629, Shahjahan had been in power for less than two years. For the first time in half a century, a viceroy had to deal with a Mughal ruler who was seen as a dangerous orthodox Muslim and a fierce enemy of the Portuguese and the Jesuits (Figure 6). As the missionaries put it quite crudely from Agra in the early years of Shahjahan’s rule, the “Moorish dog” (cão mouro) felt “intrinsic repulsion for the priests and all the Franks.”7 Linhares would effectively need to resort to a host of ingenious spies since his government years constituted a key moment for the Estado da Índia vis-à-vis the Mughal Empire. It is therefore worth revisiting in broad strokes the severe challenges he had to face. The short period of slightly more than three months between the death of Jahangir (in Lahore, late October 1627) and the rise of Shahjahan (in Agra, early February 1628) was rather convoluted. The dynastic transition involved the physical elimination of various members of the imperial family who nurtured well-founded expectations of seeing themselves sitting on the Mughal throne, with the all-powerful Asaf Khan (Shahjahan’s father-in-law) exercising a decisive, though concealed, role in his son-in-law’s taking power.8 Among the princes who were then assassinated, the figure of Prince Dawar Bakhsh—son of Kushrau (d. 1622), grandson of Jahangir, and nephew of the future emperor Shahjahan— stands out. Bulaqi, as Dawar Bakhsh was known, assumed the title of emperor for little more than two months, but was executed on the order of his uncle in Agra on January 21, 1628. Soon after his death, the rumor spread that the prince had been spared at the last minute and another man had been killed in his place. According to the stories, Sultan Bulaqi fled Agra and prepared a rebel army to wrest power away from the usurper. Well into the late 1650s, he—or rather the various “incarnations” of him—appeared and vanished in different parts of India and Iran, declaring himself to be Jahangir’s legitimate heir. Similar tales were likewise disseminated about Baisunghar, claiming that he had also escaped execution. The son of Prince Daniyal (d. 1604), Bulaqi’s cousin Baisunghar was one of three Mughal princes who had converted to

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Figure 6. Emperor Shahjahan (d. 1666, r. 1628–1658). Folio from the late Shah Jahan album, attributed to Bichitr, Mughal India, c. 1635. The Nasli and Alice Heeramaneck Collection, Museum Associates Purchase (M.78.9.15), LACMA. Public domain. Image courtesy of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Catholicism in Agra in 1610; thereafter he was known among the Portuguese and the Jesuits as Dom Carlos.9 He had in fact managed to flee to Badakhshan and eventually died there, but someone impersonating him traveled to Balkh, Iran, and finally Turkey. Once in Istanbul, and with an eye on overthrowing Shahjahan, this false Baisunghar hoped to count on the support of Sultan Murad IV (r. 1634–1640). However, his negative reputation grew fast at the Ottoman court, and it did not take long for him to be identified as an impostor. Baisunghar’s double was thus sent to India and eventually executed in 1636.10 The rebellion of the Muslim-turned- Catholic Baisunghar obviously excited the Portuguese, who set the “brave and generous Dom Carlos” in opposition to the “tyrant and disliked” Shahjahan.11 But it was Bulaqi who cast a shadow over Goa. For a good part of his term, Linhares dreamed of a political alliance. Yet the sultan kept appearing and disappearing and the viceroy alternated between moments of enthusiasm, during which he sent letters and invited him to Goa, and periods of disappointment when he severely criticized this sort of Mughal King Sebastian.12

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Besides the shadows of Baisunghar and Bulaqi, Shahjahan met enormous challenges in the southern confines of the Mughal Empire during the early years of his reign. In October 1629, Khan-i Jahan Lodi—an intimate of Jahangir, supporter of Dawar Bakhsh in the struggle for succession, and one of the most important Afghan nobles in imperial service—abandoned Agra and sought refuge in the Deccan. A former governor of this province, the Afghan rebel was received in Ahmadnagar by Burhan Nizam Shah III and from there led a seditious movement against the new emperor. Similar to Bulaqi’s case, the Portuguese did not neglect this potential ally of Goa, corresponding with “Khan-i Jahan, the Pashtun” (Canejão patane) and trembling at each victory of the “great captain” (grão capitão). Linhares even toyed with the idea of a league between Khan-i Jahan, Burhan III, and Bulaqi in order to bring Shahjahan’s reign to an end, but the project never materialized. Khan-i Jahan could very well have become a second Sher Shah Sur, the Afghan who had dethroned Humayun in 1540. Yet Shahjahan surely had no intention of emulating his great-grandfather, who had jeopardized the existence of Mughal India barely fourteen years after the foundation of the empire. Fearing a rebellion among the Afghan nobility in his service, whose influence in the political landscape of the empire would diminish significantly during his reign, Shahjahan reacted harshly.13 The emperor marched south and settled in Burhanpur in 1630.14 There he held court for two years, launching successive attacks against Khan-i Jahan Lodi, who was eventually captured and killed in February 1631. The rebel’s head was brought before Shahjahan in Burhanpur, who ordered it to be hung from the door of the imperial palace. The decapitation of Khan-i Jahan was painted by ‘Abid around 1633, an impressive portrait that could not fail to be integrated into the visual program of the Padshahnama manuscript housed in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle.15 The presence of the Mughal court in the Deccan was a clear sign that Shahjahan intended to oversee the submission of the local sultanates.16 The first campaign against Ahmadnagar culminated in the siege and taking of the fort of Daulatabad (March–June 1633).17 The end of the Nizam Shahi dynasty would occur only in 1636, since the Maratha leader Shahji (d. 1664) made Murtaza III the last (nominal) ruler of Ahmadnagar and was thus himself able to govern what remained of the sultanate for a few years more.18 Notwithstanding, the conquest of the colossus that was Daulatabad represented an undeniable military exploit and symbolized the effective crumbling of the Nizam Shahi kingdom. Parallel to these events was the Mughal assault on Bijapur. Between 1634 and 1636, the imperial armies successfully harassed the sultanate and its principal

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fortified positions, even though they faltered at the strategic fortress of Parenda. This stalemate made Shahjahan return in person to the Deccan and hold court in Daulatabad between the end of 1635 and February of the following year. Overall, the movements of the Mughal emperor caused great alarm at the courts of Sultan Muhammad ‘Adil Shah and the Count of Linhares alike. News circulated in the capital of the Estado that Shahjahan had left Agra with an army of 60,000 horsemen and it was believed that the emperor was even planning to reach the southern tip of India; as rumor had it, he intended to bequeath not one but two empires to his sons.19 With the predictable demise of the Deccan sultanates, nothing would impede Shahjahan’s progression and Portuguese Goa would be in real danger. But the Mughal emperor took an intermediate path: neither eliminating these states nor simply demanding tribute. Instead, Bijapur and Golconda signed documents of submission in 1636, which, while securing both dynasties’ formal survival, subordinated them de facto to imperial authority. In accordance with the treaty (‘Ahdnama) signed with Bijapur, Shahjahan shared the domains of Ahmadnagar with Muhammad, with control over such important territories as Konkan, Parenda, and Sholapur falling to the ‘Adil Shahi kingdom.20 The anxiety triggered by the unwelcome proximity of Mughal India and Portuguese India in the western Deccan was further exacerbated by the outbreak of crises between the two empires in Gujarat and Bengal. In late March 1630, the Portuguese captured two vessels off the port of Surat and soon after auctioned their cargo in Goa. The capture of these “two Moorish ships” (duas naus mouriscas), one of them property of the emperor himself, had a significant impact. This incident was resolved through diplomacy before the turn of the year, but it brought tangible tension to relations between the Portuguese and the Mughals.21 The second conflict took place in Bengal in 1632, in the port city of Hughli. The three-month Mughal siege of the Portuguese settlement (bandel) of Hughli ended in the death, capture, or flight of the Portuguese and Christian population of the settlement. The perdição do Golim (“loss of Hughli”) meant the loss of men, goods, and prestige, and had quite a negative impact on the capital of the Estado da Índia. Shahjahan, for his part, enjoyed a clear victory in Hughli as far as his internal and external image as a ruler was concerned.22 From Goa, the Count of Linhares saw everything in Mughal India: dynastic struggle, with a couple of phantom princes challenging Shahjahan’s rule; politicalethnic sedition, with the prospect of an Afghan takeover of the empire; imperial expansion southwards and the fearful specter of a Mughal Deccan; and serious clashes between the Estado da Índia and the Mughal Empire in Gujarat and Bengal. There was much work to do behind the curtains of the viceregal palace.

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Linhares at Work Like many other early modern cities, and particularly Asian port cities, the Goa Linhares lived in for six years was an open city, exposed by sea and land to the intense and continuous movements of people. People from the Indian Peninsula continually entered and left the capital of the Estado da Índia, but so did people from all over Europe and from the many worlds between East Africa and East Asia. And even the resident population was a floating one. As Philip III was told, many of the “gentiles” of Goa did not truly live in the city: “they come and go” (vão e vêm).23 Such a floating mosaic, made of individuals and groups that encompassed myriad ethnic origins, belief systems, and political allegiances, was seen in the viceregal palace of Goa as threatening. Linhares worried about outsiders; VOC servants and their Asian spies occupied much of his time in this regard. In April 1631, the viceroy and the State Council members met to discuss what should be done regarding an Afghan merchant of precious stones who lived in the baniya quarter (rua dos baneanes) and spied for the Dutch.24 A month later, “with all caution and secrecy,” Linhares ordered the capture in Chaul of a baniya called Vimaldas. The viceroy suspected him of passing information to the “enemies from Europe” (inimigos da Europa), all the more so because the baniya’s father-in-law acted as broker (corrector) for the same European “rebels” in Surat. Consequently, the ouvidor of Chaul arrested Vimaldas, seized the papers in his possession, and sent him to Goa, forbidding anyone to speak with him along the way.25 In the same vein, it did not go unnoticed when a “Gujarati gentile” (gentio Guzerate) claiming to be a pearl merchant but instead acting as a spy for the “enemies of the State,” traveled overland from Surat to Goa during the rainy season and stopped at every Portuguese city along the way. Having arrived in the capital of the Estado in late August 1635, the alleged merchant let a few days pass before returning to Surat on board a parau, “a light vessel, which is used only to take news dispatches.” Linhares soon concluded that the man’s purpose was to recount to the Dutch what he had seen and heard among the Portuguese. To avoid him escaping, the viceroy engaged a slave to kill him, so that it would appear to be a common murder. The baniya was eliminated on September 13 and Linhares was fast to promote a hoax inquiry (devassa) to mask the real cause of death and therefore avoid giving rise to suspicions among the Dutch. The viceroy was able to uncover this Gujarati spy thanks to two letters penned by “qualified persons” whose identity he did not reveal as a precaution. But the letters, one of which written in Persian, were at the time kept in the secretariat of the Estado da Índia.26

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The episodes described above are meaningful in many ways. They disclose the existence of a small multilingual archive in Goa, housed in the secretariat—an administrative body that will be discussed in Chapter 5—or otherwise kept by the viceroy himself, consisting of papers by and about spies.27 The accounts further demonstrate how diverse were the espionage and counter-espionage agents that populated Goa during Linhares’s government: Afghan and baniya merchants, unidentified native informants able to write letters in Persian, and slaves of unknown ethnicity hired as contract killers. Finally, these stories reveal a viceroy particularly at ease with the political words and praxis of his time; no matter what he may have read on these subjects, Linhares’s actions show that he was conversant in secrecy, dissimulation, and cynicism. Alongside the VOC spies, many Mughal agents lived and circulated in Goa. The imperial envoys sent on diplomatic missions to Portuguese India were in a unique position to watch and later report once back in the court. This was the unshaken conviction of the Jesuit Fernão Guerreiro about the ambassadors sent by Akbar to Goa, whom Guerreiro portrays as spies.28 Akbar would send several emissaries to the capital of the Estado during his reign, but two of them are worth special consideration in this regard. The first visited the city in 1575: Haji Habibullah, an Iranian with notable “powers of observation” according to Abu’l Fazl’s judgement.29 Another Iranian, a man called Tahir Muhammad, would spend time in Goa in 1579–1580 as Mughal ambassador. Part of what he saw and heard there was eventually incorporated into his work Rauzat ut-Tahirin (The Immaculate Garden), written around 1602–1607.30 A crowd of people used to attend these ambassadors. Muqarrab Khan entered Goa as Jahangir’s ambassador in February 1611 accompanied by 300 men of arms, all of them potential disseminators in Mughal India of news and perceptions concerning the Portuguese.31 But informants, or simple onlookers, could likewise be fooled by Portuguese propaganda. On July 25, 1630, the ambassador of Bijapur was Linhares’s host in Goa and the viceroy had been alerted to the presence in the city of “people from diverse kingdoms,” including “some from the Mogor.” It was St. James’s Day, a festive and timely occasion to impress Shahjahan from a distance through the unconscious mediation of this undefined group of people (gente). Despite the Estado’s chronic financial problems, Linhares decided to offer the representative of Muhammad ‘Adil Shah an expensive banquet consisting of more than 150 plates; news about the wealth of the Portuguese would certainly reach Burhanpur soon, the viceroy reasoned.32 Besides, Goa had prior experience in using Christian saints’ anniversaries to impress Mughal and Deccani diplomats in the city. On January 25, 1577, St. Paul’s Day, the procession

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that marked the apostle’s conversion became an opportunity to display both the religious fervor and the political might of the Portuguese. Invited to attend, the ambassadors of Bijapur, Ahmadnagar, and the Grão Mogor of course declined. Still, the parade overtly passed by the street where they were housed.33 Security anxieties led Linhares to inquire about the foreigners who moved within the city, especially those coming from Western Asia and Mughal India; it was deemed urgent to identify and register them, as well as to surveil their physical space and social circles. Hence, a viceregal order which, considering the many “foreigners, both gentiles and Moors, Mughals, Arabs, Persians, Habshis, and those from many other nations” who regularly entered Goa—a city, Linhares emphasized, “open from all sides, with no castle or fortress to defend and protect it”—gave power to the Estado’s officials to “interrogate them in order to know their purpose for coming, the weapons and merchandise they bring, and which occupation they have.” The viceroy expected in this manner to recognize “spies and military experts who are able to identify the city’s positions and forces.” Furthermore, he planned to nominate an “examiner” (examinador), whose principal task would be to find out how many foreigners there were, where they came from, and how long they lived in Goa in order to register them all in a book. This examiner was required to report weekly to the viceroy.34 The Jesuit António Botelho would have agreed with Linhares. Years later, as he described with great admiration Shahjahan’s mass surveillance methods in the imperial capital, the missionary lamented in turn the Estado’s carelessness regarding its cities. Goa, in particular, was a time bomb, for a host of Muslims and Hindus could easily enter the city during the day only to burn it at night.35 Eventually, both Botelho and Linhares were in line with the fears expressed by several early modern Italian authors about wall-less cities being defenseless, naked entities.36 Nonetheless, there were some precedents for the surveillance practices in Goa. Contemporary European visitors to the city remarked on the use by the Portuguese authorities of an intriguing device in order to control cross-border human mobility. When traveling to terra firme, all the indigenous inhabitants of the city were “stamped” on their bare arms and had to show that same ink mark upon return.37 The French traveler François Pyrard de Laval remarked in the early years of the seventeenth century that it was possible to “ascertain the number of people coming and going, for there are writers at every point who make up the register.”38 Linhares’s measure, which he planned to extend to the cities of the Província do Norte as he considered it to be “the most important and wise thing” done during his time in office, was not entirely novel. Yet it was rejected by Philip IV.

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The viceroy would insist by calling the king’s attention to the numerous and dangerous “spies and Moors” in the city, but the royal decision was eventually confirmed and the project was put aside due to financial constraints and economic prudence; it would imply the nomination of more officers, which the crown definitely wished to avoid, and would offend the foreign “gentile” merchants who traveled to Goa for business purposes.39 A significant document repository was thus lost, or rather never came into being, and one is left wondering about the destiny of the comprehensive rolls mentioned by Pyrard de Laval. Be that as it may, the viceroy’s purpose is in itself quite revealing: Linhares was in line with the concerns expressed and the systems implemented in many coeval European cities with regards to the identification and registering of individuals.40 To transform Goa into the sealed city Linhares imagined, a place where all the “spies and Moors” were effectively monitored, was simply not feasible. It was just as impossible to prevent the existence in the major cities of Mughal India and the western Deccan of several eyes and ears in the service of the Estado da Índia, and Linhares seems to have taken as much as he could from their hard work. Intelligence in the form of correspondence was obviously vital. “I had letters from Bijapur,” or “I had letters from Burhanpur” are the kinds of frequently repeated expressions found in his journal. Many of these letters were then summarized so that their substance could be analyzed in State Council meetings in the form of condensed reports.41 The viceroy was rather cautious with the circulation of such documents and their secret character. There is no surviving evidence of them, just references to encrypted letters, but the ambassadors of the Estado to Bijapur were required not to leave Goa without taking a “rather secret” (tão secreta) cipher.42 Besides, Linhares had his tricks to avoid letter interception. For example, knowing that Mustafa Khan—one of the most influential figures in the ‘Adil Shahi court—could easily seize incoming correspondence from Goa, the viceroy wrote in January 1631 a “public letter” (carta publica) to Vicente Ribeiro, meant to be read by Sultan Muhammad’s favorite, at the same time as he sent a real, ciphered letter (carta de çifra) to his secret agent.43 Another way of securing confidentiality was to resort to oral communication; the written record coexisted intensely with the spoken word in Linhares’s palace, and the viceroy seems to have listened as much as he read about Mughal India and the western Deccan. Some filaments of these conversations have endured. Linhares frequently noted that he received news verbally (de palavra) from men placed at the courts of the neighboring kings: “I spoke with and heard at a rather slow pace a man sent by Diogo Saraiva from the Melique.”44 These

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were in fact long, time-consuming exchanges: “The physician Fernão Lopes arrived from Bijapur; I met with him and received substantial information about everything related to the court of King ‘Adil Shah, the plans of his favorites [validos] and governors. . . . I have not yet got all of the information and will speak with him another time.”45 On April 30, 1630, Linhares spoke at length with the Jesuit António Pereira, who had arrived from Surat with rich information on the Mughal court.46 Similar to what had happened with Fernão Lopes, one single conversation was not sufficient and Linhares would receive the same priest the following day.47 The viceroy used to listen with great care to a host of people about major political developments in the Mughal Empire, Bijapur, and Ahmadnagar. The importance of verbal intelligence reports in Goa evokes the vibrancy of the oral across the early modern world and its interplay with the written.48 The attention devoted by Linhares to his oral informants couples with the care he took about the veracity of the information received, regardless of form. The viceroy was keen on cross-checking diverse sources and obtaining different versions of the same incident until he had a coherent picture upon which to reflect. The need to analyze rumor, confirming it as reliable information or not, is distinct in every stroke of his pen: “I received news on the Mogor; things are worsening, but I am not sure about the certainty of the news,” reads an entry for April 28, 1630.49 A few days later, Linhares confirmed the hardships of the imperial offensive in the Deccan: “I am now sure of this because it is noted by different people and they all confirm it with the same language.”50 Linhares felt impelled to register on paper the uncertainty that gnawed at him regarding the reliability of news about the Mughal Empire. Such uncertainty was a hallmark of the period, for it afflicted many people in Europe, who did not hesitate to reflect in writing on the subjectivity of what they heard and read.51 Finally, the rhythms of circulation: how quickly and regularly did news about Mughal India and the imperial conquest of the Deccan reach Linhares? These are trying questions, since a vast array of factors came into play, from weather conditions and season cycles to routes taken and road hazards. Distance could also be shorter or longer depending on several contingencies, like the importance of certain news (hence, the greater or lesser urgency of its transmission), the difficulty of communicating it in secret at once, and the agency of the couriers. Consider the circulation between the capital of the Estado and the ‘Adil Shahi court. These places were less than 200 miles apart, but maps like the one produced in 1677 by the French geographer Pierre Duval (d. 1683) might be deceptive. Drawing on the information amassed in 1638 by the German traveler Johan Albrecht de Mandeslo (d. 1644), Duval’s representation of the route that

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Figure 7. The route from Goa to Bijapur and from Bijapur to Dabul according to the account by Johan Albrecht Mandeslo (1638), Pierre Duval, Cartes des itineraires et voïages modernes, qui ont esté faits tant par mer que par terre dans toutes les parties du monde . . . (Paris: n.p., 1677). Bibliothèque nationale de France, département des Cartes et plans, GE DD-2987 (6869). Public domain. Image courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

linked Goa and Bijapur mirrors a hodological conception of space (Figure 7). The map shows a straight pathway between the two cities, a sort of metro line, as if snaking and hardships were to be excluded at the outset.52 Now, let us take a specific, significant moment during Linhares’s term in office: the Mughal attack on Parenda and Bijapur’s resistance to it. Six critical months between March and August 1634, were closely followed on paper in Goa. The Portuguese viceroy had news from the ‘Adil Shahi court about once per week. Between March 11 and April 8, 1634, the viceroy received at least four letters from the Bijapur court.53 The same rate was maintained in May: four letters in three weeks, two of them on the same day but written by two different “intelligencers.”54 The maximum rate was reached during the first half of June with four letters.55 Yet in July not a single letter arrived in Goa before the twenty-third of the month. The viceroy rejoiced, since “I did not have news for a long time.”56 In August there was a return to the average: at least three letters that month.57 But,

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whatever the cause, the irregularity of news in July reveals Duval’s drawing, with its suggestion of a “clean” itinerary, to be somewhat problematic. The importance of Bijapur as a privileged center of information for the Estado da Índia explains the frequency of news and the speed with which it reached Goa.58 Sometimes letters were written every day, or every other day, as Ambassador Baltasar de Azeredo did in 1630 from Sultan Muhammad’s court. As soon as he arrived at the capital of the sultanate, Azeredo started to write fervently. Linhares would receive his news on March 25 and 26 and on April 10, 12, and 13: five letters in less than three weeks.59 Such frequency is in line with what was then prescribed and practiced in Europe; diplomats were asked to write daily, even more than one letter a day if needed.60 Azeredo complied with this rule, as did many other “intelligencers” in the viceroy’s service, even though many of them had never read Vera y Figueroa or any other seventeenth-century European theorist of ambassadorial work.

Linhares’s Network What the Count of Linhares knew about the Mughal Empire and the Deccan sultanates owed a great deal to the information amassed by a fairly numerous and rather diverse group of people. Some were occasional collaborators, while others constituted long-term connections. The network obviously included many Portuguese, but native agents can also be identified. The nature of their activities required discretion; hence the scarcity of references to names, ethnicities, profiles, and careers. The documents frequently contain generic designations like emissaries (enviados), spies (espias), gentiles (gentios), tongues (línguas), intelligencers (inteligentes), and runners (patamares). The concern with preserving secrecy and the need to mask identities caused the viceroy to pay spies placed in the courts of “neighboring kings” directly from his own purse. No written traces were usually left since it was vital not to “endanger the intelligencers,” Linhares noted in 1632 when he boasted to Philip IV about having spies “in the courts of all the kings of India.”61 In other cases, the informants’ names are disclosed, but the sources remain evasive as to the nature of their missions. Despite these shortcomings, it is possible to reconstruct in some detail the intelligence network of the Count of Linhares and draw conclusions about its nature, reach, and significance. To have the Mughal emperor’s seat of power in the city of Burhanpur represented a danger for the Estado da Índia. Between March 1630 and March 1632, Shahjahan’s court lay about 600 miles from Goa and relatively close to the cities

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of the Norte. But risk also meant opportunity; this imperial capital was far more accessible than Agra or Delhi, let alone Lahore or Kabul, and its proximity made it easier for the viceroy to receive more political intelligence, and to receive it faster. The runners were able to traverse this distance in little less than three weeks in exchange for two pagodas (pagodes), even if news from Burhanpur could sometimes take seven weeks to reach Goa, as was the case with news of the death of the Empress Consort, Mumtaz Mahal.62 Proximity also meant that it was possible to rely on more diverse sources of information, which in some way compensated for the limited influence the Jesuit missionaries had at the court of Shahjahan in comparison with the “deceptive familiarity” they had enjoyed during the reigns of his father and grandfather.63 Even though other Jesuits used to report from Burhanpur, Francesco Corsi was Linhares’s favored informant in the Mughal capital. The rich contents of the letters Corsi sent from Burhanpur on August 14 and October 15, 1630, explain why the viceroy admitted to having more trust in the information conveyed by this Italian priest than by anyone else.64 Still, Linhares diversified his intelligence sources in “the house of the Mogor” and therefore recruited moles, mostly indigenous, outside the Jesuit circle.65 On March 15, 1630, the viceroy read “news from a spy that came from the Mogor camp; he left from there twenty-five days ago today.” According to this spy, Shahjahan was then four days from Burhanpur, fleeing from Agra in fear of Bulaqi.66 As soon as the emperor settled in Burhanpur, the Count of Linhares sent three baniyas “to the Mogor camp” so that he could “be informed about his plans, and learn his intentions.”67 These men were recruited and paid by Krishna Shenvi, a Brahman who served as chief interpreter of the Estado da Índia and whose career will be discussed in Chapters 6 and 7. It proved far more difficult to gather news and hearsays from Dhaka than from Burhanpur. The distance between the capital of the Estado da Índia and the provincial capital of Bengal, as well as the weakness of the crown’s authority in the ports of the Ganges delta, made it hard for the viceroy to be regularly informed about the eastern confines of Mughal India. And yet, the region had become a dominant concern in the viceregal palace since the destruction of Hughli in September 1632. Gaspar Pacheco de Mesquita emerged as the principal agent in Bengal at this difficult juncture. Born in Ponte de Lima, in the north of Portugal, married and resident in Cochin, he would have then been about fifty-six years old, thirty-seven of which were spent in India. Mesquita knew particularly northwestern India (partes do Norte), “some of the Mughal lands” (alguas terras do Mogor), and Bengal.68 His knowledge of the ground was valued in Goa prior to the loss of Hughli, for in mid-March 1630 he had a lengthy exchange with the

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viceroy on the affairs of northeastern India.69 Thus, it comes as no surprise that Mesquita was chosen in 1633 to travel to the region in the guise of a merchant in order to negotiate with the provincial Mughal officials. Recognized by the State Council members as a “rather knowledgeable person concerning that coast, and very much respected by the governors that reside in those ports controlled by the Mogor, Arakan, and Pegu,” Mesquita left Goa carrying letters and gifts for the “nawabs of Bengal.”70 Mesquita’s voyage was met with success since the Portuguese return to the ports of Bengal did not take long. From Chitaggong he wrote a letter to the viceroy on Christmas Eve 1633, which must have been received in the capital of the Estado almost four months later on Easter Sunday, April 16, 1634; the letter arrived via Nagapattinam and was carried overland from there to Goa by a courier.71 Linhares’s emissary further instructed an Augustinian priest on his way to Goa “to converse with Your Excellency about what he saw and knows.” Mesquita additionally mentions some Portuguese also on their way to the capital of the Estado who could transmit events as if they were “living letters” (cartas vivas).72 This suggestive image of individuals as animate messages embodies the interplay of the written and the oral as far as political intelligence is concerned. The viceroy clearly had more options in Gujarat, the western maritime frontier of Mughal India, than in Bengal. The cities of the Província do Norte were much closer and better connected with Goa than the loose string of Portuguese settlements between Pipli and Chitaggong. What is more, the walled cities of Chaul, Bassein, Daman, and Diu rested on their own systems of vigilance and intelligence. As we have noted in the previous chapter, such systems also fed the capital city of the Estado, making the circulation of letters and news to and from Goa rather intense. Those who carried news dispatches overland were mostly native couriers but, unlike their counterparts from the Coromandel Coast, they do not seem to have been recruited from among Christian converts. An unidentified Persian runner (pattamar parsio) took letters from Goa to the northern fortresses in 1630–1631 and received six xerafins for his work.73 There is mention of a “runner from Surat” (patamar de Surrate) called Vido, as well as basic references to Todiga, Nondaa, Quizir, Stopa, Adalves, and Gafur. These runners regularly traversed the routes between the capital of the Estado and the lands of the Norte during these years, concealing the documents they carried in the most artful ways.74 Those known among the Portuguese by their nicknames probably held excellent professional reputations. The two individuals who brought letters from Goa to Bassein and Chaul in September and November 1630 were identified, respectively, as “Silver Soles” (solas de prata) and “Silver Foot” (pé de prata).75

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It remains to be known whether such nicknames were given by their employers or otherwise constituted part and parcel of these runners’ own identity and identification. At any rate, there is sufficient Portuguese evidence to conclude that these letter bearers were not inert, silent pieces of a viceroy’s intelligence puzzle. A later source, namely a volume that comprises the correspondence exchanged between the Secretary of the Estado da Índia Luís Gonçalves Cotta and Viceroy Count of Alvor over the course of the latter’s government (1681–1686), shows how “minor” indigenous couriers often dialogued with high-ranking Portuguese officials about the letters they carried.76 We also learn that these anonymous messengers could go as far as pushing the letters’ recipients for a timely answer.77 The Portuguese capture of “two Moorish ships” off Surat in 1630 and its repercussions offers a unique view of the Estado’s intelligence apparatus in Gujarat. In order to learn about Shahjahan’s retaliation plans and to negotiate with imperial officials in Gujarat, the viceroy counted on Jesuit missionaries who often circulated between Surat, the cities of the Província do Norte, and the Mughal court: António Pereira is the main face of the early stages of the negotiations.78 António de Andrade, with whom Mir Musa—the mutasaddi (“governor”) of Surat—eventually signed an agreement in late 1630, is another key figure.79 In Goa, the State Council analyzed in August the various letters that had been sent by Andrade since June from Surat, Daman, and Bassein, in which the missionary provided “an account of what he was able to gather about the Mughals.”80 Andrade’s letters, whether discussed in the Council in summary form or not, would certainly have resembled those of other missionaries of the Mogor, his contemporaries. The contents of the letters that Francisco de Azevedo sent from Surat and Burhanpur, abridged in Linhares’s journal in May and June 1631, constituted pure political intelligence on the Mughals.81 The same holds true for the letters dispatched by Paulo Reimão from Surat in July 1634.82 In addition to relying on the Jesuits, the viceroy turned to men with different expertise. Casados from Daman, such as Manuel Coelho de Sampaio or Francisco da Costa, frequently sent avisos from Surat.83 It was also in Daman—a city closer to Surat than it was Diu—that Linhares went as far as recruiting criminals to travel to the main port of Mughal Gujarat and abort any Dutch and English attempts to approach Mir Musa. These men are nameless in the Portuguese documents, but the viceroy valued them as “chief spies” (espias principais).84 Among the casados of Daman with privileged knowledge of the political and social milieu of the main seaports of Gujarat, Manuel Velho clearly stands out. A man “of truth, experience, and intelligence,” Velho mediated Linhares’s exchanges with Mir Musa during the crisis of 1630 by taking and bringing presents between

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Goa and Surat.85 The viceroy would again turn to him in the following year in order to grasp the news that circulated in Surat. Velho was then asked not only to “know the enemies’ plans and the news that has arrived from Europe,” but also to “learn what the Mughals say and what their intentions are.”86 In the five days that he spent in Surat in November 1631, Velho seems to have focused mostly on the first task. Pretending to be a runaway, Velho ate, drank, and chatted with several Englishmen and Dutchmen until he extracted what he wanted. Another Portuguese spy in Gujarat in the service of Linhares, perhaps himself also a casado from Daman, was Manuel da Silva. He penned a report sent to the viceroy from Surat on October 27, 1629, that included a short section “On the things that I learned about the Mughal king.” The document echoed intelligence obtained at the imperial capital through a jeweler called Bartolomeu Nunes “who came from Goa to these parts of the Mogor about three years ago.”87 Silva combined this information with the outcome of his own conversations in Surat with Mir Musa, who had just returned from the court in Agra in the company of the same Bartolomeu Nunes. Towards the end of his report, Manuel da Silva suggestively summarized his method of gathering information in Surat—“I extracted it from the local people by resorting to violence, ingenuity, and money”—and promised to send more news as “the caravan [cafila] from Ahmedabad” had arrived. 88 In the capital of the Estado, Linhares relied on Portuguese residents who conducted business and fostered personal contacts in Gujarat. Manuel de Paiva, treasurer of the House of Mercy (Misericórdia) of Goa in 1630, had extensive expertise on the Mughals, “their customs, and way of writing.”89 Born in Lisbon around 1585, Paiva established himself in Goa on an unknown date. He participated in the negotiations that led in 1615 to a Portuguese-Mughal entente in Gujarat; consequently, the affair of the “two Moorish ships” in 1630 might have looked like a copycat incident to him.90 In 1620 he claimed to have traveled over a “large part of [the lands of ] the Mogor, Idalcão, and Melique.”91 His expertise did not go unnoticed by Francisco da Gama who, during his second term as viceroy (g. 1622–1628), relied on intelligence Paiva gathered on the Mughals and Gujarat. Political news was as precious a commodity as the exquisite carpets Paiva used to bring from Ahmedabad and Agra to sell to Gama in Goa.92 All these Portuguese experts surely employed indigenous informers, even though these are often elusive. Diogo de Melo de Sampaio, captain of Daman in 1630, was attentive to the “wording of the brokers from Surat” in order to inform Linhares.93 The viceroy himself commented on the possible death of Shahjahan based on a prophecy echoed by the baniyas, according to which the emperor’s

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“great era” was over (he acabada a sua hera grande).94 Among the very few who breached anonymity was a “rich, honored, and truthful baniya called Umaldas,” who provided Goa with information from Chaul about Sultan Bulaqi.95 More robust are the references to one “Andregissá,” probably Hari Vaisya. Vaisya was then one of the wealthiest merchants of Surat and the EIC officials labeled him as an informer for the Portuguese.96 He in fact accompanied Mir Musa to Bulsar to witness the agreement signed with the Estado da Índia on November 28, 1630, and may well be the “Andregissá” identified by the Portuguese as being the trading agent and representative (feitor e procurador) of the mutasaddi of Surat in Goa.97 Linhares resorted to him when in need of a Muslim patamar to take a message (recado) to the Mughal camp in March–April 1632.98 The figure of Hari Vaisya is crucial for understanding how problematic the rigid distinctions between an Indo-Persian political sphere and a Portuguese political stratum in the region could be: a true intermediary, Vaisya worked in Surat at the same time for Mir Musa and Linhares. If there was a counterpart of Hari Vaisya in Daulatabad, he would be a Portuguese soldier rather than a Hindu merchant. Apparently, the Count of Linhares could not count on many informants in Ahmadnagar. Instead, he relied on the captain of Chaul and on Portuguese inhabitants of the same city, like one Manuel de Azevedo. They transmitted intelligence to Goa in late 1630 about Bulaqi, when the rumor circulated that the “true Mughal king” (verdadeiro Rei Mogor) was in Upper Chaul.99 Half a year later, the same captain of Chaul provided Linhares with privileged information on the murder of Sultan Burhan III, even though the viceroy had shown himself reluctant to accept “this news as truthful.”100 But solutions were scarce at the Nizam Shahi court proper. In Daulatabad, the capital of Ahmadnagar until the Mughals took the city in 1633, the viceroy depended on a single spy, although a rather cunning one: Diogo Saraiva. Another resident of Chaul, Saraiva had been placed in Daulatabad by Linhares so that the viceroy could “be sure about the Mogor’s plans.”101 Saraiva’s recent past was somewhat cloudy. A few years earlier, he had solicited a Portuguese called Francisco de Brito de Vasconcelos, who apparently had access to Malik Ambar, to hand over a letter to the famed Habshi leader. Having received no response, Saraiva penned a letter to one Gaspar Gomes de Faria and asked him to tell Ambar about his willingness to join the armies of Ahmadnagar. Accidentally, a copy of this letter has survived as part of Faria’s inquisitorial file.102 A mestizo from Chaul, Faria served Malik Ambar in Ahmadnagar while apparently keeping a Portuguese clique in his hometown. Saraiva belonged to this group, as he treats Faria with great deference. Penned in Chaul on September 1,

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1624, Saraiva’s letter reflects an educated veteran soldier who was familiar with the political landscape of the western Deccan. His desire to join Malik Ambar, the “great captain of the world,” was rooted in a set of interesting arguments. Saraiva argues that his estate (estado) and reputation (fama) could only increase if he committed himself to the practice of war. Rather than being a soldier in the service of Philip IV, he wished to fight in Malik Ambar’s army, whose fame was greater than that “of Alexander and the Ancient Romans.” This entailed a change of allegiance, but there is no word in Saraiva’s letter about changing religion.103 Diogo Saraiva’s dream never materialized. Malik Ambar died less than two years later and Saraiva likely remained living in Chaul, feeding his ties with the sultanate that he saw as the preferred neighbor-ally of Goa. Soon he would be spying and reporting from Daulatabad for the Estado. And he would write frequently: five letters in less than three weeks in October 1630, for instance.104 Despite such a wealth of news, Linhares hoped for more. About Bulaqi, the viceroy asked Saraiva for “an extended account . . . and this should be a wellstructured account.” Overall, Linhares recommended that Saraiva “write frequently” (escrevei amiúde), even if “there are no letters from the king [i.e., Burhan III] to be dispatched, it is important that I receive news from you, every day, if possible, about everything that happens there and between these kings; please proceed in this manner.”105 Goa received regular news from Diogo Saraiva about the sultan, his court, and his kingdom in the context of a serious Mughal threat and permanent tension with Bijapur. News originated in Agra and related to other areas of the Mughal Empire likewise reached the capital of the Estado from Daulatabad.106 And much of what Linhares thought and decided regarding the Estado’s involvement in the putative alliance between Bulaqi and Khan-i Jahan was based on the avisos sent by Saraiva. The Portuguese spy, as we have seen, was an unfailing supporter of a coalition between Goa and Daulatabad. He dreamed of a new configuration for the western Deccan grounded on a reborn Nizam Shahi kingdom that would align with the Estado and that would support the two men deemed legitimate to overthrow Shahjahan: Canejão and Bolaquim. The ultimate purpose was to change the very political direction of Mughal India. Once in Daulatabad, Diogo Saraiva did not wait to bond with Sultan Burhan III, mediating the latter’s letter exchanges with Linhares and acting as his representative in Chaul. Far from interpreting the latter function as a sign of ambivalence from his spy, the viceroy recognized the advantages of the situation and pointed out them enthusiastically to Philip IV: “I have placed Diogo Saraiva in the court of the Melique, more as his vassal—for he is his agent in the city of

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Chaul, and in that capacity collects his rents there—than as my envoy. I believe I have proceeded in an ingenious and necessary way because in this manner I can excuse myself from sending him [i.e., Burhan III] a present and avoid making such an expense. This man resides there like one of his [i.e., Burhan’s] own and thereby has the chance to get closer to the king, his governor, and counselors, gathering intelligence more effectively and transmitting it to me.”107 “As his vassal” (como creado seu), “like one of his own” (como couza sua)—this image of a subject of the king of Portugal interacting with a Muslim king of India might have left Philip IV wondering where Saraiva’s loyalties lay. But it did not bring any uneasiness to the viceroy, who intended not only to reduce the expenses of the Estado, but also to secure access to true insider information about Ahmadnagar and the region. Diogo Saraiva might be portrayed as a lone wolf, yet he had several collaborators. In Chaul, he counted on nameless agents, certainly native ones.108 Runners, likewise unidentified, used to bring his letters from Daulatabad to Goa.109 The man who used to translate for Saraiva attained more visibility.110 A Prabhu called Tavaji worked as Saraiva’s interpreter but, as with so many others in the region, he had a composite profile, which included carrying letters and gathering information.111 The success of Linhares’s spy in Daulatabad depended on his ability to relate to the “favorites and counselors” (validos e conselheiros) of Burhan III. Diogo Saraiva became friends with the “governor” of the sultanate, who was known for being informed of “everything that happens in Surat.”112 Another member of the sultanate’s political elite would have been Aquid Murad, Ahmadnagar’s ambassador to the Estado in whose company Saraiva traveled to Goa in April– May 1631.113 However, the dynastic transition in 1631 had considerable impact on court circles given that Fath Khan—Malik Ambar’s son and his father’s “successor” as kingmaker in Ahmadnagar—hastened to purge “all the favorites and governors and ministers of the Royal Council, and placed others of his extraction.”114 The rise of Husain III would not have benefited Saraiva, for the Portuguese spy had been quite close to Burhan III and some of his courtiers. Already in late 1630, Linhares commented on the influence that the “enemies of the Christians” had in the Nizam Shahi court, people who would completely oppose an alliance between the sultanate and the Estado.115 The triumph of this group in all probability resulted in Saraiva’s elimination, for he simply vanishes from the Portuguese record at this point. To have someone like Diogo Saraiva in his service, tirelessly spying, lobbying, brokering, and writing from Daulatabad, was an enormous advantage for Linhares. However, the solution of a one-man show deeply embedded in the

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sultan’s court was not in any way transposable to Bijapur. This sultanate was a larger regional power and political player than Ahmadnagar. It was also closer— both geographically and historically—to Goa and embodied the Estado’s “real” neighbor. If continuously tense, the relationship between the two states was one of intrinsic dependence and complementarity. Bijapur was the only case in which a formal exchange of resident ambassadors between the Estado da Índia and an Asian power was agreed.116 However, the commitment taken in 1576 never translated into the presence of permanent Portuguese ambassadors in Bijapur; the viceroys of Goa opted instead to cyclically send diplomatic emissaries to the ‘Adil Shahi court. Conversely, Bijapur went on to nominate permanent representatives in Goa, which the Portuguese recognized as resident (assistentes) ambassadors. But, living mostly in Bicholim (Divchal) and not in the city proper, these men and their retinues were far from view. Moreover, they were often the cause of friction between the two capitals and, from the biased perspective of the viceregal palace, created more problems than they resolved. The Portuguese intelligence apparatus ought to have been more substantial in Bijapur. True, part of this structure was geared toward what Daniela Frigo has identified in some Italian city-states as microdiplomacy, that is, tailored to tackle the problems of vicinity between two small states, be they jurisdictional conflicts, border disputes, military skirmishes, religious tensions, or arguments over provisioning.117 These were relatively minor matters, and yet they shaped the negotiations between the Estado and Bijapur on several occasions. Hence, the whirlwind of men and letters between Goa and the “mainland,” where figures such as the ambassador of Bijapur to the Estado and, especially, the havaldar (governor, “manager”) of Konkan—also known among the Portuguese as the “captain of Ponda”—stood out.118 Many of the Estado’s acts of espionage and diplomacy in Bijapur targeted the terra firme specifically and were alien to courtly high politics. But it is also true that, on many other instances, the viceroys envisaged Bicholim as the antechamber to the capital of the sultanate. Moreover, Bijapur served as Goa’s intelligence hub for Hindustan and the rest of the Deccan. The intelligence structure crafted by Linhares in Bijapur was inter-ethnic and socially transversal in essence. It involved Catholic priests employed as diplomats, but also included Muslim women recruited as letter bearers. It resembled in some ways an old chandelier. The ceiling hook corresponds to the viceregal palace and its main occupant. From here downward we find a complex structure of branching lights, which represent the different intelligence groups and members of the network. Larger structures are meant to light up larger rooms or offer a deeper and broader intelligence picture.

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Consider the upper layers of the chandelier first, or the agents who emanated from the viceroy himself and whose actions reflected directly on the reputation of the Estado da Índia: the ambassadors of Goa to Bijapur. These men spent stretches of time in the ‘Adil Shahi court but were not true resident ambassadors. Linhares’s choice as his first ambassador to the court of Sultan Muhammad in February 1630 was Baltasar de Azeredo. By selecting Azeredo, the viceroy privileged factors such as social status and diplomatic experience. Azeredo was “old, respected, and rather experienced in these matters.”119 Indeed, he was over sixty years old at the time and had been living in Goa for so long that he could then claim to have met more than twenty viceroys. Moreover, he was a fidalgo of the royal house and a knight of the Order of Christ.120 But despite his gravitas, Azeredo did not master Persian and might not have been fully conversant with the intricacies of Muhammad’s court. For this reason, the Portuguese ambassador traveled to Bijapur in the company of two priests, both Discalced Carmelites: Fr. Leandro da Anunciação and a certain Fr. Lucas. The viceroy had a high regard for the former but was not convinced about the latter.121 The sudden death of Anunciação in March–April 1630 made Linhares change his plans. Furthermore, he feared for Azeredo’s safety in the capital of Bijapur and opted for the ambassador’s return, simultaneously forcing the unwanted Lucas to travel back to Goa. The new ambassador of the Estado da Índia at Muhammad’s court was Fr. João da Rocha, formerly provincial of the Augustinians (1623–1628).122 Rocha entered the capital of Bijapur accompanied by another missionary of the same order: Fr. Sebastião de Jesus, a “specialist of the Persian language” who had spent many years in Safavid Iran.123 The presence of these four priests in the capital of Bijapur—two Discalced Carmelites, followed by two Augustinians—shows that the Portuguese viceroy attempted to capitalize on the experience of missionaries whose Iranian expertise could be of great use in Persianate India. Proficiency in Persian, knowledge of the Safavid court, and of courtly culture per se was to play an enormous role in an Indo-Persian court such as Bijapur. For Linhares, these priests were men of politics rather than men of religion. The instructions (regimento) communicated to Azeredo upon departure have not survived, but Rocha’s instructions have.124 Such notes, or apontamentos, read largely as directions given to a spy. Rocha was required to collect “all the certified news than can be gathered in Bijapur, even if from afar.” To that end, he should take advantage of employing a baniya as an informer and not neglect to weave his own intelligence web; ideally composed of spies recruited in the capitals of the sultanate and the Estado alike, the structure ought to cover a broad geographical area and therefore access intelligence beyond Bijapur. To spy also

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meant to socialize and the Augustinian was expected to make friends in the ‘Adil Shahi court and to build relationships with the sultan’s favorites. This would give him access to “the secret intelligence of this people, which is the main purpose for me to send you,” Linhares reasoned. Rocha was specifically instructed to approach the sultan’s mother and wives by way of gifts (brincos), since these women were repositories of political information. This strategy, which later ambassadors to Bijapur were also asked to follow, was not without irony: a Catholic priest, the former provincial of a major religious order, was expected to foster intimacy with some of the most influential women in the harem of an Indo-Muslim ruler.125 Several other Portuguese moradores of Goa engaged in intelligencegathering actions in Bijapur during Linhares’s time, if with no ambassadorial status. The chief constable of the city was sent “to Bijapur with important affairs in the service of His Majesty,” as was the fidalgo António de Oliveira Morais, “a very intelligent man who has a close friendship and intelligence with the Moors.”126 A New Christian goldsmith born in Lisbon around 1590 and who had been living in India since his mid-twenties, Vicente Ribeiro became very close to the viceroy. Ribeiro saw himself as an “inquisitive person” (pessoa curiosa), knowledgeable about several regions of the subcontinent; he had received much praise from Linhares for his observation and negotiation skills in Bijapur.127 Others, such as Miguel Carneiro and Jorge da Costa—the latter being quite close to the sultan and his favorite Khawas Khan—seem to have been on a lower level of the social hierarchy, but were no less useful as informants.128 And, like in Gujarat, Linhares did not hesitate to employ Portuguese runaways (homiziados) living in Bijapur, not necessarily to obtain intelligence but to kill Europeans that cast artillery in the service of Muhammad ‘Adil Shah.129 One Portuguese in Bijapur, doubtless of the same caliber as Diogo Saraiva in Ahmadnagar, stands out as Linhares’s informant: the physician Fernão Lopes, or Fernão Lopes d’Orta. Little is known about this character before he accompanied Viceroy Jerónimo de Azevedo (g. 1612–1617) to Surat in 1615.130 Lopes would travel a few years later to Bijapur during the time of Governor Fernão de Albuquerque (g. 1619–1622) at the request of Ibrahim II himself. The ‘Adil Shahi court, as we have seen in Chapter 2, was an eclectic and multiethnic space frequented by Europeans of many extractions. The Portuguese medical doctor certainly found a place in the collage of learned traditions and professional skills that the sultan envisioned for his abode. Lopes likely blended in well, devoting his time to the entwined practices of espionage and medicine. However, he was not to come out of the dynastic transition of 1627 unscathed. Being a spy and having

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failed to cure Ibrahim II, Lopes was subjected to “harsh prison” and defaced. In addition, he saw his property confiscated, his son was arrested, and a moça—a nameless Christian native female slave of his—was forced to convert to Islam.131 This is what the Portuguese documents tell us about Fernão Lopes. However, Ibrahim Zubayri’s Basatin al-Salatin gives a more colorful picture (fictional on occasion) of Farmalub, as he refers to Lopes, and his demise: In 1037/1627, an ulcer appeared around the sultan’s buttocks. The doctors invested their upmost effort to treat it, but to no avail; all of the doctors’ devices and medications were of no use. . . . Fernão Lopes ( farmalub) was a skillful European (farangi) doctor, said to be the Hippocrates of his time. Being among those close to the royal court, he arrived to treat the king. Having treated [the sultan’s wound] for four or five days, the disease increased a hundredfold. The king said to Fernão Lopes: “what medicine did you give that the disease ended with this increase?” [Fernão Lopes] replied: “I have never treated this kind of disease; I reached this treatment by way of experimentation but made an error.” The king, who had the ethics of [the Prophet] Ibrahim and whose mercy for God’s creature was ample, said: “Oh Fernão Lopes! You have finished this affair for me. After me, no one will let you stay alive. Hit the road quickly; while I have life in my body, you should run to safety and save your honour.” Because the European had not yet received remuneration, he did not execute the king’s order and remained in the city. After the king’s death, Khawaṣ Khan cut [Lopes’s] nose and lower lip [off ] as punishment. Fernão Lopes went home, cut the lip and nose off a slave (ghulam), attached those to his own face, and healed. He spent some time practicing medicine in the city of Bijapur; he was an unparalleled doctor.132 Self-admittedly, the unparalleled Portuguese Hippocrates had not been competent enough to save Ibrahim’s life. But contrary to the advice of the ailing sultan, he stayed on, ready to risk his life for owed remuneration. Consequently, Lopes had his nose and lower lip cut off by order of the powerful Khawas Khan (nose and ear, according to the Portuguese version of this story).133 Still, he remained in Bijapur. Zubayri, who never mentions his activities as “intelligencer,” reveals a cold Farmalub, capable of disfiguring a slave in order to reconstruct his own face. Be that as it may, Linhares was most concerned about the Portuguese physician’s precarious situation in Bijapur. Following a suggestion by

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Francesco Corsi, the viceroy considered placing Lopes in the Mughal capital as a doctor (and surely as an informant). The Jesuit’s advice seems to echo Shahjahan’s own desire, since the emperor was keen on having itinerant doctors in his court.134 Lopes, however, would end up staying in Bijapur. He continued to spy for Linhares, as he regularly received money from Goa in 1631–1632 to pay for the many couriers that he dispatched with letters and avisos from the capital of the sultanate and the capital of the Estado.135 To return to the metaphorical lamp, the espionage activities carried out in Bijapur by all these people would not have been possible without the lower branches of the chandelier. There we find the various “petty” informants and envoys that went frequently to Bijapur hunting for political news. Some are known by their full names: Manuel Dias, António Dias, Jorge Pedroso, João Ribeiro, and Manuel Correia.136 Still, the Portuguese references remain dry and conceal the men’s deeper profiles and concrete actions. António Dias was “a native Christian that the viceroy ordered to go to Bijapur and reside there in the service of His Majesty for as much time as needed.”137 The others probably conformed to a similar profile. Beneath António Dias and the like we find runners continuously carrying correspondence and information (cartas de serviço and cartas de aviso); there was a host of indigenous couriers like the ones working for Fernão Lopes, recruited in Goa, in the ‘Adil Shahi court, or in Ponda. Among the most unexpected in a world of men are “two Muslim women [mouras] who came from Bijapur with an important message.”138 These women represented a fragment of the indigenous network of information and communication at Linhares’s disposal. Another piece of the same structure was a Muslim called Muhibb ‘Ali (Mouballi, Moybaly). Identified as an envoy of the havaldar of Konkan, Muhibb ‘Ali was paid by the Portuguese “for going back and forth with matters related to the service of His Majesty.”139 Plausibly, Linhares’s Hindu moles outnumbered the Muslim ones. Vishvanatha (Viso Nato) was sent by the viceroy in October 1632 as a spy to the mainland. An inhabitant of the terra firme, Khandoba (Cannopá) played a crucial role in the viceroy’s web of intelligence. Not only did he employ several patamares remunerated by the Estado to circulate letters between Goa and the courts of Sultan Muhammad and Emperor Shahjahan, but he also recruited spies on the viceroy’s behalf to report from the capital of Bijapur.140 What is more, Khandoba worked as Apaji’s agent, a Hindu (Abagi gentio) who lived in the court of Muhammad and used to come to Goa as envoy of the havaldar of Konkan.141 Apaji was a high-value spy. As compensation for “sending all the necessary intelligence” from Bijapur, the viceroy in 1631 offered him a golden chain with five

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seed pearls and six golden keys with ten rubies on each. The chain and keys together were worth 441 xerafins and 61 réis and served as symbolism for Apaji’s weight.142 It is plausible that the Portuguese mounted the six golden keys on a chain and expected Apaji to wear them around his neck, which in Europe signified privileged access to the king. According to the contemporary Western political vocabulary, “the more golden keys he could display, the greater the extent of his power and influence.”143 Would this gift have signified Apaji’s ability to facilitate the Estado’s access to Bijapur’s inner circles? Was it otherwise meant to communicate that the gates of Portuguese Goa were always open to him? The present surely embodied political capital, but we do not know whether Apaji ever displayed the six golden keys or what they meant to him.

A Community of Spies? The unusual wealth of archival materials related to the term in office of a viceroy of the Estado da Índia allows for a detailed reconstruction of his intelligence apparatus vis-à-vis Mughal India and the western Deccan. True, the sources abound for the first half of Linhares’s government but are scarcer for its later years, which makes the analysis somewhat unbalanced. Be that as it may, the many characters discussed in the present chapter constitute pieces of a bigger, albeit incomplete, puzzle. The circumscribed spatial and temporal nature of this inquiry, as well as the juicy information on some of the intelligence agents, might foster the illusion that the extant fragments—profuse and rich as they are in the context of seventeenth-century Portuguese India—equal the whole. Totality is of course a fallacy, but a larger and denser network would not necessarily look different in nature and plan (Chart 1). Based on a variety of documents rather than on one major source, the microscopic approach pursued here provides a thick portrait of a particular early modern intelligence system. It revolved around one city of South Asia (Goa) during the six-year government (1629–1635) of a Portuguese viceroy (the Count of Linhares) and combined short- and long-distance information (ranging from Bicholim to Lahore, and beyond). By zooming in on Linhares’s informational web, one sees individuals, human agency, and personal bonds more than structures, institutions, and organizations. The viceroy did not mastermind his Mughal intelligence complex with a ruler and square. Nor does he seem to have chosen spies prior to his arrival at the viceregal palace by opting for his criados, people who accompanied him from Lisbon. Once in Goa, Linhares, or any other

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Chart 1. The Count of Linhares’s web of intelligence (1629–1635)

viceroy for that matter, did not find an institutional framework for intelligence activities upon which to build. Instead, he handpicked local individuals schooled in Mughal and Deccani affairs. Regarding Portuguese “intelligencers,” the viceroy took advantage of veteran officials and residents of the Estado, men with diverse profiles, but typically with two or more decades of field experience. In addition, he resorted to missionaries of different religious orders with robust knowledge of Indo-Persian polities.

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All in all, the viceroy made use of rather varied people, comprising padres and fidalgos, merchants and doctors, officers and soldiers, casados and homiziados. Artists were apparently absent; Shahjahan proved less interested than his two immediate predecessors in having Jesuit-sponsored painters and craftsmen around him. But in Bijapur, Muhammad ‘Adil Shah, while no Ibrahim II, managed to attract some European artists to his court. Maybe the anonymous priest who traveled from Goa to serve him as a painter—and painted “whatever the king asked him”—worked simultaneously for Linhares as a spy.144 Different political geographies required different answers, and Linhares quickly understood the need for tailor-made solutions within the available manpower. The economic-political entrepreneur tended to prevail in Gujarat. Individuals like Manuel de Paiva, Manuel Velho, and Manuel Silva were at ease in the seaports of the Portuguese província and the Mughal suba alike and had access to news arriving from Ahmedabad as well as from the imperial capital. In turn, the courts of the western Deccan easily absorbed borderline figures, like soldiers and doctors of fortune. Diogo Saraiva and Fernão Lopes walked on thin ice in Ahmadnagar and Bijapur by serving the local sultans and plunging into local politics while simultaneously spying for the Estado and sticking to their Catholic identities. (Curiously enough, Linhares’s anxiety about their loyalty, if any, never emerges from the extant sources.) Regardless of their profiles, spies had to socialize, and Linhares’s agents were no exception. Effective informants needed to immerse themselves in local societies and be familiar with specific milieus. The Augustinian friar João da Rocha was presumably intimate with the wives of Sultan Muhammad in the ‘Adil Shahi court, while the Portuguese morador of Daman Manuel Velho ate and drank with English and Dutch Company servants in Surat under the guise of a Portuguese homiziado. Rocha and Velho, or better yet, the harem and the harbor were the two extremes of the spectrum. Even though the profession of spy started to be recognized in Europe as such in the early modern period—the moment when professions, or at least some, became progressively structured—there was always room for fluidity.145 Individuals were used to playing many roles at once as well as fostering several professional identities in their lifetime, and this is a drawer in which Vicente Ribeiro, Fernão Lopes, and Manuel de Paiva can easily be placed. Similar to the diplomatic corps of the small Italian states of the period, the structure of the Estado’s intelligence network was flexible and pragmatic, without fixed roles and clear specializations.146 Besides, there was no such thing in seventeenth-century Goa as professional spies, as there was no distinction between career and amateur informers.

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When one shifts the focus from Portuguese to indigenous informants, the picture becomes intriguingly ambivalent. If many of the latter remain unavoidably invisible, it is equally true that the imperial archive has managed to retain something of these transient figures. Consider the several native information brokers, especially the couriers that the Portuguese often identified by name or nickname, as well as the moços—unnamed apprentices—who accompanied them. Reflecting an eclectic socio-professional texture, the indigenous element of Linhares’s network was likewise heterogeneous with regard to its ethnic and religious composition. It included Muslims, Hindus of different castes—mostly baniyas and Brahmans, representing the most important intelligence and scribal communities of the subcontinent—as well as Catholic converts (equally Brahmans?) like António Dias. Even if their “historical existence” depends to a great extent, if not entirely, on Portuguese documents, it goes without saying that their early modern lives went well beyond collaboration with the Estado. Linhares’s network spoke and listened in various languages. It constituted a collage of “nations,” social systems, competences, and beliefs in which men like the ambassador Baltasar Azeredo, the runner “Silver Soles,” the Jesuit Francesco Corsi, and the “gentile” Apaji all fit. Many of the viceroy’s agents were Indian born and did not even understand Portuguese. Among the Portuguese moles, several were relatively conversant in the Indo-Persian world—language, political rituals, and social manners—yet they were not Persian scholars. Linhares’s web of eyes and ears in Mughal India and the western Deccan was evidently a space of “intercultural exchange.”147 But such a formula might not capture fully the grid’s complexity and richness. On the one hand, it tends to efface the tensions and ruptures that inevitably affected an intelligence structure rooted in Goa, a city shaped by the rigid hierarchies of Iberian society and exposed to the winds of Catholic orthodoxy.148 On the other, the intercultural exchange paradigm might not be sufficient or adequate to explain some of the paradoxes at play. People such as Diogo Saraiva in Daulatabad, Hari Vaisya in Surat, and Apaji in Bijapur openly served two masters and, what is more, the two masters seemed content with the arrangement. They were on both sides of the fence simultaneously, which makes the fence itself problematic. Strictly speaking, these men were not double agents, as they openly worked across conflicting political spheres. We probably do not know enough about the world of early modern brokerage to make full sense of them, but they likely represent the natural outcome of a dynamic and volatile market of services and skills that did not conform to the stringent logic of political loyalty or religious solidarity.149 One is perhaps closer to the “familiarity of

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strangers” conceptualized by Francesca Trivellato for the world of business during this same period.150 Needless to say, the individuals who gave form to Linhares’s network belonged to different social orders, had their own agendas, and surely did not always count the interests of the Estado as their top priority. The network was not a fraternity, but it doubtless formed a political community, one whose members lived on news, endlessly “buying,” “selling,” and moving information around. Power and its exercise directed what they saw and heard, said and wrote, took and brought. Such political communities existed with great vitality during these years in other places on the globe, whether in Shakespeare’s England or in China during the Ming–Qing transition.151

Chapter 4

Intelligence and Ethnography at Linhares’s Desk

Making Knowledge One can aspire to gauge the efficiency of Linhares’s community of spies by attempting to identify its concrete political outcomes. Did the information available at the viceroy’s desk translate into specific decisions? Is it possible to demonstrate that the viceroy’s strategy was molded by the news brought by his spies from, say, Surat, Burhanpur, Daulatabad, or Bijapur? And shall one venture considering—in a risky formulation, closer to counterfactual history—that the Mughal incorporation of the Deccan could have been crowned by the eventual demise of Portuguese Goa if Linhares made poor, uninformed choices? Such a line of reasoning, to be sure, would lead us to false direct correlations between rich intelligence and efficient empire. Indeed, imperial communication is full of unknowns and, as Cornel Zwierlein has argued, decision-making in early modern imperial contexts was often shaped by ignorance, or non-knowledge.1 A different, if related, plan of analysis involves reflection on how some of this intelligence was transformed into knowledge. This was not necessarily the kind of “learned and abstract knowledge” usually associated with the colonial era, even though C. A. Bayly has convincingly underlined the political hue of colonial knowledge by unearthing “a level of practical, ad hoc, ‘satisficing’ administration which was not embodied in texts or procedures and worked on particular circumstances.”2 It is on this practical level that much of the knowledge which resulted from the endeavors of Linhares’s moles ought to be situated. We speak mainly of political knowledge with a strong ethnographic component, with no ambition to become scientific knowledge proper.

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A part of an investigation into otherness, early modern ethnography stemmed from several different practices, be it “relaxed” observation, methodical inquiry, or violent interrogation. Ethnographic analysis was practiced globally in the period, from Christian writing on Jews and European views on India to Qing classifications of “savage” groups living in frontier regions and Tokugawa understandings of the West.3 The Count of Linhares nurtured a particular interest in political ethnography, which commonly steered clear of questions of religion and ethnicity and instead concentrated on power.4 True, the viceroy’s mindset and prejudices often reached the surface. Sect mattered for him, as for any Portuguese living in Goa at the time: Muslims were “Moors” and Hindus were “gentiles.” However, the information about Hindustan and the western Deccan that Linhares accessed revolved mostly around power struggles, notable figures, the inner workings of court politics, and geopolitical puzzles. Neither systems of belief nor categories of social differentiation seem to have occupied much of Linhares’s attention in this regard. What is more, when commenting on his informants, the viceroy cared for their professional and personal qualities—experience, ability, truthfulness—not their creeds and groupings. Curiously, the way in which his “intelligencers” operated in the early 1630s was not much different from what political scientists do today when they employ political ethnography as a methodological tool. For example, both groups adopt “ground-level, field-based techniques” and practice both “participant observation” and “immersion in a community, a cohort, a locale, or a cluster of related positions.” Both are “at close range,” “‘neck-deep’ in a research context to generate knowledge based on that context,” favoring “face-to-face contact with the people studied.”5 Another, if perhaps unusual way to delve into the nature of Linhares’s knowledge of the Indo-Persian world is to relate it to the current historiography on the links between science and practice in the early modern period. Think, first and foremost, of Simon Schaffer’s investigation about “the information order and the knowledge flows” which shaped Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica (1687). Newton is said to have operated in isolation, and yet the “empiricist knowledge regime of the late seventeenth century,” which comprised travel, commerce, and reportage, was central to his work. 6 The English savant, Schaffer further reasons, depended on sources of information at the global scale, or the input of a plethora of local testimonies coming from all four corners of the world. The Principia thus mirrors the constant dilemmas its author encountered with regard to “know whom to trust” and to choose from “a large number of observations.”7 Linhares was likely alien to the world of natural philosophy, but

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he faced the same critical challenges in his quest to make sense of the political landscape of Hindustan and the Deccan out of many and disparate voices. As we saw, the viceroy’s spies moved in a world in which information was collected in a variety of spaces, from palace to street. Political intelligence had very different textures, but it frequently came wrapped in specific episodes and anecdotes reaching ample and rich circulation through text, orality, and performance.8 This is precisely the context of tales like that of Sultan Bulaqi, which had so impressed the Portuguese: born in north India, the story reached Portugal as well as Assam, though with diverse shades. The Padshah Buranji includes a rather corrupted reverberation of the legend of Bulaqi, apparently mixed with the legend of Baisunghar. According to this Assamese chronicle, which covers events up to Aurangzeb’s reign, Shahjahan came to the throne after having assassinated two of his brothers, but one of the others managed to flee, disguising himself as a fakir (a Muslim ascetic) and eventually marrying the widow of the Ottoman sultan. Once he became emperor, the text tells us, Shahjahan recognized in one of the slaves of Sa’dullah Khan (d. 1656), his chief minister, “the marks of a future Padshah.” The slave’s name was Muhammad Sayid. Worried, the emperor showed interest in having him as a slave and Sa’dullah Khan, forced to acquiesce, only had time to warn Muhammad about the danger he was in: “The Padshah wants you as you are endowed with the marks of a sovereign.” The slave escaped, seeking the protection of Shah Bhramara, “the prince of vagrants,” who gave him much money and said, “Go and become a Padshah.” The slave raised an army and took the Mughal throne, forcing the overthrown Shahjahan to take refuge with the Ottoman emperor. Yet the fakir warned Muhammad Sayid that he “had only three years more to live and not an hour more.” And the story goes on, fancifully, until Shahjahan regains power.9 The bitter dialogues that peppered the political struggle in Hindustan and the Deccan were fostered in related settings. Echoes of them often arrived in Goa, if not in Lisbon. Indeed, several Portuguese texts include references to the exchange of insults between rulers of the Indo-Persian world by way of shameful allegories and offensive gifts, some satirical, some violent.10 One such fragment can be found in Linhares’s diary. On July 25, 1634, the viceroy noted down that he had received word from the Jesuit Paulo Reimão, then in Gujarat, about recent political developments in imperial lands. Once more, the hot topic was Sultan Bulaqi and his legend, a story which had just traveled between Surat and Goa in a particular vest. Shahjahan, the missionary reported, was in Lahore en route to Kashmir, where he hoped to punish the rebel Bulaqi for his open defiance. The sultan had dispatched a letter to his uncle, together with an outrageous present:

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“as a gift [Bulaqi sent] a sword and a golden bed. The letter asked [Shahjahan] to choose the one that was more to his liking: either the bed on which to lie down and hand over the kingdom to him [i.e., Bulaqi], or the sword with which he should await him. The Mogor felt very offended with this [sentio muito isto] and considered killing the ambassadors, but eventually scorned them. Without sending [Bulaqi] an answer, he prepared for war.”11 A few months earlier, in late May 1634, Linhares had been confronted with another intriguing tale, this time originating in Bijapur. The following story shies away from insult to focus on succession, which embodies another significant concern of early modern political ethnography. Muhammad ‘Adil Shah, the rumor had it, was either dead or had been “dispossessed of the kingdom.” Reliable news ultimately arrived, and reality proved different: the sultan of Bijapur was alive and still in power. Notwithstanding, His subjects wanted to depose the king since he was unsuited for women because he was impotent, and he was not going to have any children. When they were about to dethrone him, a jogue [yogi, a Hindu ascetic] arrived and told them not to depose the king because he could cure him. However, he would have to put the king’s life at risk; if he [i.e., the king] survived, he would become fit for women. But if he were to die, they would have to promise him that they would not do anything to him. They made this promise and issued a document to him. The king nearly died but was eventually healed; they say that he is now cured and able.12 We do not know by what means the yogi was able to cure Muhammad, but there is clear continuity with the previous episode as to the topos of the strong, manly king: the specter of an impotent sovereign, deprived of authority and incapable of wielding power. Not being fit for women, Muhammad could not possibly be fit for his subjects. The tale likewise illustrates the relations of yogis with the rulers of Bijapur and recalls another, quite similar case years earlier at the court of Ibrahim II. The story is narrated by the Sufi Abu’l l-Hasan Qadiri in his Sahifat. When a daughter of Ibrahim II (sister of the future Sultan Muhammad) suddenly died, a yogi offered to resuscitate her. The body of the princess was then placed in a room next to an image of the goddess Saraswati; the yogi played a raga until she was “completely restored to life.”13 Linhares’s jogue and Qadiri’s yogi have much in common, with the exception that the first had less confidence in his powers, asking for a document that

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guaranteed his life in case of failure. Maybe he had witnessed or heard of the Portuguese doctor Fernão Lopes d’Orta being disfigured at the ‘Adil Shahi court a few years earlier for failing to keep Muhammad’s father alive. In the same vein, and despite differences in the plot, the Bulaqi of Linhares’s journal and the Bulaqi of the chronicle Padshah Buranji are remarkably close. It may be concluded that much of the information gathered by the Portuguese relating to the western Deccan and Mughal India belonged to what has been termed the “circulatory regime” of South Asia.14 To Indo-Persian stories and news arriving in “liquid” form to Goa in different guises and through the most varied means, one shall add “artifact” indigenous documents that the Estado da Índia obtained and somehow managed to retouch as Portuguese by way of literal and cultural translation. Still, we are mostly faced with raw materials that were not truly handled by the Estado da Índia. To a large extent, the knowledge remained native and did not become colonial knowledge, since we are distant from the nineteenth-century desire to discipline “the space of Asia” and regulate “the facts of Asia.”15 (And, even in colonial times, the outcome was not necessarily more “modern” or “scientific” than in the preceding centuries.)16 Analysis of the two following cases—anchored in materials typical of the political ethnography that would have reached the hands of the Count of Linhares in Goa—is in this regard quite illuminating. They take us, respectively, to the beginning of Shahjahan’s reign and to the sultanate of Bijapur on the eve of submission to the Mughals.

A Mughal Dispatch in Disguise, Late 1629 Book 13B of the Livros das Monções, housed in the Historical Archives of Goa, includes two short reports written in different hands which are bound sequentially and datable to the beginning of the government of the Count of Linhares. Probably penned in the very last days of 1629, the first of these reports has been known to historians for several decades, and yet never thoroughly studied. It was arranged “for Your Excellency to see” (para V. Exa ver), that is, the viceroy, and bears the title of Relação dos Reis Vizinhos do que ora passa e contão (Relação in its shorthand form), or “Account of the neighboring kings of what is presently happening and being recounted.”17 It was customary for viceroys in Goa to commission, receive, and discuss political reports on the neighboring kingdoms of the Estado da Índia, documents that were later sent to Lisbon accompanied by “cover letters” addressed to the king or embedded within such

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correspondence.18 As a rule of thumb, these are anonymous and relatively short texts. It is worth reflecting on who might have written such pieces and how they were produced; given the evidence, it is not implausible to contemplate the possibility of composite authorship. The Relação is undoubtedly a Portuguese text, which refers to “our lands” (nossas terras), “our fortresses” (nossas fortalezas), and often invokes the “Lord Count Viceroy” (Senhor Conde V Rey) and “His Majesty” (Sua Magestade). The text has an “I,” if a virtually invisible one. The author surfaces in a single instance but remains undisclosed. When elaborating on the kingdoms that supported Bulaqi in his struggle against Shahjahan, the anonymous “I” lets slip a short phrase: “the ones I know in detail” (o extenço que sei de alguns). However, the specificity with which the Relação describes the political landscape of the Mughal Empire and the sultanates of Bijapur and Ahmadnagar—in fact, the focus of nearly the entire report—points toward polyphonic indigenous sources of information. It is the kind of account that someone like the interpreter Krishna Shenvi could have put together. Consisting of three pages of dense writing, the second report bears no title and is not nearly as well known.19 The text is undated, though its contents lead us to conclude that it was written sometime at the end of 1629 or the beginning of 1630. It resembles the Relação and was certainly prepared to be read in Goa and Lisbon. But unlike the Relação, this text does not make a single reference to the Estado da Índia or to its viceroy. It alludes to the fortresses of Daman and Diu without noting that they are “ours.” It speaks of the English, the Dutch, and the “Christians,” but only once, in the last paragraph, does it employ the expression “enemies from Europe” (inimigos da Europa). An equally anonymous piece, this text is essentially a native text, which could just as much have arrived at the viceregal court of the Count of Linhares as at the court of Muhammad. It does not have direct origin in any akhbarat, the handwritten newsletters that reported at least weekly from and on the Mughal court. Not only does its structure not resemble that of an akhbarat but, more significantly, its stance is one of clear opposition to the emperor. With all probability, the text reflects the news and rumors that could be gathered in public spaces of the major urban centers of north and northwestern India, be it Agra (then the imperial capital) or a provincial capital like Ahmedabad. The text was likely collated, translated, and/or copied in Goa, but nothing seems to indicate that it would have been truly reworked or heavily edited by the Portuguese. In short, we are probably in presence of an indigenous report, similar to so many others that circulated in Hindustan and the Deccan in this period, the difference being that this one comes to us in Portuguese.

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The structure of this account resembles that of the Relação, though it is a more imbalanced text with regard to the subject matter: it concerns itself with one king and kingdom, not multiple kings and kingdoms. In fact, the account centers on political events at the Mughal court, and the figure of Shahjahan monopolizes the entire text. Its author is not a passive narrator since what he wrote constitutes a severe political judgement. For him, the Mughal emperor was a coward who had illegitimately seized power and who intended to maintain it at all costs. If Shahjahan embodies the unscrupulous usurper, then his father-in-law Asaf Khan represents a dangerous eminence grise. There are tragic heroes in this account, like Shahryar and Bulaqi. Khan-i Jahan Lodi, who ended up being decapitated in February 1631, is the tragic hero par excellence. But the text was penned before this violent ending; it leaves the Afghan noble as he moved south to seek refuge in Ahmadnagar more than a year earlier. To explain Shahjahan’s turbulent rise to the throne in 1628, the author of the second report goes back a few years, to the beginning of the revolt of then Prince Khurram against his father, Emperor Jahangir, in 1623. The image of Khurram is one of an unthinking and dangerous man, capable of killing his brother Khusrau (d. 1622), the apparent “heir to the kingdom” (the author curiously omits mention of Khusrau’s own rebellion against his father in 1606). Jahangir, the threatened emperor, temporizes and uses “good manners” with Khurram, but the prince, “guilty,” breaks with his father, only to be successively defeated, condemning himself to a state of permanent flight. As soon as the news of Jahangir’s death reaches him in the Deccan, Khurram sends a message to Khan-i Jahan— the commander of the imperial army in Burhanpur—so that the latter might help him take the throne. The general declines. This first paragraph, whose topic is the object of a more synthetic and less rich treatment in the Relação, functions as a sort of teaser for what constitutes the core of the account: the outbreak of the conflict between Shahjahan and Khan-i Jahan in the city of Agra in 1629 and the events that followed. With this first disagreement between the two men duly recorded, the following paragraph narrates the bloody process that would raise Khurram to power and the role played by Asaf Khan in it, a matter that the Relação considers in detail. Concealing his support for his son-in-law—acting covertly (por baixo da capa) and treacherously (não comvinha fiarçe delle)—Asaf Khan took it upon himself first to eliminate another candidate to the throne, Sultan Shahryar, whom the text calls the “poor king” (pobre Rei). Asaf Khan did so by using Sultan Bulaqi, “making him king and handing him all the royal insignia that belonged to his grandfather [i.e., Jahangir].” Asaf Khan’s next move consisted of isolating

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Bulaqi at the court, watching and controlling him, while he urged Shahjahan to return from the Deccan and take power. Khurram then marched to Agra, ordering by letter that his father-in-law eliminate Bulaqi as well as the other princes. With Prince Khurram finally transformed into Emperor Shahjahan, the text reaches its dramatic climax: the conflict between the new Mughal ruler and Khan-i Jahan Lodi. The emperor felt “hurt” (sentido) by the fact that the Afghan noble had not supported his rise to the throne. Shahjahan therefore nurtured “great hatred” (grande ódio) for him, but the emperor knew how to dissimulate, writing him “affectionate letters” (cartas mimosas), sending him presents, and calling him to court so that he could benefit from his counsel as an “older captain.” Khan-i Jahan consequently traveled to Agra and was initially well received by Shahjahan. The latter, however, could not long conceal the hatred he felt for the Afghan general (the word is used twice in the text), and it became clear that he intended to eliminate him. Khan-i Jahan then went before Shahjahan and offered him a present worth of “seventeen lakhs of rupees in money and items.”20 In a symbolic act, he returned to the new emperor on the same occasion the sword that Jahangir had in the past entrusted to him, arguing that he was now old and suggesting to the emperor “to give it to someone willing to serve him.” Shahjahan purportedly “accepted everything” and thus Khan-i Jahan definitively left imperial service. But the emperor did not really accept everything. He did not wait long to put Khan-i Jahan’s palace under siege, while menacing, upon penalty of death, all of his followers who refused to declare loyalty. However, “since the Patanes [Pashtuns] are a resolute people, around five hundred of them went inside the houses of the said Canejão,” while others spread out over the city and surrounding areas, concealing their bond with the Afghan noble. The emperor sent an iron shackle (macho de ferro) to Khan-i Jahan, expecting that he would put it on his own feet, but the Afghan noble insisted on shouldering no blame. The siege of the palace lasted a week before reaching an impasse. “Such a ridiculous thing,” the author intervenes in his own account, “that within such a large city like Agra, and under its strength, a king with so many thousands of people at his service does not dare to enter the houses of one of his captains, who could count on only five hundred men to defend himself.” In this scenario, the only option for Khan-i Jahan was to escape Agra with his followers; he did so “between eleven and midnight” on an unspecified date in the text, but which we know was October 15. There then follows a lively account of the clashes between Khan-i Jahan and the men Shahjahan charged with pursuing him. The initial fights took place at Dholpur, on the banks of the Chambal River, and the outcome favored the Afghan noble, who eliminated several

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Mughal captains. Among these was Raza Bahadur, whom the author of the text identifies as the person who cut off the heads of Mughal princes in the battle for imperial succession. The death of Raza Bahadur would have been particularly painful for the emperor: “when he saw his body before him, he started to cry and said some words of sorrow.”21 The ordinary people, on the other hand, celebrated the death of the executioner of princes—“all the kingdoms felt a universal joy”— and rose up against the persecution of Khan-i Jahan. In this first confrontation with the imperial army, the Afghan rebel also lost a son, whose identity is not revealed. The text states that Shahjahan exhibited the head of Khan-i Jahan’s son triumphally on the gates of Agra and had it “guarded so that no one could take it down.” But, despite his success, the emperor could not feel secure. “Many horsemen came at midnight and using a ladder they took it down and carried it away, killing two [guards] while the others fled.” The account of the conflict between the Mughal ruler and Khan-i Jahan concludes in the next paragraph with the rebel riding in the company of 15,000 horsemen in the direction of Ahmadnagar, where many other Pashtuns would join him. This extended paraphrasing of the text highlights the richness and the type of information that reached Goa, while also revealing the complexity of this anonymous report. The text contains details that do not appear in any other Portuguese source—the Relação, for instance, says nothing about Khan-i Jahan—and these likely originated in conversations at the bazaars and streets of any major urban center of Mughal India, either an imperial capital like Agra or a provincial capital like Ahmedabad. The bitterness in the author’s tone should again be stressed, for the emperor’s behavior is here condemned and the text unequivocally takes the side of the rebellious Afghan noble. In the Mughal chronicles, Khan-i Jahan is presented as someone who had followed a dangerous and disloyal path, a man with a malicious mind who had entered an irrational state of boldness.22 A Sunni who was too close to Shi’ism, spending much time in the company of dervishes (Muslim mendicants), he had chosen vagrancy and nourished a hatred for the world.23 In contrast, the “Portuguese” account almost recognizes the legitimacy of Khan-i Jahan taking power and becoming emperor: “It is true that the uprising of the Pashtuns, and there are many of them in those kingdoms, was feared; and these were the kings whom the Mogor had deprived of the scepter and the crown.” The text thus offers a curious formulation, which does not emphasize the deposition of Humayun by Sher Shah in 1540. This would have been the obvious viewpoint of any Mughal chronicler. Instead, it is the legitimacy of the Sur regime, ended by the restoration of Mughal rule in 1555, that the author cares to accentuate. This same idea is taken up again at the end of the narration of the

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conflict between Shahjahan and Khan-i Jahan Lodi, where the departure of the Afghan noble toward Ahmadnagar is described. In the version of events given in this account, it is stated that there were revolts by Afghans in Bengal and that the emperor “consequently fears that all the Pashtuns will rebel and eventually seek to make Canejão the king.” Distinctively, the Mughal emperor is portrayed as a fearful tyrant who was unable to gain the confidence of his subjects: “today he lives in great unease and fear, for he is not loved by his people.” It is uncertain whether this particular report influenced the Count of Linhares and shaped his political strategy vis-à-vis the Mughal Empire. Nevertheless, there is a clear correspondence between the words of the text and the words of the viceroy. For Linhares, in March 1630 Khan-i Jahan was “the most esteemed man in the kingdom of the old Mogor [i.e., Jahangir], in which he achieved great victories.”24 Months later, the viceroy thought that in the conflict between Shahjahan and Khan-i Jahan, “Khurram’s party continually lost reputation.”25 And echoing what was then discussed in Daulatabad, Linhares did not fail to refer to Canejão as the “former king of the Pasthuns and Gujaratis.”26 Let us return by way of conclusion to the form and structure of this anonymous text, especially with regard to its long section on the conflict between Xajão and Canejão. Some of the most critical moments take place at night, and the author grabs the reader’s attention when he narrates events that were possible to undertake only under the cover of night, a time of potential disorder and lack of control. Khan-i Jahan escapes from Agra at night and some of his men return to Agra at night in order to retrieve the decapitated head of his son.27 The gestures of the principal actors, the objects they handle, and their symbolism are likewise sublimated. Khan-i Jahan hands over to Shahjahan the sword that Jahangir had given to him, while the emperor responds by sending him a fetter. Lastly, there is room for the description of emotions expressed both by individual and collective actors. Shahjahan cries, hates, and fears, while his people do not love him and are filled with happiness at the death of evil imperial servants. This text is structured as though it was a play; usurpation, treason, and revenge are some of its essential ingredients.

May 1634: A Brahman Surveys the Western Deccan On March 3, 1634, in Goa, Linhares received a letter from the captain of Chaul containing important information on Bijapur: “the son of the Mogor was just three day’s journey from the fortress of Daulatabad. From there he sent some

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captains with people to the lands of the Idalxá and they put the fortress of Parenda to siege, the one that the Idalcão took from the Melique.”28 The son of Shahjahan to whom the Portuguese captain refers is the young Shah Shuja’ (1616–1661), who joined the imperial offensive to the south under the protection of the Mughal governor of the Deccan, Mahabat Khan. As for Parenda, it was a hill fort of great importance in the geopolitical landscape of the western Deccan. Built during the second half of the fifteenth century, it was located about sixty miles from Sholapur and afforded direct access to the capital city of Bijapur.29 Contrary to the sieges of Dharur, Qandahar (not to be confused with the city of the same name in southern Afghanistan) and Daulatabad, which strangely did not leave many traces in the Portuguese record, the Estado da Índia bestowed great attention on the Mughal assault on Parenda.30 The fact that the imperial army failed in this instance—the fortress never surrendered and remained under the authority of the rulers of Bijapur even after 1636—might serve as an explanation. Perhaps more importantly, Parenda had enormous strategic significance not only for the ‘Adil Shahis, but also for the Estado. The viceroy was well aware that, with no other fortified position between it and the capital of the sultanate, “by taking that [fortress] of Parenda, the Mughals would easily reach [the city of ] Bijapur.”31 In contrast, Shahjahan wished to forget such a defeat. The chronicles of his reign do not overlook the subject, but in the Windsor Castle Padshahnama—where one finds several paintings depicting imperial victories in the Deccan—there is no room for the unsuccessful siege of Parenda.32 Goa carefully followed the events from March to June 1634. Linhares certainly made the most of his sources of information in Bijapur so that he might monitor the Mughal offensive from his palace. But the confusing news that arrived from the ‘Adil Shahi court on April 8 showed that his intelligence grid needed to be tighter and more effective.33 The viceroy became perplexed with the evanescent political fidelities in the Bijapur court in the midst of a war with the Mughals. On the following day, April 9, declaring himself in his journal puzzled by the disparity of news sent by his spies, the viceroy decided to order “a gentile who works as an interpreter in the secretariat to go to Bijapur and find out what is really happening in the war between the Mogores, the Idalcão, and the Melique.”34 We do not know who this “gentile” was, especially because Linhares is hereafter vague concerning his identity; the viceroy does not go any further than calling him “the intelligencer that I sent there” or the “Brahman that I sent there as intelligencer.” But even without a name, one can still reason about his profile, which matches that of several indigenous scribes and interpreters who worked

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for the Estado da Índia (a subject that will be discussed at length in the coming chapters). The viceroy might have gone for someone like “Diogo Fernandes, a native Christian and interpreter of the secretariat of this State,” who, a few years earlier, was serving “with much truth and diligence in the said position as well as in the registering of all the documents that are produced in the said secretariat.”35 He was a Catholic Brahman, capable of translating into and writing Portuguese. Alternatively, the viceroy could have chosen a Hindu Brahman, someone like Krishna Shenvi, who was then in the early days of his career as an interpreter of the Estado. It was common for indigenous interpreters in Portuguese Goa to be charged with political-diplomatic missions in the sultanates of the western Deccan, and Krishna was no exception. However that may be, and whoever he might have been, the Brahman sent to spy at the court of Bijapur was expected to produce intelligence reports in Portuguese for the viceroy’s eyes. People with the spy’s skills were also able to produce intelligence maps, like the four drawings that one of the harkaras in the service of Colin Mackenzie (d. 1821) prepared in 1788 on Guntur (Andhra Pradesh). These specific maps include captions in both Telugu and English and pinpoint forts and cisterns, temples and mosques, hills and roads.36 Although equivalent documents have not survived in the Portuguese context, we know that they had circulated in the Estado well before Linhares’s time. In 1547, Diogo Lopes de Aguião sent out from Chaul to Governor Dom João de Castro in Goa “a large sheet of paper” (um papel grande) that one of his agents—certainly an indigenous spy—had prepared in Balaghat. Aguião further recommended that Castro have it “drawn well” (debuxar bem) in Goa because there was no one apt in Chaul.37 Aguião’s biased suggestion implied that a native map was inescapably rustic, and in need of being “varnished” by a European hand. It is not difficult to imagine indigenous maps of this kind being destroyed in Goa once their immediate utility waned. For almost a month, between April 9 and the first week of May 1634, the viceroy’s journal says nothing about Bijapur. Linhares’s “gentile” naturally needed time to travel, install himself, and blend in. Without creating and reenacting links, it would be impossible to listen, inquire, and scribble. Beginning on May 7, the work of the new informer of the Portuguese viceroy began to bear fruit. True, not everything Linhares was to record in his diary in the following weeks on Bijapur can be certified as coming from this particular agent. Not only was the viceroy ambiguous when identifying the individuals who sent him intelligence from the sultanate—“news has arrived,” “I received letters”—but we also do not know how long the Brahman might have remained at the ‘Adil Shahi

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court. However, the three letters that reached Linhares on May 7, 10, and 13, 1634, were surely penned by his new intelligence agent.38 The news from Bijapur received in Goa throughout this week—from Sunday to the following Saturday—gave the viceroy much food for thought. The Brahman went into detail about the siege of Parenda and other clashes between the armies of Shahjahan and Muhammad, providing estimates of the cavalrymen on each side. The condition of the Mughal Empire beyond the conquest of the Deccan itself did not escape notice, for he commented on the situation of Shahjahan vis-àvis the Safavid ruler Shah Safi I (r. 1629–1642) and in relation to the vexed doubles of Bulaqi. Linhares’s spy was also aware of the divergent position of Asaf Khan regarding the imperial strategy for the Deccan; as he rightly noted, the emperor’s father-in-law was more inclined to maintain the status quo than to pursue conquest. Besides these topics, everything else that the Brahman wrote revolved around the western Deccan proper. Overall, Bijapur occupied most of his attention, with digressions about the influence enjoyed by the two principal figures of the sultan’s entourage—Mustafa Khan and Khawas Khan—and lamentations on the high price that water and cereals had reached in wartime. He also did not fail to register the death of the queen mother, the sultan’s grief following this news, or the pilgrimage that, “on the third day of the moon” (aos tres da lua), Muhammad and his two favorites made “to the grave [cova] of Taj Sultana in order to perform their ceremonies.”39 Significantly, and similar to how he handled other intelligence letters from Bijapur, the viceroy kept in his diary the original reference in his spy’s report to the lunar month of the Hijri calendar in use in the sultanate, a signal that we are dealing with a close summary of what the “gentile” wrote. Despite the significance of this news, what makes the espionage activities of this Brahman singular are two intriguing lists he sent to the viceroy. Linhares, or a scribe, copied them into the count’s journal on May 10. One consists of a list of the forty fortresses—said to comprise eighty-four mountains (serras)— which shaped the territory of Ahmadnagar and represented altogether an annual income of eighty lakhs of pagodas.40 The Brahman also provided generic calculations of this kind for Golconda (70 lakhs of pagodas) and Bijapur (at least 125 lakhs of pagodas), but Ahmadnagar—a sultanate in steady decline, on the verge of being torn to pieces by its neighbors—was the main object of his scrutiny.41 The other list consists of an account of the “captains, loyal, rebellious, brave, and weak, in the service of King Idalxá, together with the number of horses each of them has.”42 This document would presumably allow the Portuguese viceroy to assess Bijapur’s military capacity to resist the Mughals. For further information, the Brahman makes an indirect comparison with Golconda; this sultanate could

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not count on more than 10,000 horses but in compensation there were many soldiers on foot, which they preferred over horsemen.43 The breakdown of the list concerning Ahmadnagar’s fortresses, “tenents,” and rents shows that authority over the sultanate was exerted by three different power groups. None of them, though, were the Nizam Shahis; Murtaza III’s crown was virtually hollow at this point. The Mughals had the lion’s share, for they controlled the eastern region of the sultanate, contiguous with Golconda. The lands and fortresses under Shahjahan’s control, corresponding to a corridor that stretched from Galna to Qandahar and comprising the former sultanate of Berar (20 lakhs), equaled forty-one lakhs a year. The Marathas had their own fiefdom in the western region of the sultanate, bordering the Arabian Sea. Shahji ruled over the valuable “lands of the Konkan” (11 lakhs) as well as several fortresses and other lands between Trimbak and Chamargonda, which amounted to twenty-one lakhs. Lastly, there were the ‘Adil Shahis, who could claim authority over the territory of Ahmadnagar that faced the former sultanate of Bidar. It was worth twenty-seven lakhs a year and included fourteen unspecified but valuable “lands and fortresses” (9 lakhs). However, Sultan Muhammad was forced to share power and income with two important characters—to Shahji he gave control over part of the Konkan (3 lakhs) while the influential Habshi Sidi Raihan controlled Sholapur (6 lakhs) and Ausa (1 lakh) under the nominal authority of Bijapur. The list demonstrates that Linhares’s informer knew exactly how to map power in the western Deccan. The Brahman was not unaware that the major relief features in the region had significant political consequences, for geography determined the location of fortified positions and, therefore, the potential rise of political autonomy; hence, the explicit connection made between mountains and fortresses. A fortress in the Deccan represented much more than a simple military structure; it constituted a local and regional seat of power. A fortress was a fiscal and economic unit as well as an organism of social and political control. One cannot make sense of the permanent disputes between Ahmadnagar and Bijapur without considering their mutual, competing desires for control over certain strongholds. Similarly, when one visualizes the geographical distribution of the fortifications taken by Shahjahan, the coherence of the Mughal advance into the Deccan becomes clear. And, needless to say, the political fortune of the Marathas was inseparable from their control of the fortresses of the Maharashtra.44 The second list seeks to respond to the viceroy’s desire to know who supported whom in the sultanate of Bijapur on the eve of the Mughal conquest. All the reports penned by the Brahman spy include systematic considerations about political allegiance and discuss particular instances in detail. One of the

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most interesting cases is that of Kheluji, the Maratha who left Muhammad for Shahjahan in exchange for two lakhs.45 This desertion had a devastating effect on the sultan of Bijapur and became an opportunity for Linhares’s spy to show his talents beyond numbers. Indeed, the Brahman vividly captured Muhammad’s state of mind at that particular moment: “this left King Idalxá in a state of deep sadness [muy triste], and for two full days he refused to eat, until Khawas Khan and Mustafa Khan consoled him and persuaded him to eat.”46 The “gentile” spy devoted time at the ‘Adil Shahi court to painstakingly prepare a list of around thirty nobles of Bijapur (besides unnamed and nonquantified “captains”), indicating their martial power, their loyalty to the sultan, and, in several instances, a brief assessment of their bravery. The sultanate could not count on an equivalent to the Mughal mansabdari system which, with its dual structure, allowed Akbar and his successors to classify and reward their servants according to personal rank (zat) and military might (sawar).47 Yet the weight of a Bijapuri noble on the battlefield (and at court) was measured by the number of horses, or horsemen, that he was able to put on the ground.48 According to Linhares’s agent, the overall number of cavalrymen in Bijapur was 40,000. In his list we identify several captains with 1,500 and 2,000 horses, some loyal, some rebel, some suspect. The three most important Maratha captains—Kheluji (Shahji’s cousin), Krishnaji (Shahji’s brother), and Shahji himself—were powerful, if not necessarily trustworthy warriors; altogether they represented around 9,000 horsemen. Towards the end of the list, the spy acknowledges the enormous influence of Mustafa Khan and Khawas Khan; each of them had 5,000 horses, as many as the sultan himself. The emphasis is put always on military power and political loyalty, never on ethnic origin or social identification. Some of the elements included in the list resemble the work of contemporary lashkar nawis, or the Mughal muster masters who “counted, described, and cataloged men and horses” in descriptive rolls (!arz-o-chehrah).49 Interestingly enough, and just like these Mughal officers in the Deccan, the “gentile” spy did not seem to be interested in classifying the Bijapur nobles according to ethnicity, even if there was plenty of variety (Habshis, Afghans, Marathas) and he knew how to distinguish between Maratha families (Bhosle, Ghatge, Ghorpade). Spies were expected to gauge the enemy’s military might. Among the tasks assigned to a Mughal mole sent by Shahjahan from Kabul to Qandahar in 1651 was “to count the cavalrymen of the king of Persia’s army.”50 In a world where political loyalties were not enduring and in societies shaped by a military market in which people and competencies often changed sides according to the best proposal and the most promising patron, it was imperative to regularly count

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heads and prepare rolls.51 Considering the Deccan scenario specifically, Linhares was convinced that the strength of the Mughal army and the emperor’s secret for preventing defections lay in his ability to pay punctually an amazingly high number of horsemen.52 But liquidity was often a problem for the ‘Adil Shahi rulers and the specter of betrayal loomed large in the sultanate. The sultans had to know on whom to count at any given moment. The Brahman did no more than follow local practice, and so he managed to organize lists drawing from materials that, in all likelihood, were made available to him at the court of Bijapur. The sultan himself did so recurrently. Some months after the Brahman concluded his list, worried by the prospect of a new Mughal offensive, Muhammad “called all his captains, made a list of people [fez reçenha de gente], and concluded that he could count on 43,000 horsemen.”53 And when Shahji—realizing in 1636 the imminent extinction of Ahmadnagar and the likely end of his career—offered his services to the Estado, his first gesture was to present to Viceroy Pero da Silva (g. 1635–1639) a list of men willing to follow him; this was a kind of dowry, meant to convince the Portuguese, but to no effect.54 The names, titles, and offices of the most prominent political subjects of a given state are at the heart of this kind of list. They were as relevant to Linhares when crafting an anti-Mughal strategy for the western Deccan as they were to Shakespeare when writing several of his plays, or to the eunuchs at the court of the Chinese emperor Tianqi (r. 1621–1627) when chasing members of the Donglin faction, or to a crowd of contemporary Japanese readers when acquiring printed copies of the personnel rosters compiled by Tokugawa bureaucrats.55 The original report by the Brahman spy has not survived and there are no traces of copies either in the letters exchanged between Goa and Lisbon or in the minutes of the State Council meetings held in the capital of the Estado. Consequently, the two lists come to us exactly as they were inserted into the viceroy’s journal—one endless paragraph, corresponding to the diary entry of May 10, 1634. Certainly monotonous to today’s readers, they must be approached with early modern eyes, even if many questions remain unanswered. Some of the potential lines of inquiry were charted above and others have been explored in relation to a Jesuit list of Mughal mansabdars dated 1610–1611 that bears some resemblance to the list of Bijapur nobles by Linhares’s secret agent.56 Another relevant path to pursue consists of discussing how to read these two fragments of Linhares’s diary. Even taking into consideration their flaws and incongruencies, it is possible to include these lists in a body of historical sources for seventeenth-century Ahmadnagar and Bijapur. Such a corpus comprises South Asian (Deccani, Mughal, Marathi) and European (Portuguese, Dutch, English) materials, although it would be

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problematic to label the Brahman’s lists as Portuguese documents tout court. Yet our goal is not to explore the accuracy (or lack thereof ) of the quantitative data presented by the Hindu spy to his Portuguese patron. Moreover, successive generations of specialists have concentrated on the numbers of the Mughal Empire, but the precision of their computations, and the reliability of the imperial records themselves, has been credibly called into question.57 To focus on process and purpose is probably more effective than to favor outcome and substance. One is left wondering how the Brahman retrieved such materials, and which channels so many names and numbers had to traverse until they materialized in Portuguese in the journal of a Portuguese viceroy. It is plausible that Linhares’s spy had direct or indirect access to documents of this nature kept in the chancellery of Bijapur. Apparently, as we have seen in Chapter 2, a Portuguese renegade—António de Aguiar, or Islam Khan—did the exact same thing some decades earlier in Ahmadnagar.58 It should also be remembered that the anonymous Brahman was used to working in a similar structure and environment, although a Portuguese one: the secretariat of the Estado da Índia. He was surely familiar with the practices and agents of record keeping and record management across languages and traditions. All he had to do in this case was to navigate between European and Indo-Persian. As to purpose, one may wonder why Linhares included the lists in his journal in their entirety. Was he expecting high-ranking officials in Madrid and Lisbon to truly analyze them? Did the viceroy intend to “exhibit” the lists as authoritative sources, that is, as proof of his intelligence network’s ability to retrieve native, real Indian documents? The latter possibility seems stronger, even if never acknowledged by Linhares himself; the efficacy of the Brahman spy—he might have thought—would mirror the efficacy of his own government. But we will suppose for the moment that Philip IV read, or at least leafed through, the viceroy’s diary. How would the king have interpreted these two lists, crowded as they are with place names, people, quantities, and measures which were totally alien to someone sitting in the Palace of the Buen Retiro? What significance would Philip IV attribute to the episode of the yogi of Bijapur—probably recounted by the same Brahman spy—who was able to transform an impotent Muhammad into a fertile Muhammad? And the term jogue itself: would it not have confused the king as well as the members of the Council of Portugal in Madrid? In the late sixteenth century, the Portuguese Inquisition recommended that the Inquisition of Goa provide language keys so that one could make sense in Lisbon of the crimes committed in India: “when, in the said crimes, there are peculiar words such as anamar [prayer, commendation], sumbaya [homage, obeisance], chara

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[manner], and the like, you are expected to explain them so that they can be understood in this realm [reino].”59 One cannot avoid thinking about how peculiar, or incomprehensible, the intelligence report concerning the rebellion of Khan-i Jahan Lodi or the two lists by the Brahman “intelligencer” might have sounded in the Iberian Peninsula. What the Count of Linhares deemed important in Goa was probably of little value to Philip IV in Madrid. True, the affairs of India had their place in the Council of Portugal, and there is no denial that the three Habsburg kings of Portugal took a direct interest in Asian matters.60 But distance and transmission could transform political information and ethnography into something different. In many instances, long-distance information mutated as it moved, enriched by the intervention of local agents and local agendas.61 In some other cases, though, traveling political news could be turned into a curiosity or simply fall into oblivion. The nitty gritty of Shahjahan’s conflict with an Afghan imperial servant, as well as the minute surveys of the forts of Ahmadnagar and the captains of Bijapur, was probably lost in transportation. The composite materials we have considered in this chapter show how the Count of Linhares was exposed to “uncooked” political narratives that originated in Hindustan and the Deccan. The lack of a transformative system in Portuguese Asia in this period has permitted these narratives to traverse several centuries as if kept in jam jars. From a purely European perspective, to borrow Zwierlein’s words on Spanish America, “what was missing is an integrative, heuristic organization and data ‘handling.’”62 Still, if one aspires to see beyond what the received wisdom holds about the strengths and weaknesses of the science of colonial administration, then nothing is really missing. Centered on written texts but also in oral tales, this chapter builds on the previous one, which focused on individuals and networks, to show how the door between the Indo-Persian sphere and the Portuguese sphere was, if not open, then at least ajar. A quasi-Persianate intelligence apparatus necessarily produced quasi-Persianate information. The second part of the book continues to unearth the connections between the two strata by looking specifically at who, in the capital of the Estado da Índia, translated, wrote, copied, and handled varied types of documents. These constituted a sort of Portuguese archive of Mughal India and the early modern Deccan.

Chapter 5

The Oficial de Unha

The Count of Linhares did not pen his diary himself. The viceroy had no ghostwriter, but there were plenty of people in Goa to either copy and arrange his own scribbles or, more likely, to regularly put down his words on paper. One such man was Cristóvão de Meneses. In the early years of his career as a scrivener, Meneses served “in the office [escritório] of the Count of Linhares from November 1629 to [November] 1635, writing the diary Your Majesty ordered to be done.”1 Despite his given and family names, Cristóvão de Meneses was not originally from Portugal; he was a Goa-born Brahman, one among a crowd of convert native writers who held public office in the capital of the Estado and the cities of the Northern Province. Meneses practiced his profession for several decades in the service of the Estado da Índia and was still struggling to secure advantageous imperial posts as late as 1666.2 This chapter focuses on the indigenous scribes (escreventes) and clerks (escrivães) of Goa.3 Unlike the informants who filled the previous chapters, these writers were not on the front lines of the Estado’s actions vis-à-vis the Mughal Empire and the sultanates of Bijapur and Ahmadnagar. They did the office work: most of the documents from, to, and about these three states passed through their hands. And this was only a small fraction of the myriad papers that these amanuenses were to produce, handle, and archive during their long careers. They copied and managed the documents related to or exchanged between the Portuguese viceroys and all the other “neighboring kings” from East Africa to East Asia. In addition, these men left a mark on the intense documentary interactions between Goa and Lisbon by generating copies of the bulky official letters and other documents that circulated according to the rhythm and travails imposed by Monsoon Asia.4 The aptly named “monsoon books” (livros das monções), which comprise Goa’s annual correspondence to and from the realm, are thus

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filled with their quills’ ink. The same holds true for many of the papers, public and private, that either circulated within Portuguese Asia through Goa or were originated and stored in the city. Finally, many local scribes busied themselves with producing copies of the manuscripts that members of the imperial elite used to ship from India to Iberia. These writing enterprises were very much in demand, for people often lamented the lack of good copyists in Goa. In the absence of competent writers in critical situations, authors risked sending the original texts to Lisbon without keeping a copy for themselves.5 Like any major European overseas urban center of the time, Goa can be defined as a lettered city in much the same way as suggested by Angel Rama for Latin America prior to the nineteenth century. The prevalence of the Spanish word (or Portuguese, for that matter) inscribed on paper by secular and religious letrados represented a powerful tool of domination in colonial cities and towns.6 However, recent scholarship on Spanish America has been rightly reframing the concept of the lettered city in order to go beyond binaries and to consider the role of other groups and languages that contributed equally to shaping imperial urban centers. For instance, while José Jouve Martín has surveyed the uses of Castilian made by enslaved people in Lima, Joanne Rappaport and Tom Cummins have excavated an indigenous lettered city in the northern Andes by studying “the interplay of Spanish genres of alphabetical expression with native northern Andean genres of oral and spatial expression.”7 Early modern Goa likewise encompassed two lettered cities. Even without necessarily embracing Rama’s concept, historians have showered a good deal of attention upon the Portuguese lettered city with its notable political and religious manifestations.8 We certainly know less about the indigenous lettered city with its many shades and protagonists. The present chapter explores this in-between space by considering the careers of those at the crossroads of two worlds: native individuals, families, and groups who depended on writing for their livelihoods and who became conversant with the imperial administration, its language and procedures, workplaces and archival spaces. These professionals could surely write in more than one vernacular language but eventually made a living in the lower reaches of the Estado’s institutions, consequently spending endless hours at a desk, penning, handling, and storing numerous documents in Portuguese. They reside in the lower and mid-strata of the tense junction between imperial and indigenous societies. We start with a brief consideration of the bureaucratic framework these writers navigated, with particular reference to one of the most relevant sites for the management of Indo-Persian papers—the secretariat—and its main figure: the secretary of the Estado da Índia.

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The Paper Palace and Its (Indo-Persian) Papers A lettered city like Goa was inevitably a paper city. Upon departure from Lisbon, high officers of the Estado made sure they would annually receive several reams of paper for their personal use.9 Paper was the vehicle of myriad interactions in the city, frequently out of the state’s reach or even in defiance of its authority.10 The pervasiveness of paper in almost every dimension of Goa’s life was not synonymous with effective imperial control, since tension between public and private uses of the written word was the norm. A cursory glance at the bodies responsible for matters of government, justice, and revenue shows how the political and administrative organization of the Estado da Índia was somewhat loose and fragile.11 This structure’s main nutrient was state paperwork, but it did not necessarily equate to bureaucratic efficiency and institutional strength. Heavily dependent on a variety of paper transactions, the Indo-Persian archive of Portuguese Goa mirrors these overarching strains and flaws. One way or the other, those transactions involved the viceroy and took place, physically or figuratively, in his residency: the paper palace. Overlooking the Mandovi waters to the south and linked to the river by the Viceroys’ Arch from 1597, the building complex known as Fortress Palace (Palácio da Fortaleza)—the casas do Viso Rey in Linschoten’s map of Goa of 1596—functioned as viceregal residence from 1554 to 1695 (Figure 8).12 Viceroys drew up plans and took decisions in this palace, backed by the outcome of discussions regularly held with their advisors. The State Council (Conselho do Estado) gathered about ten of the most influential figures of Portuguese Goa in the palace’s royal hall (sala régia) on an irregular basis. Surrounded by the portraits of their predecessors that ornamented the room, the viceroys often devoted time in these meetings to debate Mughal India and the western Deccan based on intelligence reports and diplomatic documents. But the State Council, on whose records this book draws in particular, had an unstable existence before 1604.13 Moreover, the confidential nature of council meetings was not easy to ensure; information leaks were a recurrent theme in the correspondence exchanged with Lisbon.14 Amongst other motives, Philip II prohibited the Portuguese residents of Goa from traveling in a palanquin because “the secrets discussed in the Council are unearthed by the Indians who carry them [i.e., the Portuguese].”15 One of the key members of the State Council was the secretary of the Estado da Índia, who usually served for three-year stretches and was second to the viceroy in several matters. Either appointed in Lisbon or chosen in Goa, but invariably a reinol (born in Portugal), the secretary sat closer to the viceroy than any other

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Figure 8. As cazas do Vizorey. Detail of the viceregal palace of Goa from Linschoten’s plan of the city, Itinerario (Amsterdam: Cornelis Claesz, 1596). Image courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library, Providence, RI.

person during the council’s meetings and signed the respective minutes on the viceroy’s behalf.16 The secretário oversaw the secretariat, which seems to have functioned in the premises of the viceregal palace on more than one occasion. The secretariat was an essential office and record room, and yet its daily operations were discharged by a limited staff, which in all likelihood did not exceed ten people throughout the seventeenth century. A chief officer worked close to the secretary and replaced him at times. Below this oficial maior, the labor force consisted of six to eight clerks, along with an interpreter who simultaneously served as a guard.17 The secretariat thus accommodated a handful of overwhelmingly native penmen. They earned more during periods of intense work, but in turn found themselves on the breadline during the rainy season; rice provisions were then distributed “in order to help them through the winter, when official councils do not convene.”18 Usually a letrado, the secretary of the Estado should have exhibited knowledge of Indian affairs.19 Typically, though, he was not schooled in the local

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languages. Take the case of Luís Gonçalves Cotta, who served as secretary while the Count of Vila Verde was viceroy (g. 1681–1686). Cotta’s desk was often covered with Indo-Persian and Marathi papers but translated and copied in Portuguese by invisible “native aids.” His full grasp of vernacular idioms was poor, to the point of thinking that Konkani and Marathi were the same language until an indigenous interpreter clarified that they were distinct.20 Nevertheless, a highranking bureaucrat as much as a power broker, the secretary had a role to play in the Estado’s external relations. He had a central presence in the ceremonial receptions routinely performed in the palace’s royal hall for foreign ambassadors. Furthermore, secretaries would sometimes travel to the western Deccan in order to conduct diplomatic missions themselves. This is the case of Amaro da Rocha: appointed secretary of the Estado in October 1602, but acting as the de facto secretary before nomination, Rocha had been chosen a few years earlier by Viceroy Matias de Albuquerque as emissary to the sultanate of Ahmadnagar.21 Manuel Dinis, a casado from Goa who claimed to have served as secretary during the brief government of André Furtado de Mendonça in 1609 (was he secretary of the Estado or rather Mendonça’s personal secretary?) is another significant example. Dinis was conversant with Bijapur’s politics and known in particular for his proximity to Mirza Muhammad Raza, the sultanate’s ambassador to Goa in the late 1620s and early 1630s. Through Raza, Dinis managed to secretly obtain copies of documents from the ‘Adil Shahi chancellery in 1630, which ended up being analyzed in a State Council meeting.22 Later, in 1647, one of Mirza Muhammad Raza’s successors would go so far as to address the king of Portugal in order to request a pension (tença) for Dinis, whom he flatteringly described as “an old and honored knight with great experience of India who has been working for many years on the Estado’s behalf with the ambassadors and governors of the king, my lord, towards the conservation of peace.”23 Manuel Dinis’s self-portrait is that of an India expert able to elaborate on “the king Mogor and his sons” as well as on “the king Idalxá.”24 Information concerning the Mughal Empire and the sultanate of Bijapur is included in the letters addressed in 1641–1642 to Viceroy Count of Aveiras (g. 1640–1645), King John IV, the city of Lisbon, and the former governor-general of Brazil, Diogo de Mendonça Furtado (g. 1621–1624).25 Dinis remarked in one of these letters that he still possessed documents from his time as secretary, roughly three decades earlier. His advice on how Portuguese Asia should be governed drew on these “written remembrances” (lembranças escritas), and we can assume that most secretaries of the Estado maintained small personal archives containing copies of official documents, if not the originals.26 Such documents were obviously fated

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to lose their topicality with the passage of time and were thus of little relevance for everyday political action. Nonetheless, they constituted objective markers of a secretary’s accumulated knowledge and could serve as a documentary basis for written advice offered to the king by his sage official. In short, storing records could help boost one’s political career.27 Documents like those Manuel Dinis presumably kept for more than thirty years in his Goa house certainly coexisted in the city’s many personal archives with papers of a different sort. Toward the end of the sixteenth century, Amaro da Rocha managed to collect and assemble an amazing set of written and visual materials—political, ethnographic, and scientific texts and illustrations. Entitled Amphiteatro Oriental, this large volume is now lost, and we know nothing of its whereabouts before the eighteenth century. In his much-revised version of León Pinelo’s Epitome de la Biblioteca Oriental y Occidental (1629), González de Barcia describes the Amphiteatro in 1737: Amphiteatro Oriental, in five books, in which the portraits of all the viceroys and governors of India since the Portuguese arm was incorporated in its Castilian head are shown; all the events thoroughly presented and a life model and natural portrait of all the fortresses with their districts and latitudes; and all the fleets that the kings of Portugal sent to her [i.e., India], with the portraits of all the nations and their particular emblems, variety of colors, their professions, the abomination of their rites, and bestiality of their mores; and finally the most notable medicinal plants, with their hieroglyphs, virtues, and properties; many of them [were] rigorously examined in the presence of Viceroy Matias de Albuquerque.28 The book would soon after find its way into the Portuguese royal library, but it remains unknown whether Amphiteatro Oriental was the title originally chosen by Rocha in Goa or if the manuscript was named in the Iberian Peninsula.29 Be that as it may, the title indicates what the book consisted of: theatre and amphitheater communicate totality and refer to an encyclopedic work.30 Bringing together several kinds of source material, this volume sought to encompass Portuguese and pre-Portuguese Asia. The first part was devoted to the preservation of the memory of the Estado da Índia and included texts and drawings that complement the Portuguese books of fortresses and fleets of Asia. Its middle section was focused on Asian (or just Indian?) ethnography and recalls the celebrated Casanatense Codex, a sort of visual record of the peoples between the Cape of Good Hope and China,

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likely dated from the late 1540s.31 It is quite possible that, like in this codex’s case, anonymous local artists under Portuguese commission painted the indigenous “portraits” and “emblems” included in the Amphiteatro Oriental. The last part of the volume concerned Indian plants and their medical properties. Its direct missing link might well be an anonymous text called “Experiences with Oriental herbs, which His Majesty ordered Viceroy Matias de Albuquerque to organize, year 1596.” Rocha probably collated this sixty-folio document based on indigenous information amassed in Goa or the western Deccan.32 The examples of Amaro da Rocha and Manuel Dinis show that the secretary of the Estado was in a privileged position to produce and compile political and ethnographic knowledge about Asia in word and image. The same applies to the viceroys’ private secretaries; men like Pedro Barreto de Resende, who clerked for the Count of Linhares and to whom the authorship of the maps and plans included in António Bocarro’s Livro das plantas de todas as fortalezas do Estado da Índia Oriental (1635) is attributed.33 In order to assemble the materials for the Amphiteatro Oriental, Rocha relied on his on-the-ground knowledge, web of contacts (European and Indian alike), and personal archive. To this he could add favored access to the archive of the administrative body of the Estado he directed for some years: the secretaria. The secretariat was the bureaucratic epicenter of Goa’s connections with Portugal and Portuguese Asia. It was likewise the privileged site for the production and preservation of documents concerning the Indo-Persian political world, and several other Asian states for that matter.34 The secretariat’s record room held the written, tangible mark of all these intense documentary exchanges, with particular emphasis on the livros dos reis vizinhos, livros dos segredos, livros de pazes, and the cadernos dos embaixadores, besides the aforementioned livros das monções.35 Many of these volumes should have been transferred to the Torre do Tombo of Goa after its foundation in 1595 but eventually were not. Among its many ascribed roles, the new archive was to document the Estado’s interactions with its many “neighboring kingdoms” and thus be the guardian of diplomatic exchanges and rituals, treaties and agreements, political events and decisions. Ideally, a new viceroy could build from this accumulated body of information in order to plan and act. Reality proved different, though. The information kept in the archive about the various Asian states and their relations with Goa was neither comprehensive nor sequential, which often resulted in a sort of institutional amnesia.36 In fact, the new archive was as fragile as the secretaria’s record room. Its grounds consisted of a house inside the viceregal compound that took an

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excessive amount of time to equip; it was also to change places within the Fortress Palace.37 The working conditions of those responsible for the Goa archive represented another obstacle. Diogo do Couto, accomplished historian and the Torre do Tombo’s first and most emblematic chief custodian (guarda-mor), during his long tenure (1595–1616) repeatedly denounced the negligence which imperiled public papers in the capital city of the Estado.38 The archive was chronically understaffed—it did not employ more than two escreventes—and paper was often lacking.39 Shaky leadership was the norm after Couto’s passing; over the next fifteen years, until António Bocarro’s nomination in 1631, the Torre do Tombo was entrusted to people who showed “no interest in taking care of the books and papers housed there.”40 The poor care and management of public documents, together with the variety of their private and corporate uses, was reflected in records concerning the Mughal Empire and the Deccan sultanates. We have seen that Secretary Manuel Dinis turned state papers on the Mogor and the Idalcão into private documents, while Chapter 7 will provide intriguing insights on how a Hindu Brahman interpreter managed to preserve similar records. Far more impressive was the Jesuit Indo-Persian archive, which intersected with the Estado’s in many ways. It was mainly housed in the Society’s college in Goa but circulated between the subcontinent and Europe (some of its fragments will be at the core of Chapters 8 and 9). Documents pertaining to the Indo-Persian world were also appropriated by viceroys like Dom João de Castro and Dom Luís de Ataíde in order to perpetuate the fame of their deeds. The authors of these viceroys’ biographies enjoyed access to documents which were never incorporated into the public archive. In chronicling Castro’s life and actions, Fernando de Castro and Leonardo Nunes included in their works correspondence between the viceroy and the Sur ruler Islam Shah, as mentioned in Chapter 1.41 António Pinto Pereira, for his part, wove some letters exchanged between ‘Ali ‘Adil Shah I and Ataíde into his História da Índia and used them to elaborate on features of the Persian language and its political status at the court of Bijapur.42 The same applies to the journals of the counts of Linhares and Sarzedas, to which we resort extensively in this book. Both diaries include copies of the correspondence the two viceroys exchanged with rulers and officials of the Mughal Empire and the Bijapur Sultanate, but in several instances there is no trace of such letters in other contemporary document repositories. The Estado da Índia was thus far from securing effective control over the Indo-Persian archive of Goa; an archive without walls, its shape was defined by a hoard of papers on Hindustan and the Deccan that were produced, received,

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utilized, and stored, but also neglected, and lost.43 This figurative archive was scattered among numerous concrete archival spaces in the city, from private to ecclesiastic to public. The Estado’s records were managed and kept in the latter sites with recourse to an array of functionaries ranging from the secretary to low-level scribes. Still, it is hard to grasp why—obviously leaving aside long-term natural and human hazards—some materials were intentionally preserved over the course of several decades while others sank into oblivion shortly after their production. In fact, there is no easy explanation for the fact that in seventeenth-century Portuguese India, certain documents were read, duplicated, and “vivified” (if archived), while others were disregarded, frozen, and ultimately condemned to death. This state of affairs helps explain why “transforming the unknown into knowns”—to borrow from and adapt Zwierlein’s stance on the role of ignorance in imperial communication—was not a predominantly cumulative process, at least in the case of the Estado da Índia.44 There was no such thing as an evergrowing body of state documents, easily retrievable for political action. Instead of an established culture of records, we identify disruptions and gaps, the result being the absence of long-term reference.45 The norm in Portuguese Goa seems to have been short cycles of political apprenticeship, corresponding to a viceroy’s term in office and based on individual and generational memory in situ, more than long-lasting written evidence. Take the formal reception of a Mughal representative in the capital of the Estado, a delicate and vital diplomatic gesture and political moment. When, in 1683, an ambassador of Emperor Aurangzeb visited Goa, Viceroy Alvor had no idea how to receive him, even though Mughal diplomatic agents had been coming to the city since the 1570s. There was no written trace of the procedure to be observed, assuming that such guidelines were ever put to paper before the early eighteenth century.46 Secretary and viceroy thus worked from scratch; it took them four days to devise a plan and design a ceremony.47 The Mughal emperors’ decrees, in particular, had an erratic existence in the official archive. Several were preserved, but many others were misplaced even at the time: Aurangzeb’s decrees concerning the Portuguese and received years earlier in the viceregal palace, were considered lost in 1710.48 The same happened with the first Persian documents testifying to Portuguese-Mughal interactions at the time of Akbar; they were apparently left out of the public record of Goa. The letter (and one appendix) sent by the emperor to the captain of Diu in 1572 seems to have never entered the secretariat, but did circulate privately in late sixteenth-century Portugal.49 Equally, an imperial decree dated 1573 concerning the Portuguese was to be found in Goa by Diogo do Couto “in the hands of a man whose name I cannot remember, nor the manner by which he came into its

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possession.” Couto showed it to the viceroy “so that he could realize how we care for things of such importance,” stored three copies in the Torre do Tombo, and included a Portuguese translation of the decree in his Décadas da Ásia.50 Shahjahan’s farman authorizing and regulating the return of the Portuguese to the port of Hughli tells a similar story. Dated 1633, the document was deemed crucial in 1784 by George Gearmain, a man of Portuguese descent residing in Calcutta, as it served his utopian plans to relaunch “Portuguese Hughli.” In Gearmain’s reasoning, the farman would force British restitution of the “properties and privileges which the Mughals of Delhi had conceded to the Portuguese nation in Bengal.” Yet all relevant papers on this matter were dispersed (todos os papéis espalhados) and not a single copy of the farman could be found.51 It is unknown whether this document truly existed, for it survived solely in the dubious guise of an early nineteenth-century Portuguese version.52 Perhaps Gearmain was just creating or reproducing an oral tale about a putative document, the same way Aboriginal people in colonial Australia used to ground their claims to land in the supposedly missing title deeds granted by Queen Victoria.53 Be that as it may, the solution according to Gearmain was to ask the Mughals for a copy of Shahjahan’s farman: they “have a general register in the court, where literally everything is recorded,” he stressed.54 The external image of the perfect Mughal archive, which we discussed in Chapter 1, outlived the demise of the empire itself.

Goa and the Scribal Communities of South Asia Should access to the main imperial register be denied, Gearmain added, there was a provincial register located near Hughli, carefully kept by “certain Brahmans of authority,” where duplicates of documents could be obtained.55 The main documentary sites of Goa were likewise filled with Brahman scribes, clerks, and record-keepers. The difference lay in belief, language, and identity; those at the service of the Estado da Índia were Christian converts who had mastered Portuguese and held Portuguese names. And yet, beneath this imperial and Catholic surface, lay a more composite profile of the vast complex of groups specializing in technologies of writing and administration in western India. The geographic boundaries of such groups can be stretched to encompass the varied scribal and secretarial communities between the northern edges of the Mughal Empire, its northwestern and Central Asian neighbors (the Ottomans and the Safavids, as well as the Uzbeks), and the Buddhist kingdoms of

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Sri Lanka.56 To do so convincingly, one needs to paint the lives of the Christian Brahman bureaucrats of Portuguese Goa on a truly global canvas with regard to private and public writing. West to east, its high and low agents ranged from the indios ladinos of colonial Quito—especially the escribanos de cabildo depicted in Guaman Poma’s celebrated drawing (1615)—to Erasmus’s amanuenses and their myriad colleagues in Europe to women calligraphers in Chosŏn Korea.57 Still, for the purposes of this chapter, the focus is on India proper.58 In the north, the heart of Indo-Persian culture, clerks (muharrirs) and secretaries (munshis) were sought-after bureaucrat-intellectuals occupying a primary place in the politico-administrative structure of several states. As a result of Akbar’s policy of ethnic diversity with regard to imperial service, a large number of Mughal munshis were in fact Hindus. They learned the Persian language and literature in the madrasas, which they coupled with knowledge of several other idioms and scripts. The munshis were masters of letter writing (insha’), but also handled and stored documents. Their training in accountancy (siyaq) and fiscal management was complemented by expertise in normative literature (akhlaq), which ranged from administrative manuals to moral treatises to tracts on good government. The instruction of a munshi also included the study of philology and the reading and composition of poetry.59 To the south, where a fragmented political landscape dominated, Mughal muharrirs and munshis gave way to a host of writers—Brahmans and nonBrahmans—in the service of numerous and diverse courts and patrons. Rao, Shulman, and Subrahmanyam suggest that these writers should be situated in the context of “a newly emerging middle-range group of graphically literate communities” which represent what they call the “karanam culture.”60 Karanams were specialized in accounting and record keeping, resorted to paper as a work tool, and reflected on the art of writing.61 They spoke and wrote in various local idioms, in addition to Sanskrit and Persian, and several engaged in history writing.62 Rooted in the western Deccan from the first decades of the seventeenth century and quite active in Maratha service, the Kayasthas were one of a number of different groups making up these karanam communities.63 The Niyogis, secular Brahmans originally from Telugu country but dispersed throughout the Deccan, constituted another prominent group. They put their bureaucratic skills at the service of both villages and courts, and it was from among them that Colin MacKenzie recruited his collaborators.64 Similar to other karanams, the Niyogis were “precolonial intellectuals,” to borrow from Phillip Wagoner.65 Their profile differed from that of “prestige intellectuals,” the coeval Sanskrit literati that were the object of Sheldon Pollock’s work.66

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Peninsular India was thus home to myriad scribal groups whose success is partly explained by mobility and adaptability. Their members were accustomed to moving across ethnic and linguistic boundaries and often worked in political settings marked by cultural and social pluralism. Yet the coercive atmosphere of the Catholic Reformation made some of these limits hard to transcend in the capital city of the Estado da Índia. The local indigenous “men of the pen” were mostly Goud Saraswat Brahmans, a Konkani-speaking group that had made the region its homeland in the post-Gupta period.67 These specialists’ entanglements with a colonial framework since the sixteenth century had a deep impact on their lives and occupations. The religious experts among them hardly had a place in the Portuguese city and were oppressed even beyond the island of Tiswadi. Their libraries were often burned and the individuals with whom they were intimate could expect attention from the Inquisition, even if, somewhat ironically, the work of these Sanskrit literati was frequently appropriated by Catholic missionaries.68 The lively religious and identity debates which opposed the Brahman communities of Cortalim (Kunshashtali) and Quelossim (Keloshi) in Salcete with other Brahmans of Goa in the early eighteenth century speak volumes about their strength and ability to thrive even in a colonial environment.69 The Brahman clerks of Goa fit Wagoner’s definition of pre-colonial intellectuals. They stemmed from vibrant regional communities of writing and chiefly engaged in secular work, namely “hands-on” scribal service. Cortalim, where the aforementioned discussions took place, is a case in point. The Jesuit Francisco de Sousa stressed in 1710 that this village of Salcete was well known for its numerous “masters,” who taught reading, writing, and accountancy to other Brahmans and “served the mainland kings in quill posts” (officios de penna). According to Sousa, Cortalim was home to the “nail official” (official de unha) and the village could be appropriately compared to a cat. Cats used their nails to scratch, and so did the professional scriveners from Cortalim; they scratched papers.70 Imperial rule did not translate into a decline in the overall number of native “nail officials” of Goa, be they originally from Cortalim or not. It was noted with a pinch of irony as early as 1519 that one could encounter more scriveners in the city “than in two Lisbons.”71 António Bocarro would witness a similar reality in the 1630s: “It is worth mentioning the great inclination these native canarins have for papers and litigation [demandas]. They possess an inherent inclination to write, and those who do it do it rather well; thus, there are more than one thousand scriveners in the city of Goa and across the entire island.”72 Many of the canarins Bocarro refers to were surely converts. Needless to say, their relationship with the imperial order was deeper than that of learned pandits; they acted

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as would any Portuguese official and performed as would any devout Catholic. Still, they were strongly concerned with the affirmation of their identity beyond the imperial curtain.73 These Catholic karanams of sorts do not seem to have risen to the sound training and erudition of Mughal munshis like the celebrated Chandar Bhan.74 Scanty evidence suggests, however, that some among them were involved in history writing, as so many contemporary karanams in South India were. A converted Kayastha Prahbu called Caetano de Sousa is said to have authored the lost Historia de Mahim (Mumbai) in 1594.75 The figure of the bureaucrat-poet Alagiyavanna Mukaveti, a native of Sri Lanka who became a Christian and adopted the name of his godfather—Dom Jerónimo de Azevedo, captain-general of Ceylon (g. 1594–1612) and later viceroy of the Estado—is equally telling. Jerónimo Alagiyavanna collaborated in the early seventeenth century with Catholic Brahmans from Goa, like one Lucas Pinto, in the composition of the Portuguese tombos (land registers) of Ceylon.76 Jerónimo Alagiyavanna was simultaneously emerging at that time as a major Sinhala poet; among several other works, he probably authored the Kustantinu Hatana, a poetic eulogy of the famed Portuguese Captain General of Ceylon Dom Constantino de Sá de Noronha (d. 1630).77 With a view to population increase and “human engineering,” some viceroys toyed with the idea of implementing extreme language policies, designed to induce Brahmans and non-Brahmans alike to abandon their “natural idiom” (idioma natural). In the late seventeenth century, for instance, the Count of Alvor entertained vain hopes of deepening the faith of converted naturais by marrying them to white Portuguese widows so that the former would exclusively speak Portuguese in the long run. If Alvor were to succeed, polyglot Brahmans would simply cease to exist in Goa.78 But the viceroy’s plans did not get off the page and the converted native scribes and clerks of Goa continued to stand as multi-dexterous figures, able to manage more than one language and to move between scripts. It is possible that some clerks—especially those who, in an earlier period, had not converted to Christianity but nevertheless served the Estado da Índia— maintained a sort of indigenous archive in vernacular idioms, parallel to the imperial archive in Portuguese. A Brahman, presumably a Hindu who worked at the Goa customs house and earned a “royal stipend” (ordenado del Rei) in the 1540s, provides us with a suggestive example. This unnamed clerk engaged himself in rather creative accounting exercises. Alongside the “book of our Lord the King,” in which he entered fictitious amounts, he kept another book “written in the language that the Moors understand” in order to register illicit payments

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(por fora).79 These situations, however, must have become less frequent as the sixteenth century advanced. The policy of mass conversion implemented by the Portuguese in the latter half of the century resulted in the predominant recruitment of Christian Brahmans and favored the tight scrutiny of native scribes. Simultaneously, the use of Portuguese as the language of administration gained leverage and went hand in hand with the introduction of major changes regarding the physicality of documents. The “paper from Portugal” eventually became the only legal material for public writing and documentary proof, at the expense of the native palm leaves (olai).80 Still, even during a period of heightened Catholic influence, Portuguese Goa had a hard time penetrating, and did not fully succeed in disciplining, the indigenous sphere. Instances of religious and linguistic heterogeneity occurred particularly in Bardez and Salcete, under Portuguese control since the 1540s but remote from the imperial core. Expectedly, Hindu clerks prevailed in rural areas dominated by village assemblies and the authority of elite villagers (ganvkars). Scribes in these places often showed a poor command of the Portuguese language, as illustrated by records from the village of Sirula (Bardez) in 1674.81 To circumvent these setbacks, viceroys determined that one of the two clerks working in each village ought to learn how “to read and write in Portuguese.” As a result, record books in Portuguese coexisted with volumes of identical content written in the “local script” (letra da terra) by the local clerk (escrivão da terra).82 Two archives thus ran in parallel and many of the early modern volumes kept in the Historical Archives of Goa are written in vernacular languages and scripts.83 This strained the authority of imperial and Catholic Goa. And yet, it was an everyday practice in south India at the time, much as it was common in coeval Spain to combine Castilian and Arabic in documents concerning the administration of affluent noble houses like los Vélez.84 The viceroys of the Estado eventually accepted the existence of a bilingual and bi-scriptural archive in some areas and under specific circumstances. In the mid-sixteenth century, at a time when Hindu interpreters were not admitted as officials in the Fortress Palace, it was a Brahman resident in the city, a certain Santu Shenvi (Santu Sinai), who was chosen as translator “of all that concerns this tombo [of the islands of Goa], for knowing how to read and write, and speak and declaim in our Portuguese language very well, and for knowing our customs, and for always associating with the Portuguese.”85 As one traveled from Salcete, Bardez, and the Goa islands to the city proper, urban papers took the place of rural documents and Portuguese archives (cartórios) outnumbered native or hybrid repositories. The transition inevitably makes the voice of indigenous scribes and clerks fade. Their voices have

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survived, but are overlaid with imperial varnish. Due to religious conversion, these people’s original names were blanketed by imposed names. Ironically, what we know about this secretarial class derives largely from the colonial archive, the very documentary spaces it contributed to creating and maintaining. Be it in Goa, Bahia, or Lisbon, Portuguese bureaucracy had the power to mold who one was and what one did. The Brahman clerk was thus straitjacketed by an imperial apparatus which ignored his former self.

Indigenous Writers in Portuguese Service At the base of the pyramid of the indigenous groups that made writing their profession in early modern Goa, there were simple copyists. The imperial elite members invariably referred to these nameless and fleeting figures in derogatory terms. When Fr. Aleixo de Meneses—archbishop of Goa (g. 1595–1612) and governor of the Estado (g. 1607–1609)—sent out his writings on the lives of Augustinians missionaries in India, he suggested that his fellow brothers in Portugal assign a “curious” priest to correct (emendar) and clean (limpar) the texts since, he confessed, “I fear that the copyists [trasladadores], being blacks [negros], make many mistakes and daubs [negradas].”86 Later in the century, the only known copy of the anonymous Jornada do Reino de Huva (1635) was produced by mestizos from India (cabras da Índia), people “whose knowledge of orthography is as bad as the draft of this text shows.”87 Many of these invisible hands were in fact enslaved people, tasked with copying manuscripts throughout Iberian Asia.88 Despite such criticisms and the prejudice they mirror, the Portuguese could not do without these copyists’ labor; ironically, bureaucracy and even literacy in Goa was built in part on the work of people deemed illiterate. They recall the many “unskilled hands” employed by the Inquisition in Portugal, as well as the poor scriveners of seventeenth-century Venice.89 On the next level, we find more linguistically accomplished natives who pursued a Portuguese career, had a place in the world of public writing in the city, and enjoyed a better reputation in the imperial record. These men changed their religious affiliation and consequently earned Portuguese names. They were relatively minor officials, operating mostly within the intermediary ranks of the administration of the Estado and performing different but interrelated tasks; scriveners and clerks in early modern Goa wrote and registered papers, but also acted as interpreters. It is not clear whether they translated documents or conversations and we also do not know which languages they mastered. At any rate,

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the local Christian interpreters who served in the secretariat, the treasury, and other government bodies of Goa should not be confused with the more prominent línguas do Estado that fill the next two chapters. It remains to be known how these native functionaries were trained. The chancellor of the Estado da Índia and a magistrate were in charge of overseeing their work and scrutinizing their mistakes (erros), but there is no firm evidence of formal apprenticeship.90 This is in striking contrast with Spanish America, where such careers seem to have been structured and demanding. The officials of the viceroyalty of Peru, be they the clerks of Quito or the notaries of Cuzco, had manuals to study and exams to pass.91 Nonetheless, the skills that their Goa colleagues acquired in imperial and Catholic contexts were but one strand of their formative years. The local Christian scribes working for the Estado were certainly taught like their Hindu ancestors had been: within the family and through habit.92 In early modern South Asia, as in the Ottoman Empire, there was a crowd of low-level clerks, secretaries, and interpreters who probably learned on the job without receiving formal training, and were thus unable to compete with legitimate men of letters.93 Many of the indigenous officials of Goa considered in this chapter likewise embody less erudite, more practical uses of the written word. To perform scribal work for the Estado at this level was not incompatible with the practice of war. The same is true for the early modern states of western India, even if the two roles were moving progressively in opposite directions.94 Often, the native clerks and interpreters of the secretariat, or of any other imperial office of the city, served additionally as guards (naiques). This common mixture of warfare and paperwork is embodied by Diogo Ferreira. Following in his father’s footsteps (a convert Brahman from the island of Divar called Francisco Salvador), Ferreira worked as clerk and simultaneously held an impressive military record in Fort Naroa, one of the passos that shielded the Estado’s capital from the sultanate of Bijapur.95 When John IV was acclaimed in Goa as king of Portugal, Ferreira organized “a camisade, with his relatives and people of his entourage, all dressed the Moorish way [à mourisca], with arms and music, and considerable manifestations of loyalty and vassalage to His Majesty.”96 The indigenous employees of the secretariat often began their careers in the personal offices (escritórios) of either the viceroy or the secretary. For instance, the Brahmans Victoriano da Costa and João Coelho combined the work in Linhares’s office with the escritura in the secretariat.97 Cristóvão de Meneses, with whom we opened the chapter, traded the former venue for the latter early in his career. Commended for working “with much diligence, secrecy, and faithfulness”

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in the composition of documents sent to Portugal, the fortresses of the Estado, and the “neighboring kings,” Meneses impressed his employers and consequently climbed the professional ladder. Viceroy Aveiras considered him to be a better clerk than any of his colleagues, and so tasked Meneses with drafting the minutes of the State Council’s meetings.98 Similar to the viceregal letters dispatched to the king, these minutes were customarily written by a Christian Brahman clerk and subsequently signed by the Portuguese secretary of the Estado. The imprint of both clerk and secretary lingered, for the closing lines of these documents include reference to who “wrote it” (o fez) and who “ordered it to be written” (o fez escrever). The boundary between public and private writing at these sites and in these contexts was tenuous. It is quite possible that the Count of Aveiras took advantage of Meneses’s proficiency and employed him to pen the count’s own papers. But a native scribe could face hardships when acting simultaneously in the two spheres. Take the case of Bartolomeu Lobo, a married Catholic Brahman from Santa Ana, in Old Goa. In 1634, when he was around thirty years old, Lobo clerked and interpreted for the Estado but his handwriting was identified as the same as that of an anonymous defamatory paper sent in three copies to Philip IV the year before. The libel targeted the Count of Linhares and its author’s identity was eventually exposed: Francisco de Sousa Falcão, a controversial seventy-yearold enemy of the viceroy who had served as secretary of the state twice (1617– 1620, 1629–1631). Lobo had worked in the secretariat during Falcão’s second term. Like Meneses and many other clerks in the same position, he had partnered with the secretary in writing the minutes of several State Council meetings. Some of these documents contained sensitive information on Mughal India and the Deccan sultanates: for instance, the assento that registered the discussions held on October 5, 1630, about the escalating conflict situation with Shahjahan in Gujarat bears Lobo’s signature.99 To copy and duplicate libels against the viceroy was incompatible with sitting together with said viceroy in the royal hall, listening to confidential conversations, and preparing the minutes of highprofile meetings. Falcão stepped down, but Lobo kept serving him as personal scribe. The dangerous contradiction was centered on the fact that Lobo, an official of the Estado, continued to see Falcão as “his master” (seu amo).100 Lobo was eventually excused from responsibility in the defamation case and his Portuguese career—long and successful as it proved to be—was not harmed by his intimacy with Falcão. From 1640 to the late 1660s, Lobo’s name is associated with a series of positions in Goa and Diu, all of them at the intersection of writing, translation, and accountancy. Like so many others in his situation, he

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engaged in office farming with an eye to securing hereditary posts and safeguarding his descendants. In the 1670s, toward the end of his life, Lobo counted more than forty years as a “paper official” (official papelista). A great many of these years were spent in the secretariat, several as its chief official, the most important figure in the office below the secretary of the Estado. On more than one occasion, Lobo went so far as to briefly replace the secretary.101 Together with a small number of his contemporaries, Bartolomeu Lobo rose to the higher echelons of the indigenous Christians who served the Estado da Índia as professional writers. To reach the top of a secretarial career in this imperial context did not necessarily require a better education; it all came down to being a more skilled, diligent, and seasoned clerk. Kin and connections might also have played a role. Lobo was born into a family of recent converts. His father was called Jorge Lobo, but his grandparents did not have Portuguese names; they were “gentile” Brahmans from Tiswadi, “which are”—their grandchild proudly stressed, partially as a way to soften their “wrong” religious choice—“the best [Brahmans] of India” (que são os melhores da India). Lobo’s example broadly matches our sample of seventeenth-century cases. These Brahmans’ families probably changed faith in the second half of the previous century, at the high tide of Christian conversions in Goa. The descendants of indigenous writers in imperial service usually bore Christian names and likewise worked for the Estado as scribes, secretaries, and interpreters. When the time was ripe and generational turnover inevitable, they sought to pass their posts on to younger family members. Cases like that of Dinis de Sá were common; as soon as Aleixo de Sá stepped down as interpreter of the secretariat in 1675, Dinis filled his position. As it happens, Aleixo was Dinis’s uncle and had written for the Estado for almost three decades; between around 1641 and about 1669 Aleixo acted with “secrecy” and assisted “in the drafting of letters which were written to Your Majesty and to the neighboring kings.”102 Another telling example is that of Francisco Gonçalves, who had worked in the secretariat from at least the 1620s and was the only Brahman to rise to the rank of secretary of the Estado.103 Francisco, in all probability, acquired the necessary professional skills from his father, the highly regarded Salvador Gonçalves; an official of the secretaria from the early years of the seventeenth century, Salvador became chief official in 1631 and surely shepherded his son’s career.104 The professional trajectories of these individuals were shaped by the exact same stages and procedures as those of any crown servant, be it in the reino or overseas. An economy of obligation grounded in the service-reward (serviçomercê) binary ruled. Recurring requests for posts put forth by indigenous Christian officials were usually anchored in service reports, and these allow us to enter

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their obscure lives. Mindful of the retributive imperial system’s rationale, native escrivães petitioned regularly, though they made less of a “resistant” use of this device than people in other imperial contexts, such as Spanish America. Their work was then gauged by high-ranking Portuguese officials, and ultimately by the viceroy and the king: “engagement” (aplicação) and “diligence,” including willingness to work at night, on Sundays, and on saints’ days, were highly valued. The “truthfulness,” “faithfulness,” and “secrecy” with which they served were likewise acknowledged. Brahmans who turned into imperial officials tended to mimic the typical Portuguese bureaucrat and embrace the respective social conventions. They could therefore react harshly to discriminatory treatment, such as being forced to stand during meetings with their Portuguese employers or when subjected to lower forms of address.105 Writing for the Estado entailed several steps and accommodated several categories. The difference between the two extreme poles—the ill-fated cabra and the respected secretary of the Estado—was obviously huge. In the twilight of his career, Bartolomeu Lobo aimed at securing more substantive markers of social recognition, namely admittance to a Portuguese military order. As far as the natives were concerned, such an honor was reserved to a symbolic few empirewide.106 Some Christian Brahmans providing services to the Estado da Índia as soldiers and officials were made knights of the Order of St. James (Santiago), though not of the more prestigious Order of Christ. Membership came with a meager pension of 12,000 réis, the minimum acceptable annual tença; a knight’s dignity was considered to be at risk below this amount.107 Lobo eventually became cavaleiro de Santiago in 1677, although a dissonant voice in Lisbon cast doubt on the decision because his grandparents had once “venerated idols” (adorauão idolos). The admission process had started in Portugal several years earlier and Lobo counted on the support of an old acquaintance from Goa: António Pais de Sande, former secretary of the Estado and member of the Overseas Council in 1672. Sande indeed proved to be a fierce advocate for the Indian candidate. He argued that Lobo’s Brahmanical condition should not weigh against entrance into the Order of St. James and went on to basically endorse a sort of Portuguese alliance with Brahmans in India built on mixed marriages.108 Lobo’s case brings to mind that of his contemporary Guilherme Pereira. Born into a family of converted Brahmans from Cortalim, the son of Amador Pereira and Isabel Gamboa, he was a true oficial de unha with expertise in accountancy. Pereira worked for about forty years—from 1613 until at least 1651—in the archive (cartório) of the treasury (fazenda) and eventually became its chief official. This escrevente da fazenda is another example of upward mobility within

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the society for which he worked his entire life. He was investigated for corruption in 1626 together with his brother Jordão Pereira, but the charge soon faded; Guilherme Pereira was successively made an escudeiro cavaleiro of the royal household and a knight of St. James.109 Still, the position of a Catholic Brahman bureaucrat in rigidly hierarchical Portuguese society was problematic. Pereira, Lobo, and a few others constituted exceptions, for their social status was deliberately enhanced with a view to providing other Brahmans with exemplary models of behavior and service. Experts in Lisbon sought to make sure that Pereira’s parents belonged neither to the “race of Jew, nor [that of ] Moor” (raça de Judeu nem de Mouro). But the concern in his and Lobo’s cases was not exclusively about purity of blood. Admittedly, the mercês bestowed on Pereira were “not in line with what is usually granted to natives, but they set an example: realizing that those who serve well are awarded substantial favors, the others will be encouraged to serve with loyalty and good will.”110 In fact, such honors were typically barred from individuals who, despite having embraced Christianity, inescapably remained natives of India. Regardless of having been born Catholic and of their readiness to accept the rights and duties of the juridical status, neither Pereira nor Lobo ever truly became full citizens. As Ângela Barreto Xavier has noted, “reducing the difference . . . entailed long-lasting paradoxes and tensions” in Goa.111 A different principle prevailed in Spanish America, where adherence to Catholicism was the required condition for entrance into the community; once this qualification was met, the distinction between citizen and non-citizen corresponded to the difference between those who respected the internal norms of the group and those who, in bad faith, failed to do so and, as such, were never integrated into the community.112 Yet the reluctance to grant full membership to someone like Guilherme Pereira had no connection with the confidence placed in him to deal with the “neighboring kings” on the Estado’s behalf. In fact, the close relationship Pereira maintained with the havaldar of Konkan was of conspicuous importance. Pragmatically, different viceroys and secretaries of the Estado relied on Pereira to ease tensions with Bijapur.113 Pereira often transcended his position as an official of the treasury archive in order to act as a minor, though privileged, political mediator. For example, he participated actively in the process of writing and translating correspondence sent from Goa to the ‘Adil Shahi court, namely to Sultan Muhammad and his favorite, Mustafa Khan. Pereira met frequently on the terra firme with Mirza Muhammad Raza, a relative of Mustafa Khan, ambassador of Bijapur to Goa in the 1620s and early 1630s, and later havaldar of Konkan (c. 1638). To these meetings the Catholic Brahman used to bring drafts of letters

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for review. The documents were first “read” and “declaimed” (lesse e declaraçe) to Raza, so that he could “augment” (acreçentar) or “reduce” (demenuir) them as appropriate.114 But the reverse procedure also occurred, if with other actors. At least some of the letters concerning Goa and the Portuguese that the ambassador of Bijapur to the Estado dispatched to Sultan Muhammad as well as to members of his council in the early 1640s were first examined by Manuel Dinis.115 A third and final significant case does not involve Portuguese secretaries or converted native clerks, but rather a Hindu Brahman called Narayana (Narna). Narayana entered Goa in October 1630 as envoy of the havaldar of Konkan to the Estado. While he was in the city, the Portuguese viceroy took advantage of his linguistic skills and employed Narayana to translate unspecified Portuguese papers into Persian. The documents were addressed to the havaldar of Konkan and ultimately to Khawas Khan, the sultan’s closest favorite together with Mustafa Khan. Narayana was paid 20 xerafins for his work, but the significance of this arrangement goes well beyond remuneration.116 The mediating role played by Pereira, Dinis, and Narayana regarding the political dealings between Goa and Bijapur poses fascinating challenges: what sort of language combinations (Portuguese-Persian) and language skills (spokenwritten) did the composite production of these letters entail? The next two chapters provide tentative answers to this question. The communication between the Estado da Índia and the ‘Adil Shahi sultanate was inevitably characterized by several divides. Nevertheless, these intriguing epistolary transactions—specifically the quasi-collective process of letter-writing at play—show how easily some boundaries could be transgressed. Pereira trusted Raza to edit Portuguese documents while Raza’s successor welcomed Dinis’s amendments to Bijapur letters. For his part, Linhares went as far as recruiting an envoy of the ever-suspicious havaldar of Konkan to translate viceregal papers. True, these are chiefly frontier arrangements, not courtly exchanges. Yet all the documents at stake were addressed to Sultan Muhammad or to his most influential courtiers, Mustafa Khan and Khawas Khan. Composed by a variety of cross-cultural hands rather than by strictly in-house experts, these sensitive documents show how the relationship between different belief and cultural systems in certain political and social contexts cannot be conceived of in terms of sharp contrast and inevitable opposition.

Chapter 6

The Língua do Estado

Tongues and Hearts “Not that many people master two languages equally well,” considered the Spanish humanist Vicente Mariner (d. 1642) in 1636. The librarian in charge of the Greek collection at the Escorial under Philip IV and himself a prolific translator of Latin and Greek, Mariner opens his El oficio de interprete with this remark and then subsequently cites the Roman poet Quintus Ennius (d. 169 BCE), who claimed to have had three hearts because he knew three languages.1 The foremost linguistic mediators of seventeenth-century Goa, the contemporaries of Vicente Mariner, never translated or even read the Iliad and the Odyssey, and yet they surely knew the two great Indian epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana.2 These men were typically Hindus and it is unlikely that they had been tempted to embrace the Christian faith. Nonetheless, they knew how to compose letters in Portuguese according to the epistolary norms of Europe and, to return to Ennius’s evocative image, possessed more than three hearts. The individuals at the core of this chapter and the next mastered a considerable number of languages, most unknown to the Portuguese bureaucrats and decision-makers with whom they worked daily. Without a good grasp of these idioms, the Indian courts would have remained largely unintelligible to the viceregal court; the heteroglossia of the línguas do Estado, as they were known among their employers, granted the Portuguese access to the political world of Mughal India and the western Deccan. The following pages survey the expertise in Persian available in Goa and chart the evolution of the position of chief interpreter of the Estado da Índia vis-à-vis the challenges presented by a geographically close, yet culturally distant, Indo-Persian sphere.

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Vicente Mariner lived at a time when vernacular languages were being boosted in Spain and all across Europe. Dictionaries circulated, the number of translators ballooned, and people learned other languages.3 South Asia, too, was then going through a process of vernacularization. Sheldon Pollock has shown that, similar and concurrent to the waning of Latin in Europe, pushed as it was by the proliferation of new states and their idioms, Sanskrit in India receded and gave way to the languages of the country, although it was not forced out by “national” vernaculars.4 Persian became the dominant political and literary idiom in a wide and rich Persianate sphere that went well beyond Iran proper. Hindustan and the Deccan were loci of a thriving Indo-Persian political culture to which outsiders like the Portuguese and other European actors had to conform.5 However, the privileged position of Persian did not mean the “banishment” of other languages and literary cultures from major political and social spaces, Mughal and Deccani contexts included.6 Lexicography, philology, and translation were dynamic fields of knowledge just as much in India as in Europe.7 Two early seventeenth-century lexicons attributed to Jerónimo Xavier—a Portuguese–Hindi–Persian dictionary briefly discussed in Chapter 1 and a related work entitled Rudimenta Linguae Persicae—somewhat embody the encounter of the two coeval traditions.8 On the one hand, the affiliation of these materials with the European production of multilingual dictionaries, to which the Society of Jesus gave a strong push, is straightforward.9 On the other, it is impossible not to recognize affinities between Xavier’s works and the prolific northern Indian production of dictionaries for Hindavi, Arabic, Turkish, and Persian.10 Early modern societies exposed to systematic cross-cultural interactions, as well as early modern polities involved in intense diplomatic activity, were confronted at every step with interpreting and translating. Mariner’s erudite milieu and similar European circles apart, the need to decipher conversations and documents marked the daily life of global cities, trading communities, and courtly contexts in and outside Europe. How to tackle this challenge varied enormously across the early modern world. Eric Dursteler has rightly argued that the Mediterranean was innately multilingual, a space where several individuals, groups, and states (like the Habsburg, Ottoman, and Venetian empires) communicated in a variety of languages without having to resort to professional interpreters on every occasion.11 In principle, the go-between, an inevitable but controversial figure of the period, was less in demand in such a scenario. Or, better yet, by being able to “speak in tongues,” each person could act as his or her own gobetween. Notwithstanding, Dursteler downplays the importance of the formal,

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rigorous translation of texts by classifying as “exceptional” the “moments when linguistic and cultural clarity were crucial” in the Mediterranean context.12 Be that as it may, the early modern world generated highly varied situations where translation is concerned. For instance, if one travels from Livorno to Beijing and focuses on the East Asian arena, the picture is one of highly formalized language mediation. With its blooming commercial activity and human circulation, the South China Sea certainly shared traits with the Mediterranean and  language barriers might have often been blurry. But ritualized state formations like Ming-Qing China, Chosŏn Korea, and Tokugawa Japan absolutely relied on structured offices of interpreters and translators to communicate politically between themselves and with the outside world.13 It goes without saying that European overseas empires were at the forefront of early modern linguistic engineering.14 In the Portuguese case, most of the initial approaches were improvised and adapted to the different political and social environments at play. Like in Spanish America, the first ad hoc solutions tested beyond the Cape of Good Hope gave way to more institutional arrangements, not to mention the significant contribution by Catholic missionaries as linguistic mediators from the mid-sixteenth century onwards.15 The names given to interpreters and their function varied significantly throughout Portuguese Asia, ranging from the catchall designation of língua (“tongue”) to more localized terms, such as turgimão, topaz, or jurubaça.16 Each fortress and city of the Estado da Índia counted on locally recruited interpreters, yet the contexts between Sofala and Solor were rather diverse. Malacca, for instance, employed the bendahara—the city’s “head of the Malays”—as an interpreter, but simultaneously paid an “interpreter and translator of the letters the kings send to the captain.”17 Macau, in turn, sought to adhere to the East Asian model and in 1627 established a translation bureau which was to additionally function as a training school. Composed of five people—one chief interpreter (jurubaça mor), two lower-rank interpreters (jurubaças menores), and two clerks—the bureau was under the authority of the municipal council and was meant to improve the city’s response to the sophistication of Chinese paperwork. It remains to be seen, though, whether this office ever really got off the ground.18 Many miles to the west, in Goa, language brokering bore both similarities and disparities with Macau. Both cities had to deal with vibrant political languages (Chinese and Persian, respectively) and with effective bureaucratic cultures; hence, the centrality of written interpretation in the two settings. As we shall see, Goa resorted to a somewhat permanent structure, but not to a formalized bureau of translation. The capital of the Estado likewise recruited native interpreters,

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without necessarily pushing them to convert. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries reveal the names of predominantly Hindu specialists in the service of the Portuguese in Goa, but this does not mean that they were free from discrimination. The question lingers, however: how did indigenous, non-Christian interpreters come to secure the position of língua do Estado in the long run? What were the reasons behind this intricate solution, which entailed recruiting Brahmans to render comprehensible the languages and modes of Mughal India and the Deccan sultanates to a European Catholic overseas empire? This chapter and the next attempt to explore the conundrum. As the seventeenth century began, an extended family of local Brahmans managed to perpetuate itself in the post of língua de Estado. Effective handling of office transmission practices and the acquisition of the appropriate language tools explain this family’s success. Still, its members fluctuated between their home society and an imperial, outer framework. Disparate modes of believing, behaving, and belonging were continuously at stake; the Hindu línguas of Goa had the upper hand in many situations, but walked on thin ice.

Command of Persian in Portuguese Goa The generic phrase “línguas do Estado”—the Portuguese label employed from the second half of the sixteenth century to designate those who worked for imperial Goa as professional interpreters and translators—is somewhat misleading.19 The activities of these language experts were not directed toward all spheres of influence of the Estado da Índia, for their competence could not encompass the overwhelmingly vast linguistic map between Mwenemutapa and Guangzhou. Based in Goa, the so-called línguas do Estado covered the most important languages of political communication in the Indian Peninsula, with a particular focus on western India. (The great bulk of the documents included in the livros dos reis vizinhos were surely translated by them.) Considering the language’s importance with regard to Mughal and Deccani politics, knowledge of Persian was key. The professional expertise of the línguas was put to the test daily behind the scenes. Yet the rich activity of these men as political and cultural brokers entailed far more than office skills. In Goa they acted as cicerones for the diplomatic agents of “neighboring kings.” They would likewise travel to the mainland in order to mediate the political conversations held by Portuguese envoys in adjacent courts—never to the Mughal court, though—and, on occasion, were chosen as emissaries themselves. Diplomatic intercession was usually combined

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with intelligence collection, as the interpreters of Goa spied and recruited spies. Some of these language experts were able to combine the pen and the sword; to translate for the city and to defend the city were not incompatible activities, at least in the sixteenth century. It is possible to consider the línguas do Estado as intellectuals in their own right, an important subject to which we will return later in this chapter. By mediating between state actors who communicated in different languages, the línguas bridged different political cultures. They often had to liaise between belief systems or, better yet, to establish ties between the faith professed by each party and the good faith inherent in political negotiations. With regard to treaties and peace agreements (assentos de pazes) involving Goa and the “neighboring kings,” the two sides were customarily bound to an understanding by more than signatures. A religious oath was required and the interpreter performed a symbolic yet crucial mediation gesture during the signing ceremony. While the governors and viceroys of the Estado put both hands on a missal under the vigilant eyes of a Catholic priest, the emissaries of the Deccan sultans swore on a copy of the moçafo (i.e., the Qur’an), handed to them by none other than the língua.20 Christians and Muslims swore by God or their respective gods, with the Estado da Índia entrusting religious authority to its interpreter. Invariably a Christian or a Hindu, the interpreter acted on such occasions as if he were the leader of the local Muslim community.21 Such a sweeping profile and range of activities greatly reduces the likelihood of consistently identifying Portuguese individuals among the interpreters of Goa. To be sure, natives of Portugal with long decades spent in South Asia could speak some of the languages at stake and, as we saw in Chapter 2, those fluent in Persian were frequently employed in the Estado’s political and diplomatic dealings with Iran and several Persianate states. The question remains, though: did they write it well? Were they able to pen a letter in highly stylized Persian? Probably not, for the stakes were usually high in this field. Indian teachers of Persian living in late eighteenth-century England used to cast doubt on—conceivably out of professional competition—their English counterparts’ mastery of the language.22 In the same period in North India, scholars like Muhammad Hasan Qatil mocked Husayni Brahmans for their poor Persian.23 Portugal did not train people to work as interpreters and translators in Asia, or in other parts of the empire for that matter. Unlike in several other European countries, there were no Arabic or Oriental studies at the university level in Portugal.24 True, the fortress cities of Morocco provided Lisbon with Portuguese interpreters and translators of Arabic throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth

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centuries.25 Yet these men never achieved deep command of the language; literary knowledge and scholarly translations were out of their reach. In contrast, Morisco Spain managed to survive within Catholic Spain despite prohibitions and persecutions, the result being an army of Arabic-Spanish translators eager to assert authority and loyalty.26 What is more, Madrid managed to take advantage of its Mediterranean and Habsburg nexuses in order to attract interpreterscholars, such as the Neapolitan Diego de Urrea. Taken as captive to Algiers in his early years, Urrea studied in the madrasa of Tlemcen before re-entering the Spanish world in the 1580s to later serve as “interpreter of the Arabic, Turkish, and Persian papers” for Philip III and to teach at the University of Alcalá.27 To find Urrea’s Portuguese counterpart can be challenging. Consider Diogo Rombo, a native of Sesimbra, a seaport twenty-five miles south of Lisbon. After “having seen much world” (vio muito mundo) and spending an adventurous decade in the middle of the sixteenth century between the Mediterranean and the Arabian Sea, he offered his services in Muslim lands to King John III, aspiring for royal favor in return. In a letter to the Portuguese monarch, Rombo tells his tale in the third person and underlines his knowledge of “the Arabic language and that of the Turks, albeit not as well.”28 Good Arabic (presumably), broken Turkish, no Persian: Rombo was definitely no Urrea. In a similar vein, the Estado da Índia failed to generate institutions geared toward linguistic training on the ground. The St. Paul’s College (1542) also functioned as a school of languages (like the Jesuit seminary of Rachol since 1609), albeit one primarily associated with missionary work—but instruction in Persian seems to have been poor in Goa. Writing from Fatehpur Sikri in 1582, Rodolfo Acquaviva (d. 1583) suggested the creation of a seminary of Persian and Hindi in the capital city, but his proposal was never pursued.29 The officialdom and the imperial elite of Goa would have profited from a university like the one that had operated in Mexico City from the early 1550s, where chairs of Nahuatl and Otomí were founded and interpreters learned native script so that they could read indigenous documents.30 An alternative path would have been to follow the Venetian model—embraced by several other European powers—and endeavor to create at the Mughal capital a school similar to that of the giovani di lingua in Istanbul, where trainees in the service of the Serenissima spent years familiarizing themselves with the workings of Ottoman Turkish.31 Equally, Indians could have been brought to Portugal in order to acquire Portuguese and later be employed as interpreters in Goa. The English adopted this approach and trained several Greeks at Oxford before sending them to Istanbul as dragomans.32 But the Indians who entered Lisbon in this period were mostly nameless enslaved men and women destined to serve

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in noble households.33 The Hindu interpreters of Goa acquired their Portuguese on the ground without typically traveling to Lisbon. Asked by a Maratha general in 1739 how he found “the city of Portugal” (a cidade de Portugal), the língua do Estado Bahuguna Kamath answered: “Sir, I have not seen Portugal . . . , it is a piece of the world that we have not seen.”34 The decades immediately following the conquest of Goa in 1510 were marked by the recruitment of diverse linguists: Hindu Brahmans, like one Krishna and his son Dadaji, both committed to preserving and asserting their creed despite their collaboration with the Portuguese; Sephardic Jews-turned-Christians, namely Francisco de Albuquerque and Alexandre de Ataíde; or educated Persian merchants like Khwaja Pir Quli (Coge Percolim), representative of the thriving Iranian diaspora in maritime Asia.35 However, the tense atmosphere of mid-sixteenth century Goa would narrow the pool of individuals and groups in the service of the Estado who were able to bridge languages and polities. The introduction of major transformations in the way the Portuguese conceived of relations between Christians and non-Christians, or even among Christians, reflected a new and trying context in which political allegiance and religious communion were indissolubly linked. Stemming from dreams of Catholic universalism and continental expansion, a significant increase in the number of conversions was to occur in the Estado’s domains; more people, Christians specifically, were needed at both ends.36 This shift slightly antedates the Council of Trent (1545–1563), but would soon align with the Tridentine directives regarding evangelization, as attested by the outcome of the five provincial councils in Goa between 1567 and 1606.37 Brahmans, in particular, were regularly identified as the primary and most serious obstacle to the spread of Christianity in Portuguese India. Figures like Juan de Albuquerque, Archbishop of Goa (g. 1539–1553), went as far as suggesting that discreet assassinations of selected “honored gentiles” should be carried out.38 Hindus and “infidels” were prevented from wearing “Christian dress and attire, except if bearing some sign that makes it immediately obvious that the person is a gentile or a moor.”39 Like in Portugal, where Jews had been forced to wear a red star on their clothes since 1537, religious discrimination came with tangible, public marks in Goa.40 Imperial posts were now barred to non-Christians, since loyalty and competence were examined exclusively through a religious lens. Indigenous scriveners and interpreters who chose to remain “gentiles” were particularly targeted, and it would take several decades until the position of língua do Estado was again entrusted to Hindu Brahmans.41

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Unsurprisingly, the few interpreters and translators of Persian who consistently show up in the Portuguese record during the second half of the sixteenth century in Goa were all Catholics: Baltasar Pacheco, Cristóvão do Couto, and Simão Ferreira. The names disclose their religious affiliation, but hide almost everything else. A Muslim convert to Christianity, Ferreira was to face the Inquisition of Goa and the paper trail left behind allows us to go deeper in his case. With regard to Pacheco and Couto, they were probably Portuguese, but could have been Catholic converts from Hinduism, Islam (like Ferreira), or Judaism. New Christians, for instance, found jobs in the region as Persian-Portuguese translators. Consider Bernardo Rodrigues, who translated the letters sent by the sultan of Bijapur to Viceroy Luís de Ataíde on the eve of the siege of Goa (1570). According to António Pinto Pereira, who claims in his chronicle to have seen the original letters bearing Sultan ‘Ali I’s signature and seal, Rodrigues was “very skilled, and gifted in languages [ladino em lingoas], especially in that of Persia, and eloquent in it and in Portuguese.” Pereira goes on to note that the sultan’s letters arrived in the viceroy’s hands already “translated [tresladadas] from the Persian script [escriptura] in his [Rodrigues’s] own handwriting.”42 Baltasar Pacheco was língua do Estado roughly from 1550 to 1590 and in that capacity mediated a couple of treaties signed between Goa and Bijapur in the mid-1570s.43 Spanning the same four decades, Cristóvão do Couto had an equally long career as a language and political broker. A “very practical man in the arts of those kings, who all knew him very well,” he had mastered Persian and probably Gujarati.44 Couto was familiar not only with the political milieu of Bijapur, but also with that of Gujarat during its final years as an independent sultanate; sent as Goa’s emissary to Ahmedabad during Ahmad Shah III’s reign, he was eventually granted a village in the lands of Daman by the sultan.45 More importantly, Couto emerged as a key intermediary between the Portuguese and the Mughals following the latter’s conquest of Gujarat in 1572–1573. In March 1573, he acted as língua during the meeting held in Surat between António Cabral and Akbar. Two years later, Couto traveled from Goa to Gujarat in the company of the first Mughal ambassador to the Estado, who was on his way back to Fatehpur Sikri. Once in Ahmedabad, he met with the subadar of the new imperial province: Mirza ‘Aziz Koka, Akbar’s controversial foster brother.46 It is possible that Couto mediated direct or indirect contacts in December 1572 between the Mughal emperor and the captain of Diu. These intense Portuguese-Mughal interactions produced at least four Persian documents, which were likely rendered into Portuguese by Cristóvão do Couto.47

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It is open to question whether Couto and Pacheco had more than verbal competency in Persian, and if they supplemented their skills by collaborating with individuals who could write the language properly. If so, were these other experts Muslims or Hindus? The two línguas surely had clerks in their service, but we are unsure who they were or the specific tasks they performed.48 Maybe Pacheco and Couto worked in partnership with Krishna and the like whenever they had to make sense of a letter in Persian. Krishna was the person whom Viceroy Francisco de Mascarenhas (g. 1581–1584) entrusted with the “post of clerk of the Persian script” (cargo de escrivão da letra parçia) in 1584.49 This shadowy figure—not to be confused with the other two Krishnas mentioned in this chapter (who died, respectively, around 1548 and 1658)—was one of the Goa Brahmans proficient in written Persian, even if not all Hindu interpreter-translators in the service of the Estado throughout the following century mastered the idiom simultaneously in its oral and written forms. What we know for sure is that Couto and Pacheco’s other colleague as língua parsea do Estado in the early 1570s was at ease with all sorts of Persian documents. Born in Shiraz to a qadi (judge), Mulla Hussein became Simão Ferreira by converting to Christianity in Hormuz (a similar profile to that of Francisco Henriques, discussed in Chapter 2). Ferreira served the Portuguese captains of the city as interpreter (língua dos capitães de Ormuz) until being forced to travel to Goa in March–April 1569, accused of Islamic practices.50 Several interrogation sessions and witness testimonies later, in mid-July, Ferreira was publicly humiliated in an auto da fé and subjected to heavy penitence and vigilance thereafter. Furthermore, he was instructed neither to return to Hormuz nor to ever again engage in conversation with Muslims. Simão Ferreira was finally given permission to travel to the Persian Gulf in October 1571, yet he remained in Goa for some time. When the Inquisition decided in his favor, Ferreira already enjoyed some proximity to Viceroy Luís de Ataíde, serving him “in things of importance to the Estado” (informant? interpreter?) during the ‘Adil Shahi siege of Goa.51 Ataíde did not waste the opportunity to recruit Ferreira as língua parsea; we consequently find his name in the Portuguese version of a treaty signed with Bijapur in December 1571. In his capacity as interpreter of the Estado, Ferreira handed a Qur’an to the two representatives of Sultan ‘Ali I and made them swear on the moçafo.52 For someone who had been recently forbidden to even talk to a mouro, this was a bold move. It also indicates that viceroys and inquisitors in Goa did not always act in synchrony. A gulf separated Luís de Ataíde and Aleixo Dias Falcão on what to do with someone like Simão Ferreira; where the inquisitor saw a religious traitor, the viceroy spotted a valuable broker.

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Hindu Interpreters in a Catholic City: The Fortunes of a Brahman Family Simão Ferreira, Cristóvão do Couto, and Baltasar Pacheco vanished from the Portuguese record before the turn of the century, and the Estado da Índia would hardly employ interpreters like them from that point forward. One identifies Christian names among those who, in Goa, commanded Persian and Portuguese simultaneously. Domingos Pacheco de Carvalho served as língua do Estado in the 1610s and 1620s and was chosen to undertake a diplomatic mission in the Persian Gulf given his expertise in both the language and the region.53 Also acquainted with Persian, Diogo Nunes Evangelho proved an active linguistic mediator in the following decade, especially in the Estado’s political dealings with Bijapur.54 Carvalho and Evangelho were probably reinóis, but they could also have been originally from India, either mestizos or local converts. Still, Catholic interpreters were not to secure the position of língua do Estado systematically in the years to come. The same holds true for another earlier approach to language and translation in the city, namely the selection of Iranian experts; there is no trace of either learned merchants capable of reconciling business (tijarat) and government (imarat), like Khwaja Pir Quli, or of “men of the pen” converted in Hormuz, like Simão Ferreira.55 Indeed, the profile of the línguas do Estado changed significantly around 1600. It is not entirely clear why the Portuguese chose to revisit a model which had been in place before the mid-sixteenth century, when people like Krishna and his son Dadaji worked as interpreter-translators. Hindu Brahmans were again employed in Goa as language brokers, with apparently much less religious vigilance imposed. Even the local inquisition, which found indigenous interpreters distrustful and “inconstant persons,” often resorted to the linguistic expertise of converts.56 The rationale for the Estado’s new recruitment strategy remains nebulous. The broader context suggests that the Portuguese authorities softened their position concerning Hindu beliefs and practices in view of the need to assure social stability and demographic balance in Goa, its islands, and the territories of Bardez and Salcete.57 As a consequence, the number of conversions diminished at the turn of the century and successive viceroys—probably fearful of resistance and rebellions—tended to be more accommodating as to the religious affiliation of the indigenous professionals in their service. There were other nuances, mostly related to the position of the língua do Estado itself. Such officials continued to perform several duties, but these tasks were more and more within the field of political communication. Fiscal

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administration and warfare, which were counted among their responsibilities in the previous century, vanished from their list of services.58 The position was moving toward specialization, with a strong focus on knowledge of an array of languages and mastery of the sophisticated technologies of writing in the IndoPersian world; the figure of the interpreter-diplomat, conversant with the political idioms and social conventions of the courts of the country, eventually prevailed. Those chosen were mostly Shenvis, a subgroup of Saraswats from the Konkan region who specialized in administrative tasks, took politico-diplomatic roles, and explored related employment opportunities in the Deccan and beyond.59 Judging from Father Francisco de Sousa’s stand in the early eighteenth century, the Jesuits of Goa were rather critical of them.60 In the same vein, while viceroys like the Count of Linhares were utterly reliant on the Shenvi Brahmans, they also disliked them profoundly. On July 25, 1634, Linhares vented his anger, jotting down in his journal a few lines about how poorly he regarded them. Wordplay with Sinais—the Portuguese corrupted form of Shenvis, which means “signs”—constitutes an amusing element in the following bitter sentence: “The Dutch from the sea [Olandezes do mar] are not the ones who cause the perdition of India, but rather the Dutch from the land [Olandezes da terra], who live in these cities of the North and are called Sinais. . . . Together with the other Konkani Brahmans [bramanes Canarins] of this city [i.e., Goa], they bear the signs [sinais] of India’s demise because they are not gentiles, nor Moors, nor Christians; they are all strangers, without God, without faith, without law, without fear, without shame.”61 Linhares’s harsh criticism concerning their lack of religion, values, and sense of belonging is the best possible tribute to these Brahmans’ ability to navigate several polities, societies, and beliefs. In fact, the Estado da Índia represented but one of the several job opportunities available to them in western India. The market was competitive, and the Sinais were one group among the many that informed the highly mobile “transcultural political elites” of the Deccan, as coined by Wagoner.62 Shenvi Brahmans with expertise in European languages easily found work outside the Portuguese sphere. Commercial companies like the EIC used to recruit them as linguists.63 Indian courts engaged in negotiations with Goa likewise offered a consistent alternative; men such as Vitthala Shenvi, interpreter of the ambassador of Bijapur to the city in 1633, or Ganapati Shenvi, língua of the Mughal ambassador who came to Bassein in 1666, are cases in point.64 The extant sources do not always disclose precise identities, yet we sense their presence. The two letters sent by Prince Akbar (Aurangzeb’s son) in January 1683 to the viceroy and the secretary of the Estado had Persian (letra

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mourisca) on the envelopes, but the actual documents were in Portuguese; someone in the rebel prince’s entourage had mastered the imperial language of Goa.65 Our focus, though, rests on those who opted for the Estado. Instead of moving around western India, offering their expertise to different courts and patrons, there were people who sought long, stable careers in Goa. When petitioning the Portuguese crown for positions, they sometimes adopted a dramatic tone and evoked the problem of subsistence.66 Nevertheless, the financial reality was not that severe; the línguas earned between 36,000 and 50,000 réis per year in the last quarter of the sixteenth century, slightly above of the salary of the viceroy’s doctor.67 Their salaries would not take long to skyrocket, as the chief interpreters would make almost triple this amount—about 140,000 réis annually—in the 1620s and 1630s.68 Beyond the stipend, however, the life of a Hindu linguist in Catholic Goa might have been harsh. The seventeenth-century indigenous línguas, as we have seen, were less pressured religiously than most of their sixteenth-century predecessors. But religious difference went hand in hand with legal segregation, as the case of Ramoji Shenvi Khotari in the middle of the seventeenth century reminds us.69 Moreover, viceroys like Linhares and missionaries like Sousa were certainly not the only ones to belittle the Shenvi Brahmans in Goa. Like other interpreter-translators across the early modern world (from Eastern Christians in Jerusalem to experts of Chinese in Chosŏn Korea), the Sinais must have frequently faced situations of stress, anxiety, prejudice, and conflict.70 Even Emperor Akbar, who did so much to train Brahmans as imperial bureaucrats, could discriminate between Muslim and Hindu translators. A painting included in a late-sixteenth Razmnama copy shows Muslim scholars and Hindu experts working to translate the epic poem Mahabharata from Sanskrit into Persian. But while the former occupy the best part of the composition and have people at their service, the latter are relegated to the lower part of the folio, with no servants whatsoever.71 In his two terms as viceroy (g. 1597–1600, 1622–1628), Francisco da Gama relied heavily on a certain Ajju Nayak in matters of translation and negotiation. This Brahman, who capably dealt with the “neighboring kings and their ambassadors and envoys” for twenty-six years, “knows the Persian language, and those of Balaghat, Deccan, and Gujarat, and other [languages] of the country, and he is smart.” Thus reads the most relevant passage of a letter from the fourth Count of Vidigueira to Philip IV in 1625, recommending the son-in-law of his favored interpreter for the position of língua do Estado.72 Ajju Nayak was a polyglot Brahman who moved with ease, although also with danger, in a western Deccan

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exposed to Mughal forays; his name is often associated with Portuguese political and diplomatic transactions in Bijapur and Ahmadnagar in the 1610s and 1620s.73 Ajju continued serving as chief interpreter until at least 1626, to be replaced thereafter by Krishna Shenvi; Francisco da Gama’s recommendation was accepted by Philip IV with the condition that the father-in-law prepare his son-in-law for the position.74 The king’s prerequisite was pointless, however, for transmission of this kind of knowledge in India was customary within the family.75 What is more, dynasties of language brokers were the norm in different parts of the Portuguese Empire and in several early modern states. No matter the geographical or political landscape, it was to the employers’ advantage to rely on old acquaintances: an interpreter-translator with a known family tree meant trust. The position of língua do Estado was sought after, with Brahmans and their families fighting for it.76 In addition, the appointed interpreters often worked in conjunction with other experts. If we look back into the previous century, Krishna and Khwaja Pir Quli had overlapping careers, and so did Baltasar Pacheco and Cristóvão do Couto. Viceroys evidently turned to more than one interpreter in order to overcome impediments, to cover for absences from the city (like the inclusion of the main língua in a diplomatic mission to a neighboring state), and to meet the demands of added workloads. Apparently, there was no rigid hierarchy among the translators and one wonders whether they competed with each other. For instance, how did Krishna Shenvi coexist with Diogo Nunes Evangelho? Was there tension and disquiet? The língua do Estado stood as the core figure with regard to language mediation in Goa, but he did not oversee a hierarchical bureau of translation similar to the one the city of Macau outlined in 1627. There is no evidence of such a structure and relationship as regards the capital of the Estado da Índia. We can thus identify several language brokers working in Goa for the Portuguese at a given point in time. These individuals did not necessarily hold the same linguistic skills. Some, like a Maratha called Matimia Bhandari Dubashi (“interpreter”) Rao, show up just once in the sources. Obviously an expert of Marathi language and the Modi script, we find him in October 1615 at the ‘Adil Shahi court serving as interpreter of the treaty that bound the Estado da Índia and the sultanate of Ahmadnagar.77 Like other agreements signed between these two states in 1617, this document was drafted in Portuguese and in letra hindu (lit. “Hindu letter,” i.e., Marathi), but not in Persian; a Persian-Portuguese interpreter would have proven useless in this case.78 Recruitment practices had to be flexible, tailored to specific needs and concrete situations.

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Be that as it may, a single family of Shenvi Brahmans managed to monopolize the key position of língua do Estado over the course of the seventeenth century, resulting in consistent, prolonged group influence. “Office holding,” Bhavani Raman notes, “is not an individual enterprise but is tied to social processes of accumulation and family mobility.”79 The family seems to also have succeeded in securing the position of “transcriber of the Persian language” (tresladador da língua parsea), or “translator of the Persian script” (traduzidor da letra persa) after around 1650.80 We have seen that a Hindu Brahman called Krishna served as “clerk of the Persian script” in the early 1580s. The office was entrusted to Muslim officials during the first half of the seventeenth century, but gradually merged with that of língua do Estado. The two positions became one, often held by the same person, invariably a Hindu Brahman (Chart 2). Like his father-in-law, Krishna Shenvi enjoyed a long career, from around 1626 until about 1658. During these three decades, he traveled frequently to the ‘Adil Shahi court, particularly as an interpreter for Ambassadors Baltasar de Azeredo (1630) and António Moniz Barreto (1638), but also as a fully-fledged representative of the Estado to Bijapur in 1646.81 He probably translated the correspondence exchanged between Viceroy Linhares and Emperor Shahjahan in August–September 1630 and likewise rendered into Portuguese the Persian letters sent from the court of Golconda to Goa in the 1640s and 1650s.82 Krishna Shenvi was also charged with translating the copious correspondence exchanged between Muhammad ‘Adil Shah and Governor Brás de Castro in 1654–1655, including the treaty signed by the Estado and Bijapur in 1655.83 The last known reference to his name appears in the Portuguese version of a farman from Sultan ‘Ali II, dated 1658.84 Krishna Shenvi surely prepared his son for the position of língua do Estado upon retirement. Dadaji Shenvi replaced his father at least on one occasion, in 1639; Krishna was away from Goa and a Portuguese translation of a letter written in Kannada was needed.85 Only the premature death of Dadaji, sometime before 1646, made Krishna follow an alternative path and ask King John IV for the appointment to his position, in due time, of the “person who marries one of his daughters or another person deemed able and sufficient.”86 That person was Narayana Shenvi, Krishna Shenvi’s son-in-law. Narayana consequently managed to secure work and subsistence for thirty years (c. 1658–1688). Ingeniously, he held two offices at once: língua do Estado and tresladador da língua parsea.87 Still, Narayana Shenvi had to coexist, if not race, with Ramoji Shenvi Kothari, who also translated for the Portuguese from around 1645 to 1674. Born in Salcete, Ramoji proved to be a key mediator vis-à-vis the political landscape of the

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Writing, Translating, Performing Ajju Nayak (AN) active c. 1599-1626

Krishna Shenvi (KS)

Ramoji Shenvi Kothari (RSK)

active c. 1626-1658 son-in-law of AN

active c. 1645-1674

Narayana Shenvi (NS)*

Dadaji Shenvi (DS)

Vitoji Shenvi (VS)*

active c. 1658-1688 son-in-law of KS

died before 1646 son of KS

active c. 1667-1714 son-in-law of RSK nephew of KS

Rama Krishna Shenvi (RKS) active c. 1688-1697 son of NS

* also “translator of the Persian script”

Chart 2. The línguas do Estado of the seventeenth century

western Deccan during these three decades. As emissary and interpreter, he was often assigned to Bijapur, where he befriended courtly figures and influential local officials. Ramoji was likewise familiar with both Kanara and Maharashtra politics. He acted as an intermediary between the desais (district officers) of Konkan and the Estado da Índia, and was also intimate with Catholic priests, such as the Habshi Pero da Costa de Brito, vicar of the church of São José, Goa. Like his predecessors, Ramoji knew several languages, including Persian, Marathi, and Kannada.88 This sharing of functions continued into the following generation of interpreters and translators of Portuguese Goa. Rama Krishna Shenvi succeeded Narayana Shenvi, his father, as língua do Estado around 1688.89 Two decades

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earlier, in 1667, Ramoji Shenvi Kothari had already placed Vitoji Shenvi—his son-in-law and Krishna Shenvi’s nephew—as translator of the Persian script.90 Among the Persian documents Vitoji rendered into Portuguese was the farman from Emperor Shah Alam I (r. 1707–1712) to King John V (r. 1707–1750) and a letter by Juliana Dias da Costa addressed to the Portuguese monarch.91 At this time, and during the last decade of his forty-year long career, Vitoji also served as língua do Estado.92 What can one learn from this succession of names and career trajectories of the Shenvi Brahmans responsible for making Hindustan and the Deccan accessible to those who reasoned in Portuguese in the capital of the Estado da Índia? Several reflections are in order. The first concerns office transmission patterns. As with the clerks studied in Chapter 5, the appropriate linguistic, literary, and cultural competencies necessary for a successful administrative career were acquired in Hindu Goa within the domestic sphere. For a family strategy to succeed, as this one undeniably did, the father, the uncle, or the father-in-law needed to transmit their knowledge as well as their position to the son, nephew, or son-in-law. The strong links between cousins (a peculiarity of Dravidian societies), combined with the need to supply daughters with dowries, were the backbone of such succession patterns.93 Unfortunately, the women at the center of this story are utterly invisible. We do know the wives’ names of some of the Christian interpreters; Cristóvão do Couto was married to Madalena Luís and was father to Maria Couto, while Domingos Pacheco de Carvalho left Guiomar da Silva a widow in 1629. As for the wives and daughters of the Hindu Brahman interpreters, not even the names are available; they were totally ignored by the imperial archive. Starting with Ajju Nayak, the enduring ability to pass down positions from one family member to another reduced the Estado’s intervention in the choice of its own línguas to a minimum. Portuguese law had accommodated hereditary succession with regard to ofícios from the latter half of the sixteenth century, but uncle–nephew transmission of posts was rarely recognized. Still, the crown accepted it in the case of the Shenvi Brahmans of Goa.94 Whenever a língua do Estado had to be selected, the viceroy and the secretary were allowed a little leeway; the petitioner was invariably the office holder and a relative of the proposed individual. High-rank Portuguese officials lacked the expertise to properly evaluate the professional performance of native linguists. As a consequence, demonstrations of faithfulness—individual as well as familial—and judgment on zealousness weighed more than an examination of competency. All the extant

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seventeenth-century cases show that Goa and Lisbon did no more than to ratify their indigenous collaborators’ own choices. For instance, the nomination of Vitoji Shenvi to the position of translator of the Persian script in March 1667 was decided in less than a week, based on a purely administrative procedure built on the reputation of the outgoing translator rather than on the assessment of the professional skills of the incoming one.95 The second reflection concerns language competency. The Portuguese documents show that the línguas do Estado were familiar with several South Asian idioms and could handle texts in different scripts. In addition to Sanskrit and Konkani, both innate languages to any Goa-born Brahman, the línguas mastered several languages of the country, which certainly included popular and widely disseminated vernaculars at the time. To these, the Hindu interpreters of Goa added knowledge of at least one of the classic idioms of Islam: Persian. Oral mastery of this language gradually combined with written command, since proficiency at directly translating Persian documents into Portuguese became apparent around mid-century. Still, not all the línguas do Estado after around 1650 were able to achieve true proficiency, for in many instances they had to seek the collaboration of a “true” expert. The pattern is not always consistent, but it is also possible that Portuguese documents and assumptions mask a more complex reality. Ajju and his Brahman relatives and successors kept pace with the evolution of language, culture, and identity in the early modern Deccan. They were well adapted to the linguistic foundations of the political communication of their time and space; knowledge of regional languages, from Dakhani, which prevailed in urban centers and among the Deccan elite, to others like Kannada and Marathi, on the rise as literary languages at local courts, was not neglected.96 These latter idioms were increasingly used in the official papers the línguas had to render in Portuguese. We have seen that the political arrangements between Ahmadnagar and the Estado in 1615–1617 were sealed by documents in Portuguese and Marathi. A 1658 farman from the sultan of Bijapur translated into Portuguese by Krishna and Narayana provides another clear example: prepared in two versions “of the same tenor,” the original document was written in Persian and Marathi.97 The picture of multilingual skills that we have just painted does not mean that the interpreter-translators of the Estado da Índia had strong command of the exact same languages over the course of the seventeenth century. For instance, the anonymous interpreter (the língua do Estado?) whom Secretary Luís Gonçalves Cotta consulted in August 1682 about the features of the Marathi

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language could not speak it fluently: “it is rather different [from Konkani], and one can grasp some words but”—the interpreter admitted—“not continuously, to the point of forming a perfect clause.”98 Others, as we noted, did not master Persian fully. When a letter from Emperor Aurangzeb to Viceroy Alvor had to be rendered into Portuguese, the língua do Estado brought to his meeting with Secretary Cotta “a translator . . . who knows the Persian language.”99 Mastery of the two imperial languages—Persian and Portuguese—was obviously crucial for political mediation between the Estado da Índia and the Mughal Empire or the Deccan sultanates. And yet, it remains largely unknown how the interpreter-translators of Goa learned Portuguese, and consequently became conversant with Portuguese bureaucratic and cultural practices. Since they were not converts, and thus did not earn a Catholic education, it is unclear where and how these Hindu mediators attained such linguistic and cultural proficiency. They probably went through informal language learning. One possible way was to converse regularly with a native speaker. This is how a young member of the royal family of Hormuz and Catholic convert who had to prepare in the late sixteenth century to fill a relevant post in the city’s administration proceeded. Specifically, following the captain of Hormuz’s advice, the young man started to take home lessons daily with an unnamed choir boy (moço do coro).100 Still, such arrangements do not explain it all. Beyond the interpreters’ familiarity with the viceroy and the secretary, were they intimate with other elite members of the city, including priests? Ramoji, we have noted, was friends with a vicar. Despite religious difference, the línguas do Estado were secular Brahmans and cross-cultural sociability might have translated into access to Portuguese books and libraries. These reflections direct us to a third point, which concerns the intellectual profile of these interpreters. A sea of unknowns remains in this regard: were they familiar with the disciplines nurtured by the typical munshi? Was there awareness among them of the growing literary production in the vernacular languages of western India? These and other related questions cannot be satisfactorily answered because the Portuguese overlooked their cultural habits and the available sources are consequently mute. Back in the 1560s, Simão Ferreira owned a book in Persian on how “to write letters to kings and governors,” that is to say, a Persian manual of letter writing.101 But Ferreira was originally a learned Muslim from Shiraz and Hormuz; his case therefore tells us nothing about the education of Hindu Brahman interpreters in Goa. Did the latter consult similar Islamic manuals or otherwise employ the same epistolary formulas learned

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mechanically from their predecessors and passed down from one generation to the next? Did they have access to equivalent European letter-writing manuals? They surely mastered the art of drafting Western letters and such materials must have been available in Goa.102 Maybe they read the two dialogues on letterwriting included in Francisco Rodrigues Lobo’s Corte na aldeia (Lisbon, 1619), a book which gained some traction in the Iberian context during the seventeenth century, or otherwise consulted the contemporary work by Fernández Abarca (Lisbon, 1618) on missive letters and competent secretaries.103 We likewise wonder if the Goa linguists had at their disposal (or if they themselves composed) lexicons and language manuals, like their Chinese and Korean colleagues did.104 As we have seen, the extant Portuguese–Persian dictionaries were prepared in the early seventeenth century at the Mughal court by Jesuit priests in collaboration with local intellectuals. We have no knowledge, though, of comparable materials being prepared or utilized in the capital of the Estado da Índia. It was in the língua do Estado’s nature as a Brahman and broker to engage with erudite figures outside the Catholic city. An unnamed Goa interpreter fostered ties with a “mathematician” from the terra firme who provided him with intelligence in 1682.105 In 1739, amidst a tough round of diplomatic negotiations with the Marathas in Salcete, Bahuguna Kamath exchanged Sanskrit verses with a chief as part of the overall political discussion.106 One after the other, Bahuguna and his son Anant monopolized the position of língua do Estado between about 1719 and 1793. What we know of their written work and family archive suffices to label them as indigenous intellectuals.107 A fourth and final point concerns religion and identity. The línguas do Estado habitually signed their Hindu names in Roman characters—some with a firm hand, others with shaky handwriting.108 Unlike the typical early modern go-between, they did not have to navigate several names and the respective selves.109 Yet the safeguard of their Brahmanical condition implied challenges that went well beyond choosing a name and signature. The political and communicative spaces of Portuguese Goa, with which these men were familiar, did not always coincide with the city’s religious and legal geography, which they certainly viewed as hostile. This mismatch brought serious constraints with regard to communal life. Convert clerks used to live in Catholic Goa, but that would be an imprudent choice for non-convert interpreters; a Portuguese law from 1559 determined that the property of a gentio was to be confiscated upon his death. The same law established the separation of Hindu orphans from their mothers in those instances, thus paving the way for children to be forcibly raised as Christians.110 Ramoji Shenvi Kothari, who lived in Bicholim with his family,

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contested this rule and eventually succeeded in embarrassing the Portuguese crown.111 Around the midpoint of his career, in 1658, Ramoji petitioned to live “in the lands subjected to the city of Goa,” without, one day, his widow being forced to suffer the loss of property and his children having to forfeit their religion. Ramoji probably decided to move forward after learning about the asset seizure of the late Krishna Shenvi, who had taken the risk of living in Santa Luzia (a neighborhood located within the limits of the Portuguese city).112 At the end of a ten-year struggle, Ramoji’s request was ultimately accepted. Ramoji, as with the other línguas before and after him, certainly had compelling reasons for not converting. Portuguese Goa represented a valuable professional market, an imperial city that offered enduring, seemingly well-paid careers to language mediators and some integration into a new social order. But if they truly wished to continue to be recognized as Brahmans, these men also had to comply with the fundamentals of their natal social order and to continuously restate their ties to it.113 The accepted behavior was established by experts in Benares, who convened regularly in order to assess the different Brahman communities in light of lineage, social relations, lifestyle, and religious practices. A decision would follow as to whether certain groups were worthy of continuing to be counted as part of the larger community.114 Perhaps for this reason, the Brahman bureaucrat included in an Iberian illustrated volume of the time is depicted as a “true” Hindu Brahman. The figure is identified as a Viaparulu Brahman, meaning that he belonged to the Golkonda Vyapari community (the Vyaparis being part of the Niyogis, mentioned in the previous chapter). A caption in Castilian guides us through the drawing and conveys a derogatory view of these Brahmans by linking their alleged arrogance to their great political recognition as top officials in several states: “these [Brahmans] disparage the others because they secure jobs and enjoy the princes’ favor, who really trust their ability and customarily delegate to them the hardships of Government [los embarazos del Govierno]” (Figure 9). And yet, the Brahman in the picture dresses and acts like someone eager to state his belief. He holds no documents and instead waters a tulsi plant in the company of his equally devout wife. Sadly, and unlike the case of their Ottoman counterparts, visual representations of the línguas do Estado are not available.115 We wonder whether they also watered tulsi plants, a practice condemned by the local inquisition.116 Regarding attire, converted Brahman clerks might have walked around the city dressed as Portuguese. In contrast, the Hindu interpreters probably presented themselves “wrapped in a white bed sheet, with a cap on the head, and sandals on the feet.”117 This disapproving observation is by a Jesuit missionary, who distinguished Hindu Brahmans from Christian Brahmans in 1559 by dress and pose.

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Figure 9. Golkonda Vyapari Brahmans (Bramines que se llaman Viaparulu), anonymous, “Dibujos dela India Oriental,” eighteenth century. Real Biblioteca de Palacio, Patrimonio Nacional, II/1612, pl. (lámina) 3. © Real Biblioteca de Palacio, Madrid.

Shenvi Brahmans, we have just noted, were additionally pressed by pandits to comport themselves in accordance with the canon. They were free to embrace a secretarial career, yet they were to avoid behaving like farmers or merchants. This situation was difficult to get around due to the fundamental role the Saraswats played in the economy of Goa.118 It is certainly possible that a figure such as Ramoji Shenvi Kothari found himself under scrutiny due to his proximity to the Portuguese. Moreover, his position as língua do Estado was inseparable from the acquisition of financial benefits, placing Ramoji quite close to the merchant class.119 The identity trials that he had to face when attempting to square Hindu Goa and Catholic Goa were conspicuous. Ramoji was one of the several línguas do Estado who sought to reconcile Lusitanism and Brahmanism and their respective social orders on a daily basis. To serve a given political community and yet belong to a different community of devotion did not come free of hardships. One had to show their ability to observe what the scholars in Benares

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prescribed and simultaneously deal with prominent members of the colonial elite. Occasionally, the latter had to be confronted on their own terms, as Ramoji did with his petitions to the crown. In other instances, Brahmans opted instead for a gentle push by engaging in courteous epistolary transactions with former viceroys living in Lisbon. That was Ajju Nayak and Khrisna Shenvi’s choice, as we will see in the next chapter.

Chapter 7

Familiar Letters and Letter Dissections

This chapter plunges into the lives of the Brahmans who worked as interpretertranslators for the Estado da Índia, closely examining some of the private correspondence they exchanged and the official documents they translated. A small but significant set of letters in Portuguese penned by two of these individuals roughly between 1628 and 1655 opens a window into how the indigenous línguas of Goa fostered ties with their notable patrons in Portugal. The micro-historical study of this tiny collection of personal papers allows us to make some sense of these interpreters’ world, their social networks, and personal aspirations. It also enables a better understanding of the means of circulating news and images about the Mogor and the Idalcão from India to Portugal. In the later part of the chapter, we shift from the línguas’ outer horizons to an appraisal of their artisan-like translation skills. Focusing on the technicalities of their work, the chapter reconstructs and reflects on the convoluted process of rendering a Persian letter into Portuguese in seventeenth-century Goa. Therein lies the key to how people who mastered several tongues simultaneously cared for their many hearts, to revisit Quintus Ennius’s metaphor and Vicente Mariner’s use of it from the previous chapter. The mining of the history of interpreter-translators in the service of the Estado entails skillful handling of the extant sources; despite their markedly transcultural profile, the Brahman línguas of Goa left a trace only in the Portuguese record. Yet it is possible to contrast diverse imperial angles, from viceroy to secretary to inquisitor. What is more, the words of the línguas can be heard, be it in the letters they penned, or in their annotations embedded in the documents they translated.

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Correspondence and Patronage around the Mogor and the Idalcão The core characters over the next few pages are Ajju Nayak, his son-in-law Krishna Shenvi, Dom Francisco da Gama, and his son Dom Vasco Luís da Gama (1612–1676). They had much in common with their contemporary Englishman James Howell (d. 1666), who was secretary, ambassador, writer, and royal historiographer to Charles II. In his Epistolae Ho-Elianae (Familiar Letters), dated 1645, Howell defined the extraordinary power of correspondence: Love is the life of Friendship, Letters are The life of Love, the Loadstones that by rare Attraction make Souls meet, and melt, and mix, As Mercury exalted Gold doth fix. ... They can the Cabinets of Kings unscrue, And hardest intricacies of State unclue; They can the Tartar tell, what the Mogor, Or the great Turk doth on the Asian shore.1 Having undertaken two round trips between Lisbon and Goa, Dom Francisco, the fourth Count of Vidigueira, would have considered himself a veteran traveler, another of Howell’s interests which he wrote about in his Instructions to Forraine Travell (1642). Dom Vasco, fifth Count of Vidigueira and first Marquis of Niza, never undertook such long voyages, but he was an ambassador, as was Howell. And even though neither father nor son were historians, they nurtured an active interest in history, particularly the history of the Portuguese Empire in Asia, which was also the history of the Gama family. With regards to Ajju Nayak and Krishna Shenvi, they spoke several different languages just like Howell, though not necessarily the same ones, and were both men of the pen. Had these four characters read the poetic preamble to the Familiar Letters, they would certainly have seen themselves in it. The letters they wrote succeeded in overcoming the distance between Lisbon and Goa and in making “souls meet, and melt, and mix.” Ajju Nayak and Krishna Shenvi “unclued” the “hardest intricacies of State” by recounting to Francisco da Gama and Vasco Luís da

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Gama what the Mogor was doing “on the Asian shore.” Unfortunately, the two Indian línguas do Estado did not speak much about themselves when they corresponded with the two Portuguese noblemen. They catered to their interlocutors’ interests as their writing is largely shaped by a patron-client relationship. The exchange of letters—in its many forms, uses, and motives encompassing a plurality of individuals, groups, and networks—constituted one of the key cultural phenomena of the early modern world, and is particularly well studied for Europe.2 It is important to understand how, in the context of a global culture of letter-writing, links were fostered between people separated by geography and culture, or how expressions of friendship (if often unequal) and trust operated at a distance among foreigners. Think of the personal ties forged in Qing Beijing between Korean ambassadors and Chinese scholars, which were fostered through correspondence thereafter.3 Broader spatial and civilizational divides could also be bridged, as the eighteenth-century exchange of commercial correspondence in specific Eurasian contexts shows.4 Our concern here is seventeenth-century cross-cultural political correspondence. Fragmented yet precious, the epistolary exchange that the two Shenvi Brahmans of Goa kept for roughly three decades (c. 1628–1655) with two Portuguese noblemen in Lisbon is quite revealing on several grounds. These documents display an interesting blending of European and Indo-Persian substance and style and, as we shall see, constituted a particular way of presenting the Mogor and the Idalcão in Portugal. Once back in the reino after a long and stormy second term as viceroy of the Estado (g. 1622–1628), Francisco da Gama began to receive letters from Ajju Nayak containing news from India. The full content of this correspondence is unknown today, but one may grasp its substance and tone from the brief letter of gratitude the Count of Vidigueira wrote from Lisbon on March 24, 1629, to his former Hindu interpreter in Goa: I have received your letters and was pleased to know that you are in good health. May God bless you with good health and the true knowledge that your soul needs. I was very pleased to see that your salary was dispatched. I have sent the request to His Majesty and written to some friends I have there [i.e., the Madrid court] so that the decision arrives here before the departure of these ships. Rest assured that I will help you with a good will in any way I can. Do send me every year and in detail good news about yourself and all the available news concerning the Estado and the neighboring kings, since I give great credit to the news you send me. I convey them to His Majesty because I know that

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they are accurate. I am in good health, thank God, and may He protect you as He can. Lisbon, 24 March 1629. The Count Admiral.5 It is highly plausible that Ajju Nayak and Francisco da Gama had exchanged letters prior to this one, specifically between the end of the Count of Vidigueira’s first tenure as viceroy (1600) and his return to India for a second term (1622) (Figure 10). Gama’s personal and professional lives changed quite a bit during those two decades, as he married the daughter of a future viceroy, Rui Lourenço de Távora (g. 1609–1612), and presided over the ephemeral Council of India (Conselho da Índia) between 1608 and its dissolution in 1614.6 The kind of information that circulated between India and Portugal in 1628–1629, penned by Ajju Nayak and read with interest by the fourth Count of Vidigueira, would have been of great use to this council. The early 1610s constituted a particularly significant moment, for Gama directed the Conselho da Índia from Lisbon at the same time that his father-in-law was governing the Estado da Índia from Goa, and both relied on the collaboration of Brahman interpreters. Unsurprisingly, Philip III conceded to Ajju Nayak a perpetual annual pension of 250 xerafins in 1612, considering “the many and special services” this “gentile living in those parts of India” had rendered; no doubt this was a royal grant bearing Gama and Távora’s imprint.7 The letter penned by Francisco da Gama from Lisbon in 1629 shows that his ties with Ajju Nayak had been woven in Goa in the closing years of the sixteenth century and were to endure until the end of the two men’s lives. The count admiral fought for a salary increase for his old Hindu friend by raising the issue with Philip IV in writing and simultaneously endeavoring to persuade his contacts in Madrid to hasten the process. Gama indeed supported Ajju Nayak, but, in exchange for his “good will,” Gama expected to receive “news of the Estado and of the neighboring kings” every year. His interest in the subject is unsurprising for someone who nurtured such long and intense personal, familial, and symbolic links with Portuguese Asia. The other uses—political, rather than intellectual—given by the Count of Vidigueira for such “news” can be largely inferred from his own words: Gama directed them to Madrid and sought to share privileged information on India with Philip IV. The count tried to make himself useful at court, surely as a means to alleviate his own political isolation, considering that he returned from India a discredited figure. We have here an intriguing patronage link, involving a polyglot Shenvi Brahman whose sustenance and influence in Goa depended to some extent on the favor of a great grandson of Vasco da Gama. The count, for his part, profited

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Figure 10. Dom Francisco da Gama (d. 1632), fourth Count of Vidigueira, thirty-first and forty-second viceroy of India (g. 1597–1600, 1622–1628), Pedro Barreto de Resende, Breve tratado ou epilogo de todos os visorreys que tem havido no estado da India. . . . 1635. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des Manuscrits, Portugais 1, f. 60r. Image courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

from his close relationship with the Hindu interpreter (and the privileged ethnopolitical information that such a relationship entailed) in his attempt to regain influence at court and rage against the twilight of his career. It was a mutually beneficial relationship, based on trust and embodied in the exchange of information for favor, and stands as an example of what an early modern social network looked like. As in many premodern societies, this case illustrates how “network and alliance-building” could be achieved “through the sharing of political information in private communication genres such as letters.”8 In addition, Krishna Shenvi’s letters to Gama constitute a significant mode, though one less valued than others, of knowledge diffusion concerning Mughal India to and in Europe. Ajju Nayak passed away on an uncertain date in the late 1620s and Krishna Shenvi, as we know, took over as língua do Estado. Besides securing his fatherin-law’s important post, Krishna also assumed the role of privileged interlocutor and informer to the Count of Vidigueira. This is reflected in the following letter sent to him by Dom Francisco da Gama in April 1631. “I have received your letter together with the account you have prepared about the situation of all the neighboring kings of that State. . . . Do inform me in minute detail every year about all

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that happens there because I am interested to know it. Keep working diligently and attentively so that the viceroys care to grant you rewards and ask the king to grant them to you. I will not fail to help you whenever possible. Do your best to imitate your father-in-law, who was a truly honored person. May God enlighten you and protect you as He can.”9 Krishna did in fact “imitate” his father-in-law by sending political reports to Francisco da Gama and hoping for favors in return. For his part, Gama, who pushed successfully in 1625–1626 with Philip IV for Krishna’s nomination to the position of língua do Estado, proceeded as before: he pledged his support and expected to receive annual news about “neighboring kings” in exchange. Yet, the fourth Count of Vidigueira was to die soon thereafter in Oropesa (in the outskirts of Toledo), on his way to Madrid and the court of Philip IV. When Gama passed away, in July 1632, Krishna Shenvi was in the early stages of his career. He could not afford to lose contacts and patronage in Lisbon, and so he continued to write and update the Gama family on all things Indian. From then on, in an attempt to replicate the relationship that for several decades associated Ajju Nayak with Dom Francisco, Krishna Shenvi corresponded with the latter’s only male child, Dom Vasco Luís. It was essentially a relationship of obligation, molded by the typical vocabulary of early modern Portuguese society—servant (criado), service (serviço), favor, or reward (mercê). Krishna’s letters reflect social and political hierarchy but are coy with regard to religious and ethnic distinction. Unlike his father and several of his ancestors, Dom Vasco Luís da Gama was not a veteran of India. He did not hold first-hand knowledge of Portuguese Asia, although, against his will, in 1649, he had been considered as successor to Viceroy Filipe de Mascarenhas (g. 1645–1651).10 Dom Vasco Luís instead opted for a European career, serving as Portuguese ambassador to France twice (1642–1646, 1647–1649) in the aftermath of the Restoration of 1640.11 Based in Paris, Dom Vasco Luís established a close relationship with the famed priest Dom Vicente Nogueira (d. 1654), who lived in Rome at the time. This association was accomplished entirely by means of letter exchange, since they never met in person.12 A polyglot, compulsive reader, and accomplished book dealer, Nogueira was one of the few Portuguese with a seat in the Republic of Letters, corresponding with people like Galileo Galilei, Nicolas Fabri de Peiresc, and Jacques-Auguste de Thou.13 The bibliophile devoted much time and enthusiasm to purchasing books and manuscripts destined for the Marquis of Niza’s collection. Nogueira helped make the library of the marquis the best in Portugal, even though we do not know exactly what the marquis read or how the library looked.14

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What was the place of Asia in the library? Did Krishna Shenvi’s letters have a place in his collection? We do know that Dom Vasco Luís purchased works which were at the center of lively debates between those in the Republic of Letters and that he fostered an interest in Oriental matters; he had books in Hebrew, “Chaldean, Arabic, Ethiopian, and the primeval [peregrinas] Oriental languages,” such as the ones Nogueira sent to him from Livorno in March 1648, even though he was unable to read them.15 The Marquis of Niza—who was also interested in chronology—another field of knowledge nurtured by many in the Republic of Letters—plainly wished to be associated with this European intellectual community.16 To the ancient and somewhat static Asia that gave such delight to antiquarians across early modern Europe, one should add another, more recent and livelier Asia. It formed part of the seventeenth-century Portuguese Empire and would have been on the marquis’s mind as a Restoration diplomat. Dom Vasco Luís had in his possession a manuscript volume solely devoted to the question of Ceylon and the threat posed by the VOC to the Portuguese on the island.17 He received information about Portuguese Asia and its European rivals from well-placed people, namely the merchant-adventurer Francisco Vieira de Figueiredo, who wrote to the marquis once from Makassar about English and Dutch pressure over Timor.18 Asia was not ignored in the letters exchanged between the Marquis of Niza and King John IV in the 1640s. Nevertheless, Brazil and West Africa understandably filled their correspondence at the height of the Dutch Atlantic.19 Regardless of geopolitical priorities, Dom Vasco Luís was able to combine professional obligation and ethnographic curiosity. His enthusiasm for a book “of the ceremonies of the Indians” of Brazil—a work prohibited in Portugal but purchased in the Low Countries by Nogueira for the marquis’s library20—parallels his interest in “the news from here [as novas de cá], concerning the stories [estórias] of the neighboring kings” which regularly arrived from India.21 A manuscript volume housed in the Torre do Tombo, Lisbon, and once in possession of Dom Vasco Luís da Gama, conveys a fair idea of the kind of manuscripts the library of the Marquis of Niza contained.22 The surviving letters and documents Krishna Shenvi and his father-in-law sent to Lisbon are included in this volume and coexist with an assortment of reports on Europe—surely stemming from the marquis’s diplomatic activity in Paris—and accounts (relações) on the Portuguese overseas empire, which stretched from the African Christian Kingdom of Kongo to the Burmese Buddhist Kingdom of Arakan.23 The fact that Krishna’s materials date from the mid-1650s poses some problems. Maybe the Hindu interpreter approached the Marquis of Niza in writing

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only after the latter’s return to Lisbon in 1649. But what if the língua do Estado began to correspond with Dom Vasco Luís as soon Dom Francisco’s death was known in Goa? Or did Krishna instead address him while he was in Paris as the Portuguese ambassador? We likewise do not know whether Dom Vasco Luís responded regularly, if at all, to Krishna; letters authored by the marquis, similar to the ones his father sent to Ajju Nayak, are not extant. Nevertheless, the few surviving documents seem to indicate a relatively prolonged and established interaction. Krishna’s letters were presumably received in Portugal around November, when the naus da Índia generally entered the port of Lisbon on their return trip, and the Marquis of Niza hurried to confirm the arrival of the cinnamon to which his family had held the rights since the time of his great-great-grandfather, Vasco da Gama.24 It is also uncertain whether the Marquis of Niza ever cared to discuss Krishna Shenvi’s pecuniary situation with John IV, especially since the marquis often took refuge in Vidigueira (in southern Portugal) and at times cultivated a distance from the court.25 Be that as it may, Krishna Shenvi sought to capitalize on Ajju Nayak’s ties with the fourth Count of Vidigueira to feign a familiarity with Dom Vasco Luís that he clearly did not enjoy. Krishna Shenvi began by sending copies of two letters penned by Dom Francisco da Gama dated 1629 and 1631 in order to introduce himself to the Marquis of Niza. The letters were preceded by the following comments: Copy of the letter that His Lord Count Dom Francisco da Gama, Count of Vidigueira and admiral of India who was twice viceroy of India, wrote to Ajju Nayak (Azunaique), former interpreter of the Estado da Índia and my father-in-law. ... Copy of the letter that the same Lord Count Admiral Dom Francisco da Gama wrote to me, Krishna Shenvi (Crisnasinay), his servant [criado] who now serves as interpreter of this State of India, when he, after being viceroy for the second time, left to that realm [i.e., Portugal].26 Immediately following the copy of the first letter, Krishna reminded his interlocutor of who Ajju Nayak was: “This Azunaique is my father-in-law, to whom the Lord Count Admiral, Your Excellency’s father, used to do many favors; and kindly consider the news that he used to dispatch, which were then sent to His Majesty.”27 These two letters additionally demonstrate that the Hindu interpreter preserved a small personal archive in his house in Goa. This was probably common

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practice among the línguas do Estado. Several decades later, in the 1730s and 1740s, Bahuguna Kamath’s house was likewise a small documentary space in Goa.28 Amongst other papers, Krishna kept copies of the correspondence that both he and his father-in-law exchanged with the Gama family, together with duplicates of official documents about the “neighboring kings,” whose originals were probably housed in the secretariat. For instance, Krishna sent to Dom Vasco Luís copies of his own Portuguese translations of some Persian farmans issued at the court of Bijapur. Obviously, these documents were meant for restricted circulation. They were to be read by the viceroy, later discussed in a State Council meeting in Goa, and on occasion sent to the king in Lisbon. Krishna, therefore, maintained and made use of a private archive where his personal correspondence intermixed with, and was simultaneously fed by, confidential materials originating from the main record room of the Estado. The Brahman, though, possessed a clear sense of the transgression he had committed and of the dangerous situation in which he had put himself through such a practice. Fearful of the possible consequences, he made clear recommendations to his patron: “kindly do not disclose my name, and reveal that I have sent these copies [treslados], nor show them to anyone. These are for your eyes only, and if people know about this, I will be in trouble here; therefore, on God’s mercy I ask you not to tell anyone. Once you have read these copies, destroy them and throw them away.”29 The copies whose unrestricted circulation worried Krishna so much consisted of Portuguese translations of four documents issued by the chancellery of Bijapur during the final months of 1654. Two were letters from Sultan Muhammad to Governor Brás de Castro. There is another copy of each of these letters, likewise translated by Krishna but sent to Lisbon through official channels.30 Alternative copies of the other two have not survived. This means that the língua do Estado kept copies of these documents for himself, transforming official papers that were supposed to be housed in the public archive into private ones. The first of these two consists of a farman from Muhammad to his officials concerning neighborly relations between Bijapur and the Estado. It had been brought from the ‘Adil Shahi court by the Jesuit emissary Gonçalo Martins and anticipated the agreement that the two states were to sign in March 1655.31 The other document corresponds to an undated letter addressed by Shah ’Abul Hasan, an Iranian at the court of Bijapur, to Castro.32 The way Krishna conceived and handled this set of papers shows that, for him, a proper account of the recent political interactions between the sultanate of Bijapur and the Estado da Índia implied recourse to original native documents. Yet these could only be “decrypted” and understood in Lisbon through

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his indispensable mediation work in Goa. It is Krishna who accesses, translates, and explains the documents in question. Krishna’s copies of these Bijapur farmans functioned as a kind of teaser, an “exotic” curiosity which enabled the Hindu interpreter to establish his authority vis-à-vis his Portuguese patron. Krishna did not efface himself in the process, as he left a visible imprint on the translated texts. Conscious of addressing someone who had little direct knowledge of India and its current sociopolitical landscape, the Brahman seeks to situate his interlocutor by providing Portuguese synonyms for terms and formulas which would sound strange in Lisbon: Carmaluco (Kar-i-Mulki) corresponds to “secretary of state,” while avaldar mor (havaldar) “means captain general and governor,” the interpreter observed. Krishna gave formão as the synonym of provisão, but there were terms, such as desai and saudagar (trader), which he neglected to explain. In the first letter he translated, Krishna added details that were not repeated in the following ones. Before delving into the document, he clarified that Muhammad ‘Adil Shah was “king of Bijapur and neighbor of the city of Goa.” Still in this document, and probably because it was the first one, Krishna decided to include the translation of the farman’s alqab and succinctly explained to Dom Vasco Luís da Gama the significance of those opening lines: “the courtesy is the customary one that this king’s father [i.e., Ibrahim II] used to write to the former viceroys and governors of this state, and he [i.e., Muhammad] does the same.”33 Krishna systematically provides the date according to both the Islamic and the Gregorian calendars on his documents. The língua do Estado was likewise keen on conveying information about formal aspects of the missives, such as “physiognomic traits” which his interlocutor could not otherwise perceive from a simple copy in Portuguese translation. For instance, in order to call attention to the seal of Bijapur’s ruler stamped on the farman dated November 3, 1654, the Hindu Brahman noted that “on the letter’s margin there is the seal [chapa] in Persian script [letra parçea].” Sometimes Krishna adjusted the form of these Islamic documents according to Portuguese epistolary conventions, rendering them more intelligible to someone like Dom Vasco. In his translation of the letter by Shah ’Abul Hasan, Krishna closes the text in the following manner: “May God increase the days of our friendship for many years.” This was a recognizable formula for those who exchanged letters in seventeenth-century Portugal, but it was unlikely to have been the form used by Shah ’Abul Hasan when addressing Governor Brás de Castro. Krishna makes his presence felt more strongly either through the inclusion of marginal notes or the addition of his own commentary following the

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translation. The translator guides the reader, stresses his key role as mediator, and endeavors to highlight his authority. This was Krishna’s strategy to reaffirm his ties with the Portuguese and Catholic worlds, to which he did not belong either by birth or by religious choice, as he established or reinforced trust with his interlocutor. By way of a postscript to one of the two farmans sent by Muhammad ‘Adil Shah to Brás de Castro, Krishna remarked: “this king writes the letter with much presumption and arrogance [muita ronca e soberba], as if he were addressing his ministers and subjects, and he shamefully asks for money and a present [sagoate].”34 In the same vein, Krishna concludes his transcription of the Portuguese version of Shah ’Abul Hasan’s letter with the following note for his interlocutor’s eyes: “May Your Excellency realize the petulance [parvesia] with which this Moor writes this letter; nowadays everyone treats the affairs of the State of India with less esteem.”35 On both occasions, Krishna chose to enter into direct dialogue with the Marquis of Niza and expressed himself like any Portuguese of the time. By portraying Sultan Muhammad as arrogant and a braggart, and by treating a notable member of the political elite of Bijapur—someone whom the interpreter had known for at least two decades—as a simple “Moor,” Krishna presumably sought to emulate his Portuguese patron’s mindset.36 Such an approach, however, went against the expected posture of a member of the Deccan’s “transcultural political elites.”37 Many Hindu Brahmans with Krishna’s profile worked at the ‘Adil Shahi court and were intimate with men like Shah ’Abul Hasan. Krishna was no Muslim, but his attitude equals that of the Fez-educated Yuhanna al-Asad (or Leo Africanus) who did not refrain from criticizing “the folly of Mucametto [Muhammad] in the Qur’an” in his Descrittione dell’Africa (1550). Natalie Zemon Davis interprets this unexpected phrase as a “concession to his godfather Egidio [da Viterbo] and his other masters.”38 Krishna might have been tempted to walk a similar path. Accustomed to dealing in India with Catholics, Hindus, and Muslims without religion impinging too much on his work, the Brahman decided for once to assume a distinctly religious discourse in order to better identify with his interlocutor in Portugal. Krishna Shenvi shipped to Lisbon more than just political papers concerning Bijapur; he also provided Dom Vasco Luís with short ethnographic reports about the “neighboring kings,” particularly the Mogor. The surviving sample shows how close these materials are to those we discussed in Chapter 4. In 1655, the Hindu interpreter dispatched to the Marquis of Niza a list of the formerly autonomous kingdoms that had been successively assimilated by the Mughal Empire. The list is preceded by a brief introductory letter concerning the “news from here, from

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India” (as novas de caa da India), which closes with the promise of more news “in the coming January of [1]656 if I live until then.” Krishna’s report lists the approximately thirty kingdoms that formed Mughal India at the end of Shahjahan’s reign and includes data on the military strength of each. Their martial power was expressed in the number (inflated, as Krishna rightly pointed out) of horses that each kingdom could mobilize. The língua goes on to discuss the military structure of the Mughal Empire, highlighting the secondary role of infantry—“the Mogores do not like footsoldiers”—and noting perceptively that each horse corresponded to a horseman (cavaleiro) and a couple of men, one of whom “carries the lance”: this small contingent they call a “complete” (inteiro) or “perfect” (perfeito) horse. Krishna elucidates that the stipend refers to the “complete horse,” not just to the horseman.39 His report further echoes, perhaps unintentionally, Shahjahan’s broad territorial ambitions. In fact, the Hindu interpreter lists Qandahar and Badakhshan as imperial domains, when, despite the emperor’s efforts, neither was part of Mughal India in the 1650s.40 Otherwise, Krishna stresses the inevitability of a Pax Mughalica in the Indian Peninsula by stating that “nowadays there is not a single king here who wages war against the Mughal king, the emperor, as they have all been seized; and some of the remaining ones, numbering seven or eight, are small kingdoms, like the Idalxá and the Cotoboxá . . . and are not able to maintain such large quantities of horses.”41 The correspondence between Krishna Shenvi and Dom Vasco Luís da Gama—fed by descriptions of the political and military canvas of Shahjahan’s empire as well as by farmans from the chancellery of Sultan Muhammad ‘Adil Shah—is of utmost significance. Krishna was a Hindu Brahman who reconciled the figure of the interpreter-translator with that of the news writer, thus embodying the association of bureaucratic work and textual production. Such a combination, as we know, was customary in South Asia and rather vibrant in Hindustan.42 What the city of Goa and people like him brought to the picture was one idiom—Portuguese—and a flavor of the political and literary cultures the language itself carried. In this particular case, the transmission of political information and cultural imagery from India to Portugal was cloaked in the conventions of early modern European epistolary culture or, to put it simply, in the simulated conversation between two individuals through paper. Conversation, the relevance of which has been explored in Chapters 2 and 3, seems to secure here the serene transformation of political information, essentially tailored for restricted circulation, into entertainment, potentially meant for a larger audience.43 This is not very different from seventeenth-century Japan, with information on the nation ceasing to be an exclusive tool of governance and

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becoming a source of instruction and distraction as well.44 One can also draw a parallel with the Republic of Venice, where politics and recreation were often interrelated.45 The phrase with which Krishna concludes his report on Shahjahan’s India in 1655 is rather telling in this regard: “Since Your Excellency is a rather curious person, who, like His Lordship the count, Your father, very much wishes to learn the news from here concerning the stories of the neighboring kings, I wrote this truthful account [relação] as a service.”46 Compiled with “truth” and as “service,” the “stories of the neighboring kings” (estórias dos reis vizinhos) were thus recounted to satisfy the curiosity of people living thousands of miles away. These pieces mirrored political and cultural allegiance and substantiated the bonds (personal, material) between the one who narrates and the one who reads. They contributed to shaping a network of sociability and patronage between men who, in the particular case of Krishna Shenvi and Dom Vasco Luís da Gama, never met in the flesh. In addition, such texts represent a singular way of making the Mogor and the Idalxá travel to Europe. We are far removed from the abundant and rich materials penned by the dragomans of Istanbul and the impact this corpus attained regarding the European image of the Ottomans.47 But the fragments of political ethnography of India penned or collated by Ajju Nayak and Krishna Shenvi remind us that early modern European views on the Mughals were variegated as far as sources, actors, content, medium, and audience are concerned. Think of the intriguing trajectory of a tale recounted by Jerónimo Xavier in his Tratado da Corte e Caza de Iamguir Pachá Rey dos Mogores. The missionary refers to a house covered with gold and emeralds left unfinished in Agra despite Akbar’s efforts to complete it, and yet the building is fictional and the Jesuit’s vignette totally unique.48 Be that as it may, the Portuguese writer Francisco Rodrigues Lobo picked up the story somewhere and used it in his 1619 manual on courtly etiquette to express disapproval of the chivalric romance and ultimately to elaborate on the dividing line between “real stories” (historias verdadeiras) and “disproportionated lies” (patranhas desproporcionadas).49 Not everything came down to famed travelers like François Bernier and the widely known accounts they produced. But the two worlds may have not been that distant in certain respects. One can argue that, in essence, the epistolary exchanges between the Shenvi Brahmans of Goa and their Portuguese noble friends in Lisbon are not too different from the way in which, say, Pietro Della Valle (d. 1652) communicated in Europe what he experienced in Turkey, Persia, and India. The Roman noble opted to write fifty-four lettere familiari—similar to James Howell’s compendium of Familiar Letters with which we opened this

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chapter—and to dispatch them to his old friend Mario Schipano in Naples.50 Besides being contemporaries, Krishna Shenvi, Pietro Della Valle, and James Howell shared something else in common: the familiar letter.51

“Untangling” the Persian to “Build” the Portuguese Krishna Shenvi and the other interpreters of Goa worked fast. They could translate a document within the same day, probably pressed by their employers to adjust work speed to political urgency. On the night of September 5, 1655, for instance, the Count of Sarzedas had in his hands the Portuguese version of a Persian letter arrived that very afternoon from the sultan of Bijapur.52 Typically, it did not take more than three or four days after receiving a letter in Persian in the Fortress Palace to answer its sender. Take the correspondence between the Count of Linhares and Shahjahan’s representative to the ‘Adil Shahi court as an example. A letter from the Mughal ambassador had arrived in Goa on June 1, 1630; the viceroy’s response, presumably in Persian, was ready to be dispatched on June 4.53 Speed, nonetheless, should not be mistaken for ease. At least from the 1620s until the 1660s, the interpreter of the Estado worked in collaboration with the “translator of the Persian script” (tresladador de letra pársia) whenever Persian documents needed to be rendered into Portuguese. Catholic Goa resorted to Muslim men of letters (Iranians? Indian Muslims?) to this end for almost half a century, apparently without religious difference weighing much. Sadly, these tresladadores left very little trace in the Portuguese record. In 1625–1626, salary payments were registered to one Mulla Da’ud, but we wonder how he had been recruited, for how long he served in this capacity, and whether he was the first with such a profile to fill the role.54 Mulla Da’ud was likely replaced by one Mulla Mu’inuddin, who seems to have worked for the Estado between at least the 1650s and 1666–1667.55 Were these two men family or connected in any other way? With Mulla Mu’inuddin’s passing in the late 1660s, as we saw in the last chapter, the Hindu Brahmans who had until then served exclusively as línguas do Estado also started to act as tresladadores da letra parçia. Narayana Shenvi and Vitoji Shenvi are cases in point. But the question remains: where did Narayana and Vitoji, among others, acquire their command of Persian script? In Goa, trained by the very Muslim men of letters they eventually replaced? In the madrasas of Bijapur? Regardless of how they learned it and to what level, they seem to have been following in the footsteps of the Hindus instructed by Iranians in Mughal India from the time of Akbar.56

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As early as 1658, Narayana Shenvi replaced Mulla Mu’inuddin in the translation of a bilingual farman (Persian and Marathi) from the sultan of Bijapur. In this particular case, Narayana Shenvi worked together with Krishna Shenvi by “reading” (lendo) and “untangling” (destrinçando) the document that his father– in-law wrote down (tresladou) in Portuguese.57 But the next year it was Narayana who put a letter from Sultan ‘Ali II on paper in Portuguese, a document initially “read” and “untangled” by Mulla Mu’inuddin.58 We may therefore conclude that Narayana’s proficiency in Persian was higher than Krishna’s, but evidently poorer than Mulla Mu’inuddin’s. In fact, Krishna Shenvi does not seem to have attained mastery of written Persian, since he depended on Mulla Mu’inuddin to prepare the Portuguese versions of letters from the Deccan sultans received in Goa. Mulla Mu’inuddin verbally communicated to Krishna—either in Persian or in another language they possibly had in common—the content of any document. The Hindu interpreter then translated it into Portuguese, either composing the translation himself or dictating it to a clerk, if not to the secretary of the Estado. The translation was usually signed jointly by Krishna in “Portuguese script” (letra Portuguesa) and by Mulla Mu’inuddin in Persian characters as evidence of their collaborative work and shared responsibility. It was a complex process that required two (or three) people, two (possibly three) languages, and two scripts. Krishna felt the need to explain at the end of each translated document the method employed: a Persian letter was “read” (lida), “explained” (esplicada), and “untangled” (distrinçada) by the tresladador da letra parsia before the língua do Estado wrote it down (tresladar) in Portuguese.59 As the secretary of the Estado remarked when describing how a Persian letter from Emperor Aurangzeb to Viceroy Alvor was transformed into a Portuguese one, the translation was prepared in his presence by the (unnamed) língua do Estado together with a translator of Persian (also unnamed), who “was gradually building it” (a hia construindo).60 The employment of the gerund precisely communicates slow progress and maturation. The língua Baltasar Pacheco made use of the same technique in the 1570s, even though he could not then rely on the collaboration of someone acquainted with written Persian. The translation of a letter from Sultan ‘Ali to Governor António Moniz Barreto entailed several steps: the document “was read” (by Bijapur’s ambassador? His interpreter?) “before Baltasar Pacheco, língua of this State, who then declaimed [declarou] it in the Portuguese language . . . which I, Mateus Pires, secretary of this State, copied [tresladei].”61 This practice was likewise adopted in other areas of the Portuguese Empire, such as North Africa, where officials commonly handled documents written in Arabic. A letter from

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the king of Fez arrived in Tangiers on January 5, 1610. The local captain, Nuno Mendonça, “summoned a Moor to read it, and to me, the língua, he asked to declare what the Moor was saying in his language.” The língua was a Portuguese named Afonso Fernandes, the author of a brief diary written in Tangiers between 1599 and 1610. Fernandes’s command of written Arabic was, as he confessed, deficient: “of that script I could read some words, but not all, since the letters of the Moors are rather difficult to understand.” The collaboration of the unnamed “Moor” was therefore key.62 Similar to Afonso Fernandes and Baltasar Pacheco, the translational practice of Hindu interpreters and Muslim translators in Goa relied on the constant interplay of the oral and the written. The extant Portuguese translations of chancellery documents originally penned in Persian by munshis of the Mughal and ‘Adil Shahi courts are the visible expressions of a presumably intricate conversation, a discussion about the choice of words and their meanings among professionals with different but converging expertise. The several individuals involved in the translation, the simultaneous use of various languages and scripts, and the fertile intersection of the spoken and written word point toward multiple levels of mediation with regard to the process of turning Persian into Portuguese. As Ronit Ricci reminds us, a text (the interlinear text, in her research, which we unfortunately lack in ours) is a “a world of intent and priorities, of a transfer of meaning, of grammar and syntax in translation, of choices and debates.”63 Still, the way in which Krishna Shenvi and Mulla Mu’inuddin partnered up in the 1650s to render Persian documents into Portuguese was not always the rule. A totally different picture emerges from a few Mughal epistles translated in Goa under the supervision of Secretary Luís Gonçalves Cotta in early 1683, namely a letter from Emperor Aurangzeb to Viceroy Alvor and two letters by unnamed high imperial officials. In this case, we do not have the actual documents, but the written record of the fascinating discussions held around their translation survives. A first translation of the emperor’s letter was prepared by the língua do Estado with the help of someone who had mastered written Persian. It was then copied by the secretary and sent out to the viceroy on January 31, together with the original text. Still, Cotta was unsure about the result and decided to ask an Augustinian missionary, who found himself in Goa but lived in Delhi and knew the language, to assess the translation.64 Two days later, the secretary of the Estado opted to convene a collective, somewhat informal, translation session at his house instead of conferring with the priest about the extant translation. Four people attended: Cotta, who coordinated the session but had no expertise in Persian; Fr. Manuel de Jesus, the Augustinian in question; the

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celebrated Venetian Nicolò Manucci (d. around 1720); and the ambassador of Aurangzeb who had brought the letter.65 The participants worked all day translating three documents. Around noon, or “dinnertime,” they had finished rendering the letters from the two Mughal nobles into Portuguese, but the meeting continued until ten in the evening, presumably due to the need to translate the imperial epistle—no doubt a more sensitive text—a second time. A preliminary draft (borrão) of the new Portuguese version of this document was put on paper by the secretary himself and dispatched the next day to the viceroy. However, predicting his superior’s frustration with the outcome, Cotta preemptively cautioned: “every time one revises [it], one will find something to add, or correct; considering the style of the letter, much study and labor [muito estudo e aplicação] is needed in order to understand it.”66 Alvor was in fact displeased with the text(s) he received and reacted the same day: “Given the variety of these translations, one cannot grasp with clarity what the letter contains. Either the letter is so obscure, to the point of not permitting itself to be read [que não deixa entenderçe], or the translators have less knowledge of the language than we assume. At any rate, we need the ambassador’s version.”67 The exchange of written messages between the two about this subject was to continue, with the secretary replying firmly that same day: We finished at dinnertime the translation of the two letters from the favorites [validos] of the Mughal king, which I have sent to Your Excellency already in clean versions. May Your Excellency rest assured that, judging from how they explain themselves, the translators show expertise [mostrão sciencia] in the language. I told the ambassador that Your Excellency wanted the translation to be done by him. He answered that if he were to do it in the language of Hindustan [na lingua Industão, i.e., Hindi], [the language] would not accommodate words similar to those of the Persian language. [He further said] that the translation of all the letters was truthful and according to the originals. To that effect, he asked Fr. Manuel de Jesus to read the translations he had prepared from our language to Persian, and said they could not be better and that he himself would sign the translations. I therefore assume there is nothing more to be done in this respect. In case Your Excellency wishes Fr. Manuel de Jesus to come to your presence, Your Excellency will be able to listen to his reasons and I believe Your Excellency will be satisfied.68

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Aurangzeb’s convoluted Persian letter and the great pains people took to translate it in Goa, combined with the last excerpt of the secretary’s message to the viceroy, raise fascinating questions. The second translation of the imperial epistle was prepared without any Hindu or Muslim linguists at the secretary’s desk. Instead, we identify a Catholic missionary with a presumably solid knowledge of spoken and written Persian and a seasoned Italian traveler-adventurer who, however, remained silent (or unheard) during the course of events. The active consensual involvement of the Mughal ambassador in the translation process recalls similar cases explored in Chapter 5, namely the letters exchanged between the Estado da Índia and the sultanate of Bijapur in the 1630s and 1640s that were woven jointly across the border by Portuguese and ‘Adil Shahi officials without consideration of religious, political, and cultural barriers. These collaborative ventures suggest the need for deeper reflection about the linguistic debate held in the secretary’s house on February 2, 1683, and the translation method pursued during the day-long meeting. Curiously enough, the viceroy considered the ambassador’s views key to decoding the letter, and eventually gave him the power to solve the riddle. But the Mughal courtier adopted a prudent stance and did not question what the group had accomplished. Regarding language expertise, he obviously could not correlate Portuguese, which he ignored, and Persian. So, he drew a parallel between Persian and Hindi in order to declare the insufficiencies of the latter idiom and ultimately to establish the difficulty of rendering Persian words into any other language. Simultaneously, with a view to convincing the viceroy of the translations’ accuracy, the Mughal ambassador engaged the Augustinian missionary in an intriguing exercise of retroversion: Fr. Manuel de Jesus was asked to read the Portuguese translations of the Mughal letters and say them loud in Persian so that the ambassador could compare the priest’s oral version with the originals’ written content. Regardless of the competence of those involved, the work sessions described above show that the Estado’s translational structures and practices were not monolithic and could vary according to time and occasion. This episode shows that viceroys and secretaries did not always trust the work of their línguas and tresladadores and were ready to explore alternatives in such instances. These other options allowed room for improvisation and informality, to the point of including the “political other”—Aurangzeb’s ambassador in this case—in the process. To translate Persian into Portuguese, and vice versa, was a collective endeavor that could go as far as asking “them” to collaborate with “us.” It was acknowledged as an arduous and time-consuming task, one that required “much

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labor and study,” to borrow Cotta’s own words. The result was not necessarily defined by its exactness, for different versions could be equally legitimate. For his part, Krishna Shenvi did not have any doubts concerning the “purity” of his collaborative work with Mulla Mu’inuddin. Their translations, he remarked, were made “faithfully without adding or cutting a single thing.”69 But how did he specifically approach the documents that regularly arrived in Goa from the Mughal chancellery and the Bijapur court? The analysis of a small collection of farmans rendered into Portuguese in the mid-1650s helps us to understand the mechanics of translation and allows us to better grasp the professional skills and actions of a língua do Estado. Krishna’s voice is seldom heard in these translations. To render the salutations at the opening and closing of a letter in Portuguese, the língua do Estado did not opt for a literal translation of the original followed by his own “decryption” of what they could possibly mean. He chose instead to adapt well-known formulaic sentences, like “may our God protect Your Excellency, as I wish” or “may God enlighten Your Lordship in his divine grace.”70 Indeed, these and similar phrases could be easily recognized by those in the Fortress Palace. Contrary to his treatment of the Persian documents he sent to Vasco Luís da Gama, Krishna neither translated words like formão and avaldar nor saw the need to elaborate on their meanings. He surely knew that such terms were familiar to any Portuguese official in Goa accustomed to dealing with Bijapur. He did provide rough Portuguese equivalents of the alqab without noting what it consisted of, whereas his translations for the Marquis of Niza included an explanation about the role of such an epistolary device. Krishna Shenvi, therefore, had two faces as a língua. When translating for his Portuguese patron, he made his presence felt throughout the document as cultural broker. But when working for the Estado, Krishna opted for self-effacement; his purpose was “to voice the source as transparently as possible, fully assimilating the sultan’s perspective to his own.”71 Krishna’s invisibility, however, is often interrupted in the final lines of a farman, when registering the document’s date. The Hindu Brahman systematically follows the original document and renders the date according to the Islamic lunar calendar, but also provides the equivalent of the “era of the Moors” (era dos mouros) in the Gregorian calendar. Krishna thus knew how to calculate the correspondence between the two calendars, as certified by a note from his own hand at the end of a farman whose precise date gave him particular trouble.72 The interpreter of the Estado da Índia was also an interpreter of chronologies, someone expected to handle the time computations of different cultural

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zones. Krishna, a Hindu, made the Islamic lunar calendar intelligible to those who used the Gregorian calendar (or “Portuguese” calendar, as he often called it), even though he followed neither of these calendars himself. People like him were prepared to handle documents even with additional dating systems. The anonymous interpreter in charge of bridging gaps (linguistic, cultural) during the 1617 negotiations between Goa and Ahmadnagar about the “borderline” dividing Lower Chaul (the Portuguese-controlled Chaul de Baixo) from Upper Chaul (Chaul de Cima) managed to compute time according to three different systems: the Islamic calendar, the Shaka era, and the Gregorian calendar. The discussions started “on the twenty nine of the moon of the month Jumada I [ Jamaladicar] of the Moors, and the first of the month Ashadha [Asar] of the Gentiles, which according to our calculations corresponds to 16 June of the year 1617.”73 More than a century later, some of the Maratha papers translated by the língua do Estado Bahuguna Kamath show his mastery of four calendars; besides the “Moors’ era,” the “Portuguese date,” and the Shaka era, he was also acquainted with the Suhur era, the dating system used in Maratha bureaucracy.74 The inclusion of all dating systems at play in documents generated in multicultural scenarios was perhaps a wise thing to do. As we shall see in the next chapter, calendars could be a sensitive matter across premodern societies.

Chapter 8

“With the Letters Inserted Like Seed Pearls” Epistolary Performances

Kingly Holograms “With the letters inserted like seed pearls.” Thus spoke Muhammad ‘Adil Shah at his court on 23 Rabi‘al-Awwal 1064, the equivalent in the Islamic lunar calendar to March 13, 1654. Soon after, on March 29, these words echoed in Goa in Portuguese: com as letras enxerridas como aljofres. The expression is part of a letter written “with love” (escreuo esta com amor) by the Sultan of Bijapur to Governor of the Estado da Índia, Dom Brás de Castro, and suggests how the letter itself was composed.1 The document constitutes a highly representative example from the Indo-Persian archive of Goa. Translated from Persian by Krishna Shenvi and Mulla Da’ud, Muhammad’s letter, as with his other correspondence, was inserted into one of the livros das monções.2 The Persian original is not extant and we are thus unable to listen to the sultan’s “real” voice. Equally untraceable are the challenges that the translation placed before the língua and the tresladador, namely the discussions that eventually led them to opt for this particular rendering of Muhammad’s words. Regardless of the idioms and persons that might have altered the sultan’s letter once it arrived in the paper palace of Goa, the poetic appeal of this phrase in Portuguese directs us to the mind of the skilled secretary—surely a master of epistolography (insha’)—who penned it. For this invisible munshi, his ruler’s epistle was made of letters woven into one another until they formed words and, eventually, a text, just as a cord of seed pearls turns into a necklace.

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In the last chapters of this book, we move onto the performance of communication between the Estado da Índia, on the one hand, and the Mughal Empire and the sultanates of the western Deccan, on the other. The focus is on the political and social effects of a supposedly rather mundane object: a piece of paper. Meet the farman, or royal edict, the textual artifact which contributed the most to conveying political authority and shaping power relations in premodern Islamic societies.3 Indeed, potent words were inscribed in the documents at the core of our study. Obviously, our interest lies in farmans and similar epistles composed in the Mughal and Deccan chancelleries directed to, or about the Portuguese. To be precise, the letter from Muhammad to Castro quoted above is not a farman, but, like so many other Indo-Persian missives addressed to the viceroys and governors of the Estado da Índia, it adopts the style of such a decree. The farman constituted a privileged site of performance, its very content being highly ritualized, shaped by formulaic but meaningful language. Political tropes and religious ideas were conveyed through a broad range of metaphors and stylistic tools. This is how the ruler communicated in writing with subjects and strangers, the effectiveness of his message tied to the richness of the rhetorical apparatus deployed. Occasionally, the king would write the letter himself, or otherwise dictate it.4 The norm, however, was to have it drafted by one of the munshis in his service, conversant as they were with a plethora of conventional formulas included in the several insha’ manuals in circulation across the PersoIslamic world.5 The numerous collections of Mughal letters available—Abu’l Fazl’s being one of them—testify to these secretaries’ professional talents and intellectual labor.6 The performative qualities of a farman, though, rested on more than the munshi’s ability to interlace words and thus build the sovereign’s discourse. It likewise depended on the document’s design, materiality, and transmission, especially on the traces left in it by the many imperial functionaries who had a role in its issuing, folding, and locking. Special marks by the ruler himself, like a mention of his presence as the farman was being drafted, an inscription from his own hand, or the actual impression of his hand (panja), were of particular significance. Equally relevant was the farman’s acceptance, for its delivery represented a civic ritual aimed at coining visually an uneven, hierarchical relationship between two men. The king’s words on paper equaled the king’s physical presence. The farman was like the projection of the sovereign, a weaponized object designed to interact directly or indirectly with people and to elicit emotions. In the next pages, we examine the powers of the farman in Portuguese and Jesuit contexts. The present chapter begins by broadly addressing the topic,

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both historically and historiographically: what farmans were and meant, especially in early modern cross-cultural settings, and what scholars make of them today. It goes on to offer an in-depth study of how the officials of Portuguese India and priests in Mughal India viewed, handled, and sometimes twisted these royal orders. The chapter that follows consists of a tightly intertwined analysis of two ceremonies at which Indo-Persian farmans were accepted in Goa in 1630 and 1653. This micro-perspective will enable us to shed light on how “Moorish” mandates affirmed authority among Christians through ritual but might also be contested in ingenious ways. The exploration of these epistolary performances calls for a broader consideration of how Europeans in India perceived farmans and other royal letters. For the East India Companies, Mughal decrees primarily translated into commercial advantages and exemptions. The English EIC, Philip Stern has argued, envisioned such documents “as somewhat analogous to English charters and patents.”7 Its officials raced for imperial farmans and prided themselves on their ability to obtain several in a few months, as Richard Davidge, the chief factor at Agra, did in 1650.8 Yet such pieces of paper were hard to earn, subject as they were to suitable political connections, unpredictable personal moods, and numerous administrative procedures. Think of the Dutch, who likewise eagerly sought out these documents, and particularly of their successful but laborious attempts to obtain some farmans from Shahjahan, as recorded almost daily at the Mughal court between early June and early August 1648 by Joan Tack.9 It thus comes with no surprise that these Mughal papers were commented on, exhibited, translated, and ultimately preserved. European archives hold collections of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Indo-Persian royal orders, often comprising the original text and an English or Dutch translation.10 The VOC secured copies and Dutch versions of farmans issued for the benefit of the EIC and vice versa. All parties tried to be aware of the concessions granted to their competitors, comparing conditions and surveying precedents. It was surely for this reason that Warren Hastings, the first governor-general of Bengal (g. 1772– 1785), assembled the Persian texts and English copies of the “Firmans granted to the Dutch East India Company, 17th and 18th century.”11 And it is no coincidence that, amongst a few other “Mughal-Portuguese” documents in translation dated from 1630, the VOC archives hold the Dutch version of a farman by Shahjahan to the viceroy of the Estado da Índia that we will examine in the next chapter.12 Curiously enough, the Jesuits had a similar thirst for Mughal farmans. Obviously, their agenda was religious rather than commercial, but ultimately everything came down to securing imperial privileges.13 For the Estado da Índia, though, it

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was the opposite: most imperial farmans and similar letters addressed to the viceroys and other officials contained political commands, not business benefits. Still, there is no room here for an essentialist argument, namely to interpret the plurality of Western views on Mughal farmans according to a strict divide between European corporations concerned with trade and European states focused on political matters. The English, for instance, saw much beyond the “basic” commercial farman and valued the exchange of “high” royal correspondence with Mughal emperors, among several other Asian rulers, by paying close attention to the ritual components of such epistolary transactions.14 They were well aware that “the power of the monarch is textual,” as Mel Evans has shown for the Tudors and, mutatis mutandis, for the European monarchies of the period.15 Two important distinctions need to be made here. The first rests on the difference between minor Mughal decrees—ones dealing with commercial and religious affairs, granted respectively to the Companies’ officials and the Society’s members—and major imperial letters addressed to other Islamic rulers or European kings and viceroys. To draw a parallel with Safavid Iran, we are on safe ground when affirming that the former documents “were not considered ideal forums necessarily for fully fledged discursive enterprises,” whereas letters like, say, the one Akbar addressed to Philip II in 1582 (through Abu’l Fazl’s pen) were.16 The second dissimilarity concerns the reception of a farman. In contrast to the missives they dispatched to their Islamic neighbors, which were accompanied by ambassadors and large retinues, Mughal emperors had no way to scrutinize how European rulers reacted to their words on paper, if at all (Philip II never read Akbar’s letter). And yet, unlike the other European powers with a foot in Mughal India, the Portuguese held some ground in western India and had a capital city within reach where their king lived through the figure of a viceroy. The political intent and visual impact of a farman delivered to the latter in Goa was well beyond that of a decree handed to a Company official at the imperial court. The appropriate comparison is thus not between the Portuguese and the Dutch or the English, but rather between the Estado da Índia and, say, Bijapur; in the mind of a Mughal envoy, to ceremoniously convey an imperial letter to the ‘Adil Shahi ruler or to the Portuguese viceroy in their respective courts probably made little difference. What is at stake in this chapter does not entirely conform to the superb work by successive generations of scholars who have assembled, published, and studied farmans from Mughal India, as well as from coeval Islamic political formations stretching from Istanbul to Bukhara. Many among these specialists have privileged the field of diplomatics and therefore centered their analyses on style

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and script, typologies and classifications, elements and themes.17 Others have resorted to farmans in order to engage with a relevant set of historical topics, from imperial fiscal administration to the Mughals’ diplomatic interactions with their neighbor states.18 Unfortunately, the historians who, from the late John Richards to Azfar Moin and several others, have artfully explored a wide range of sources in order to study Mughal imperial ideology have not considered the discursive power of epistolary texts produced by the Mughal chancellery in the same way that Colin Mitchell did for the Safavids.19 We seek to follow a different path, one in line with the nature of the sources at hand. The documentary basis of the present chapter consists mainly of coeval Portuguese translations of Mughal and Deccani farmans and other letters whose Persian originals, for the most part, are not extant. Obviously, these are problematic materials, since they simultaneously mirror and conceal varied processes of linguistic rendition and cultural adaptation. An initial assessment by a true expert of Mughal India would likely label these texts as translations of little or no use. And they would be right, to an extent. What can one make, for instance, of the Portuguese copy of a letter dated April 3, 1615, and sent by Muqarrab Khan, the mutasaddi of Surat, to the chief chancellor of the Estado da Índia? Ideally, this and other letters dispatched to Goa by imperial officials from Gujarat could contribute, if obliquely, to a better understanding of how Mughal provincial chancelleries operated.20 However, this version of Muqarrab Khan’s letter bears no features of a Persian letter; it is a purely Portuguese and Christian text with little plausible resemblance to the lost original. Disclosed by the chronicler António Bocarro, the document is said to have arrived in the capital of the Estado already translated, either by a Portuguese captive or a Jesuit priest. Bocarro further notes that the letter exhibited the name of Jesus and the sign of the cross at the top, “all according to our custom.”21 This means that either the translator “defaced” the Persian text in Surat or the chronicler heavily adapted the translator’s work in Goa. This is a fantastical document, to be sure, but not one deprived of historical significance. By looking more closely at the overall corpus, the same Mughal specialist would surely lament the absence of the Persian originals, and thus the impossibility of comparing versions and gauging the exactitude of the Portuguese copies. Emphasis would be put on the “authentication” of the existing document, or on rescuing the Persian original from its translation by peeling away the Portuguese skin. This is exactly what Denison Ross did more than a century ago, in 1911, when preparing for publication the available abstracts in English of the Persian correspondence exchanged between “Indian rulers and notables” and EIC

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officials between 1759 and 1793. In order to overcome the absence of the original texts, Ross assigned the materials in question to Maulavi Zarif Muhammad, one of the members of his team at the Imperial Record Department, considering his “knowledge of the Persian language and the Munshi style.”22 The strategy adopted was recuperative, rather than interpretative. Obviously, hidden factors at play when dealing with European versions (either full or summarized) of a Persian text—namely the translator’s possible intent or his patron’s agenda— were not of concern in the early twentieth century, “accuracy” was. A farman was not made to be translated, but rather to be read and circulated in an idiom—a linguistic and political one—that both the sender and the receiver mastered. True, some Mughal farmans were bilingual and written in other scripts, even if their original Persian drafts probably remained in the imperial chancellery. However, Portuguese, Dutch, or English translations of Indo-Persian farmans were not a political concession from the senders, but rather a cultural construct by the recipients. Considered from the chancellery of an Islamic state of the subcontinent, these translations were anomalies. And yet, for the modern historian they represent a novel and intriguing document genre. Challenges are opportunities, and the interest of such papers lies in their improbability. Once we engage with the translated texts per se and follow their lives between distinct societies, interesting research directions emerge. One option is to undertake a thorough textual and linguistic analysis of these unexpected documents (but without struggling to attain the purity of the originals) in order to understand whether they mirror, consciously or not, Perso-Islamic ideologies of rule in Portuguese. Another possible path represents the reverse side of this coin. It consists of identifying, through the Portuguese translation or description of a farman, those components, signs, phrases, and words presumably extant in the original text which were valued, queried, altered, or erased with an eye to preserving the political and religious supremacy of the receiver. From performances within the text, one can move toward performances with the text, studying the battles of authority around the ritual reception of an Indo-Persian farman in Portuguese territory. To examine farmans along the two latter lines of enquiry entails a conversation with diverse but interrelated disciplinary fields. Surprisingly, they are all quite distant from the available work on the royal letter as a power tool in the three last Islamic empires. As they traveled from Mughal India or the western Deccan to Portuguese Goa (some eventually to Lisbon and Madrid) or Catholic Rome, farmans traversed several cultural frontiers and were thus exposed to different “regimes of value.”23 I seek to engage with the thriving scholarship

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on the history of things, even if the research on the material culture of the early modern period has paid little attention to books as objects, let alone singlesheet documents.24 This leads to the materiality of the letter, a subject that goes beyond the classical approach offered by diplomatics to focus on discourses, uses, and exchanges enmeshed in, or provoked by, the letter.25 Furthermore, the visual and  tactile farman sparked passions across emotional regimes. By considering the agency of the farman, that is, its ability to shape social relations and political behaviors when displayed and delivered, this chapter speaks not only to the history of emotions, but also to theater studies and literary history, whose scholars have proved attentive to theatrical documents and staged books mainly in the context of early modern England.26

The Power of “Papers with Ink” The Jesuits at Akbar’s court were the first Europeans to deal consistently with documents produced by the Mughal chancellery. A good number of the surviving Portuguese versions of farmans and other imperial letters were prepared by the priests themselves and come to us enmeshed in Jesuit written materials. These missionaries-cum-translators often discussed the travails of learning Persian while also commenting on the language’s beauty, preeminence, and quasiuntranslatability. The Jesuit responsible for the Italian translation of a letter from the Armenian Mirza Zulqarnain to the superior general in Rome—Francesco Corsi, in all likelihood—thought precisely so. Zulqarnain’s letter, the Jesuit remarked, “was translated from the Persian language as best as was possible, because it sounds quite beautiful and rather elegant in its original idiom.”27 The compliment was not essentially one from a dazzled, acculturated European, for in the previous chapter we have seen an ambassador from Aurangzeb practically admitting in Goa that Hindi ranked lower than Persian. Most of the imperial orders that exist exclusively as Portuguese copies refer to the Jesuit missions of Mughal India and date mainly from Akbar’s time.28 Some farmans from Jahangir, also on religious affairs, could be added to this small corpus, but their translations, with one exception, did not survive or otherwise have not been located.29 Shahjahan kept the Catholic missionaries at bay, so his reign generated less documents of this sort. Still, we count on a 1635 farman, both in its Persian original and in a contemporary Portuguese translation, through which the emperor assured protection to Jesuit property in Agra and freedom of religion to local Christians.30 The Mughal documents referred to

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so far can be inscribed in the category of faramin-i-sultani, edicts of a political nature addressed to a broad spectrum of persons. They specifically belong to a type known as farman-i-mulki-va-mali, orders directed to subadars and other high-ranking imperial functionaries on matters such as freedom of religion or temple construction, restoration, and protection.31 Other existing documents correspond to a type known as farman-i-rahdari, which can be inscribed in the category of akham-i-divani. These farmans were dispatched to provincial governors and port officials and constitute letters of safe conduct for Europeans and other foreigners crossing the imperial domains.32 When in Jesuit hands, such documents were eventually combined with other materials related to the Society’s overseas missions and prepared for publication in Europe. For instance, two imperial orders concerning the second mission to the Mughal court and dated 1590 were translated into Italian and inserted into a Jesuit volume about the two Indies (East and West) published in Rome in 1592.33 The exact same farmans were woven into a set of missionary letters on Asia which came out as a Portuguese book in Lisbon in the following year.34 The European journeys of these edicts did not end there, for Luis de Guzmán incorporated them in Castilian translation into his Historia de las missiones (1601), preceded by an imperial edict of 1578 to the Jesuits of Goa.35 Even pieces of personal correspondence from Mughal nobles in Persian were publicized by the Society in Europe through translations and in printed form; the early seventeenth-century chronicles of Fernão Guerreiro and Pierre du Jarric include Portuguese and French versions of letters by ‘Abdur Rahim Khan-i-Khanan, respectively addressed to the provincial of India and Father Gaspar Soares in 1605.36 Once in circulation across Europe, these documents strengthened the perception of the Society of Jesus. They were seen as authentic native texts, which conveyed the voice of the Mughal ruler as well as that of prominent members of the empire’s ruling elite. Swiftly made available in vernacular languages, such precious Mughal speeches illustrated the close ties that bound the Mughals and the Jesuits. Obviously, these pieces were not as unique as the latter liked to think; the farmans issued in favor of the priests do not substantially differ from, say, the grants made to the Gujarati Jain community or to Hindu temples of Vrindavan by the same emperors.37 Still, Mughal edicts and letters in European languages contributed to underscoring the success of the Society’s mission and imparted a sense of veracity to the words of its representatives. The same holds true, though aimed at a more restricted, essentially Jesuit audience, for non-printed materials. Inserted into a missionary’s letter and complemented both by an expressive comment on how hard it was to obtain and a vivid description of its tense reception

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by the priests’ many local enemies, a Mughal farman fits perfectly into the “theatrical mode” of Jesuit writing.38 An edict dated 1604 provides telling evidence of the intimate relationship between “acts and texts,” or of how a document triggered an intense performance composed of two actors and a silent but responsive audience.39 Identified by the Jesuits as the “farman that came to the houses” (formão que veio para as casas), this mandate acknowledged their right to build a church in Lahore.40 Technically, it was not a farman, but rather a nishan, or a princely order—usually issued by the heir to the throne—that seconded an emperor’s decision.41 Father Manuel Pinheiro presented the nishan granted by Salim (the future Jahangir) to the subadar of Lahore, Qulij Muhammad Khan, exactly at the time of the day when courtiers flocked to the governor’s presence. The Jesuit priest carefully staged the act in order to amplify its effect at the provincial court: I presented this to the governor in front of the entire court and I intentionally waited for this hour, when all would be present. Upon seeing it, he and all the gentiles—authors of past [affronts]—changed their colors [mudou as cores], for they realized that the king held us in great respect and that he did not put Qulij Muhammad Khan (Colichecão), who presumes to be secundos rege, ahead of us. Neither he nor the others imagined that the king would grant us a farman and that [the king] cared so much for these poor people. This farman brought great credit with everyone and our enemies were fallen and ashamed [caídos e envergonhados]. They have now changed their past utterances into praise of the fathers, making them a thousand compliments.42 Pinheiro sought to communicate to his readers the (imagined?) emotions sparked by a loaded piece of paper, which was nervously read “two or three times” by its recipient (did the subadar read it aloud, just to himself, or both?).43 The Jesuits obviously had a solid understanding of the “divine agency of sacred objects,” from crosses and relics to statues and religious manuscripts.44 They were highly dexterous with magical things, and the Mughal capital provided them with myriad opportunities to transform inanimate objects into animate ones. Consider the conversations that some Jesuit priests maintained at the imperial court around Christian books and images, or think, more specifically, of a dialogue in Agra in 1623 between Father António de Andrade and a Muslim. Portrayed as being on the brink of conversion, this unnamed man asked the Portuguese Jesuit “to give him some words of the Holy Gospels in writing.” After

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some hesitation, Andrade handed him a slip of paper containing “the 4 or 5 main Mysteries of our Holy Faith.” The effect was immediate: the mouro “grabbed the papelinho and kissed it many times, putting it on his eyes and head.”45 Similar to Pinheiro, Andrade opted for emphasizing the recipient’s physical reactions. Divine truths and imperial words bore equal vitality, and the Jesuit missionaries neither overlooked the power of a Mughal farman nor rejected its comparison with pieces of paper which embodied the holy. On one occasion at Jahangir’s court, Jerónimo Xavier wished to explain to a Mughal noble the reason why Catholics revered depictions of the Virgin Mary and the crucified Christ. To this effect, he invited his interlocutor, and the emperor for that matter, to consider a parallel between Christian sacred images and Mughal imperial edicts: “We do not venerate these images for what they are, since we are well aware that [they] consist of paper or cloth with colors, but rather for what they signify; your formões, or provisions, we put them on top of the head not because they are papers with ink [papéis com tinta], but rather because we acknowledge in them your command and will [mandado e vontade].”46 Xavier does not contend here that God is actually in the images of Christ and the Virgin Mary or that the Mughal emperor is in his farmans. But the inky papers at stake do represent God and Jahangir, since to represent—as Caroline Walker Bynum put it—“can mean to re-present or present anew or stand in for.” Like the medieval devotional objects Bynum masters as a scholar and Xavier once mastered as a missionary, Mughal imperial edicts “are a presence that holds absence within itself, a dissimilitude that is, as what it is, similar to what it represents.”47 Mindful of the significance of “papers with ink” in the Mughal political context, the Jesuits adopted a holistic approach to imperial farmans and engaged with the complex fabric of these documents by paying attention to more than content. Unlike most Portuguese translations of Indo-Persian documents prepared in Goa, which purposely erased the opening elements of a farman, the versions made by the missionaries at the Mughal court usually preserved the sarnama (the invocation of God) and the tughra (the ruler’s name and title). The next component of a Mughal decree, the alqab—a set of honorific titles which identified the addressee and preceded his name—was likewise translated and decoded. As he rendered into Portuguese the long and ornate alqab of the subadar of Lahore in 1604, Manuel Pinheiro felt impelled to add an explanatory note to the benefit of his readers: “Eulogies with which the king always addresses him.”48 Like the other experts of Persian-Portuguese in India, the Jesuits probably struggled to translate the long and intricate imperial “eulogies” addressed to Mughal high officials, but also to Catholic priests, Portuguese viceroys, and

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other functionaries of the Estado da Índia. Years later, Francesco Corsi would offer a more substantial reflection on the importance of such sobriquets in the economy of a Persian letter: “the epithets at the beginning are not affectations [affettationi], but a courtesy of the Persians with great princes, such that doing otherwise would be considered boorish [saria tenuta rustità].”49 The two Jesuits did well in signaling to their superiors in Rome and Goa the potential oddness of a Mughal alqab. Someone like Francisco Rodrigues Lobo, for instance, would certainly have been critic of such verbose addresses. In the third dialogue of his Corte na aldeia (1619), a character called Leonardo echoes a gendered comment about the employment of flowery language in Portuguese letters: like an overly ornate woman, an overly ornate letter can be seen as dishonest. When intended as mere ornament, Leonardo further reasons, epithets should be “banished” from a missive.50 The debate around the excessive recourse to hyperbolic vocabulary with regard to letter writing was then taking place in Mughal India too; Lobo would not have felt alone if, by any chance, he had offered his reflections on the theme from imperial Agra instead of the Portuguese town of Leiria.51 Besides paying close attention to the date and seal on an imperial order, the missionary-translator also cared about how the document itself was actually composed and transmitted. We are informed, for instance, that Salim’s nishan of 1604 was penned by “Secretary Chanderban” (evidently not the celebrated Chandar Bhan Brahman, who may not even have been born at this point).52 The Jesuits also paid attention to the dimn, the reverse side of a farman where the signatures and seals of the many functionaries through whose hands the document passed were recorded.53 The Portuguese translation of Shahjahan’s farman of 1635 displays intriguing, if fragmentary, evidence of this office routine (Figure 11). Faced with too many of these marks, the translator summed them all up in one short comment: “On the back of this patent [patente] are fourteen signatures [sinais] pertaining to the king’s principal officials with their seals [chapas], [including] those of the grand vizier and the king’s father-in-law.”54 The description of, or allusion to the itinerary of a farman within the imperial bureaucracy before being dispatched represented another way of rhetorically reinforcing the missionaries’ privileged status at the Mughal court. Hence, Father Manuel Pinheiro’s insistence on the exceptionality (“of uncommon importance and to the amazement of all”) of having a farman issued by Emperor Akbar or Prince Salim instead of the “purvanchi” (porvanazi), the officer routinely charged with the task.55 “These little things [cousinhas] matter enormously here, although people may laugh there,” Pinheiro argued in 1605.56 True, letter writing in Europe, from

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Figure 11. Farman of Shahjahan to the officials of the empire, Agra, December 9, 1635. Persian text with Portuguese annotations by a Jesuit missionary. Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu, Goa 46 I, f. 131r. © Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu, Rome.

composition to reception, was likewise regulated by specific codes and practices. Pinheiro knew this; a Jesuit priest, he was fully conversant with the epistolary conventions observed by his own order. Still, Pinheiro could not think of a suitable parallel for Mughal India. By “there” (lá), though, he did not mean the headquarters of the Society of Jesus in Rome, but rather the city of Goa, where his interlocutor was based. The cultural divide could indeed manifest itself within India, among Europeans. What a Catholic priest embedded in the Mughal court deemed as meaningful, another Catholic priest living in the capital

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of the Estado would likely picture as palhada, the Portuguese word employed as the seventeenth-century equivalent of “hot air.” In order to bridge the gap and convince his superior of the opposite, Pinheiro explicated the procedures and lexicon that molded the inner life of a Mughal farman. As he narrated in dramatic tones the hardships he went through to obtain one in Lahore, Pinheiro clarified the meaning of “cabce” (qabz, receipt) and remarked that once the word “balelcaçar” (bilaqusur)—signifying “this is to be granted with no exception whatsoever”—was inscribed on a farman, the document became irrefutable.57 The missionaries’ close consideration of these “little things” was not exclusively for the Society’s benefit. Their expertise was often put at the service of the Estado da Índia in the form of ready-to-read translations of Mughal correspondence dispatched to Goa either from the imperial capital or from significant regional sites of imperial authority like the suba of Gujarat. These documents, though, belong to a different breed: farmans and lesser orders concerning religious affairs give way to edicts and letters dealing with state matters. We definitely move into the realm of political letters or high-status documents that mirror the often-tense interactions between Mughal India and Portuguese India. A farman from Akbar to Viceroy Aires de Saldanha dated 1601 is one such case. Written from Burhanpur in late March, this document was probably rendered into Portuguese by Jerónimo Xavier, who accompanied the emperor on his military campaign to the Deccan. The translated farman does not seem to have been preserved in any of the two main record rooms of Goa (the secretaria and the Torre do Tombo), but soon found its way onto Fernão Guerreiro’s desk in Portugal, surely via the well-oiled Jesuit communication machine. Intrigued by “its very strange style when compared to ours,” the Jesuit historian included it in his Relação anual, confessedly to accentuate difference and satisfy curiosity.58 But the strange style covered up tough political claims. Akbar used to label his edicts as the “the exalted farman which ought to be obeyed” or the “mandate by the one whom the world obeys.”59 When expressing the emperor’s commands, the munshis referred to the Portuguese as those who come “to kiss the foot of my high seat” or “the threshold of our court,” thus using the exact same rhetorical devices employed by chroniclers such as Abu’l Fazl or Muhammad Arif Qandhari to characterize how vassals and outsiders were expected to communicate with Akbar.60 The Portuguese were regularly faced with such potent words after the Mughal conquest of Gujarat, and a strong feeling of unease must have prevailed every time one of these documents arrived in the Fortress Palace. A particular imperial edict dated March 1573 invites reflection on how Akbar’s voice sounded in Goa. The chronicler Diogo do Couto tells us that “this farman was

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considered by some to have discredited the Estado due to the great arrogance [grande soberba] shown by this barbarian, and there were doubts about whether one should accept it or otherwise dissimulate.”61 Indeed, it must have been hard to realize that the “barbarian” emperor took for granted the Portuguese viceroy’s “great desire to render services to this my great and royal house.”62 And Akbar was not to soften the tone of his correspondence with Goa for the remainder of his reign. Through his farman to Viceroy Aires de Saldanha written almost thirty years later, Akbar invited the Portuguese into his presence and emphasized the protective nature of his court by describing it as the “Empyrean Heaven” (céu empireo)—one wonders to what extent the original Persian phrase matched the coeval European concept of Empyrean Heaven—and “creatures’ shelter” (amparo das criaturas).63 What should the Portuguese attitude be vis-à-vis such documents? Couto pointed in two different directions: to accept or to dissimulate. But what did he exactly mean by dissimulate? How could one avoid being submissive and circumvent the problem without fostering political rupture? In the next chapter, we will discuss Linhares’s posturing when confronted in Goa with an imposing farman from Shahjahan. Linhares’s reaction shows that a viceroy could counter by giving a cold reception to an imperial edict and drafting an equally harsh response. Another possible strategy, even if mainly suited for domestic consumption, was to twist a Mughal farman’s words and commands through translation. Of course, no Mughal officer would notice this, but a “tamed” Mughal letter worked well for its recipient. The practice sought to dilute the authority of the original document by tempering the strength of its words and the persuasive effect of its theatricality. Ultimately, it was important to counterbalance, if not reverse, the presumed superiority of the sender. One must concede that, in several instances, the translator might have stretched his role as cultural mediator too far, even to the point of extensively reworking a Mughal text and making it essentially Portuguese. In other cases, though, this linguistic operation seems to have been politically driven. The most intriguing example of this hypothesis relates to the first known farman by Akbar addressed to the Portuguese. Issued in Ahmedabad in December 1572, the imperial edict was directed to the captain of Diu, Aires Teles.64 Once in Portuguese possession, this farman was subjected to a comprehensive process of alteration through translation. The original document surely was an authoritative piece; it no doubt reflected the stance of a triumphant emperor who, having annexed the sultanate of Gujarat, expected recognition from his novel subjects. Portuguese Diu was no exception, and Akbar wanted the two key markers of sovereignty

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to be acknowledged: the Friday prayers (khutba) should be read in his name in the local mosques, while imperial currency (sikkha) was to replace the sultanate’s coins in the city. However, the edict’s Portuguese version—likely prepared by the experienced Cristóvão do Couto (Chapter 6)—reads quite differently. It preserved the sarnama, probably because “Great is the grandeur of God” (He mui grande a grandeza de Deus) could be understood as a reference to the God of the Christians; years later, when providing the translation of ‘Abdur Rahim Khan-i Khanan’s letter to the Jesuit provincial of India, Fernão Guerreiro claimed that the allusion made in the original document to “God’s soul” (alma de Deus) actually meant Christ.65 Akbar’s tughra was adapted and does not include the expression Ghazi (“warrior of the Faith”), which Portuguese translations of later farmans from the same emperor render as “slayer of enemy kings,” or “slayer of the infidels.”66 With respect to the content and its form, the imposing Mughal farman was converted into a courteous Portuguese carta (the word formão is never used), comprising some polite requests (“these are the things that the Great Mughal requests”) made in a rather cordial tone (“I ask you to kindly”). No trace of a commanding voice lingered. Finally, this farman’s date was conveniently manipulated, as the Islamic lunar calendar was simply erased to give room to the Julian calendar: “written on the thirteenth of the month of December [1572].”67 Considerable discrepancies in how different translators of Portuguese in India dealt with the dates of IndoPersian documents makes it difficult to discern a pattern. In the previous chapter we saw that the Shenvi Brahmans working as language mediators in seventeenthcentury Goa correlated systematically the calendar of the “Moors” with the “Portuguese” calendar. But the last decades of the previous century offer a less inclusive picture. The few Portuguese copies of Mughal farmans from the 1570s, including Akbar’s “letter” to Aires Teles, overlooked the dating system of the Persian documents.68 The translators of later edicts issued by the same emperor adopted mixed solutions, either by alluding to the month according to the Islamic lunar calendar—yet failing to mention the month’s name proper—and the year in the Christian calendar (“done in the moon of the month of February of 583”), or by establishing correspondence between the latter and the Persian solar calendar with regard to months (“month Dey [Dei], that is, December”).69 The translation of Akbar’s farman to Aires de Saldanha (1601) is, to the best of our knowledge, the first to offer the complete date according to the original document (“at nine days of Farvardin [Favardi] of God, in the era of 46 years”). But this would be a puzzling phrase for any Portuguese reader, and so Guerreiro elucidated: “The era is called the time of his reign; the month Farvardin is the

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name of the first month of the year, which begins on the day of the equinox, which this year was on the twentieth of our March.”70 Perhaps we are faced in most cases with inconsistent but honest attempts to commensurate different forms of calculating time. Still, the adoption of a foreign calendar across polities and beliefs in this period carried strong meanings and evident dangers. Think of how carefully Jews handled Christian time in early modern Europe, or how Spanish intellectuals struggled to incorporate the Muslim calendar into the narration of Spain’s past.71 Think, also, on how Tokugawa Japan refused to adopt the Ming-era name in diplomatic correspondence.72 To impose one’s time by neutralizing the opponent’s calendar was a way to gain leverage. The missionary-translator of Shahjahan’s farman of 1635 lessened the emperor’s authority through a twisted rendering of the document’s date. Where the original text had “written on the second day of Dey, in the eighth divine year,” the Jesuit wrote “written on the second of the month that the Moors call Dey, in the eighth year of my reign.”73 The sentence lost strength, and so did Shahjahan; “divine,” for a Catholic priest, was of course reserved for the God of the Christians and did not apply to the Mughal emperor. Viceroys also confronted their Mughal and Deccani counterparts in their own terrain by scrutinizing compliance with the conventions of Indo-Persian epistolary civility. The meticulous attention paid to the form of an Islamic letter became a mode of warfare in the Fortress Palace, as recurrent discussions held in State Council meetings demonstrate. From size to iconography to placement, seals in royal letters effectively communicated political authority across the early modern world and Portuguese Goa was no exception.74 In 1630, Viceroy Linhares felt offended by the incorrect affixing of the royal seal on two letters from Ahmadnagar and complained via his agent in Daulatabad, Diogo Saraiva: “the seal [chapa] of these letters from King Melique [i.e., Burhan III] is not in its place and where it should be, because it is placed on the first line [regra] and on its margin, but ought to be placed near the fourth and fifth lines. You shall caution them about this so that King Melique does not fail to show the courtesy and respect I am due.”75 Years later, in 1643, a letter from Muhammad ‘Adil Shah to Viceroy Aveiras was considered in Goa to be “disordered” (descomposta). Several of the viceroy’s counsellors suggested admonishing the sultan’s favorites because “the required style was not the one employed in that letter, which was way distant from any good form of correspondence.”76 A new incident was to occur soon after, this time involving the “prince, son of the Mogor” (i.e., the future Emperor Aurangzeb) and a port official from Sind. They wished to obtain Portuguese

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cartazes (sea passes) for several Mughal ships, but their written request showed “some lack of composition.”77 Details are missing, though. One is not entirely sure whether, in such occurrences, the problem rested on the language of a letter, its layout, or both. Linhares visibly cared about spacing in 1630, as we see in his vigorous reaction centering on the seal of the sultan of Ahmadnagar and its position on the page as a marker of the attributed quality of the recipient. This issue was particularly important among the Mughals. The strong role their dynastic seal played with regard to imperial correspondence was in line with its ultimate political function: to underline the Timurid affiliation of the Mughal dynasty by every possible means. Imperial visual culture thus paid close attention to this theme—the seal is commonly visible in Mughal paintings—and paired it with other equally powerful pictorial instruments of dynastic propaganda, namely illustrated genealogical scrolls (silsilahnamas) and imaginary family portraits, which show the Mughal emperors arranged in a circle with Timur at the center.78 Not only did Jesuit missionaries see ink impressions of the Mughal dynastic seal on numerous occasions, but they also described it at times. Father Manuel Pinheiro’s translation of Akbar’s farman of 1602 probably represents the first piece of European evidence regarding the genealogical seal of the Mughal emperors.79 Besides offering a Portuguese version of the document, Pinheiro drew a rough representation of “the king’s seal” (chapa del rey) on the same page. The missionary placed the circular seal exactly where it was supposed to be set in Mughal chancellery documents: on the right-hand side of the tughra. Below the translated farman, Pinheiro elaborated on his own sketch: “the king’s signature [sinal] and seal [chapa] represented above is large. Within it there is the name of Timur [Tamorlão], from whom he [i.e., Akbar] descends, followed by the other descendants of Timur [Tamur] up to his [i.e., Akbar’s] father, and his [name] is below the name of his father”80 (Figure 12).The anonymous translation of Shahjahan’s farman of 1635 likewise includes a description, but no drawing, of the large circular seal (muhr-i-muqaddas-i-kalan) of the Mughals: “above this patent is placed the large seal of the king [a chapa do Rei grande], in which the names of the kings his predecessors are written, beginning with the great Timur [gran Temurlang] from whom they all descend. This king is the tenth, and in the middle of the seal is written the name of this king which is Shahjahan [Xaagiahan], or Lord of the World [Sor do mundo].”81 Far from the imperial court, the Portuguese in Goa were also acquainted with Mughal seals. The Luso-Malay polymath Manuel Godinho de Erédia (d. 1623), for instance, had the chance to at some point examine Emperor

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Figure 12. Farman of Akbar to the officials of the empire, [Agra], July–August 1602. Portuguese translation with the depiction of the emperor’s seal by Father Manuel Pinheiro. Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu, Goa 46 I, f. 46r. © Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu, Rome.

Jahangir’s seal, probably in the Torre do Tombo and from Diogo do Couto’s hands.82 As painting ranked high among his many professional abilities, Erédia felt impelled to depict the dynastic seal of the Mughals on the frontispiece of his short description of the “Province of Hindustan” (1611), even if under a somewhat misleading caption: formão del Rey Mogor (Figure 13). After providing the Romanized names of all the Mughal rulers since Timur, Erédia focused on the reigning emperor: “the ninth, Nuruddin Muhammad Jahangir Padshah Ghazi [Noradin Mahamet Zanguir Patxagazi], who presently wears the Mughal crown in the year 1611, and the seal and royal arms of his crown consist of a large circle with nine smaller circles or spheres [orbes] inside it, and on

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Figure 13. Drawing of Jahangir’s seal by Manuel Godinho de Erédia, 1611. Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, Reservados, cod. 11410, f. 51r. Public domain. Image courtesy of the Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, Lisbon.

each sphere is written the name of each of the aforementioned kings, inscribed in Arabic script [letra Arabia].”83 The importance of this drawing lies in the fact that it predates the famed English portrayals of Jahangir’s seal by William Baffin, Samuel Purchas, and William Terry. Despite some mistakes, Erédia’s depiction of the Mughal genealogical seal is noticeably better than Pinheiro’s sketch made a decade earlier.84 But aesthetics and accuracy likely mattered little in terms of how the governing elite of Goa saw the Mughal genealogical seal. People in the Fortress Palace seem to have turned their attention primarily toward the seal’s exact placement on a decree, since to stamp it on the lower part of the document meant that the addressee ranked low in Mughal eyes. However, there were ways to sidestep this thorny issue. The seal, or rather its ink impression, could be sent separately so that it was affixed in the proper place upon acceptance. Diogo do Couto saw the “pendent seal of Akbar [Hecobar] made on a sheet of paper” attached to an imperial farman, and so did Thomas Kerridge and Thomas Roe regarding Jahangir’s epistles.85 The practice was to endure in the Mughal-Portuguese diplomatic context until at least the early eighteenth century; a farman from Shah Alam I (r. 1707–1712) arrived in Goa with the imperial seal stamped “on a separate paper” (hum papel a parte).86

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Both the government elite of Goa and the Jesuit missionaries of the Mughal court realized the visible and invisible reach of a farman. But there was a fundamental difference in attitude between them. While the Catholic priests sought to profit from the authority of an imperial edict, the Portuguese officials fought to contravene it. It is no surprise that the latter, namely the viceroy, neglected the materiality of these documents. Paper, calligraphy, and decoration constituted the text’s subtext and could also communicate political authority. The Estado’s representatives were not (or did not want to be) taken in by the sensory elements of the Indo-Persian political letters they received, hence their silence.87 What is more, the originals of these letters rarely survived in the Portuguese archive. They were supplanted and considerably normalized by their Portuguese copies. And yet this was not always been the case. In line with coeval European practices, the first half of the sixteenth century provides us with several examples of Portuguese kings and viceroys describing the material features of the Asian epistles they received and courteously expressing admiration for the actual artifacts.88 Still, people at the Fortress Palace in the seventeenth century seem to have engaged with a small object that proved central to these epistolary transactions: the cloth pouches containing the letters going to and from the capital city of the Estado. Sadly, none of these bags have survived in the Portuguese context, although there are some extant Mughal and Ottoman exemplars.89 The written evidence is scanty but indicates that the high officials of Goa understood these bolsas as being integral to a letter exchange.90 When the secretary presented an incoming letter from Emperor Aurangzeb to the viceroy in January 1683, he preserved it “in the same pouch in which it arrived” (na mesma bolça em que veyo) instead of just handing the envelope to his superior.91 More importantly, the Portuguese reciprocated—exactly like seventeenth-century English monarchs did when corresponding with rulers from Russia to Japan—and made the viceregal letters addressed to various Mughal and Deccani representatives travel inside velvet or satin bags, some green and some red, with or without golden strings.92 Significant “papers with ink” should not move “naked” between courts.

Chapter 9

(Un)Staging the Farman

The previous chapter centered on the composition of farmans and other epistles, with emphasis on the myriad and complex meanings their words and signs conveyed. But, as the colorful pouches in which these political letters were transported remind us, a farman implies inception and reception. Reception evokes a different, stronger dimension of the performative attributes of a farman, since its public delivery entailed several symbolic actions and gestures. In a permanent display of authority and hierarchy, other objects equally charged with implicit meanings were called into play on these occasions. Upon arrival, the farman was more than the oeuvre of a munshi through whose pen the ruler commands; it became the centerpiece of a ritualized spectacle through which the same ruler manifested his power. Essentially, this contention builds on ideas of harmony and order. And yet, these and similar ceremonies could be performed under a cloud of tension and conflict. The cases presented below allow us to explore the nitty-gritty of the reception of two seventeenth-century Indo-Persian farmans in the capital of the Estado da Índia. Our first incident consists of Shahjahan, in the form of an imperial edict, parading into the city and being received in the viceregal residence in August 1630. In the second case, we chart Muhammad ‘Adil Shah’s visit to the Fortress Palace and the Jesuit Church of Bom Jesus in December 1653, also by way of a royal farman (Map 2). Each of these events lasted for roughly a month. In both instances, the papers embodying foreign and menacing rulers— the Mughal emperor and the Bijapur sultan, respectively—became the focus of intriguing power rituals and struggles revolving around acceptance and refusal, subjection and resistance. The recipients had to decide whether to receive these holograms submissively or endeavor to disarm them.

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Map 2. The travels of Shahjahan and Muhammad ‘Adil Shah’s farmans (1630, 1653) through Goa.

Shahjahan in Goa, August 1630 In March 1630, as we noted in the opening pages of Chapter 3, the Portuguese seizure of two Mughal vessels in Gujarat threatened to escalate into a major clash between the two empires. Conventional warfare ultimately did not break out, and an agreement brought the conflict to an end six months later. Still, the episode of the “two Moorish ships” triggered a war of words and rites waged through a bitter exchange of letters between the Mughal emperor and the Portuguese viceroy. Conscious of its significance, the Count of Linhares registered this correspondence in his journal. What is more, he recorded his anxiety prior to receiving Shahjahan’s epistle. “I am also informed that people from the Mogor are coming with his letters, and these will be the first from the Mughal king to the viceroy of India,” Linhares wrote on July 19, 1630.1 Indeed, the Mughal chancellery issued a farman, seemingly on the last day of May, addressed to “the great viceroy” in Goa. While negotiations led by the

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mutasaddi of Surat, Mir Musa, progressed in Gujarat, Shahjahan decided to exert pressure directly from Burhanpur, where he held court, through a decree. The document’s content was no doubt important. But its form, and especially the way the sender envisioned the receiver’s acceptance of the imperial letter, was perhaps more relevant. Linhares had been governing Portuguese Asia since late 1629, and this was the first time he corresponded with the Mughal emperor. The nature of record keeping in Goa, as well as the patterns of letter writing and circulation between the Mughal court and the viceregal court, did not guarantee access to firm evidence concerning precedents. The viceroy thus had to find his own way. And he did: a Portuguese reply was eventually dispatched to the Mughal court in early September. We begin with the reception of Shahjahan’s farman in Goa. On Sunday, August 4, 1630, the ambassador of Bijapur to the Estado, Muhammad Raza, informed Linhares that a letter addressed to him by the Mughal emperor was in the capital of the neighboring sultanate. The Portuguese viceroy further learned that Shaikh Mu’inuddin—the imperial ambassador at the ‘Adil Shahi court in charge with delivering the letter—“intends that I receive him outdoors.” By “outdoors” (fora de casa) the Mughal diplomat meant that Linhares was expected to leave the Fortress Palace, and even cross the city limits, to come into his presence and collect the imperial letter. In Mustafa Khan’s telling (one of the most influential courtiers of Bijapur at the time), Linhares “would scoff ” (zombar) at such pretense.2 Roughly a week later, on August 13, one Mirza Muhammad—Shaikh Mu’inuddin’s envoy and his relative—was at the gates of Goa with the letter from his emperor. Linhares ordered “some men schooled in things Mughal” to meet the envoy in Bicholim. Their main assignment was to find out “where the letter is signed, since they [i.e., the Mughals] confer great honor to this, so that I can decide whether to accept it or not.” Linhares’s worry rested on an apparently minor detail: the exact position of the imperial seal on the letter. He had already asked the resident ambassador of Bijapur to Goa, in whose house in Bicholim the Mughal representative was now staying, but in vain. For two days the viceroy’s emissaries—Manuel de Paiva and Vicente Ribeiro, whom we profiled in Chapter 3—tried to ascertain the same information. However, their efforts proved futile; the two men were not allowed to inspect the letter (they only had a glimpse of the closed envelope), and the Mughal envoy did not reveal the placement of the imperial seal. Mirza Muhammad was coy and went no further than to suggest “that he was made the same courtesy which is usually done to the other ambassadors. With regard to the letter, I [i.e., Linhares] should proceed

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as deemed appropriate concerning the courtesies: if the letter contained few, I should respond with few, and if more, the reply should include more.”3 Linhares’s unease was justified. In the complex world of Mughal political etiquette, these and other subtle signs defined the status of a letter’s recipient and the hierarchies in play.4 The viceroys who represented Iberian kings in overseas territories took the reception of the royal seal very seriously. Sadly, we lack information on Portuguese India, but in Spanish America the seal was received as if it were the king. The scene described by Alejandro Cañeque for Mexico City—“the audiencia [high court] and the cabildo [town council] would go to meet it and ride back to the city with the seal, placed on a horse or mule, between the president of the audiencia and the senior oidor [judge]”—has everything to do with the reception in Goa of Shahjahan’s farman in 1630 and, more visibly, with Muhammad’s in 1653.5 So Viceroy Linhares went on to convene the State Council on August 16 in order to decide on “how this envoy and the letter he carried were to be received, and with what courtesies, according to extant similar examples.”6 The reception of a Mughal letter of this caliber was indeed a thorny issue. According to the principles of the political culture that informed Shahjahan’s farman, including its composition and acceptance, the emperor’s envoy was his surrogate and should be treated as such. The words spoken by the letter bearer carried imperial authority and the written words he conveyed asked for the same reverence due to the emperor.7 The reception of a farman was therefore subjected to a convoluted protocol which all the participants, and especially the recipient, were expected to master and perform. This consisted of a set of meaningful rituals of obedience, starting with the obligation to leave the city in order to receive the imperial envoy and the message he carried. The ceremony usually occurred in a temporary structure ( farman-bari or farman-badí) erected outside the city for precisely this purpose. Together with other royal insignia—typically a cloak, or robe of honor (khil’at) supposedly worn by the emperor, and a sword, also embodying the ruler—the farman was placed on a throne. The addressee was then to walk barefoot and give salams until submissively receiving the farman and the khil’at from the hands of the imperial emissary.8 Would the Count of Linhares be willing to participate in such a humiliating ceremony? The viceroy was conversant with the vital meanings of the Mughal rituals at stake and knew they expressed conspicuous marks of vassalage. These were the sort of submissive gestures that, for instance, the Portuguese saw the Nizam Shahi rulers practicing every time a Safavid ambassador arrived at Ahmadnagar.9 The representative of Philip IV in Asia absolutely could not

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perform them. Thus, when urged to receive Shahjahan’s letter “with the courtesy that the kings to whom [i.e., the emperor] writes show him,” Linhares declined. He refused to travel outside his palace (and city) in order to receive the farman. The example of the sultan of Bijapur, which at some point was brought into the discussion, was everything but reassuring: “The king of Idalxá used to leave the city a fair distance [distancia de caminho] to receive the letters of the Mogor, and this he did as his tributary and vassal.” Differently, the Portuguese viceroy represented “the majesty of King Dom Felipe [Philip IV], his lord, who is a very great monarch, and a much greater lord than the Mogor, as can be seen in a mappa mundi, or a book in which the entire world is shown.”10 Linhares and his advisors made here a cunning reference to an object—the world map—that best illustrated the territorial breath of a monarch’s authority, theirs being no less than the “planet king” (rey planeta).11 Still, some early modern European rulers and their overseas representatives were not the only ones to associate their might with maps; the Portuguese viceroy was probably unaware of the artful political uses that Shahjahan, and Jahangir before him, made of the terrestrial globe.12 To engender an alternative strategy, one that would allow the Estado da Índia to avoid the snares of Mughal imperial ritual, was no easy task. Together with the State Council members, the viceroy engaged in an exercise of recollection (oral or written?) with the purpose of identifying previous comparable situations in Goa: “a record was made [se fez memoria] of the ambassadors and letters that had been sent to the lord viceroys and governors of this Estado by the kings of Persia and the Mogor, who greatly exceed the other kings of India with regard to power, reputation, and authority. It was concluded that there had not been another case similar to this one.”13 Those present at the meeting ultimately acknowledged their dependence on the Jesuits of the Mughal court in such matters: “some of the letters that the Mogor wrote to this Estado were sent through the fathers of the Company who reside with him, and some of these were actually brought by them; once cognizant of the respective matter, [the priests] advised on the courtesy with which they had to be written, and then informed [Goa] about how they were written and what they contained.”14 It happened that Shahjahan’s farman of 1630 arrived in the capital of the Estado via the Mughal ambassador in Bijapur, without passing through Jesuit hands. The minutes of the State Council meeting on August 16 are of utmost importance. For one thing, the document adds to the evidence examined in Chapter 5 regarding the Estado’s archive. Specifically, crucial information on past political practices and diplomatic actions vis-à-vis the Mughals was not systematically registered and stored in Goa. For another, it unearths crucial Jesuit

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mediation where epistolary transactions between the imperial and the viceregal capitals are concerned. What is more, the priests of the Mughal court seem to have had a say in the drafting of Akbar and Jahangir’s letters addressed to the Portuguese. In fact, the wording of the assento suggests a shared process of composition involving Catholic padres and Mughal munshis, the workings of which remain largely unknown. Still, the retrieval, in the course of the same council session, of Manuel de Paiva’s past experience with Mughal letter-writing practices allows us to dig deeper. The Estado had faced an equally delicate situation following the capture in Gujarat of a Mughal ship coming from the Red Sea in 1613, an episode commonly referred to among the Portuguese as the “disaster of Surat.”15 The political crisis lasted until 1615, and, “whilst the Mogor was about to write to Viceroy Dom Jerónimo [de Azevedo], the council convened to discuss the courtesy that was to be made and on how to proceed. It was agreed that the chapa, or the royal seal of the Mughal king, would be set on a separate piece of paper [em hũ papel de fora] and this was to be put inside of the said letter [i.e., the envelope] in order to certify that it was his [i.e., Jahangir’s] and show that he did not wish to fall short on courtesy matters.”16 Paiva’s remark dovetails with analogous observations from other Europeans in India, as discussed in Chapter 8. It confirms that the location of the Mughal dynastic seal on an imperial letter addressed to a European ruler was flexible and open to negotiation. On a different note, it demonstrates that the council’s discussions and subsequent decisions concerning the Mughals and other “neighboring kings” were anchored not so much in documentary evidence but rather in oral reminiscences. Paiva’s own knowledge of a significant precedent dating back almost two decades was key to delineating a strategy in 1630. Incidentally, there was another person in the room that day who certainly preserved a vivid memory of the Mughal-Portuguese conflict of 1613–1615 and the letter exchanges it sparked. That person was Gonçalo Pinto da Fonseca, the Estado’s chief chancellor (chanceler-mor) who served as the Portuguese principal negotiator during the incident and signed a peace treaty in June 1615 with his Mughal counterpart, Muqarrab Khan.17 The Estado’s archive thus was also one made of personal memories, reliant on serendipity and exposed to erosion over time; it is unlikely such records survived for more than twenty or thirty years. Unable to build on written past examples, the State Council members adopted Paiva’s seasoned views on how the imperial farman should be received. The viceroy ought to accept it, but he obviously would not travel to Bicholim because “this is exactly what the ambassadors of the kings who receive letters from the Mogor are used to doing; to go outside of their cities a certain distance

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[espaço de caminho], since he considers them as tributaries, subjects, and vassals.” Alternatively, the Count of Linhares was to send his equerry (estribeiro) and guard, together with the chief thanadar (tanadar mor) of Goa, who would go, accompanied by local soldiery, to receive the Mughal envoy at Fort Daugim (passo de Daugim).18 From there the letter bearer was to be escorted to the Fortress Palace, meet the viceroy in the royal hall (typically filled with Portuguese dignitaries for the occasion), and deliver his king’s letter. The acceptance ceremony (recebimento) took place according to plan on the afternoon of that same day: Friday, August 16. During the session, Linhares stood under a canopy (docel) and absolutely avoided genuflections or any other signs of submission. If the confused wording of this passage of the State Council’s assento does not lead us astray, an improvised throne consisting of a chair— probably a stool (bofete)—on top of a platform (estrado) was set up in front of the viceroy and Shahjahan’s farman was placed on it. Paiva suggested being malleable in this regard, for the viceroy was actually honoring the document, not its bearer.19 Linhares cared to make a point about this distinction, not only by accentuating it in his response to Shahjahan, but also by making the Mughal envoy travel back to Bicholim unescorted; without the farman, Mirza Muhammad was an ordinary man. Once he opened the envelope, Linhares evidently saw where the imperial seal was placed and thus realized how the Mughal emperor ranked him. But, somewhat unexpectedly, the available evidence overlooks the seal’s position and the viceroy’s reaction. His diary mentions en passant the “seal which is placed on top” (chapa que esta em riba), thus proving that the viceroy’s fears were unfounded.20 Sadly, the sources are mute concerning the way the recipient engaged publicly, or not, with the imperial order he had just accepted. We therefore move from the reception of Shahjahan’s farman, and the competing visions concerning its delivery, to the document itself. The farman, to which Linhares meaningfully refers as a letter (carta), has survived in a Portuguese version. It must have been arranged in Goa by the língua do Estado, Krishna Shenvi, and the tresladador da letra parçia, Mulla Da’ud. They worked at a fast pace since the translated document was copied into the viceroy’s journal on the following day, August 17.21 It is a significant text in both form and substance. Shahjahan begins by condemning the Portuguese attack and urges Linhares to return the two captured ships, their cargo, crew, and passengers. Upon refusal, the Mughal emperor would instruct the sultan of Bijapur—his “loyal son, ‘Adil Khan [Adilcan]—to blockade Goa, thus depriving the Portuguese of all that usually arrived from the

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sultanate. Shahjahan was equally prepared to order “his subjects, servants, and ministers” to raze Goa and the other “lands of the Portuguese.” Contrary to other translations of Mughal documents, such as the Portuguese text of Akbar’s farman of December 1572 analyzed in the previous chapter, this one retained the severe tone inherent to an imperial decree: “I command,” “I order,” or “I command with no excuse nor failure,” are verbs and phrases that the translator(s) did not sidestep. This wording provides us with an interesting feeling for Shahjahan’s authority in the first person and in Portuguese. The two references made to Bijapur are quite significant, since they mirror the emperor’s belief in the sultanate’s total subjection to Mughal rule even before the treaty of 1636: “everything that I command and entrust to the said ‘Adil Khan [Adilcan] he will do without fail,” Shahjahan stated. The Mughal emperor and his predecessors considered the rulers of Bijapur to be vassals who did not merit being addressed as sultans; hence the use of ‘Adil Khan, instead of ‘Adil Shah. Shahjahan’s farman of 1630 brings to mind a nishan he sent to Viceroy João Coutinho in 1618, when he was still Prince Khurram and served as subadar of Gujarat after his victorious Deccan campaign (1616–1617).22 Known exclusively through their Portuguese translations, these documents have striking similarities and beg for comparison. The Mughal secretaries who penned the two decrees were obviously different individuals, and yet the sender’s voice and attitude rests on the same basis. In 1618, Khurram poses in writing as if he were already the sovereign. He calls Jahangir “the king, my lord and father,” but simultaneously views himself as the “great king” and employs expressions like “in my royal presence.” Like Shahjahan in 1630, Khurram in 1618 threatened to order “King Adil Khan” to destroy “the lands of the Portuguese.” Finally, and similar to the 1630 farman’s translation, whoever translated the nishan in Goa did not opt to soften its language. As a result, the addressees in both instances were shocked by the improper tone adopted by the sender.23 The translators of these two Mughal decrees excised their opening components, namely the sarnama and the tughra, but they kept the alqab. Both translations include the dates according to the original calendars used: the Islamic lunar calendar in Khurram’s nishan and the Persian solar calendar in Shahjahan’s farman.24 Yet Linhares seems to have paid more attention to Shahjahan’s farman as an object per se than Coutinho did when dealing with Khurram’s nishan. Besides the translated text of the 1630 decree, the viceroy’s diary includes a fragment of the dimn in Portuguese translation. A full reconstruction of the farman’s path through the channels of Mughal bureaucracy is impossible, for

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a number of signatures and seals have been disregarded. Still, whoever handled this imperial document in Goa did not leave unnoticed a “declaration” (declaração) which must have figured prominently on its reverse side. There Shahjahan’s father-in-law left the following mark: “endorsed by the loyal in the service of his king, trustworthy and so little in the king’s service, Asaf Khan.”25 This phrase corresponds to the expression of devotion to the emperor that ministers and officials regularly inscribed in such documents alongside their own seals.26 Nor did Linhares—or his translators and clerks, for that matter—efface a phrase from the emperor’s own hand (por letra) placed on the front side of the farman, next to the imperial seal: “much obeyed and loyal to his emanated law, King Shahjahan.”27 It constituted one of the signs of distinction that the emperor could opt for in documents of this type.28 Finally, we find a reference to the superscription “farman from the powerful king, who holds large powers, to the great viceroy.”29 On September 6, 1630, the Count of Linhares drafted what he surely saw as an equally potent response.30 The viceroy used the first eight lines of his letter to introduce himself and enunciate the rather lengthy and impressively global title of Philip IV and the kings of Spain, which included the royal titles of the Portuguese monarchs from 1580.31 Subsequently, he admonished the Mughal ruler for addressing him as if he were a figure of lesser quality: “my own person demands as much respect, as Your Highness should seek to learn.” Adopting a somewhat paternalistic tone, the viceroy stressed that such fault derived from Shahjahan’s greenness as king: “since Your Highness has been reigning for only a few years [há poucos anos que reina], you certainly lack knowledge of the courtesy with which you must treat me.” Linhares went on to note that he was the representative in Asia of a sovereign who held more kingdoms “than many kings of India combined.” As for Muhammad’s subjection to the Mughals, the viceroy cleverly recalled a fifty-five-year-old occurrence that would suffice to undermine Shahjahan’s confidence in the loyalty and might of his presumed vassal in the western Deccan. Linhares brought to the emperor’s attention the embassy of Zahir Beg to Lisbon during the reign of Sultan ‘Ali, Muhammad’s grandfather. The purpose of the 1575–1576 embassy had been to reach an accord with the Portuguese monarch and—the viceroy remarked with malice—“it may well happen that, like his grandfather, he [Shahjahan] will have to send someone to Portugal to ask for peace with this State, as Ambassador Zahir Beg [Zaerbeque] did.”32 Strangely, the Portuguese viceroy’s epistle to the Mughal emperor bears a marked resemblance to a letter sent years earlier by the sultan of Bijapur to Shahjahan.33 The viceroy and the sultan, it goes without saying, did not concoct their

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responses to the “King of the World.” Besides, Linhares opted for producing a straightforward letter, whereas Muhammad wrote a metaphorical one. But these two texts have something in common. Both openly confronted Shahjahan by underlining the emperor’s arrogance and ignorance. Both insisted on their legitimacy as representatives of independent polities: Muhammad as the sultan of a local state, Linhares as the viceroy of a planetary empire.

Muhammad ‘Adil Shah in Goa, December 1653 Our second case occurred twenty-three years later, in December 1653, also in Goa. The governor of the Estado da Índia was Brás de Castro and the incident did not involve Shahjahan, but rather Muhammad ‘Adil Shah. Despite its ruler’s failing health, Bijapur was at the core of important political, social, and religious developments during this period.34 If humiliating, the treaty signed with the Mughals in 1636 gave the sultanate sufficient leeway to embark on the Karnataka Wars (1638–1649) and expand its territory southwards. The ethnic composition of the state’s political elite meanwhile changed, with the gradual ascendancy of Ethiopians over the Iranian faction.35 The figure who best embodies this Ethiopian moment is Malik Raihan, a powerful eunuch also known by the title of Ikhlas Khan, whose portrait became a prominent theme in coeval Deccani painting (Figure 14). Bijapur seems to have leaned toward orthodox Islam during this period, but pragmatic politics might have weighed more than religious rigidity with regard to some of the sultan’s decisions and alliances.36 The Estado’s interactions with Bijapur during the later years of Muhammad’s reign reflect some of these trends.37 But there were additional challenges to be handled. Goa had increasing worries about the Dutch presence in the sultanate since the embassy of Johan van Twist (d. 1643) to the ‘Adil Shahi court and the establishment of a VOC factory in Vengurla in 1637.38 Another pressing concern was Mateus de Castro (d. 1677), the controversial Goan Brahman priest who was designated vicar apostolic of the Idalcão by the Propaganda Fide in Rome around the same time. In 1639, to the dismay of the governing and ecclesiastical elites of Goa, Castro reentered the city in his new capacity and soon after traveled to the ‘Adil Shahi court.39 Finally, Sultan Muhammad sought to annex the territories of Bardez and Salcete in 1654. These and other issues shaped the intense political transactions between the Estado and Bijapur, marked by the embassies of António Moniz Barreto (1638) and Pedro Henriques (1659) to the sultanate.40 Between these were a couple of other Portuguese diplomatic

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Figure 14. Sultan Muhammad ‘Adil Shah (d. 1656, r. 1627–1656) and Ikhlas Khan (d. 1656), anonymous, Bijapur, c. 1670. The Nasli and Alice Heeramaneck Collection, Museum Associates Purchase (M.76.2.35), LACMA. Public domain. Image courtesy of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

missions headed by padres instead of fidalgos, namely Father Gonçalo Martins (1654) and Father Pero da Costa de Brito (1657).41 Political considerations might explain why Muhammad ‘Adil Shah agreed to the establishment of a Catholic mission in his kingdom, something that the Society of Jesus and the Estado da Índia had long pursued.42 The first failed attempt was in 1561, when some Jesuit priests were received at the court of ‘Ali I.43 The second dates from 1610–1611, but Sultan Ibrahim II demanded reciprocity,

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apparently stating on the occasion that “once the Portuguese approve the construction of a mosque in Goa where Muhammad’s faith could be preached [em que se pregasse a seita de Mafoma], he would allow a church to be built in his court for the law of Christ to be preached.”44 The sought-after permission arrived in Goa in mid-December 1653, in the form of a farman issued three weeks earlier at the court of Bijapur and in “the king’s presence.”45 A local-born Ethiopian called Malik Yaqut proved to be the perfect cicerone of Muhammad’s entry, through the sultan’s surrogate, in Goa. Rather close to Father Gonçalo Martins, Melique Acute (as the Portuguese called him) had been known in the Fortress Palace since 1647 and his actions watched until at least 1658.46 He belonged to Ikhlas Khan’s circle, but, unlike his patron, held a poor reputation among the Portuguese.47 When Malik Yaqut became the ambassador of Bijapur to the Estado in 1649, they reacted harshly and considered the appointment of a castrated slave (eunuco catiuo) an affront. This cultural misunderstanding did not turn into a diplomatic conflict only because someone in the State Council recalled the “good example” of Ikhlas Khan, who had also begun his skyrocketing career as Sultan Muhammad’s slave. Thus, “even if the ambassador [i.e., Malik Yaqut] was a captive, it was a rather common thing for the kings of India to employ such people in their service.”48 Contrasting conceptions of slavery collided in this particular case.49 On December 13, 1653, Muhammad’s farman arrived in the hands of Malik Yaqut in Goa. We lack information on how the document traveled between the court of Bijapur and the capital of the Estado: did it cross the sultanate’s domains in a procession? However, once at the city gates, the document suddenly became visible. The arrival of the farman caused much excitement (grande alvoroço) in Malik Yaqut, who immediately remarked to Father Gonçalo Martins “that it would be convenient to have it received with maximum celebration and solemnity, so that among the great and the small, Christians and gentiles, the favor that the king, his lord, bestowed on the priests in his kingdoms would be known.” Governor Brás de Castro sought to downplay the “authority of the royal farman,” but he eventually conceded; after all, there would soon be “a public church in that court, in the king’s sight.”50 The reception of Muhammad’s farman in Goa can be followed in detail thanks to the report that the provincial of India, Jerónimo Fróis, appended to the letter he wrote on January 11, 1654, to Goschwin Nickel, the superior general of the Society of Jesus in Rome (g. 1652–1664). Fróis’s account of the ceremony is worth reading in extenso:

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The way in which the reception [recebimento] of the formão occurred was as follows. On the evening of the seventeenth of the month of December, Malik Yaqut went to Fort Santiago [passo de Santiago], which borders the mainland and from where this city communicates with the people of that kingdom. There, in a decorated hall, a stool [bofete] covered with a piece of Chinese embroidery had been placed, and a cushion [cuxim] made of the same material with a silver tray. The house was carpeted with roses and flowers. The king’s formão was on the tray covered with a red and silver cloth.51 On top of the cushion was the medal of his king ‘Adil Shah [Idalxá] hanging from a gold chain, and on both sides were two Moors, each of them with his cloth fanning the flies from the medal. The six priests from this house [i.e., the Jesuits’ professed house] who had been invited by Malik Yaqut found things arranged this way. As soon as they had gone up into the hall, Malik Yaqut asked them to honor his king, who was present in the medal. The priests performed the required courtesy. At this time the banners [bandeiras] of those villages within the jurisdiction of the tanadar mor of the island arrived, together with more soldiery [gente de armas] with their pipes and drums, according to plan. At the entrance to the fort, Malik Yaqut’s foot soldiers [pionagem] were arranged in a neat way. In the middle [of the fort there was] a palanquin and some horses in harnesses. Malik Yaqut descended, and a Moor carried the cushion with the medal, while another brought the tray and the king’s formão, which they placed in the readied palanquin. The two Moors with cloths positioned themselves on either side and continued with their fanning [abanadura]. The palanquin was raised, Malik Yaqut rode, as did those in his company, and they began to proceed with the guards going in front, while the foot soldiers and the horsemen followed behind the palanquin. Right next to it there was a Moorish noble [cavaleiro mouro] who had brought the formão from the court; he did not consider parting even for a moment from the formão before he could actually deliver it to the recipient. With this order of people—or [rather] disorder, because they had none and all their attention was on shouts and howls [gritas e vivas] to the king, to Malik Yaqut, and to the fathers of St. Paul, and on moving fast [andar depressa]— they arrived at St. Thomas Yard [campo de San Thome], where some of the noblemen of Goa [cavaleiros de Goa] were waiting on their welladorned horses. They were supporters of ours and therefore wished to honor the message that was brought to us. This troop [tropa] and this

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rabble [chusma] made their way to the Fortaleza [i.e., the viceroy’s palace] where Malik Yaqut dismounted and sought out the lord governor, whom he informed of the message that he brought from his king for the fathers of St. Paul, showing him the sealed formão as well as the medal.52 Then the lord governor stood up on his feet and decidedly bowed to the king’s medal [deu uma grande barretada à medalha do Rei]. Once he realized that the portrait of the Queen Our Lady [i.e., Dona Luísa de Gusmão, d. 1666] was under the canopy [sitial], behind the governor, Malik Yaqut—who is shrewd [agudo] and does not miss an opportunity to be courteous—said to the governor that the honor that his lordship had shown to his absent king required him to do the same to the queen, present in the portrait.53 He thus performed the royal courtesy, which consists of placing the right hand on the ground three times and just as many times on the head. After a brief conversation, the lord governor told him that he highly appreciated the trust that His Highness [i.e., the sultan of Bijapur] placed in the fathers of St. Paul, which was well deserved, and that for this they were renowned with the king his lord [i.e., the king of Portugal], and that he rejoiced greatly that this act of friendship was initiated during his time. He then said that it was time to take the formão to the priests, who were probably waiting for him.54 The description of the farman’s course continues with the arrival of the palanquin at the church and professed house of Bom Jesus and its entrance, duly flanked by Jesuit priests, into the building where Francis Xavier was buried.55 Malik Yaqut carried Muhammad’s patent to a room on the higher floor—the farman had also been previously exhibited on the upper story of Fort Santiago—and placed it on a “stool [bofete] prepared with roses and flowers” (Figure 15).56 He then handed the document to the Jesuit provincial, “who made great courtesies to it and signified his respect by placing it on his chest.” Rose water was sprinkled on Yaqut and on all those present at the ceremony.57 The sultan’s envoy eventually left for the capital of Bijapur on January 10, 1654, accompanied by two Jesuit missionaries, Heinrich Roth (d. 1668) and António Botelho.58 Roth did not stay long in Bijapur, for he joined the Mughal mission later the same year.59 Botelho, for his part, sent several letters from the ‘Adil Shahi court to Goa over the following years.60 His choice complied with two objectives, both related to Botelho’s recent and long Mughal experience: to cash in on his acquaintance with Islamic “manners” (estilos) and to impress the sultan of Bijapur by sending a priest who had lived for six years at Shahjahan’s

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Figure 15. The Jesuit professed house of Goa, second floor plan (2º sobrado de la casa professa de Goa), Alessandro Valignano (attrib.), 1586. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des Estampes et de la photographie, FOL-HD-4 (6). Public domain. Image courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

court. There was a shortcoming, though. Neither Botelho nor Roth had mastered Persian, an essential skill for navigating the ‘Adil Shahi court. Consequently, the Jesuit provincial made Father Francesco Morandi return from the Mughal capital and assigned him the Bijapur mission.61 On December 17, 1653, Muhammad paraded in the city of Goa by way of one of his farmans placed inside a palanquin. The royal letter was continuously fanned by two men, the same way ‘Adil Shahi rulers and other Deccan sultans were fanned in their courts, as myriad paintings attest. One is left wondering whether Indo-Persian farmans always journeyed this way in the capital of the Estado and what sort of reactions such a sight provoked among commoners. In Yaqut’s words, the spectacle was designed as an all-encompassing one, capable of touching “the great and the small, Christians and gentiles.” While fascinating, the account by the provincial of India is biased and contrasts the disciplined Portuguese performance with the unruly behavior of

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Muhammad’s subjects. As Fróis saw it, “disorder” imposed itself on “order” and the harmonious “pipes and drums” of the Christians were somewhat silenced by the “shouts and howls” of the Muslims. The subtle distinction between troop and rabble ultimately opposes the Portuguese to the Deccanis and the Christians to the Muslims. The latter moved inappropriately fast, considering that honored people in Europe and European overseas cities were supposed to walk slowly in order to display gravity.62 All in all, the report was penned by a participant observer who focused on the essential elements of any public festival in any early modern city, like movement, gesture, and sound.63 Fróis did not neglect to record scents either; his reference to the sprinkling of rosewater during the ceremony at the Church of Bom Jesus directs us to the significance of olfactants in Deccani court societies.64

1630 and 1653 Compared The farman of Sultan Muhammad to the Jesuits of Goa, with the choreography of its transmission, constitutes an excellent compare-and-contrast case with the remote clash between Viceroy Linhares and Emperor Shahjahan. Jerónimo Fróis’s graphic description focuses primarily on the reception ceremony of the farman and its circulation in a palanquin through the public space of the city. The paper trail concerning the incident of 1630 is less visual and tends to overlook the imperial decree’s processional movement, concentrating instead mostly on the object itself and the hassle around the opening of the envelope by the Portuguese viceroy. Conversely, the seal drama does not seem to have taken place in 1653. Equally, Mirza Muhammad—the bearer of Shahjahan’s farman—appears as a rather elusive, if skilled, figure, whereas Malik Yaqut shines in Fróis’s account and plays a central role regarding the arrival, display, and journey of Muhammad’s farman across Portuguese Goa. In 1653, as in 1630, an acute sense of authority over territory prevailed. The Mandovi River separated the island of Tiswadi from the mainland, providing a natural boundary between the Estado’s capital and Bijapur territory. The defensive system of Goa predated the Portuguese conquest and rested on some forts and gates which were appropriated, gradually improved, and in most cases renamed after 1510 as a means of establishing a new status quo.65 Among these landmarks, Fort Benastarim and Fort Daugim played key roles as demarcation lines vis-à-vis our two farmans and their senders. Improved at a very early stage and rechristened as Fort Santiago (passo de Santiago), Benastarim constituted

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the most important border-crossing point and therefore held strong strategic and political value. Be it in European scenarios or in colonial settings, city gates bore symbolic power in this period. They expressed authority and contributed to defining the social and religious fabric of an urban community.66 The principal agents of the 1653 incident were surely aware of Fort Santiago’s significance. Mutatis mutandis, the people who participated in the arrival of Shahjahan’s decree at Fort Daugim in 1630 likewise understood what was at stake. As in other parts of the early modern world, namely the Holy Roman Empire, “competing visions of socio-spatial order clashed” in handover situations.67 The aim of the Portuguese recipients was to make the farmans lose most of their power once the passos were left behind. Contrariwise, the Mughal and ‘Adil Shahi envoys endeavored to force the authority of the farmans beyond the forts. In 1653, at least, Sultan Muhammad’s representative sought to subvert Santiago as a Portuguese and Christian building by appropriating it. In their study of Raichur, Eaton and Wagoner show “that city gates could function not just as zones of passage, but also as destinations in their own right,” or places that represented a “physical stage on which interstate diplomacy unfolded.” They go on to stress that several of these gateways in the Deccan “contained components that were palatial in function, providing ancillary sites for the enactment of royal ceremonies of reception and appearance.”68 Maybe here lies the reason for Malik Yaqut to exhibit his sultan’s farman in the upper story of Fort Santiago: could the ceremony of reception be seen, or at least sensed, by the crowd from below? True, the king did not appear at a window. But he was there, by way of a royal decree. Both in 1630 and 1653, horses and horsemen—a typical element of early modern processions—were critical with regard to conducting the farmans from the city’s outskirts to the Fortress Palace. Linhares’s equerry and guard in Fort Santiago in August 1630, like the cavaleiros de Goa who flocked to St. Thomas Yard in December 1653, were meant to communicate authority to the envoys and their attendants. The connection between horses and power is fully apparent in a similar, if later episode. When organizing the entry of Prince Akbar’s ambassador in Goa in late January 1683, the secretary of the Estado da Índia consulted with some Augustinian missionaries seasoned in Mughal India. In the priests’ view, it was “rather convenient to show the ambassador some cavalry organized as a squadron, or row, so that he realized that we had horses, and that one [horse] equaled one thousand in their lands.” The viceroy embraced the suggestion at once and instructed his equerry to form the cavalry. To further

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convince the ambassador and his retinue that horses and men-at-arms were in abundant supply in Goa, spare animals from the viceregal stables (estrebaria) were allocated to several people, especially to the viceroy’s servants (criados de casa).69 Warhorses were key to the Mughals; it was therefore important to fill the visitor’s eyes. In a war of symbols, the image of the two farmans being escorted by Portuguese nobles through the streets of Goa translated into some sort of victory for the Estado da Índia. In 1630, Shahjahan’s representative tried to convince Linhares to receive the imperial order in Bijapur terrain, but to no avail. Castro, for his part, was not pressured in 1653 to honor Muhammad’s farman outside his residence and city; the royal patent was addressed to the Jesuits and it was their charge, not the governor’s, to come to Fort Santiago and show obeisance, as they did. Ultimately, the farman was brought to the Fortress Palace. But once in the royal hall, the heart of the viceroy’s authority, Castro succumbed by performing a grande barretada, which means that everyone in the room saw him taking off his hat submissively to Muhammad’s decree. Informed by Malik Yaqut of this courteous gesture, the sultan of Bijapur saluted the Portuguese governor for “bending down and making reverence” to his words on paper.70 As for Linhares, who likewise succeeded in accepting Shahjahan’s farman solely in the palace, he eventually had to comply with some sort of deferential ritual, albeit a much less damaging one: instead of bowing conspicuously, the viceroy stood in front of the enthroned farman, thus honoring its sender. At any rate, neither Linhares nor Castro equated the envoys with their sovereigns. Gifts and gift exchanges are not at all mentioned in 1653, whereas in 1630 they seem to have played only a marginal role.71 Apparently, the recipients in both situations were not pressed to accept any additional symbols of sovereignty, such as robes of honor. In its most precise sense, the khil’at ceremony underscored the power of the giver over the receiver; the honorific robe and its performative transfer from one body to another materialized the political bond between the ruler, who offered his own clothes, and the subject, who, by wearing them, accepted becoming part of the ruler.72 Muhammad ‘Adil Shah did send “royal clothes” (roupas reaes) to Goa on several occasions in the later years of his reign and overtly expected the recipients—be they Portuguese governors or Jesuit priests—to perform the robing ceremony.73 Considering the sultan’s insistence on the vital importance of these clothes and acts vis-à-vis his relationship with the elite of Goa, it is strange that Fróis’s account contains no reference the farman of 1653 being accompanied by a robe of honor.

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Nonetheless, the ruler of Bijapur had his decree supplemented by a royal portrait, which does not seem to have been the case with Shahjahan’s farman. Malik Yaqut was well aware of the significance of the “medal of his king”: it translated into an imposing absent presence. The Habshi eunuch was quick to note to the Jesuits at Fort Santiago that Muhammad ‘Adil Shah was participating in the ceremony through his medal portrait and consequently asked the priests to venerate it (or rather him). Later, in the royal hall of the Fortress Palace, Brás de Castro also revered both farman and portrait. The power games around likenesses continued to be played in the same room. A skilled courtier, Malik Yaqut reciprocated the governor’s gesture and hurried to venerate the Portuguese queen, likewise present through her portrait. The paintings of Muhammad and Luísa de Gusmão were quite different objects, though. Hung on the wall, the queen’s image was presumably large and certainly immobile. Her portrait was designed to be seen from a distance and not to be touched. Conversely, the medallion depicting the sultan was small and portable. It favored proximity and enhanced human interaction.74 Yet the small image of the sultan poses some problems. The first challenge lies in the portrait itself. Mughal emperors had been commonly represented on medals and coins since Akbar’s time, so the political uses of such objects were well known. Offered to disciples and vassals, who were to wear them on head turbans or around the neck, these movable likenesses signified authority and constituted vehicles of an enduring, obviously hierarchical, link between king and subject.75 To the best of our knowledge, portrait medallions with a gold chain are not extant in the case of the ‘Adil Shahi dynasty. One therefore wonders what the sultan of Bijapur’s picture exhibited in Goa in 1653 looked like and who might have painted it.76 Secondly, the Jesuit provincial’s account overlooks the afterlife of Muhammad’s portrait. Was it offered to Castro during the ceremony held at the royal hall or to Fróis, the ultimate recipient of the sultan’s patent? Both were surely acquainted with the portrait’s symbolic weight. Indeed, royal miniatures were very common in Europe, where they carried equal authority. In 1564, Philip II offered the former governor of the Estado da Índia, Francisco Barreto (g. 1555– 1558), “a portrait of myself with a chain, so that you have me chained to you for the rest of your life.”77 Outside the Iberian Peninsula, Elizabeth I frequently gifted her likeness in a gold pendant to other European rulers as a way to mark their unequal, inferior status.78 Muhammad’s farman of 1653 interacted with many other things and was somehow fortified by them: stools, a palanquin, a cushion, a silver tray, flowers

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and rosewater, musical instruments, a canopy, and several exquisite pieces of cloth. Fabric, as Giulia Galastro suggests for early modern Genoa, was a powerful tool of “material communication” in a diplomatic context.79 Goa was certainly no different in this regard, for the royal hall of the Fortress Palace was richly covered with delicate textiles every time a Portuguese viceroy had to receive a Mughal ambassador, or any other Asian envoy.80 The political and social effects of the farman depended on its ability to intermingle with these objects. This was certainly the case with the 1630 farman too, but the extant sources, molded as they are by a defensive Linhares, offer a sketchier and more sober picture. The only objects mentioned in this instance are those used to stage Shahjahan’s decree in the palace’s royal hall: a platform, a chair, and the canopy under which the viceroy stood. In such occurrences, authority was expressed, but also cracked, with recourse to meaningful signs and loaded objects. The canopy— Linhares’s dossel and Castro’s sitial—constituted a sort of antidote against the farman, since it corresponded to “the quintessential symbol of Spanish royalty” (and Portuguese, for that matter).81 Malik Yaqut and Mirza Muhammad could have not ignored neither the object nor its powers, as they were certainly used to seeing canopies placed over their rulers’ thrones, as many Mughal and Deccani paintings illustrate. For Shahjahan and his predecessors, imperial canopies were “shades of the Shadow of God.”82 We conclude this analysis by turning to the object at the core of the two incidents: the farman. There is not a single word in 1630 or 1653 about the paper, calligraphy, layout, or possible decoration of the two epistles. Apparently, neither Viceroy Linhares nor Governor Castro was impressed by the documents’ materiality and aesthetic value. But the Jesuit Jerónimo Fróis was surely attentive to such “details.” In October 1652, roughly a year before receiving Sultan Muhammad’s farman in the Church of Bom Jesus, the provincial of India urged the superior general in Rome to prepare a letter to Dara Shekuh in recognition of the Mughal prince’s role in releasing Father Hendrick Uwens (Henrique Busen, d.  1667) from captivity in Agra.83 The drafting of this letter had been suggested several months earlier by Father António Botelho. From the Mughal court, in January 1652, Botelho dispatched specific recommendations about this missive to Fróis in Goa. The priest had in mind a letter authored by the “governors of India” (the three members of the interim council of the Estado, 1651–1652), though prepared in St. Paul’s College, but Fróis decided otherwise and opted for leaving the Fortress Palace out of the equation. The missive to the Mughal “heir apparent” (principe herdeiro) ought to be penned in Rome by the highest representative of the Society of Jesus. Be that as it may, one wonders

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what Botelho meant by the following sentence: “I have sent to him [i.e., Fróis] the form in which [the letter] shall be written there” (lhe mando a forma em que se deve lá escrever).84 Indeed, it is impossible to say whether he was concerned with the letter’s content, style, or decoration. Yet we know that Fróis expected to receive from Rome an embellished document: “this letter shall be written in parchment with its margins in gold; and the letters specifically directed to the prince shall likewise be in gold, for these things are highly valued among them.”85 Either real or forced, Fróis’s sensitivity to decorated papers was in line with practice in Islamic lands.86 If ever written and sent out, the letter by the superior general of the Companhia to Dara Shekuh does not seem to have survived. The same is true for the original orders in Persian from Shahjahan and Muhammad, which are not extant in the archives of the Estado da Índia or in those of the Society of Jesus, unlike their Portuguese versions. It is not much of a stretch to assume that the farmans were destroyed at the time, replaced, and neutralized by translations deemed unfailing and final. The actual content of these documents has provoked interesting reactions. Both the viceroy and the provincial’s replies survived and a comparative approach to them offers food for thought. The Portuguese version of Linhares’s harsh letter of September 6, 1630, to the Mughal emperor makes one wonder about the (equally severe?) tone of the lost Persian text, likely prepared in Goa by the same two experts who must have translated the incoming imperial letter, Krishna Shenvi and Mulla Da’ud. Jerónimo Fróis’s letter of January 10, 1654, to Sultan Muhammad also seems to have left Goa already in Persian; like Linhares before him, the provincial neither kept a copy of it nor disclosed the name of its penman. The Persian version was possibly composed by a confrere, a sort of Catholic munshi, but a Muslim man of letters might also have written it; when, in 1684, Father João Leitão decided to petition Emperor Aurangzeb, he asked an unnamed “master and mullah” (Mestre e Moula) in Agra to translate the text into Persian.87 At any rate, Fróis commented briefly on the response strategy adopted, namely the decision to “adjust it [i.e., the letter] to the nation’s style rather than to European refinements.”88 Perhaps this was current practice among the Jesuits of Goa at the time, since a farman from Sultan Muhammad to Father Gonçalo Martins had been translated six months earlier “in a literal manner, rather than according to substance.”89 The favorable circumstances that led Fróis to address Muhammad in writing could not be more distant from the critical times which molded the exchange of correspondence between Linhares and Shahjahan. Nonetheless, the difference

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in tone and style between the two documents is striking, as the full text of the provincial’s letter to the sultan of Bijapur illustrates. Most high and powerful king, who shines like the sun among the stars, fortunate like Alexander, wealthy like Darius, on whom the whole world rests its eyes without complaint as it does on the moon; a source of chilliness to those burning in fire. The letter with which Your Highness bestowed your favor on the fathers of St. Paul, I, as head of them all, received and placed it inside my heart with much celebrations, which were held in this city so that everyone, great and small, would learn about the extensive honor that Your Highness bestowed on the fathers of St. Paul, taking us under your protection and power, and placing us under the sight of your eyes, which brings me great happiness because the eyes of the king wherever they look cast favors like sunrays. Malik Yaqut [Melique Acutt] of your royal presence, will inform Your Highness of everything. In his company I sent the fathers António Botelho and Henrique Roth, both brothers and sons of ours. All those who remain here have asked me to send them before Your Highness, but these two go in place of all the others. I entrust them to Your Highness’s shadow as the king and lord that you are, the one who has the nature of the sun, who spreads his light over the great and small, over the sky and the earth, over the stars, and over the plants and straw which bear no fruit but nevertheless grow with your warmth [quentura]. I and all of my [brothers] continue supplicating our Lord that he adds to the years of the life of Your Highness with great victories over your enemies and the expansion [dilatação] of your empire whose royal person God, our Lord, may guide with his powerful hand. Goa, 10 January 1654.90 This document constitutes a fascinating European effort to enter the world of Indo-Persian letter writing. Its anonymous author composed a text which seeks to engage with some of the skills and motifs that any trained “man of the pen” in the service of the court of Bijapur would put into play in similar circumstances. The writer seems to be aware of the close relationship between the Deccan sultanates and Safavid Iran and conversant with the political and religious vocabulary regularly employed by the Safavid chancellery. In fact, the Jesuit’s letter

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associates the sultan of Bijapur with preeminent figures of the pre-Islamic IranoMediterranean world in the inscriptio. King Darius and Alexander the Great were those chosen; similar to other pre-Islamic icons, these two characters were often included in Safavid official rhetoric. In addition, the recurring use of metaphors of light—sun, stars, rays, fire, moon—reflect the pre-Islamic association between the monarch and light, which likewise became an epistolary trope under the Safavids.91 Fróis brings the letter to more tangible grounds toward its end. In a veiled reference to the Karnataka campaigns of Bijapur, Fróis wishes Sultan Muhammad great military achievements and the ultimate enlargement of his “empire.” All in all, this letter by the Jesuit provincial of India addressed to Muhammad ‘Adil Shah encapsulates this chapter’s object and epitomizes the “encounter” between Persianate India and Portuguese India, which lays at the heart of this book.

Conclusion

The Mughals managed to stretch their dominions farther south after the elimination of the last two Deccan sultanates in 1686–1687. The Indo-Persian world was now under a single polity, but, as the eighteenth century progressed, the imperial authority faded and political fragmentation occurred. Mughal decline, including its internal and external causes, is at the heart of a long-heated debate which will not be revisited here. Suffice it to note that different political actors succeeded in carving their own space in Mughal India over the course of the century. Some sought to secure regional authority: the Rajputs, the Jats, the Sikhs, or the Nizams of Hyderabad. Others, such as the Marathas and the British, became major players in the subcontinent. Others still, namely the Afsharids from Iran, were ripe to replace the Mughal dynasty and create a second Indo-Persian empire, had Tahmasp Quli Khan (or Nadir Shah, r. 1736–1747) built momentum after a succession of striking victories that culminated in the sack of Delhi (1739).1 The Portuguese Empire in Asia likewise changed in significant ways. The once impressive maritime system between Sofala and Nagasaki was essentially dismantled around 1640. By the 1700s the Estado da Índia was a different kind of animal, characterized by a few remnants of the former network, dreams of sovereignty over certain areas, and a couple of thriving pockets of territory.2 The Zambezi River Valley fell increasingly under Portuguese control and Mozambique turned into a colony in its own right in 1752. In India proper, the Província do Norte virtually dissolved after the loss of Bassein to the Marathas in 1739, but Portuguese Goa managed to augment its territory; the so-called new conquests added to the old ones in the third quarter of the eighteenth century and became fertile ground for new imperial experiments. Like in Brazil or Angola, the colonial enlightenment of the Prime Minister Marquis of Pombal (g. 1756–1777) made its way into Mozambique and Goa. The Portuguese focus on the Mughals waned visibly in this new setting. In the years that followed Aurangzeb’s death in 1707, the Estado da Índia rested

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largely on the influence at the Mughal court of Juliana Dias da Costa (d. 1734), a female broker of Portuguese descent who came to supplement, if not substitute, the Jesuits’ longstanding political role in the imperial capital.3 Yet the MughalPortuguese relations were more and more provincialized, chiefly confined to the maritime fringes of Gujarat and driven by matters of trade and navigation. Their ultimate hollowness is embodied in Shah Alam II’s (r. 1788–1806) fictional incorporation of the governors of the Estado da Índia as Mughal vassals in the 1790s, a gesture that recalls similar perfunctory ceremonies performed in British context after 1765, as the EIC became diwan (administrator) of Bengal.4 Unsurprisingly, Persianate Goa also waned at the turn of the eighteenth century. Beyond a persistent Portuguese rhetoric about Mughal might, at this point the emperors of Delhi were fundamentally perceived in the capital of the Estado as rulers of a regional polity. The numerous pamphlets that circulated in Portugal throughout the century about the “progresses of the Portuguese arms” in India often coupled a much-diminished Mogor, not only with the rising Marata but also with “little kings” (regulos) such as the Bonsuló (the Bhonsles of Sawantwadi) and the Sonda (the Sonda kings). Conflict and negotiation came to involve smaller polities and referred to tinier geographies, even if the age of absolutism and its inflated political vocabulary tended to amplify military and diplomatic achievements that were regional in essence. Intelligence gathering must have likewise been less far-sighted. The Portuguese remained silent about the siege and conquest of Qandahar by Nadir Shah in 1737–1738, in sharp contrast with the attention devoted to the Safavid-Mughal disputes for the control of this strategic area between the 1590s and the 1650s. The pillage of the Mughal capital in March 1739 was revealed in Portugal primarily in the form of a pamphlet printed in Lisbon in the following year. The Verdadeira, e exacta noticia dos progressos de Thamas Kouli Khan Schach da Persia no Imperio do Gram Mogôr conveyed information amassed on the ground by one Joseph Voulton, a French maverick originally based in Pondicherry.5 The news was tailored to a broad audience, to habitual consumers of large-circulation papers, and was not “hard” handwritten intelligence accounts meant for a few, selected eyes. Gone were the days when Goa endeavored to screen a truly colossal area, lengthwise from Qandahar to Chittagong and crosswise from Kabul down to Bijapur. The Portuguese were now removed from the wide-ranging intelligence systems of the past. Part I of the present book, with its emphasis on the Estado da Índia’s networks and agents of political information in the Indo-Persian sphere, would therefore be challenging to write for the eighteenth century: the sphere changed and shrank, and so did the Estado. Part II would likewise prove

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ineffective, given its attention to interpreter-translators of Persian and the significance of farmans penned in the same language. True, Persian was to retain much of its cultural and political significance in eighteenth-century India.6 But it is also clear that the idiom was far less central to Goa’s language politics in the 1700s than it had been in the 1600s. By the mid-eighteenth century a learned interpreter and influential broker in the service of the Portuguese such as Bahuguna Kamath was proficient in Maratha, among other languages, and yet he could not read Persian.7 Around the same time, in 1769, a treaty signed between the kingdom of Mysore and the Estado da Índia had copies made in Portuguese and Hindavi, but no Persian version was drafted on the occasion.8 War and diplomacy in the subcontinent spoke more and more languages at this point. Empire of Contingency considered the Indo-Persian experience of the Portuguese Empire for roughly a century, that is, from Goa’s continuing exposure to Akbar’s India since the early 1570s to the full integration of the Deccan sultanates into Aurangzeb’s India as the seventeenth century drew to a close. The Portuguese monitoring of Mughal India and the western Deccan, we have seen, required “participant observation” and systematic examination, but it also resorted to simple conversation and commensality. All this was carried out by an extremely varied cast of characters and groups in an equally broad range of spatial and social scenarios across the subcontinent and beyond. A functionalist view would likely picture the Estado da Índia at the core and in full command of these webs and actions. This book, instead, sought to capture the wealth of circuits and forms of human circulation and social communication at play in this vast region in order to grasp how the Portuguese fit into them. What was made ready for the Estado by a host of agents represented only a parcel of what was available “out there” in a plurality of circles of verbal and written information. Instead of a cohesive state machine at the center, powerful enough to vacuum-clean intelligence in a broad geographical area, give it a coherent imperial sense, and store memory for future political action, we found an imperfect but fascinating structure that sought to dig out its niches in a landscape made of people and news—both often unconventional—in constant circulation. This was a structure that did not necessarily know how to format the “raw” information accessed, and whose participants contributed in ingenious ways to fuse the two domains in presence: the imperial (Portuguese, Jesuit, Christian) and the “indigenous” (Indo-Persian, Indian, Islamic). This was a structure that often failed to remember precedents and procedures with regard to its interaction with Persianate India beyond one or two generations and therefore had to start all over, time and again.

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The numerous social and political entanglements explored particularly in Chapters 2 and 3 testify to the workings of this Portuguese apparatus. And so do the textual entanglements analyzed in Chapter 4 and elsewhere. But the improvised Persianization of the Estado da Índia truly comes to the fore when one transitions from gathering information on the Indo-Persian world to conversing with the Indo-Persian world. Goa decisively engaged with Persian as the language of political communication with the Mughal emperors, the Deccani sultans, and their myriad officials. Therefore, the city developed its ability not only to render the farmans in Portuguese but also to compose political letters in Persian. These were fascinating writing ventures, regularly conducted by Hindu, Muslim, and Christian experts who worked in collaboration, even if separation and competition (not necessarily explained by religious divides) had a role to play in many instances. The shared nature of these operations, which sometimes led political adversaries to socialize around documents and their words’ meanings, is reflected in the cases studied in Chapters 5 to 7. The two final chapters of the book further show that Portuguese expertise in Indo-Persian political culture encompassed acquaintance with the symbolic power of a farman, its refined composition, and its ritualized reception. Any scholar who gauges the Persianate sphere by its literary networks and social mores must feel deceived by this Persianate state of sorts. Mastery of IndoPersian literature and Persianate high culture among the residents of Goa was virtually non-existent. These same residents did not dress, eat, enjoy music, or build houses the Persianate way. At the top of the political hierarchy, the viceroys of the Estado did not style themselves as sultans, as the Hindu rulers of Vijayanagara did, nor were they portrayed wearing a kullah and a qaba.9 The Jesuits of the Mughal mission went farther in this regard, as they composed Persian–Portuguese dictionaries, at least one mirror for princes dedicated to Jahangir, and several religious works in the Persian language. To that effect, the Jesuits partnered with local “collaborators” like ‘Abdus Sattar, one of the several Mughal intellectuals with whom they maintained learned conversations.10 Of course, the Persianate Estado da Índia—or fragments of the Persophone world incorporated into, and animated in, the city of Goa and beyond—was neither represented on a map nor did its contributors see themselves as such. Still, I argue that this was a corporeal entity, made of people, texts, tales, political practices, and bureaucratic writing. Persographia loomed large in Goa from the last decades of the sixteenth to the turn of the eighteenth century. During this wide time span, one dares to affirm, Persian—written and “performative” Persian—was second only to Portuguese as a language of political communication in the capital of the Estado da Índia.

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Interestingly, many in the reino would have opposed this “surrender” of Portuguese India to a foreign language. Had the intellectual Manuel Severim de Faria (d. 1655) realized the “messy” entanglements of his own idiom with Persian in Goa, he would surely have been displeased. Based in the small city of Évora (southern Portugal), but intrigued by the overseas world and tuned in to the topics cultivated by the European Republic of Letters, Faria harshly criticized the Portuguese people in 1624 for their lack of love for the “mother tongue” (lingoa materna). An advocate of monolingualism or, better yet, of the perfect match between linguistic practice and political community, Faria went on to contrast the scorn for one’s language with the commendable stance of several polities across time and space that forbade written communication—internal and interstate—to be conducted in any idiom other than their own. His anecdote about the Ottoman case is particularly telling in this regard: “showing great respect for their [language], the Ottoman princes make the promises they plan to break in a foreign language, whereas those they intend to keep are penned in their own.”11 There is no word in Faria’s text about the Mughal “princes,” but one wonders whether he knew of their adoption of an alien idiom as a tool of government and in court culture. The same holds for the multilingual Qing Empire. “The dominant ideology exalted written monolingualism for centuries” in China, Mårten Saarela reminds us (and Faria would have been pleased to know), whereas the Manchus “upheld a plurilingual empire in China and beyond.”12 Has the long, fundamentally empirical Indo-Persian experience of the Portuguese evolved into something else? Can one argue that political expertise turned into formalized knowledge at some point? Did the Persianate Goa “move” to Portugal, and was Europe permeable to it? All these transitions proved to be logical ones in other, comparable scenarios. In Russia, Gregory Afinogenov points out, spies on China became sinologists at the turn of the nineteenth century and were to operate in the framework of knowledge institutions like the Academy of Sciences.13 Contrariwise, the continuous political interactions of the Estado da Índia with the Indo-Persian world did not generate scholars with a seat, say, in the Academy of Sciences of Lisbon (1779).14 Natalie Rothman, for her part, demonstrated how the Istanbul-based dragomans became knowledge producers about the Ottomans in European context.15 The same, though, cannot be said of the línguas do Estado vis-à-vis the production of Western imagery concerning the Mughals. Europe remained unfamiliar to the interpreter-translators of Goa and their few known ethnopolitical writings, similar to how most of the source material at the center of the present book never went beyond Iberia. Besides

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several Jesuit printed accounts on the Mogor, European views of Mughal India resorted to a handful of seventeenth-century English and French (also Dutch and Italian) authors. Their successful accounts—published in their original language and often rendered in other European idioms—filled the expectations of lay readers and erudite members of the Republic of Letters alike. The fact that the overwhelmingly manuscript body of evidence generated in and by Persianate Goa did not “travel well” is, in and of itself, both a historical and an historiographical issue. It is a problem to be posited in the broader framework of the European currency of things Portuguese (and Iberian) in the early modern period. More to the point, there surely is a recognizable “Indo-Portuguese moment,” as Subrahmanyam put it, with respect to “Europe’s India.”16 But this was mainly a sixteenth-century moment, which doubtfully gained traction beyond the Pyrenees and did not leave a mark in the following two centuries; the “Catholic Orientalist knowledge”—“rough” and “fragmentary,” as Xavier and Županov have characterized it—became “devalued” and finally disappeared.17 As it happens, the Persianate corpus of Portuguese “extraction” that we have been dealing with was even more underground than most of the source material considered in the two above-mentioned seminal works. The question remains: is this corpus necessarily less relevant as an object of analysis because it stayed mostly within the confines of the Estado da Índia and the Iberian Peninsula in its own time? The writing of history is often guided by the search for stunning successes and enduring impacts, and one must admit that the stuff early modern history is made of contributes greatly to this end. Historians and their audiences have a penchant for game changers, paradigm shifters, turning points, and revolutions. Hence, the flurry of books on commodities, individuals, ideas, and events that presumably “changed,” “built,” or “shaped” the world. Such a Darwinist approach is problematic for it inhibits the understanding of historical phenomena with all their extension and complexity. Indeed, there are other stories to be told and Mughal-European interactions comprise many routes, even if the common assumption is that there is a favored path to reach a transformative effect. Center stage is thus given to the flashy European man schooled in Mughal India (or in any other part of Asia, for that matter) who pens an equally flashy book drawing on his lived experience, a work fated to circulate widely in printed form. While on the ground, the same man seeks to collect Oriental manuscripts that will ultimately find their way into the best university libraries of the time, from Cambridge to Oxford to Leiden. On the contrary, I see advantages in exploring different routes leading to dissimilar outcomes, with no rankings or hierarchies in mind. These routes run parallel, but they can also intersect.

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To put the emphasis on the existence of multiple forms of knowledge production and transmission between Asia and Europe in the early modern era is therefore key. Take the case of Thomas Erpenius’s collection of Malay texts in the Cambridge University Library. By focusing on the skills and actions of lesser but deep-rooted figures in the Malay world during the early years of the seventeenth century (people like the English Augustine Spalding and especially the Dutch Peter Floris), Romain Bertrand has claimed that “a practical command of Malay, sometimes linked with the philological ability to read and write it, either in phonetic-Roman or in Arabic script, therefore developed a world apart from that of academic Oriental studies.” This “troubled,” “multipolar landscape”—Bertrand goes on to argue—“is a far cry from the over-simplistic scheme associating, through a single straight line, an ‘amateur’ manuscripts-collector to a ‘professional,’ University-trained philologist.”18 I argue that Persianate Goa has contributed its share, if covertly, to the establishment of a multipolar landscape where the knowledge of the IndoPersian world in Europe is concerned. Western pictorial representations of Mughal India in the early seventeenth century revolve around a map of Jahangir’s empire and the depiction of the emperor’s seal, as well as an intriguing adaptation of a Mughal miniature (the well-known “Pictures out of the Indian copies made by the Mogols painter”). These pieces are all found in printed form and the Englishmen William Baffin, Edward Terry, and Samuel Purchas have pride of place in their production and diffusion. And yet, Europe ignored comparable handwritten work prepared slightly earlier by the Luso-Malay polymath Manuel Godinho de Erédia: three maps of the Mogor produced between 1615 and 1622 and the first Western representation of the Mughal imperial seal in 1611 (Figure 13).19 In the same vein, the first detailed European list of mansabdars mirrors Goa’s intelligence endeavors and was compiled by the Jesuit Jerónimo Xavier in 1610–1611. European readers, though, retained instead Joannes de Laet’s brief list of 1631, based on faulty data organized by William Hawkins (d.  1613).20 Finally, cross-cultural and cross-faith teamwork regarding translation and letter composition in seventeenth-century India brings to mind the Dutch Daniel Havart and his Muslim master Abdul Qasim working together in Golconda. And what to make of similar collaborative ventures taking place at that same time in Goa and involving Hindu línguas do Estado and Muslim scholars, notably Krishna Shenvi and Mulla Mu’inuddin? True, no published manual of letter-writing like Havart’s De Persiaanse secretaris (1689) emerged from this association.21 But such texts did circulate in manuscript form in the capital of the Estado da Índia.

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These three examples show, if proof were necessary, that words and ideas memorialized through the printing press and readily made available to sizeable communities of readers in seventeenth-century Europe became dominant, sedimented in the form of “text monuments,” and, what is more, eventually contributed to shaping categories of historical analysis.22 Our immediate challenge is to grasp how often, to what level, and through which mechanisms the two levels—“high” (mainstream) and “low” (underground)—communicated. A learned figure like Nicolas Fabri de Peiresc, whose network of correspondents in Asia included several Portuguese, might offer some insights on how the gap could be bridged. Invested in providing the Dupuy brothers with information on Mughal India, on more than one occasion Peiresc sent them “poor” texts for which he had some bias. “This account of the Mogor is fine, but it must be translated by, and trusted to, an honest man that will include whatever notes occur to him,” he cautioned his interlocutor ( Jacques or Pierre?) in the last days of 1626.23 Some years later, in 1633, Peiresc got hold of another “brief account of the Kingdom of the Mogor” and planned to dispatch it to one of the Dupuys; he described it as a text, though, “which you will not find unpleasant, [written] in the simple language [patoys] of a good merchant.”24 From Peiresc’s remarks one might infer that the Republic of Letters had little appreciation for “plain” texts about the Mughals, penned on the ground by merchants and similar figures with rudimentary language skills (and concepts?). One might wonder what the members of this European intellectual community would have thought of the people and writings that gave shape to Empire of Contingency.

Abbreviations

Archives and Libraries

AGS AHU ANTT ARSI BA BL BNE BnF BNP BPE HAG SOAS

Archivo General de Simancas Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu Biblioteca da Ajuda British Library Biblioteca Nacional de España Bibliothèque nationale de France Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal Biblioteca Pública de Évora Historical Archives of Goa School of Oriental and African Studies Archival Collections

Add. Ms. CC CGSO CU IL JA LM MM MMCG

Additional Manuscripts (BL) Corpo Cronológico (ANTT). Quoted by part-bundle-document Conselho Geral do Santo Ofício (ANTT) Conselho Ultramarino (AHU) Inquisição de Lisboa (ANTT) Jesuítas na Ásia (BA) Livros das Monções (ANTT, HAG) Miscelâneas Manuscritas (BA) Miscelâneas Manuscritas do Convento da Graça (ANTT)

226

SP TSO

Abbreviations

Secretarias Provinciales (AGS) Tribunal do Santo Ofício (ANTT) Primary Sources

ACE APO CSL DI DRI DUP Linhares, Diary 1 Linhares, Diary 2 Linhares, Diary 3

Assentos do Conselho do Estado Archivo Portuguez Oriental Colecção de São Lourenço Documenta Indica Documentos Remettidos da Índia Documentação Ultramarina Portuguesa First part of the diary of Viceroy Linhares, BA, MM, cod. 51-VII-12 Second part of the diary of Viceroy Linhares, BNP, Reservados, cod. 939 Third part of the diary of Viceroy Linhares, BNP, Reservados, cod. 939, published as Diário do 3º conde de Linhares, vice-rei da Índia Other Abbreviations

cap. cod. conq. cx. déc. div. fasc. ill. liv. ms., mss. n. n.d. n.p. pl. pt. tom.

capítulo [chapter] códice [codex] conquista [conquest] caixa [box] década [decade] divisão [division] fascículo [fascicule] illustration livro [book] manuscript note no date no place, no publisher, or no page plate parte [part] tomo [tome]

Notes

Introduction 1. For a relatively recent English overview of the history of the early modern Portuguese Empire, see Disney, A History of Portugal and the Portuguese Empire, II. Specifically on Portuguese Asia, see Subrahmanyam, The Portuguese Empire in Asia. 2. The classical synthesis of Mughal India is Richards, The Mughal Empire. For a novel overview, see Eaton, India in the Persianate Age. 3. See Santos, “Goa é a chave de toda a Índia”; Marques, “‘Por ser cabeça do Estado do Brasil.’” 4. Flores, Unwanted Neighbours. 5. See, respectively, Stern, The Company-State; Emmer and Gommans, The Dutch Overseas Empire. 6. See Subrahmanyam, “The Hidden Face of Surat,” 224, who quotes the seventeenthcentury French traveler and jeweler Jean-Baptiste Tavernier on this. 7. See Clulow, The Company and the Shogun, ch. 2; Clulow, “The Art of Claiming.” 8. See, for instance, Gommans, The Unseen World; Winterbottom, Hybrid Knowledge. For a survey of these historiographical developments, see Subrahmanyam, “Hybrid Affairs.” 9. See, in particular, Van Meersbergen, “The Diplomatic Repertoires”; Van Meersbergen, Ethnography and Encounter, esp. chs. 5 and 6. 10. Amrith, Unruly Waters, 47. 11. Bayly, Empire and Information. The book’s conclusion is titled “Knowing the country.” 12. See Hevia, The Imperial Security State; Mosca, From Frontier Policy to Foreign Policy; Afinogenov, Spies and Scholars. 13. A telling example in the field of political communication is De Weerdt and Morche, eds., Political Communication in Chinese and European History. Comparative in essence, this volume has the advantage of bringing the medieval period into the discussion. 14. For a critique of the term “medieval” being applied to India in its “Muslim era,” see Eaton, India in the Persianate Age, 17–18. 15. Collective volumes on the Persianate have mushroomed in recent years. See, in particular, Green, ed., The Persianate World; Amanat and Ashraf, eds., The Persianate World. For a review of much of this literature by one of the scholars who has contributed most toward a reconsideration of the Persianate linguistic and cultural sphere, see Green, “Introduction: The

228

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Frontiers of the Persianate World,” together with the review essay by Hemmat, “Completing the Persianate Turn.” 16. Eaton, India in the Persianate Age. Also see Flatt, The Courts of the Deccan Sultanates. On the Mughals’ aspirations to “rule” over the Persianate world, see Anooshahr, “Dialogism and Territorialism”; Lefèvre, “The Majalis-i-Jahangiri (1608–11).” 17. Pollock, The Language of the Gods. For an excellent study of the role of Sanskrit at the Mughal court, see Truschke, Culture of Encounters. 18. Eaton, “The Persian Cosmopolis.” On the “vernacular millennium,” see Pollock, The Language of the Gods, pt. 2. Ricci, Islam Translated, has ingeniously applied Pollock’s formula to the role of Arabic in South and Southeast Asia and consequently unearthed an Arabic cosmopolis. 19. For an exception, see Subrahmanyam, “A Tale of Three Empires.” 20. See Green, “Preface and Acknowledgments,” xiv. 21. Green, “Introduction: The Frontiers of the Persianate World,” respectively 1, 39–40. 22. Ibid., 8. 23. Bishara and Chatterjee, “Introduction: The Persianate Bazaar,” 490. 24. Khazeni, The City and Wilderness, 7. 25. Flood, Objects of Translation. The book’s conclusion is titled “In and Out of Place.” 26. Oliveira, Barros, and Gândavo authored, respectively, Grammatica da lingoagem portuguesa (1536), Dialogo em louvor da nossa linguagem (1540), and Dialogo em defensam da língua portuguesa (1574). 27. For the exploration of one of these nexuses, see Braun and Vollendorf, eds., Theorising the Ibero-American Atlantic. 28. Ghobrial, The Whispers of Cities, 158. 29. For a preliminary discussion of such materials, see Flores, “Marathi Voices.” 30. Tavakoli-Targhi, “The Homeless Texts of Persianate Modernity.” 31. Maza, Thinking about History, 118.

Chapter 1 1. For the broader Portuguese context, see Thomaz, “A crise de 1565–1575.” For a reconsideration of the demise of Vijayanagara, see Subrahmanyam, Courtly Encounters, ch. 1. 2. Pereira, História da Índia, liv. 2, cap. xx, 422. 3. Fearing a coalition between Ahmadnagar and Bijapur, the captain of Goa had spies in the Nizam Shahi court, such as João Álvares de Magalhães and Lopo Soares, whose profile was rather close to Azevedo’s. Luís Freire de Andrade to King Sebastian, Goa, 30 November 1571, ANTT, CC, I-109-75. 4. For a bird’s-eye view of the early years and challenges of the Mughal Empire, see Richards, The Mughal Empire, 6–12. 5. The layout of this rich intelligence-gathering structure can be grasped from an analysis of the many extant letters addressed by Sousa and Aguião to Castro. These materials are included in CSL, III, 179–312.

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6. Castro, Crónica do vice-rei D. João de Castro, 209–11. Pashtuns/Pathans (port. Patanes) was synonymous with Afghans until recent times. 7. These unnamed “lords of Cambay” belonged to the warrior elite of the sultanate of Gujarat: sixteenth-century Portuguese authors often wrote Cambay (Cambaia) when referring to Gujarat. 8. Aguião to Castro, Chaul, 19 July 1546, CSL, III, 247–49. 9. Sousa to Castro, Chaul, 13 January 1547, Obras completas, IV, 45; Castro, Crónica do vice-rei D. João de Castro, 211–12; Nunes, Crónica de Dom João de Castro, 63. 10. For a classic study of the first generations of Portuguese outlaws in Asia, see Cruz, “Exiles and Renegades.” 11. Among other instances, the Portuguese used it during the siege of Arzila (Asilah, in North Africa) in 1516 by the king of Fez. See Rodrigues, Anais de Arzila, I, 18. 12. Coutre, Andanzas asiáticas, 333–34. On the use of invisible ink by an early modern state, see Preto, I servizi segreti di Venezia, 280–81. 13. The literature on Orta and his Colóquios dos simples e drogas da Índia (Goa, 1563) is vast. For a consideration of Orta’s informational system, see Loureiro, “Information Networks in the Estado da Índia.” 14. Ataíde rose to fame in Portugal and in some European circles due to his victories in the sieges of Goa and Chaul of 1570–1571. For a study of his career and reputation, see VilaSanta, Entre o reino e o império. 15. Iordanou, Venice’s Secret Service; Frigo, “‘Small States’ and Diplomacy,” 147–75. 16. The Portuguese texts commonly identify the sultans (and the sultanates) of the Deccan by the name of the respective dynasties. Idalxá and Nizamoxá are thus corrupted versions of ‘Adil Shah and Nizam Shah. The Portuguese likewise used Idalcão (Hidalcão, Dialcão, that is, ‘Adil Khan) when referring to the sultans of Bijapur and tended to employ the two forms— Idalcão and Idalxá—interchangeably, even if there is a marked difference between addressing a ruler by khan (chief ) or shah (king). For their part, the sultans of Ahmadnagar were known in Goa and Lisbon as Melique (malik, “king”) and Nizamaluco (nizam al-mulk, “governor of the kingdom”). Finally, the rulers of Golconda represented the Qutb Shahi dynasty and were called Cotubuxá by the Portuguese. 17. Ágoston, “Information, Ideology, and Limits of Imperial Policy”; Gürkan, “The Efficacy of Ottoman Counter-Intelligence.” 18. See Burak, “‘In Compliance with the Old Register.’” 19. See, for instance, De Weerdt, Information, Territory, and Networks; Mosca, “Empire and the Circulation of Frontier Intelligence.” 20. Toby, State and Diplomacy; Kondo, “Japan and the Indian Ocean.” 21. Paramore, “The Transnational Archive of the Sinosphere”; Cullen, “Japanese Archives.” 22. Berry, Japan in Print. 23. Paramore, “The Transnational Archive of the Sinosphere.” For an earlier exploration of this formula, see Jansen, China in the Tokugawa World. 24. The notion of archivality was first suggested by Head, “Early Modern European Archivality.” On the history of early modern European archives, see Head, Making Archives.

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For a broad collective reflection on archival cultures across time and space, see Bausi, et al., eds., Manuscripts and Archives. 25. For a powerful critique of the “Neo-Eurocentric” perspective that still informs the history of early modern archival practices, see Burak, Rothman, and Ferguson, “Towards Early Modern Archivality.” 26. There is an extensive and growing body of work on this topic. For a recent analysis, see Dover, The Information Revolution. The most comprehensive view of how information was created, handled, and communicated from the fifteenth century to the present time on a world scale is Blair, et al., eds., Information. 27. On early modern European publics, see Wilson and Yachnin, eds., Making Publics in Early Modern Europe. 28. De Vivo, Information and Communication in Venice, ch. 3. 29. For England, see Haynes, Invisible Power; Marshall, Intelligence and Espionage. On France, Soll, The Information Master; Bély, Espions et ambassadeurs. For the case of Venice, see Iordanou, Venice’s Secret Service; Preto, I servizi segreti di Venezia; De Vivo, Information and Communication in Venice. 30. For Russia, see Franklin and Bowers, eds., Information and Empire; Afinogenov, Spies and Scholars. On archives and the Western European empires, see Donato and Saada, eds., Pratiques d’archives, 249–416; Donato, “Introduction: Archives, Record Keeping and Imperial Governance.” 31. Friedrich, “Communication and Bureaucracy”; Friedrich, “Government and Information-Management”; Nelles, “Cosas y cartas.” 32. Monserrate, Commentary, xv–xvi. On Jesuit record keeping principles and practices, see Friedrich, “Archives as Networks”; Nelles, “Chancillería en colegio.” 33. Molino, L’Impero di carta. 34. Nussdorfer, “The Politics of Space,” 170; Mesotten, “Behind the Curtains of Diplomacy.” 35. Friedrich, The Birth of the Archive, 115–16. 36. For secretaries and chancelleries in early modern Europe and beyond, see Dover, ed., Secretaries and Statecraft. 37. Helmers, “Public Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe.” 38. See Archer, Sovereignty and Intelligence. Also see Iordanou, Venice’s Secret Service, 158–62. 39. On secret letters in the early modern English context, see Daybell, The Material Letter, 148–74. 40. Lang, “People’s Secrets”; Stewart, “Francis Bacon’s Bi-literal Cipher.” 41. Borroguero Beltran, “Philip of Spain”; Brendecke, Imperio e información; Montcher, “Écriture poliphonique de l’histoire.” 42. Hugon, Au service du Roi Catholique; Carnicer and Marcos, Espías de Felipe II; Navarro Bonilla, Los archivos del espionaje; Montáñez Matilla, El correo en la España de los Austrias. 43. Tamayo de Vargas, Cifra, contracifra, antigua y moderna (1612), BNE, Mss. 8940. This manuscript had been dealt with by Kroll, “Cifras y sus secretarios.” On cryptography in early

Notes to Pages 25–28

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modern Spain, also see Gallende Díaz, “La correspondencia diplomática”; Carnicer and Marcos, Espías de Felipe II, ch. 8. 44. Vera y Figueroa, El Embaxador. Originally published in Seville in 1620, the book was later translated into French (Paris, 1635) and Italian (Venice, 1649). 45. Brendecke, “Knowledge, Oblivion, and Concealment.” 46. On the social profile of the viceroys and governors of the Estado, see Cunha and Monteiro, “Vice-reis, governadores,” esp. 94–102. Regarding princely education in sixteenthcentury Portugal, see Buescu, Na corte dos reis de Portugal, 11–51. 47. There is a wealth of studies on the relaciones de sucesos. See Ettinghausen, “The News in Spain”; Redondo, “Sevilla, centro de ‘relaciones de sucesos.’” For the Portuguese scenario, see Lisboa, “La ciudad, la corte y la información manuscrita”; Flores and Cardim, “An Imperial Formation Joins a Composite Polity,” 611–13. 48. Cardim, “‘Nem tudo se pode escrever.’” 49. Cardim, “O embaixador seiscentista.” The increase of Portuguese diplomatic activity in the European arena is obviously connected to the Restoration (Restauração) of 1640—i.e., the replacement of the Spanish Habsburgs with the new Braganza dynasty—and the Restoration War with Spain that lasted until 1668. See Cardim, “Embaixadores e representantes diplomáticos.” 50. Cruz and Lázaro, “A linguagem criptográfica”; Barroso, “Comunicação política e diplomática”; Couto, “Spying in the Ottoman Empire.” 51. Mena García, “Más allá de la historia oficial.” 52. Xavier, “The Casa da Índia.” 53. See Brendecke, “Knowledge, Oblivion, and Concealment.” 54. Goa, 12 June 1631, Linhares, Diary 2, f. 36v. 55. Khafi Khan, The Muntakhab al-Lubab, 757; Salih Kambo, Amal-i Salih, 167. I am grateful to Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam for these two references. Interestingly, these views are in sharp contrast with an early eighteenth-century treatise, which states that “Shahjahan was satisfied with oral orders and did not usually sign papers,” whereas “Aurangzeb made his signature the basis of administration.” See Bayly, Empire and Information, 36. 56. SOAS, Ms. 11952. This untitled dictionary has 143 folios and includes c. 8,000 words in three columns: Portuguese, Hindi, and Persian (transliterated). 57. Ibid., f. 58v. 58. Ibid., respectively, ff. 80r, 63v, 34v, 43r, 75r. 59. Ibid., f. 141v. 60. Ibid., ff. 124r, 95r–v. 61. Ibid., ff. 36r, 91r. 62. Flores, The Mughal Padshah. 63. SOAS, Ms. 11952, ff. 34v, 75r. 64. Concerning the postal system of early modern India, see Habib, “Postal Communications”; Farooque, Roads and Communications, ch. 2; Nayeem, “Postal Communications”; Agarwal, “An Account of the Postal System in India.” 65. For late Qing China, see Reed, Talons and Teeth.

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66. Fisher, “The East India Company’s ‘Suppression of the Native Dak’”; Bayly, Empire and Information, esp. ch. 2. 67. António Botelho, “Relação das cousas mais notaveis que observei no Reino do Gram Mogor, em perto de seis anos,” c. 1670, BL, Add. Mss. 9855, ff. 17r–40v (24v–25r), mentions the existence of a “runners’ bazaar” (bazar dos patamares) in the main Mughal cities and goes into elaborate detail on how these structures operated. 68. Monserrate, Commentary, 212. 69. Siddiqi, “The Intelligence Services”; Sarkar, Mughal Polity, 242–59; Alavi, Studies in the History of Medieval Deccan, 87–94. 70. Sarkar, “News-Writers of Mughal India,” 110–45; Fisher, “The Office of Akhbar Nawis.” For a sample of early nineteenth-century akhbarats, see Pernau and Jaffery, Information and the Public Sphere. 71. Abu’l Fazl, Ain-i Akbari, I, 268–69; Abu’l Fazl, Akbar Nama, III, 167. 72. Abu’l Fazl, Ain-i Akbari, I, 268. 73. Baqir, Advice on the Art of Governance, 63–64. The need to gather knowledge is also contemplated in the Directorio de Reyes (Adabu’s-saltanat), penned by Jerónimo Xavier in 1609 and offered to Jahangir (Uroš Zver, personal communication, May 3, 2020). 74. Monserrate, Commentary, 205–6. 75. Xavier to Acquaviva, Lahore, 8 September 1596, DI, XVIII, 561. 76. For a characterization and reassessment of this debate, see Subrahmanyam, “The Mughal State”; Alam and Subrahmanyam, “Introduction: Coercion, Communication, and the East India Company.” Specifically on the imperial bureaucracy, see Mishra, Bureaucracy under the Mughals. 77. See the useful overview (minute, but structural in essence) by Sah, “Mughal State and the Information System,” 292–309. 78. Pickett and Sartori, “From the Archetypical Archive,” 784. 79. Concerning the medieval period, see the pathbreaking (if fundamentally divergent) works by Apellániz, Breaching the Bronze Wall, esp. ch. 2, and Rustow, The Lost Archive. 80. Burak, Rothman, and Ferguson, “Towards Early Modern Archivality,” esp. 549–53. 81. See Hirschler, “From Archive to Archival Practices”; Sartori, “Seeing like a Khanate.” 82. Alam, “State Building under the Mughals,” 125. 83. Alam and Subrahmanyam, “Introduction: Coercion, Communication, and the East India Company,” 29–31; Truschke, Aurangzeb, ch. 4. 84. Aurangzeb’s sentence was registered by Hamid al-Din Khan, Anecdotes of Aurangzib, 55. 85. See, for example, Bhimsen Saxena, Tarikh-i-Dilkasha; Selected Waqai of the Deccan; Udairaj, The Military Dispatches. 86. See Kaicker, The King and the People, 117–23. For an interesting Chinese parallel, focusing especially on the critical writings of Gu Yanwu (d. 1682), see Will, “La paperasse au secours de l’homme.” 87. Shah Nawaz Khan, The Maathir-ul-umara, I, 63. On this figure, see, for instance, Lefèvre, “The Court of ‘Abd-ur-Rahim Khan-i Khanan.” Khan-i Khanan is a title (“khan of khans”). 88. See Rezavi, “The Empire and Bureaucracy,” esp. 367, 370–71 for his discussion of the seventeenth-century careers of minor bureaucrats like Shaikh Farid Bhakkari and Balkrishan Brahman.

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89. Coutre, Andanzas asiáticas, 295. The Englishman William Hawkins likewise noted that Jahangir “hath Spies upon every Nobleman.” See Hawkins, The Hawkins’ Voyages, 401. 90. This is Pickett and Sartori’s point in their “From the Archetypical Archive,” 784. 91. The scholarship on memory in Europe from Antiquity to the Renaissance is overwhelming. See the classic study by Yates, The Art of Memory. On Ricci, see the equally classic work by Spence, The Memory Palace, to be read together with more recent approaches like that of Hosne, “Matteo Ricci’s Occidental Method of Memory.” 92. Raman, Document Raj, 112–21. 93. Hermansen and Lawrence, “Indo Persian Tazkiras.” 94. Green, Making Space, 221–28. 95. See Sharma, “Reading the Acts and Lives,” esp. 297–300. 96. Smart, “Akbar, Illiterate Genius.” 97. Monserrate, Commentary, 201. 98. . . . a todos conhece e lhe sabe os nomes. . . . Xavier to the provincial of India, Lahore, 8 September 1596, DI, XVI, 564–65. 99. Xavier to the provincial of India, Lahore, 25 September 1606, DUP, III, 66. 100. See Sharma, “Reading the Acts and Lives,” 287–90, who draws on Abu’l Fazl’s testimony. 101. Flores, The Mughal Padshah, 94. 102. Sharma, “Reading the Acts and Lives,” 290, quoting ‘Abd al-Baqi Nihavandi’s Ma’asir-i Rahimi (1616). 103. That was the case with the “Relación de las cosas particulares de la China” penned in 1588 by the Jesuit Alonso Sánchez. BNE, Mss. 287, ff. 198r–226r. For the much-debated theme of Philip II at work, see Parker, Imprudent King, 61–79; Escudero, Felipe II. 104. Mansabdar was an imperial officer (not necessarily a noble) who held a numerical rank (mansab) determined by the Mughal emperor. 105. Lefèvre, “The Night Debates at Jahangir’s Court,” 55–56; Also see Moosvi, “The Conversations of Jahangir, 1608–11.” For similar sessions in Akbar’s reign, see MacLean, “Real Men and False Men.” 106. Mutribi, Conversations with Emperor Jahangir. 107. Gramatica indostana, 53. This unauthored work was published in Rome by the Propaganda Fide in 1778. 108. Khera, “Marginal, Mobile, Multilayered”; Bishara and Chatterjee, “Introduction: The Persianate Bazaar.” 109. De Vivo, Information and Communication in Venice, 86. 110. Xavier to the provincial of India, Lahore, 8 September 1596, DI, XVIII, 572; Sherley, Sir Antony Sherley, 65. 111. For two European cases, namely Venice and Barcelona, see Cowan, “Seeing is Believing”; Amelang, “The Myth of the Mediterranean City.” 112. Botelho, “Relação das cousas,” ff. 28r–30r. 113. Couto, Da Ásia, déc. 6, pt. I, liv. IV, cap. v, 308–10. 114. Tandon, “The Presence of the Marginalized.” 115. See Tabor, “A Market for Speech.”

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116. See Pellò, “Persian Poets on the Streets”; Khan, “What Story Tellers”; Sharma, “Reading the Acts and Lives.” 117. Bayly, Empire and Information, 17. Also see Moin, The Millennial Sovereign, 69–70. 118. Digby, Sufis and Soldiers; Digby, Wonder Tales. 119. Kinra, Writing Self, Writing Empire, 250–51. 120. Flores, “Distant Wonders.” 121. For a successful attempt, see Mukhia, The Mughals of India, 62–65.

Chapter 2 1. On the road system of Mughal India, see Farooque, Roads and Communications; Deloche, Recherches sur les routes; Gommans, Mughal Warfare, 15–37. For certain segments of the system, see Agarwal, “Roads from Surat to Agra”; Agarwal, “Historical Account of the Roads.” 2. Saldanha to Philip III, Goa, April 1600, BNP, Reservados, cod. 1976, f. 100v. 3. Coutinho to Philip III, Goa, 8 February 1619, DRI, V, 2. 4. For the specific contexts of the 1590s and the 1620s, see Flores, Unwanted Neighbours, ch. 2. 5. Jesuit annual letter of 1597, Goa, 1 January 1598, DI, XVIII, 879–80. 6. Respectively, Bastião Lopes Lobato to Castro, Hormuz, 3 February 1546, Obras completas, IV, 25; Garcia de la Penha to Castro, Hormuz, 5 February 1546, ibid., III, 124. The scarce information available on Penha is provided by Lucena, Historia da vida, 804. 7. Loureiro, “Gaspar da Cruz.” 8. For the case of medieval Damascus, see Hirschler, The Written Word, ch. 2. 9. Tenreiro, Itinerários da Índia a Portugal, 6. 10. These cities were taken by the Portuguese successively in 1521, 1534, 1535, and 1559. Regarding the Província do Norte vis-à-vis the Mughal challenge, see Flores, Unwanted Neighbours, 88–110. 11. See, for example, the account book of the factors of Chaul and the references therein to payments made to unidentified spies and runners between May 1680 and October 1684. HAG, Contas da feitoria de Chaul, no. 2666, f. 67r. 12. Coutinho to Philip III, Goa, 20 February 1619, DRI, V, 183; Coutinho to Philip III, Goa, 3 February 1618, ibid., IV, 130. 13. Viceroy Jerónimo de Azevedo to Philip III, Goa, 9 January 1616, HAG, LM, liv. 12, f. 225r. Some of these situations eventually came to the king’s knowledge in distant Iberia. For instance, Philip III was aware in early 1615 that the captain of Daman was “eating” the spy money. Philip III to Azevedo, Lisbon, 31 January 1615, DRI, III, 183. 14. Pereira to Philip II, [Chaul, late 1587], AGS, SP, cod. 1551, f. 130v; Pereira to Philip II, Chaul, 1 December 1588, ibid., ff. 348r–v. See also the letter by the Secretary of the Estado Duarte Delgado Varejão to Philip II, Goa, 1 December 1588, ibid., ff. 515v–16v, which provides an extensive summary of a lost letter penned six months earlier by Pereira.

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15. Firishta, History of the Rise of the Mahomedan Power; Tabatabai, Burhan-i Ma’athir. 16. Mendonça to Philip II, Diu, 26 November 1589, AGS, SP, cod. 1551, ff. 664r–v. 17. Varejão to Philip II, Goa, 1 December 1588, ibid., f. 516v. 18. Anonymous, Vida e acções, 127. 19. The Jesuits were friends with a baniya from Khambayat called Babu Shah (Babaunça, Babança) and resorted not only to his linguistic skills in Gujarat, but also to his network in order to exchange letters between Goa and the Mughal court. See the excerpt of a letter from Manuel Pinheiro to Luís Coelho (in Goa), Khambayat, 15 January 1595, included in the Jesuit annual letter, Goa, 29 November 1595, DI, XVIII, 375–76. Also see Jerónimo Xavier to the provincial of India, Agra, 6 September 1604, DUP, III, 11. 20. Petition from the baniyas of Gujarat submitted to the Estado’s Revenue Council (Conselho da Fazenda), Goa, 2 March 1646, APO, fasc. 6, 1271. The baniyas (vaniyas) were Hindu and Jain merchants, mostly from western and northern India. Their trading network stretched from the Red Sea to insular Southeast Asia and had a considerable impact on the Estado’s economy. 21. The Morro (“hilltop”) was the name given by the Portuguese to the promontory of Korlai, which overlooked Chaul and the entrance to the bay. 22. Anonymous, Vida e acções, 131, 157. 23. Inquisitors of Goa to the inquisitor general in Lisbon, Goa, 15 December 1586, A Inquisição de Goa, II, 113. 24. Gama to Philip II, Goa, October 1597, BNP, Reservados, cod. 1976, f. 89r. 25. Hespanha, Como os juristas viam o mundo, 648–49. 26. Algus havissos do Equebar. Gama to Philip II, [Goa], October 1597, BNP, Reservados, cod. 1976, f. 89r. 27. Philip III to Aires de Saldanha, Lisbon, 15 February 1603, HAG, LM, liv. 7, f. 193v. 28. Inquisition’s file of Sebastião Dias, 17 December 1600 to 13 November 1601, ANTT, TSO, IL, proc. 4934, ff. 5v–6v, 13r–v, 36v–37r. 29. This general pardon was issued in Goa, 26 March 1599, ANTT, TSO, IL, proc. 4934, f. 2r. 30. Goa, 19 February 1620, ANTT, CGSO, liv. 207, ff. 292r–302r. 31. Ibid., respectively, ff. 292r–v, 294r–v. 32. Ibid., f. 295v. 33. Ibid., f. 295r. 34. Ibid., ff. 293v–94r. 35. On Paolsanti, see Bruscoli, “Tra commercio e diplomazia”; and especially Freddolini, “Eurasian Networks of Pietre Dure.” 36. Miller, Peiresc’s Mediterranean, 370–87. 37. See Schaffer, “Newton on the Beach.” 38. Miller, Peiresc’s Mediterranean, ch. 31. 39. ANTT, CGSO, liv. 207, ff. 292v–93r, 294v–95r, 301r–v. Their careers as intelligence agents will be discussed at length in the next chapter. 40. On Venice, see De Vivo, Information and Communication in Venice.

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Notes to Pages 43–46

41. Anonymous, Primor e honra, pt. 3, cap. vii, ff. 89v–90r. The author is unclear on whether this occurred in Goa or in any other city of Portuguese India. Primor e honra was published in 1630, if penned in the late 1570s. 42. Botelho to Viceroy Count of Sarzedas, [Shahpur], 31 July 1655, ACE, III, 386. 43. Spierling and Halvorson, “Introduction: Definitions of Community in Early Modern Europe,” 1; Parker and Bentley, eds., Between the Middle Ages and Modernity. See also Burke, Language and Communities, esp. 5–6, for his critical stance on the concept of community. For the Iberian context, see Herzog, Defining Nations. 44. Coge Abraham was first studied by Pissurlencar, Agentes da diplomacia, 553–55; and Fischel, “Leading Jews in the Service of Portuguese India,” 40–45. On the Jews of Goa, see Tavim, “The Jews in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Goa”; Couto, “All Roads Lead to Goa.” 45. See Andrada, Crónica de D. João III, pt. IV, cap. cvi, 1184–85; Couto, Da Ásia, déc. 7, pt. II, liv. VIII, cap. vii, 215, 221; liv. IX, cap. ix, 363, 365; liv. IX, cap. xiv, 405, 407. 46. Letter from Father Fernão Guerreiro, [Almeirim, post 10 October], 1575, DI, X, 1059–60. 47. APO, fasc. 5, pt. III, 985–87. 48. Anonymous, Vida e acções, 115–16, 119–20; AHU, CU, cod. 500, f. 21v; Philip II to Matias de Albuquerque, Madrid, 3 March 1594, APO, fasc. 3, 439. 49. Sousa, Oriente Conquistado, pt. II, conq. I, div. II, § 7, 900. 50. Aslanian, From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean, 13–15. 51. On the Armenians and the Estado da Índia, see Couto, “Arméniens et Portugais”; Cunha, “Armenian Merchants in Portuguese Trade Networks.” 52. Goa, 17 December 1600, ANTT, TSO, IL, proc. 4934, f. 40r. There was an antiArmenian stance in Catholic Goa at the turn of the seventeenth century. See Marcocci, “A fé de um império.” 53. See, respectively, Father Gil Eanes Pereira to the Archbishop of Goa, Fatehpur Sikri, 5 June 1579, DI, XI, 595; Jerónimo Xavier to the provincial of India, Lahore, 8 September 1596, ibid., XVIII, 550, 572. 54. Fr. Manuel Tobias to Fr. Gaspar da Conceição, Agra, 18 April 1624, Archivo Franciscano Ibero-Oriental, 600/6–4, ff. 217r–33r. 55. Royal instructions to Francisco da Gama as newly appointed viceroy, Lisbon, 28 January 1596, APO, fasc. 3, 589. 56. Gama to Philip III, [Goa, 1599], BNP, Reservados, cod. 1976, f. 160r. 57. Bartolomeo Ricci to the superior general, Messina, 14 August 1591, DI, XV, 603–05. Also see “Relación del Mogor,” Madrid, February 1592, ibid., 779–80. 58. “Relazione di un corriero venuto dall’Indie Orientali . . . ,” Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Urb. lat. 818, ff. 485r–86v. For an eighteenth-century copy of this document and its Portuguese translation, see Ferreira, Relação da viagem. On Jorge’s overland journeys, see Disney, The Portuguese in India, ch. xv, 527–50. 59. 21 August 1602, AGS, SP, cod. 1463, f. 46r. 60. Francisco da Gama to Philip IV, Goa, January 1624, BNP, Reservados, cod. 1817, ff. 141r–v.

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61. Fernão de Albuquerque to Philip III, Goa, 15 February 1622, DRI, VII, 397. 62. João Coutinho to Philip III, Goa, 8 February 1619, ibid., V, 96. 63. Disney, The Portuguese in India, ch. xv, 546. Christian Brahmans also made the overland route between Goa and Lisbon. Such was the case of one António de Saldanha, brâmane de nação from Salcete, and his companion António Luís. See Saldanha’s petition to Philip III, Lisbon, 31 January 1618, AHU, CU–Índia, cx. 8, unnumbered. 64. Porto, 17 November 1609, AGS, SP, cod. 1498, f. 67v. 65. Flores, Nas margens do Hindustão, 207, 214, 224–25. 66. Couto, Da Ásia, déc. 7, liv. IV, cap. ix, 341. See Loureiro, A Biblioteca de Diogo do Couto, 237–38, also for Aguiar’s lembrança and the overall question of Couto’s sources of information. On the chronicler’s debatable access to Persian chronicles dealing with the origins of the Mughals, see Couto, Década Quarta, II, 111–14, n. 114 (by Sanjay Subrahmanyam). 67. City of Goa to Philip II, [Goa], 1595, APO, fasc. 1, pt. II, 16. 68. Philip III to Archbishop Aleixo de Meneses, [Lisbon, 1600], ANTT, CC, III-126-53. The king’s vague description of this work does not favor its exact identification, but it could well be a copy of Khvandamir’s Habib al-siyar: composed in Herat in 1524, it ends with Shah Isma‘il’s reign (r. 1501–1524). See Quinn, Historical Writing, 24–28; and Quinn’s personal communication, March, 24, 2020. 69. On Sultan Ibrahim and his books, see Overton, “Book Culture, Royal Libraries.” 70. Krieger to Corai, Nauraspur, 29 January 1616, AGS, Estado-Legajos, 437, ff. 149r–51r. On Corai and his prior diplomatic and commercial dealings between Medici Florence and Safavid Iran, see inter alia Federici, “A Servant of Two Masters.” 71. Kruijtzer, Xenophobia in Seventeenth-Century India, ch. 1. 72. See Beveridge, “Von Poser’s Diary.” 73. Kruijtzer, Xenophobia in Seventeenth-Century India, 18–73 (24–25); Hutton and Tucker, “A Dutch Artist in Bijapur.” 74. On Coutre and his Vida, see Coutre, Andanzas asiáticas, 9–41. 75. Ibid., respectively, 174–75, 177 (1604), 191–97 (1605), 280 (1616). 76. Fernão de Albuquerque to Hakim Khushal, Goa, 19 December 1619, HAG, Reis Vizinhos, liv. 1, ff. 59r–v. Hakim Kushhal grew up with Prince Khurram, whom he served. See Jahangir, The Jahangirnama, 276. 77. João Coutinho to Malik Ambar, Goa, 3 September 1619, HAG, Reis Vizinhos, liv. 1, ff. 70r–v. On Malik Ambar, see especially Eaton, A Social History of the Deccan, 105–28. 78. . . . que eramos espias e tredos a el rei cujo sal comiamos . . . . Jerónimo Xavier to the provincial of India, Agra, 6 September 1604, DUP, III, 15. 79. There were three Jesuit missions to the Mogor: 1580–1583, 1590–1591, and from 1595 onwards. For an old, yet still useful introduction to the topic, see Maclagan, The Jesuits and the Great Mogul, where the lives and actions of many of the Jesuit priests mentioned in the current book are discussed. 80. Francisco Leão to the provincial of India, Agra, 6 October 1628, DUP, III, 189–97. 81. Philip III to Viceroy Rui Lourenço de Távora, Lisbon, 22 February 1611, DRI, II, 56–57.

238

Notes to Pages 49–53

82. On the political metaphor of eating the emperor’s salt in Mughal India, see Eaton, The Rise of Islam, 162–64. 83. Clulow, “Gifts for the Shogun.” 84. Xavier to the provincial of India, Agra, 24 September 1608, DUP, III, 113–14. 85. Županov, Disputed Mission, 104–10. 86. Corsi to the provincial of India, Agra, 22 January 1627, DUP, III, 181–83. 87. For a telling example, see “Prince holding court and receiving gifts,” anonymous, c. 1590, BL, Johnson, 8, 6. 88. Rodolfo Acquaviva to the provincial of India, Fatehpur Sikri, 27 September 1582, DUP, III, 3–4; Xavier to Francisco Cabral, Lahore, 8 September 1596, DI, XVIII, respectively 545–48, 550–53. Darshaniyas were those who daily venerated Akbar upon his appearance at the jharoka-i darshan (viewing window) early in the morning. 89. Corsi to the provincial of India, Agra, 28 October 1619, DUP, III, 157; Botelho, “Relação das cousas,” f. 36v. 90. See Szuppe, “Circulation des lettrés et cercles littéraires.” 91. Jahangir, The Jahangirnama, 34. 92. Xavier to the provincial of India, Lahore, 25 September 1606, DUP, III, 82. For a discussion of Naqib Khan’s intellectual profile and role in the religious debates with the Jesuits held at Jahangir’s court, see Alam and Subrahmanyam, Writing the Mughal World, 280, 287, 289. 93. Xavier to the provincial of India, Lahore, 4 August 1607, DUP, III, 100. 94. SOAS, Ms. 11952, f. 43v. 95. Xavier to the provincial of India, Lahore, 4 August 1607, DUP, III, 100–01 (Hakim ‘Ali Gilani), 102–03 (‘Aziz Koka), 96–97 (Sharif Khan). 96. On Zain Khan Koka’s assets, see Manuel Pinheiro to Father João Álvares, Lahore, 9 September 1602, ARSI, Goa 46 I, ff. 43r–46v. On I’timad ud-Daula’s, see António de Andrade to the provincial of India, Agra, 14 August 1623, DUP, III, 167. 97. Andrade to the provincial of India, Agra, 14 August 1623, DUP, III, 167. For a firsthand Jesuit description of Asaf Khan’s palace and wealth, see Botelho, “Relação das cousas,” f. 38v. 98. Xavier to the provincial of India, Lahore, 8 September 1596, DI, XVIII, 562; Manuel Pinheiro to the Society, Goa, 22 December 1615, ARSI, Goa 33 II, f. 461v. 99. Xavier to the provincial of India, Lahore, 25 September 1606, DUP, III, 66. For another of Xavier’s depictions of these events, see Xavier to the provincial of India, Agra, 6 September 1604, ibid., 14–15. 100. Xavier to the provincial of India, Lahore, 8 September 1596, DI, XVIII, 571–72. 101. Ibid., 574. 102. Ibid., 573–74. 103. Clements, “Brush Talk.” 104. Xavier to the provincial of India, Lahore, 8 September 1596, DI, XVIII, 574; Xavier to the superior general, Srinagar, 18 August 1597, ibid., 833. 105. Philip II to Viceroy Francisco da Gama, Lisbon, 5 February 1597, APO, III, 674; Xavier to the provincial of India, Lahore, 10 July 1595, DI, XVII, 62. 106. Xavier to the provincial of India, Lahore, 8 September 1596, DI, XVIII, 581–82.

Notes to Pages 53–58

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107. Xavier to the superior general, Srinagar, 18 August 1597, ibid., 832. 108. Philip II to Viceroy Francisco da Gama, Lisbon, 21 November 1598, APO, fasc. 3, 919. 109. See Clossey, Salvation and Globalization, 202–6. 110. Bireley, The Jesuits and the Thirty Years War. 111. For a discussion of Acquaviva’s position, see Flores, The Mughal Padshah, 9–10. 112. Ibid., 87–129. 113. Županov, Disputed Mission, ch. 2. 114. Philip III to Saldanha, Lisbon, 15 February 1603, HAG, LM, liv. 7, f. 150v; Nicolau Pimenta to the superior general, Madgaon (Margão), 1 December 1601, ARSI, Goa 9 I, f. 10r; Nuno Rodrigues to the superior general, Goa, 17 December 1602, ibid., Goa 33 I, f. 27v. 115. Sebastião Dias’s inquisitorial file, 17 December 1600 to 13 November 1601, ANTT, TSO, IL, proc. 4934. The summary of his life that follows draws on information from this document, especially the six interrogation sessions held between February 22 and June 5, 1600. 116. . . . hû capitão por nome Canacana por forsa o fizera mouro. . . . Ibid., f. 25v. 117. See Matthee, “Confessions of an Armenian Convert.” 118. Viceroy Francisco da Gama to Philip IV, Goa, 27 January 1625, BNP, Reservados, cod. 1817, f. 199r. 119. Ghobrial, “Moving Stories and What They Tell Us.” 120. Markovits, Pouchepadass, and Subrahmanyam, eds., Society and Circulation. 121. On Shah Madar and the pilgrimage to his dargah in Mankapur, see Suvorova, Muslim Saints of South Asia, 171–76. 122. . . . tratando e conversando com mouros. . . . ANTT, TSO, IL, proc. 4934, ff. 20v–21r. 123. De Vivo, “Walking in Sixteenth-Century Venice.” 124. Botelho to Father Bento Ferreira, in Goa, Agra, 1 February 1652, DUP, III, 221. 125. Burke, The Art of Conversation. 126. Beasley, Versailles Meets the Taj Mahal. 127. Flatt, The Courts of the Deccan Sultanates, 109–14; Pfeifer, Empire of Salons. 128. Viceroy Count of Sarzedas to Alfonso VI, Goa, 26 December 1656, HAG, LM, liv. 26A, f. 9r. See also the viceregal instructions given to Brito, Goa, 5 January 1657, ACE, III, 609–12. On Ikhlas Khan, Bijapur, and Goa in the 1650s, see Chapter 9. Several Portuguese documents deal with Brito’s profile and diplomatic achievements in Bijapur and other regional states. See Pissurlencar, Agentes da diplomacia, 41–43, 50–51, 55–56, 58–59. 129. . . . gastamos a noite em preguntas, e repostas. . . . Manuel Dinis to Philip IV, Goa, 30 January 1633, BPE, cod. CXVI/2-3, ff. 74r–75v (quotation f. 74v). 130. For the scholarly exchanges between Vecchietti and Xavier, see the latter’s letter to the provincial of India, Agra, 6 September 1604, DUP, III, 20–21. There are several works on the Vecchietti brothers (Giovanni and Girolamo), their travels, and writings. For a classic study, see Almagià, “Giovan Battista e Gerolamo Vecchietti.” 131. Alchemy was practiced by some Mughal nobles at the time of Aurangzeb. See Shah Nawaz Khan, Ma’asir al-Umara, II, 245–46, 341. On Humayun’s interest in the subject, see Moin, The Millennial Sovereign, 114, 119–20. 132. BA, JA, cod. 49-V-18, f. 346r. 133. Cardozo, “António de Gouveia.”

240

Notes to Pages 60–64

Chapter 3 1. Linhares to Philip IV, Goa, 2 December 1630, HAG, LM, liv. 14, f. 6r. 2. On Linhares, see Disney, The Portuguese in India, chs. vii–xii. 3. See Kagan, “A World Without Walls.” On Goa’s defensive structure in this period, see Lopes, “O sistema defensivo de Goa”; Santos and Mendiratta, “Sistemas defensivos das ilhas de Tiswadi e Diu.” 4. The first part of the diary corresponds to the period from March 3, 1630, to February 6, 1631, BA, MM, cod. 51-VII-12. The second portion covers practically the whole of 1631, from February 9 to December 30, BNP, Reservados, cod. 939. The third extant section runs from February 1634 to January 1635, BNP, Reservados, cod. 939, published as Diário do 3º conde de Linhares. These annual diaries were sent to Lisbon aboard ships that left Goa sometime between December and February. 5. Royal ordinance, 31 October 1628, AHU, CU, cod. 285, ff. 130r–v. On Linhares’s diary, as well as on the shorter journal penned by Viceroy Count of Sarzedas in the mid-1650s, see Disney, “Viceroys and Their Diaries.” 6. Linhares, Diary 2, f. 104r. 7. Francesco Corsi to the superior general, Agra, 5 October 1633, ARSI, Goa 9 I, f. 153r; Francisco Leão to the provincial of India, Agra, 6 October 1628, DUP, III, 188. The Franks (Firanjis) were the Europeans. 8. On these two figures, see, respectively, Saksena, History of Shahjahan; Kumar, Asaf Khan. 9. Raguagli d’alcune missioni, 14–33; BA, JA, cod. 49-V-18, ff. 336v–40r. 10. See Farooqi, Mughal-Ottoman Relations, 6, 26, 46–48. 11. Goa, 12 June 1631, Linhares, Diary 2, f. 36v; State Council minutes, Goa, 6 December 1632, ACE, I, 557. 12. On Bulaqi and the Portuguese dealings with several of his doubles, see Flores and Subrahmanyam, “The Shadow Sultan.” For the viceroy’s association of Bulaqi with King Sebastian, killed in Morocco during the Battle of Ksar el Kebir in 1578 but rumored to have escaped, see Linhares, Diary 3, 265. 13. Concerning the ethnic “ranking” of Mughal nobility during Shahjahan’s reign, see Anwar, Nobility Under the Mughals, esp. 31–33, 86–87, 98–100. For a study of the place of the Afghan nobility in the Mughal political hierarchy of this period, see Joshi, The Afghan Nobility and the Mughals, 115–43. 14. On the city of Burhanpur as Mughal capital, see Gordon, “A Tale of Three Cities”; Hirsch, “Building Burhanpur.” 15. ‘Abdul Hamid Lahori, King of the World, 50–51, 174–76. 16. On Shahjahan and the Deccan, see Khan, The Deccan Policy, 166–88; Saksena, History of Shahjahan, chs. 6–7. For a novel view of the Deccan in the context of the Mughal expansion into the south until 1636, see Fischel, Local States in an Imperial World. 17. On the Mughal strategy vis-à-vis Ahmadnagar and the eventual conquest of the sultanate, see Shyam, The Kingdom of Ahmadnagar, 297–331. For an old, but still useful, study of the fall of Ahmadnagar, one that takes the Portuguese perspective into consideration, see Pissurlencar, “A extinção do reino de Nizam Shah.”

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18. Gordon, The Marathas, 37–58. 19. Pero da Silva to Philip IV, Goa, 10 March 1636, ANTT, LM, liv. 33, f. 258r. 20. Nayeem, External Relations, 161–66; Khan, The Deccan Policy, 234–41. 21. Flores, Unwanted Neighbours, 140–47. 22. Ibid., 221–42. 23. Governor Fernão de Albuquerque to Philip III, Goa, 8 February 1620, DRI, V, 370. 24. State Council minutes, Goa, 19 April 1631, ACE, I, 340. 25. Goa, 28 May 1631, Linhares, Diary 2, f. 31r. 26. Goa, 13 September 1635, Archivo da Relação, I, 461–62. 27. Linhares had access to personal correspondence exchanged between “gentiles” in Western India. On June 1, 1631, the viceroy confirmed the veracity of the news about Ahmadnagar (received via the Portuguese captain of Chaul) by comparing it to the content of a letter sent by a “gentile” from Chaul to a “gentile” from Goa. Linhares, Diary 2, f. 33v. This letter was likely intercepted and then translated into Portuguese. 28. Guerreiro, Relação anual, I, 10. 29. Abu’l Fazl, Akbar Nama, III, 207. On Haji Habibullah and other Mughal envoys to Goa in the 1570s and 1580s, see Flores, Nas margens do Hindustão, 113–14, 150–53. 30. For a discussion of this figure and his book, see Alam and Subrahmanyam, Writing the Mughal World, esp. 97–100. 31. BA, JA, cod. 49-V-18, ff. 343v–44r. 32. Goa, 25 July 1630, Linhares, Diary 1, f. 75r. 33. Annual Jesuit letter, [Goa, November] 1577, DI, X, 943–44. 34. Goa, 29 November 1631, Linhares, Diary 2, ff. 100v–101v. 35. Botelho, “Relação das cousas,” f. 38r. 36. See Jütte, “Entering a City,” 207–8. 37. Marcocci, “Império e escravidão,” 125–26. Marcocci draws on Balbi’s testimony but has meanwhile collected several other references and I am grateful to him for bringing these to my attention. On the secular branding of bodies in Europe (permanently inflicted marks), see Groebner, Who Are You? 103–08. 38. Pyrard de Laval, The Voyage, 34. 39. Lisbon, 24 February 1635, ANTT, LM, liv. 32, f. 61r. 40. See Groebner, Who Are You? esp. 65–94. See also Higgs, The Information State in England, for the English case; and Salzberg, “Controlling and Documenting,” on mobility control in early modern Venice. 41. Linhares, Diary 1, ff. 118r–19v; State Council minutes, Goa, 1 December 1630, ACE, I, 329; State Council minutes, Goa, 27 March 1630, ibid., 266. 42. That was the case of Fr. João da Rocha in 1630. Linhares, Diary 1, ff. 31r–v. 43. Ibid., f. 137r. For an intriguing example of these “public letters,” see Linhares to Vicente Ribeiro, Goa 30 December 1630, ibid., ff. 130v–31r. On Mustafa Khan, see Flores, Unwanted Neighbours, 186–202. 44. Goa, 29 November 1630, Linhares, Diary 1, f. 117r. 45. Goa, 13 December 1630, ibid., f. 124v. 46. Ibid., f. 28v.

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Notes to Pages 70–74

47. Ibid., ff. 29r–v. 48. For Europe, see Degl’Innocenti, Richardon, and Sbordoni, eds., Interactions Between Orality and Writing. The classic study of oral-written interactions is Goody’s The Interface Between the Written and the Oral. 49. Linhares, Diary 1, f. 28v. 50. 6 May 1630, ibid., f. 35r. 51. See Woolf, “News, History and the Construction of the Present”; Dooley, “News and Doubt in Early Modern Europe.” 52. Duval, Cartes des itineraires et voïages modernes, n.p. 53. 11, 22, 24 March, 8 April 1634, Linhares, Diary 3, 18, 27–28, 50. 54. 7, 10, 13, 29 May 1634, ibid., 101–2, 103–10, 124. 55. 1, 3, 12, 14 June 1634, ibid., 126–28, 133–34. 56. Ibid., 148. 57. 5, 9, 24 August 1634, ibid., 152–53, 155, 163. 58. In addition, letters exchanged between Goa and Daulatabad often traveled via Bijapur because they would arrive quicker this way. Goa, 17 May 1631, Linhares, Diary 2, f. 27v. 59. Linhares, Diary 1, ff. 17v, 21r–22r. 60. Ménager, Diplomatie et théologie, 132–34. 61. Linhares to Philip IV, Goa, 29 November 1632, HAG, LM, liv. 15, f. 4r. 62. A letter from Francesco Corsi to Linhares was sent on August 15 and arrived on September 8, 1630. Linhares, Diary 1, f. 89r. Mumtaz Mahal’s death occurred on June 17, 1631, but word did not arrive in Goa before August 5. Linhares, Diary 2, f. 53r. A couple of runners were paid two pagodas each for having carried letters between Burhanpur and Goa in July 1631. AHU, CU, cod. 218, f. 226r. The pagoda was a gold coin issued by several political formations in India, European powers included, and was worth 360 réis in the Estado da Índia (réis being the currency unit). 63. I borrow this expression from Truschke, “Deceptive Familiarity.” 64. These letters arrived in Goa, respectively, on September 8 and November 23. Linhares, Diary 1, ff. 89r; State Council minutes, Goa, 3 August 1630, ACE, I, 284. 65. Linhares, Diary 1, f. 31r. 66. Ibid., f. 13v. 67. Goa, 25 April 1630, ACE, I, 274; Linhares, Diary 1, ff. 49r–v. It is also plausible that not all the indigenous spies hired by the viceroy headed specifically to Burhanpur since the documents in question refer, somewhat indistinctively, to the lands (terras), camp (campo, lascar, arraial), and house (casa) of the Mogor. AHU, CU, cod. 218, f. 167v. 68. ANTT, CGSO, liv. 207, ff. 301r–v. Mesquita claimed to have been in the service of the Estado since the time of Viceroy Dom Jerónimo de Azevedo. Francisco da Gama to Philip IV, Goa, 24 February 1626, BNP, Reservados, cod. 1817, ff. 308v–09r. 69. Goa, 14 March 1630, Linhares, Diary 1, f. 14v. 70. State Council minutes, Goa, 11 March 1633, ACE, I, 462–67. 71. Linhares, Diary 3, 58. There is mention of payments made to several patamares who transported letters between Goa and Nagapattinam or Mylapur in 1630–1632. AHU, CU,

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cod. 218, ff. 227v–28r. A runner called Ragea was paid twelve xerafins in January 1632 for carrying letters between Goa and Bengal. Ibid., f. 228r. A silver coin of Mamluk origin, the xerafim (from the Arabic ashrafi) was worth 300 réis in Portuguese India. 72. Linhares, Diary 3, 69–73. 73. Goa, 15 January 1631, AHU, CU, cod. 218, f. 226v. On Iranian runners in India, drawing from the late seventeenth-century accounts of Jean-Baptiste Tavernier and Jean Chardin, see Bayly, Empire and Information, 63–64. See also Aslanian, From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean, 110–19. 74. AHU, CU, cod. 218, ff. 226v–27r. A Hindu runner traveled between Basrur and Goa with letters hidden in the sikha, the tuft of hair on the crown of his head. Linhares to the havaldar of Konkan, Goa, 4 November 1630, ACE, I, 320. On runners in British India, see Bayly, Empire and Information, 58–66. For a fascinating parallel with native letter bearers of seventeenth-century New England, see Grandjean, American Passage, 45–75. 75. AHU, CU, cod. 218, f. 226v. 76. Cotta to Alvor, Goa, 16 March 1683, BA, cod. 51-VII-23, f. 193v. 77. “The bearer of the letter from the ambassadors of the Mughal prince [i.e., Muhammad Akbar, Aurangzeb’s son, d. 1706] has been pressing me [me aperta] for an answer.” Cotta to Alvor, Goa, 16 March 1683, ibid., f. 197r. 78. State Council minutes, Goa, 2 May 1630, ACE, I, 275–76. 79. Daman, 13 September 1630, HAG, LM, liv. 14, f. 361r, ACE, I, 285–87. On Mir Musa, see Flores, Unwanted Neighbours, 140–47. 80. “Sobre as cousas de Surrate,” Goa, 3 August 1630, ACE, I, 283–86 (283–84). 81. Goa, 24 May and 12 June 1631, Linhares, Diary 2, ff. 30r–v, 36r–v. 82. Linhares, Diary 3, 146–47, 149–50. 83. Goa, 9 December 1630, AHU, CU, cod. 218, f. 227r. Costa traveled to Goa, presumably to receive instructions from the viceroy. Once back in the Norte, he was expected to remain in Surat, while Sampaio was instructed to move back and forth between Daman and Surat in order to “receive the news dispatches” produced by Costa and send them to Goa. On Manuel Coelho de Sampaio, see also State Council minutes, Goa, 4 October 1631, ACE, I, 380. 84. Goa, 4 December 1630, Linhares, Diary 1, f. 122r. 85. Goa, 21 November 1631, Linhares, Diary 2, f. 100r; AHU, CU, cod. 218, f. 122r. 86. State Council minutes, Goa, 4 October 1631, ACE, I, 380; Goa, 21 November 1631, Linhares, Diary 2, ff. 102r–03r, 100r. Linhares remarked in the same month that he “sent spies to Surat so that they gather all the available intelligence.” BNP, Reservados, Ms. 164, doc. 14. 87. There is reference to a “Jew and renegade” called Bartolomeu Nunes living in Agra in the early 1650s. António Botelho to Father Bento Ferreira, Agra, 20 January 1652, DUP, III, 209. 88. HAG, LM, liv. 13B, ff. 438r–40v. The section on the Mughals (Das cousas que soube del Rey Mogor) is published in ACE, I, 284. 89. State Council minutes, Goa, 15 August 1630, ACE, I, 288. Linhares depended on Paiva to solve a delicate political affair that will be analyzed in Chapter 9.

244

Notes to Pages 76–79

90. Goa, 15 August 1630, ibid., p. 290. On the Mughal-Portuguese crisis of 1613–1615 in Gujarat, see Flores, Unwanted Neighbours, 129–40. 91. ANTT, CSGO, liv. 207, ff. 292v–93r. 92. Gama to Philip IV, Goa, 17 February 1627, BNP, Reservados, cod. 1975, ff. 185v–86r; BNP, Reservados, cod. 1986, ff. 143v–44r. 93. Linhares, Diary 1, ff. 8v–9r. 94. Goa, 11 October 1630, ibid., f. 97r. 95. State Council minutes, Goa, 7 December 1630, ACE, I, 331. 96. “Herevassee, a man of secret intelligence with the Portingalls.” Thomas Rastell et al. to the commanders in Swally, Surat, 23 November 1630, in Maloni, European Merchant Capital, 235. 97. AHU, CU, cod. 218, f. 197v; Linhares, Diary 1, f. 42r; Linhares, Diary 3, 256; Maloni, European Merchant Capital, 444–45. 98. Goa, 13 April 1632, AHU, CU, cod. 218, f. 227r. 99. State Council minutes, Goa, 7 December 1630, ACE, I, 331; Goa, 6 December 1630, Linhares, Diary 1, f. 122v. 100. Goa, 23 May 1631, Linhares, Diary 2, f. 29v. 101. Goa, 25 March 1630, Linhares, Diary 1, f. 17r. 102. Gaspar Gomes de Faria, 27 October 1625, ANTT, TSO, IL, proc. 4933. On Faria’s fascinating figure, see Marcocci, “Portuguese Mercenary Networks.” 103. Saraiva to Faria, Chaul, 1 September 1624, ANTT, TSO, IL, proc. 4933, ff. 4v–6v. 104. Saraiva wrote two letters on the same day on two occasions: October 10 and 22, 1630. Linhares, Diary 1, f. 106v. Also see the three substantive letters he penned from Dautalabad between November 3 and 6, 1630, later summarized in Goa. Ibid., ff. 118r–19v. 105. Linhares to Saraiva, 6 November 1630, ibid., f. 107r. 106. Goa, 24 November 1630, ibid., ff. 113v–14r, 118v. 107. Linhares to Philip IV, Goa, 6 December 1630, ACE, I, 523. 108. Linhares, Diary 1, f. 107r; AHU, CU, cod. 218, f. 350r. 109. Goa, 29 July 1630, Linhares, Diary 1, f. 76r. 110. This means that, despite Saraiva’s “immersion” in Ahmadnagar, his Dakhani or Persian were never good enough, if at all existent. 111. AHU, CU, cod. 218, ff. 226r–v; State Council minutes, Goa, 7 December 1630, ACE, I, 331; Linhares, Diary 1, f. 118v. “Tavagi Parbu” is the brâmane inteligente who carried a letter from the Estado to Bulaqi. State Council minutes, Goa, 1 December 1630, ACE, I, 329; Linhares to Philip IV, Goa, 6 December 1630, in Pissurlencar, Agentes da diplomacia, 30–31. The Portuguese probably thought of Tavaji as a Brahman because Prahbus were a scribal elite of Western India that, as high-caste Hindus, competed with Brahmans by emulating their practices and seeking to enjoy similar privileges. Brahmans often complained about Prahbus, and the Maratha government in the eighteenth century tried to contain the latter’s social aspirations. See Fukazawa, The Medieval Deccan, 105, 108; O’Hanlon, At the Edges of Empire, 194– 95, 261–62. Diogo Lopes de Aguião, the influential casado of Chaul mentioned in Chapter 1, also counted on a Prabhu as an informer and news writer in Ahmadnagar in the mid-1540s. See Aguião to Castro, Chaul, 2 June 1546, CSL, III, 218–19.

Notes to Pages 79–83

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112. Linhares, Diary 1, f. 106r. 113. Linhares, Diary 2, f. 27v; AHU, CU, cod. 218, f. 298r; Linhares to Philip IV, Goa, 16 August 1631, ANTT, LM, liv. 29, ff. 39r–v. 114. Linhares to Philip IV, Goa, 27 November 1632, HAG, LM, liv. 15, ff. 30r–v. 115. Goa, 6 November 1630, Linhares, Diary 1, f. 106r. 116. Goa, 22 October 1576, Collecção de tratados, I, 170–80 (176). On the figure of the resident ambassador in the context of early modern European diplomacy, see Fletcher, Diplomacy in Renaissance Rome. 117. Frigo, “‘Small States’ and Diplomacy.” 118. On the role of the havaldar in the ‘Adil Shahi sultanate and his relationship with the ruler, see Fukazawa, The Medieval Deccan, ch. 1, esp. 27–32. 119. Linhares to Philip IV, Goa, 18 February 1630, ACE, I, 266 n. 120. Viceroy João Coutinho to Philip IV, Goa, 20 February 1619, DRI, V, 207; Linhares to Philip IV, Goa, 18 February 1630, ACE, I, 266n; Instrumento de testemunhas, 8–9; State Council minutes, Goa, 23 January 1631, ACE, I, 335. 121. Goa, 22 April 1630, Linhares, Diary 1, f. 26r. 122. State Council minutes, Goa, 15 April 1630, ACE, I, 271; Linhares to Philip IV, Goa, 18 November 1630, ibid., 519–20; Fr. Manuel da Ave-Maria, “Manual Eremítico,” in Documentação, XI, 259–61. 123. Ave-Maria, “Manual Eremítico,” 363–64. Fr. Sebastião de Jesus (d. 1655) penned the lost Jornada de Goa a Visapor in the course of this diplomatic mission. See Machado, Biblioteca Lusitana, III, 691. 124. Goa, 6 May 1630, Linhares, Diary 1, ff. 30v–31v. 125. The recommendations made to Fr. João da Rocha were replicated in the regimento given to Pedro Henriques in 1658. Pissurlencar, Agentes da diplomacia, 40–42. 126. Goa, 10 April 1631, AHU, CU, cod. 218, f. 224v; Goa, 3 November 1630, Linhares, Diary 1, f. 105r. 127. ANTT, CGSO, liv. 207, ff. 294v–95r; Linhares, Diary 1, ff. 99r, 103r–v, 128v, 130r–v, 132v; Linhares to Philip IV, Goa, 18 February 1630, HAG, LM, liv. 13B, f. 274r, ACE, I, 245n. On the close association between Ribeiro and Linhares and the former’s demise after 1635, see Disney, The Portuguese in India, ch. vii, 440. 128. Goa, 7 and 13 November 1630, Linhares, Diary 1, ff. 107v, 110r (Carneiro); Goa 19 January 1635, Linhares, Diary 3, 266 (Costa). 129. It is the case of one António Simões, whom Linhares instructed to poison an Englishman and a cleric. Goa, 3 November 1630, Linhares, Diary 1, f. 105r. 130. Linhares to Philip IV, Goa, 21 December 1631, ANTT, LM, liv. 29, f. 204r. 131. Linhares to Philip IV, Goa, 6 January 1631, ibid., liv. 14, f. 199r; Linhares to Philip IV, Goa, 29 November 1632, ibid., liv. 15, f. 4v; Linhares to Sultan Muhammad, Goa, 23 July 1632, ACE, I, 472–76; On female domestic slaves in the Deccan and the castes they belonged to, see Fukazawa, The Medieval Deccan, esp. 117–20. 132. Muhammad Ibrahim Zubayri, Basatin al-Salatin, 280. I am most grateful to Roy Fischel for providing me with the full English translation of this excerpt.

246

Notes to Pages 83–91

133. On cutting off the nose as a form of punishment and, more broadly, on attacks against the face as a form of social death in late medieval and early modern Europe, see Groebner, Defaced, ch. 3. 134. State Council minutes, Goa, 23 January 1631, ACE, I, 334–35; Linhares to Philip IV, Goa, 6 January 1631, ibid., 335n; Linhares to Philip IV, Goa, 29 November 1632, ibid., 335n. For Shahjahan and itinerant doctors, see Bayly, Empire and Information, 18–19. 135. These payments are registered in AHU, CU, cod. 218, ff. 225v–26r. 136. Ibid., ff. 224r (M. Dias), 224r–v (A. Dias), 224v (Pedroso), 225r (Ribeiro, Correia). 137. Ibid., f. 224r. 138. AHU, CU, cod. 218, f. 225r. 139. Ibid., f. 224v. On Muhibb ‘Ali, see also State Council minutes, Goa, 1 November 1630, ACE, I, 319–20. 140. AHU, CU, cod. 218, ff. 225r–26v. 141. Ibid., ff. 224v, 226r. There is mention of one Apaji Shenvi (Apagi Sinay), who served as interpreter of the ambassador of Ikkeri to the Estado in 1633 and signed his name in Roman script. Goa, 5 April 1633, ACE, I, 569. 142. Goa, 12 June 1631, AHU, CU, cod. 218, ff. 112v, 298r–v. 143. See Murphy, “The Court on the Move,” 40–41 (quotation 41), who stresses the example of the king’s gardes de la porte in sixteenth-century France. On gold chains as diplomatic gifts given by the Venetian state to visiting ambassadors in this period, see Mesotten, “Behind the Curtains of Diplomacy,” 58–60. 144. Goa, 13 May 1634, Linhares, Diary 3, 109. 145. Long, “Trading Zones”; O’Day, The Profession in Early Modern England; Alford, “Some Elizabethan Spies.” 146. Frigo, “‘Small States’ and Diplomacy.” 147. Charry and Shahani, eds., Emissaries in Early Modern Literature and Culture. 148. On this, see Xavier, A invenção de Goa. For the discussion of a specific sixteenthcentury case, see Subrahmanyam, Three Ways to be Alien, 23–72. 149. For the early modern European canvas, see Keblusek and Noldus, eds., Double Agents. 150. Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers. 151. See, respectively, Kiséry, Hamlet’s Moment; Zhang, Confucian Image Politics.

Chapter 4 1. Zwierlein, Imperial Unknowns. 2. Bayly, Empire and Information, 167–68. 3. On these several arenas, see Deutsch, Judaism in Christian Eyes; Rubiés, Travel and Ethnology; Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise; Harbsmeier, “Interrogating Travelers.” 4. Subrahmanyam has dealt briefly with early modern political ethnography in several of his works, especially in “Forcing the Doors of Heathendom.” A deeper reflection on the theme is lacking.

Notes to Pages 91–100

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5. See Schatz, “Introduction: Ethnographic Immersion and the Study of Politics,” respectively, 11, 5, 1. 6. Schaffer, “Newton on the Beach,” 245, 247. 7. Ibid., 246, 251. 8. See Orsini and Schofield, eds., Tellings and Texts; Digby, Wonder-Tales. 9. Annals of the Delhi Badshahate, 114–16. 10. Flores, “Gendered Objects and Textual Warfare.” 11. Linhares, Diary 3, 149–50. 12. Goa, 29 May 1634, ibid., 124. 13. Eaton, Sufis of Bijapur, 110–11. For tales opposing Sufis to yogis and their magical powers in India, see Digby, Wonder-Tales, 221–33. 14. For a later period, see Markovits, Pouchepadass, and Subrahmanyam, “Introduction.” 15. Hevia, The Imperial Security State, 15. 16. It has been suggestively argued by scholars of nineteenth-century Central Asia that “the mountain of paper produced by the colonial state just as often amounted to a ‘technofantasy’ of power.” Pickett and Sartori, “From the Archetypical Archive,” 775, n. 7. Also see Roque and Wagner, “Introduction: Engaging Colonial Knowledge,” esp. 9. 17. HAG, LM, liv. 13B, ff. 447r–49v, in Pissurlencar, “A Índia em 1629.” 18. For a couple of contemporary examples, see Goa, 20 February 1619, DRI, V, 191–98; Goa, 18 February 1622, ibid., VII, 379–82. 19. HAG, LM, liv. 13B, ff. 452r–54r. 20. A lakh is equal to 100,000 in the Indian numbering system. A silver coin introduced in India by Sher Shah, the rupee was soon adopted by the Mughals. 21. On his trajectory as imperial servant, see Ali, The Apparatus of Empire, S 28, S 326, S 368, S 471. Raza Bahadur is often depicted in contemporary representations of Mughal court scenes. See ‘Abdul Hamid Lahori, King of the World, 161, 165, 168, 199, 233. 22. ‘Inayat Khan, The Shah Jahan Nama, 34; ‘Abdul Hamid Lahori, Badshah Nama, VII, 7. 23. Shah Nawaz Khan, The Maathir-ul-umara, I, 795–804, esp. 803–4. 24. Goa, 11 March 1630, Linhares, Diary 1, f. 12v. 25. Linhares to Philip IV, Goa, 12 December 1630, HAG, LM, liv. 14, f. 202r. 26. Goa, 1 December 1630, Linhares, Diary 1, f. 118v. 27. On the importance of night as an event catalyst in the context of early modern Europe, see Koslofsky, Evening’s Empire; Groebner, Defaced, 58–62. For a study of the artful use of night in an eighteenth-century Mughal chronicle, see Kulke, “Conflicts and Emotions.” 28. Linhares, Diary 3, 15. 29. Michell and Zebrowski, Architecture and Art of the Deccan Sultanates, 35–36. 30. See Pissurlencar, “Antigualhas II: O cerco de Parenda.” 31. Goa, 10 May 1634, Linhares, Diary 3, 106. 32. ‘Inayat Khan, The Shah Jahan Nama, 128–36. The Windsor Padshahnama portrays the Mughal triumphs of Dharur ( January 1631), Qandahar (May 1631), Daulatabad ( June 1633), and Udgir (October 1636). See ‘Abdul Hamid Lahori, King of the World, respectively pls. 15, 18, 31, 40. 33. Linhares, Diary 3, 50.

248

Notes to Pages 100–106

34. Ibid. 35. Francisco da Gama to Philip IV, Goa, 8 March 1627, BNP, Reservados, cod. 1975, f. 188r; Philip IV to Linhares, Lisbon, 14 February 1629, ANTT, LM, liv. 26, f. 487r. 36. On these maps, see Howes, Illustrating India, 10; Howes, “Colin Mackenzie,” 76–77, fig. 3.1. For an interesting East Asian parallel, see the intelligence map of the Chinese Revolt of the Three Feudatories (1673–1681) received in Edo in 1674, in Toby, State and Diplomacy, 149, ill. 5. 37. Aguião to Castro, Chaul, 27 August 1547, CSL, III, 284. 38. Linhares, Diary 3, 101–10. Linhares received letters from two different “intelligencers” on May 13, with the Brahman’s letter presumably corresponding to the first one summarized in the viceroy’s journal. Ibid., 108–10. 39. Goa, 10 May 1634, ibid., 107. 40. Goa, 10 May 1634, ibid., 103–4. For an earlier approach to this list, see Sarkar, House of Shivaji, 37–38, who draws entirely on Pissurlencar’s work. 41. Goa, 13 May 1634, Linhares, Diary 3, 109. 42. Goa, 10 May 1634, ibid., 104–5. 43. Goa, 13 May 1634, ibid., 109. 44. On all this, see Eaton and Wagoner, Power, Memory, Architecture; Sohoni, “From Defended Settlements to Fortified Strongholds”; Gommans, Mughal Warfare, 136–41; Gordon, Marathas, Marauders, 82–98. 45. The Mughal sources give Kheluji as a high-ranking imperial servant between 1629– 1630 and 1634–1635. See Ali, The Apparatus of Empire, S 403, 8 46. Goa, 10 May 1634, Linhares, Diary 3, 106–7. 47. For an overview of the mansabdari system, see Gommans, Mughal Warfare, 85. 48. Ghauri, “Organization of the Army,” 152–57. 49. On this, see the pathbreaking study by Dayal, “Making the ‘Mughal’ Soldier,” 858. For an earlier treatment of this same source material, see Alavi, Studies in the History of Medieval Deccan, 20–62. 50. Botelho, “Relação das cousas,” ff. 32r–v. 51. Kolff, Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy; Gommans, Mughal Warfare; Gordon, Marathas, Marauders, 182–208. 52. Linhares to Philip IV, Goa, 12 December 1630, HAG, LM, liv. 14, f. 202r; Goa, 10 May 1634, Linhares, Diary 3, 106. 53. Goa, 5 August 1634, Linhares, Diary 3, 153. Curiously, this number is not too distant from the estimate provided by Linhares’s spy in May (40,000). 54. Shahji’s proposal was discussed in Goa, but the list has not survived. State Council minutes, Goa, 12 October 1636, ACE, II, 114. 55. Kiséry, Hamlet’s Moment, 103–6; Zhang, Confucian Image Politics, 39–44, Berry, Japan in Print, ch. 4. 56. Flores, The Mughal Padshah, 64–71 (analysis), 105–29 (English translation of the list). 57. See Guha, “Rethinking the Economy of Mughal India.”

Notes to Pages 106–114

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58. Unfortunately, the research on the Deccan sultanates has so far overlooked the study of chancelleries, record keeping, and documentary practices. 59. Biblioteca Nacional do Brasil, Inquisição de Goa, 25.1.3, ff. 155r–56r. 60. Regarding the Council of Portugal in this period, see Luxán Meléndez, “La revolución de 1640 en Portugal,” ch. 10. 61. De Vivo, “Microhistories of Long-Distance Information.” 62. Zwierlein, Imperial Unknowns, 321.

Chapter 5 1. Goa, 6 November 1662, HAG, Consultas, liv. 4, ff. 192r–93r. 2. Lisbon, 20 February 1666, ANTT, Registo Geral de Mercês—D. Afonso VI, liv. 7, ff. 91r, 92r–v, 399r. 3. There is no marked distinction between the two categories in this period, as the two words are used interchangeably in the sources. 4. Distance constituted a challenge for any early modern empire and its mechanisms of internal communication. For the Iberian empires, see Gaudin and Stumpf, eds., Las distancias en el gobierno de los imperios ibéricos. 5. On this, see Flores, The Mughal Padshah, 31–32. 6. Rama, The Lettered City. 7. Jouve Martín, Esclavos de la ciudad letrada; Rappaport and Cummins, Beyond the Lettered City, esp. ch. 3 (quotation 116). Also see Burns, “Making Indigenous Archives.” 8. See, especially, Xavier and Županov, Catholic Orientalism. 9. Jorge de Amaral e Vasconcelos to his brother, Lisbon, 14 April 1649, Cartas da Índia, 51. 10. Dissentions among elite members were often times fueled by the intense circulation of seditious papers. See Flores and Marcocci, “Killing Images.” 11. Santos, “Goa é a chave de toda a Índia”; Thomaz, “Estrutura política e administrativa.” 12. For a study of the building’s composite structure, its interiors, and decoration, see Dias, “The Palace of the Viceroys in Goa.” 13. Santos, “Goa é a chave de toda a Índia,” 172–73. The minutes of the State Council for the years 1618–1750 are published in ACE. 14. Philip II to Viceroy Matias de Albuquerque, Lisbon, 18 February 1595, APO, fasc. 3, 479–80. This prohibition was reinstated several times in the following decades, which says much about its repeated transgression. Philip IV to Linhares, Lisbon, 26 February 1630, ANTT, LM, liv. 27, f. 1r; Philip IV to Linhares, Lisbon, 28 February 1632, HAG, LM, liv. 16A, f. 95r. 15. Royal instructions given to Dom Duarte de Menezes, Lisbon, 10 March 1584, BnF, Portugais 33, f. 182v. In 1584, this advisory body was not yet known as the State Council. 16. Santos, “Goa é a chave de toda a Índia,” 173–76. 17. Six escreventes and one interpreter in 1635 (Bocarro, Livro das plantas, II, 137); decision to employ two more officials in 1638 due to excessive paperwork (Goa, 28 September

250

Notes to Pages 114–117

1638, ANTT, LM, liv. 43, f. 144r); one chief official, eight officials, and one interpreter in 1644 (AHU, CU–Índia, cx. 28, doc. 109); one chief official, seven officials, and one interpreter in 1653 (Goa, 25 January 1653, HAG, Cartas e Ordens, no. 2596, f. 73r). The Estado da Índia’s budget of 1588 includes reference to “the secretary’s ten men” (dez homens do secretário), besides his six clerks. See Matos, “O orçamento do Estado da Índia de 1588,” 256. 18. AHU, CU–Índia, cx. 14, doc. 38, f. 8v (quotation); ibid., cx. 28, doc. 109; Goa, 25 January 1653, HAG, Cartas e Ordens, no. 2596, f. 73r. 19. Appointment of Amaro da Rocha as secretary, Goa, 13 October 1602, APO, fasc. 5, 754; interim council of government of the Estado to King Alfonso VI, Goa, 16 August 1659, HAG, LM, liv. 26B, f. 405r. 20. Cotta to Alvor, Goa, 25 August 1682, BA, cod. 51-VII-23, f. 112r. 21. Philip II to Francisco da Gama, Lisbon, 5 February 1597, APO, fasc. 3, 691; Goa, 13 October 1602, ibid., fasc. 6, 754. 22. Linhares to Philip IV, Goa, 18 February 1630, ACE, I, 243–4, n. 1. 23. Ambassador of Bijapur to John IV, Goa, 13 February 1647; Lilly Library, Boxer Mss. II, green box no. 2, unnumbered. 24. Dinis to Philip IV, Goa, 30 January 1633, BPE, cod. CXVI/2–3, ff. 74r–5v. 25. Dinis to John IV, Goa, 20 December 1642, AHU, CU–Índia, cx. 24, doc. 135. 26. On these personal repositories of documents in Spanish context in this period, see Brendecke, “‘Arca, archivillo, archivo.’” 27. For a fine analysis of this question with regard to the Spanish Siglo de Oro, see Bouza, Corre manuscrito, 283–88. 28. León Pinelo, Epitome de la Biblioteca Oriental y Occidental, I, 542. 29. Machado, Bibliotheca Lusitana, I, 128. The brief discussion of the Amphiteatro Oriental by Xavier and Županov, Catholic Orientalism, xxiii–iv, draws on Machado (1741), who offers a lengthier and slightly different description from González de Barcia’s, and further states that the book was dedicated to Philip II. 30. On the use of the word and metaphor of “theater” in early modern European book titles, see Blair, The Theatre of Nature, 7–8, and ch. 5. 31. For a lavish edition of this work, see Oltremare: Codice Casanatense 1889. The most recent and comprehensive studies of this codex are by Van den Boogaart, ed., “The Codex Casanatense 1889” and Subrahmanyam, “Préface.” 32. “Experiencias das hervas orientaes, que Sua Magestade mandou fazer ao vizo rey Mathias de Albuquerque o anno de 1596,” BnF, Portugais 59, ff. 20r–79v. The author reveals that curiosity led him to gather these herbal remedies, “in conversation with the natives of these parts.” Ibid., f. 29r. 33. Boxer “António Bocarro and the Livro do Estado da Índia Oriental.” 34. On secretaries and archives in the early modern period, see Hunt, “The Early Modern Secretary and the Early Modern Archive.” 35. For an overview of these and related collections of documents today housed in the Historical Archives of Goa, see Pissurlencar, Roteiro. 36. Sadly, the Torre do Tombo of Goa has largely eluded the “archival turn” and still awaits to be approached as a subject per se. For standard studies on this archive’s history

Notes to Pages 118–121

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and the fate of its collections, see Pissurlencar, Roteiro, v–xxi; Souza, “Da Torre do Tombo de Goa à Gova Purabilehka”; Saldanha, Iustum Imperium, 253–78. The discussion about archives and imperial governance has been largely shaped by Stoler’s Along the Archival Grain. 37. Pissurlencar, Roteiro, vi–vii; Linhares, Diary 3, 198. 38. Couto—the archivist, but especially the writer—is the object of several works at the crossroads of history and literature. For a recent appraisal, see Loureiro and Cruz, eds., Diogo do Couto. 39. Linhares to Philip IV, Goa, 19 August 1631, ANTT, LM, liv. 29, f. 89r. 40. Francisco da Gama to Philip IV, Goa, 4 March 1626, cit. Pissurlencar, Roteiro, ix–x. On António Bocarro, who served as chief custodian until 1643, see Boxer “António Bocarro and the Livro do Estado da Índia Oriental.” 41. Castro, Crónica do vice-rei D. João de Castro, 209–16; Nunes, Crónica de Dom João de Castro, 63, 65, 72. 42. Pereira, História da Índia, liv. 2, cap. iv, 333–38. 43. I borrow the phrase “archive without walls” from Joseph, Reading the East India Company, 1. 44. Zwierlein, Imperial Unknowns, 113. 45. For an interesting parallel with the Society of Jesus, see Friedrich, “A Jesuit Culture of Records?” 46. See “Tratamento que se faz ao Embaixador de El-rey Mogor,” [Goa], c. 1704–1707, Collecção de tratados, V, 12. 47. Alvor to Cotta, Panelim, 2 February 1683, BA, cod. 51-VII-23, f. 172r; Cotta to Alvor, Goa, 5 February 1683, ibid., ff. 177r–78r. 48. King John V to Viceroy Dom Rodrigo da Costa, Lisbon, 30 September 1710, HAG, LM, liv. 76, f. 135r. 49. The two existing copies are both inserted in sixteenth-century miscellanies. See Miscelânea Pereira de Foios, 324–25 (BNP, Reservados, cod. 8920) and Biblioteca Geral da Universidade de Coimbra, Reservados, Ms. 170, ff. 86r–87r. This letter has been published in Portuguese and English in Flores and Saldanha, The Firangis, 61–64. 50. Couto, Da Ásia, déc. 9, cap. xiii, 84–85. English translation in Flores and Saldanha, The Firangis, 66. 51. BNP, Reservados, cod. 8841, ff. 1r–27r (quotation 2r), published by Flores, “Um projecto de recuperação” (quotation 216). 52. Colecção de tratados, XII, 12–17. For an English translation, see Hosten, “A Week at the Bandel Convent,” 106–11. 53. On this case, see Nugent, “Entanglement of Oral Sources and Colonial Records,” 171–72. 54. BNP, Reservados, cod. 8841, ff. 7r–v, in Flores, “Um projecto de recuperação,” 220. 55. Ibid. 56. There is a considerable body of work on this topic for the Ottoman Empire. See, especially, Woodhead, “Research on the Ottoman Scribal Service”; Fleischer, “Between the Lines.” For the Safavids, see Mitchell, The Practice of Politics.

252

Notes to Pages 121–123

57. Adorno, “The Indigenous Ethnographer”; Blair, “Erasmus and His Amanuenses”; Chizhova, “Bodies of Texts.” 58. An explosion of research and publications concerning the scribal and secretarial communities of early modern India marked the first two decades of the present century. Two thematic issues of The Indian Economic and Social History Review published with a decade apart (2010, 2020) survey the field in exemplar ways and provide a sense of the enormous progress made so far. See, respectively, O’Hanlon and Washbrook, eds., “Munshis, Pandits and RecordKeepers”; O’Hanlon, Venkatkrishnan, and Williams, eds., “Scribal Service People in Motion.” 59. Alam and Subrahmanyam, Writing the Mughal World, ch. 7; Kinra, Writing Self, Writing Empire; Bayly, Empire and Information, chs. I and II. 60. Rao, Shulman, and Subrahmanyam, Textures of Time, 19. 61. Deshpande, “The Writerly Self,” 449–71. 62. Rao, Shulman, and Subrahmanyam, Textures of Time, esp. 19–23, 136–39. In the extreme south, in Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka, we have the kanakkuppillais (accountantscribes), who were primarily palm leaf writers. See Raman, Document Raj. 63. O’Hanlon, “The Social Worth of Scribes,” 573–78. 64. Mantena, The Origins of Modern Historiography in India, ch. 3; Dirks, “Colonial Histories and Native Informants.” 65. Wagoner, “Precolonial Intellectuals,” 795–97. 66. Pollock, “New Intellectuals in Seventeenth-Century India.” 67. See Colon, A Cast in a Changing World. 68. For an early example of a Brahman’s library destroyed by the Portuguese, see the letter by Luís Fróis, Goa, 14 November 1559, Documentação, VII, 327–64 (344–45). For the inquisitorial persecution in 1619 of a Franciscan who was friends with a learned Brahman from the terra firme. ANTT, IL, cadernos do promotor, no. 8, liv. 209, f. 432r, cit. in Tavares, Jesuítas e inquisidores em Goa, 163. 69. For an examination of these Brahman communities of Salcete in the context of the broad political, religious, and intellectual challenges they faced in Portuguese Goa and early modern India, see Xavier and Županov, “Ser Brâmane na época moderna.” 70. Sousa, Oriente Conquistado, pt. II, conq. I, div. I, § 13, 829–30. Obviously, cats have claws, not nails. The distinction between the former and the latter exists in Portuguese, yet it does not usually apply to cats. 71. Aires da Gama to King Manuel, Cannanore, 2 January 1519, As Gavetas da Torre do Tombo, IV, 214–15. 72. Bocarro, Livro das plantas, II, 153. The Portuguese often used the term canarins pejoratively when referring to the Konkani people of Goa. 73. Xavier, A invenção de Goa, 417–40. 74. Kinra, Writing Self, Writing Empire. 75. See Cunha, The Origin of Bombay, 119. 76. AHU, CU–Índia, cx. 52, doc. 90. Lucas Pinto also served in the secretariat of the Estado. Goa, 16 March 1639, ANTT, LM, liv. 54, f. 224r. 77. The reference work on Jerónimo Alagiyavanna is that of Berkwitz, Buddhist Poetry and Colonialism.

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78. Viceregal provision, Goa, 27 June 1684, Archivo da Relação, pt. I, 661–64. 79. João de Mascarenhas to João de Castro, Diu, 23 March 1546, Obras completas, III, 144. 80. Goa, 31 July 1593, APO, fasc. 5, pt. III, 1323–24. For the broader political and religious picture informing these measures, see Xavier, A invenção de Goa, 385–417. 81. See Velinkar, “Village Communities in Goa,” 124–32; Souza, Goa medieval, chs. 2 and 3 (esp. 229–34, for the publication of some of these documents, which are housed in a private collection in Goa.) 82. Goa, 1 September 1604; Goa, 30 August 1614; Goa, 10 April 1615, APO, fasc. 5, pt. III, 1382–86. 83. Pissurlencar, Roteiro, 43–44, 223–24; Ghantkar, An Introduction to Goan Marathi Records; Souza, Goa medieval, 187–90; Axelrod, “Living on the Edge.” 84. Guha, “Serving the Barbarian,” 499–500. Regarding los Vélez and the use of Arabic in their papers, I refer to Fernando Bouza’s personal communication, February, 5, 2021. 85. Goa, 1552, APO, fasc. 5, pt. I, 251. 86. Meneses to the Augustinians in Portugal, Goa, 24 December 1609, Arquivo Distrital de Braga, Gaveta das Cartas, doc. 380. 87. BA, 52-VI-51, f. 72r. 88. McManus, “Martín de Azpilcueta,” 367. 89. See, respectively, Marquilhas, A faculdade das letras, 229–66; De Vivo, Information and Communication in Venice, 123–24. 90. Madrid, 16 February 1587, APO, fasc. 5, pt. III, 1129. For a preliminary study of the clerks of Portuguese India in the first half of the seventeenth century, see Cid, “O ofício de escrivão no Estado da Índia.” There is a comparison to be drawn with clerks’ poor training in seventeenth-century Portugal, on which see Almeida, “Os empregados de secretaria,” 149–51. For Brazil, see Stumpf, “Dos homens que serviam entre papéis e letras.” 91. Herzog, Mediación, archivos y ejercicio, 38–43; Burns, “Notaries, Truth, and Consequences.” 92. Raman, Document Raj, 60–61. 93. Fleischer, “Between the Lines”; Guha, “Serving the Barbarian,” 504. 94. O’Hanlon, “The Social Worth of Scribes,” 576–77; Fukazawa, The Medieval Deccan, 1–48. Emperor Khrisnadevaraya (r. 1509–1529) recommended the employment of Brahmans as commanders of forts in Vijayanagara. See Wagoner, “Precolonial Intellectuals,” 795. 95. Goa, 28 December 1631, ANTT, LM, liv. 29, f. 238r; AHU, CU, cod. 445, f. 117v. 96. AHU, CU, cod. 445, f. 117v. 97. Linhares to Philip IV, Goa, 23 February 1635, HAG, LM, liv. 19B, f. 567r. 98. Goa, 6 November 1662, ibid., Consultas, liv. 4, ff. 192r–93r. 99. ACE, I, 291–97. 100. Linhares, Diary 3, 320–26. 101. Lisbon, 26 February 1672, AHU, CU–Índia, cx. 52, doc. 21; ibid., CU, cod. 445, ff. 118r–v. There is mention to Lobo in Frias, Aureola dos Indios, 153. 102. Goa, 27 August 1675, Lisbon, 20 March 1685, AHU, CU–Índia, cx. 60, doc. 70; HAG, Consultas, liv. 4, f. 214r. For other cases of intergenerational transmission of offices

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Notes to Pages 128-133

within the same family, see Lisbon, 24 January 1651, AHU, CU, cod. 445, ff. 117r–18r; Lisbon, 23 January 1664, AHU, CU–Índia, cx. 45, doc. 251. 103. This was during the government of Viceroy Filipe de Mascarenhas (g. 1645–1648). Frias, Aureola dos Indios, 152, obviously exulted over Gonçalves’s example. 104. Lisbon, 24 March 1625, ANTT, LM, liv. 21, f. 357r; Lisbon, 23 February 1629, ibid., liv. 26, ff. 604v–5r; Goa, 6 April 1631, ibid., liv. 27, f. 275r; Goa, 24 December 1631, ibid., liv. 29, f. 229r. 105. In 1623, a Christian Brahman working as solicitor in Goa insisted on having permission to remain seated during his work sessions with the chief purveyor (provedor-mor) of the Casa dos Contos, even after being told that such prerogative was barred to all those who served in his position, regardless of their social and ethnic background. He additionally felt offended for being addressed as “you” (lhe falar por vós) and consequently resigned, only to be replaced by “another very honored Brahman.” Goa, 26 March 1623, DRI, VIII, 140. 106. See Raminelli, Nobrezas do Novo Mundo. 107. See Olival, As ordens militares e o estado moderno, 47. 108. Lisbon, 26 February 1672, AHU, CU–Índia, cx. 52, doc. 21; AHU, CU, cod. 445, ff. 118r–v; Lisbon, 27 January–17 February 1677, ANTT, Mesa da Consciência e Ordens, Habilitações para a Ordem de Santiago, letra B, maço 1, no. 35. 109. Philip IV to Dom Francisco da Gama, Lisbon, 27 March 1626, ANTT, LM, liv. 23, f. 395r; Linhares to Philip IV, Goa, 26 December 1631, ibid., liv. 29, f. 143r; AHU, CU, cod. 436, ff. 74r–75r. 110. AHU, CU, cod. 436, ff. 74r–75r; ibid., cod. 435, ff. 70r–71r 111. Xavier, “Reducing Difference,” 254. 112. Herzog, Defining Nations, 119, 201–2, 204. 113. AHU, CU, cod. 435, ff. 193r–v. 114. Ibid., f. 70r. 115. . . . eu lhe notei as cartas, em que fiz a V. Magestade hum grande serviço. Manuel Dinis to John IV, Goa, 20 December 1642, ibid., CU–Índia, cx. 24, doc. 135. 116. Goa, 18 December 1630, ibid., CU, cod. 218, f. 227r; Goa, 21 October 1630, Linhares, Diary 1, f. 100r.

Chapter 6 1. . . . leuar dos lenguas con igual passo, es de pocos. Mariner, El oficio de interprete, ff. 579r– 80v (quotation 579r). For a discussion of this short text and its context, see Gilbert, In Good Faith, 86–87. 2. A Hindu interpreter of the Estado called Anant Khamat prepared in the second half of the eighteenth century a Portuguese translation of the Bhagavadgita, corresponding to the 18 chapters of book VI of the Mahabharata. See Flores, “Marathi Voices,” 362. 3. The literature on these themes is vast. See Burke and Po-chia Hsia, eds., Cultural Translation in Early Modern Europe; Considine, Dictionaries in Early Modern Europe; Gallagher, Learning Languages in Early Modern England.

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4. Pollock, The Language of the Gods; Pollock, ed., Literary Cultures in History. 5. See Alam, “The Pursuit of Persian”; Alam, “The Culture and Politics of Persian.” 6. For the Mughal court, see Busch, “Hidden in Plain View.” Regarding the broad linguistic canvas of the early modern Deccan, see Eaton, “The Rise of Written Vernaculars”; Sharma, “Forging a Canon of Dakhni Literature.” 7. Truschke, “Defining the Other”; Kinra, “This Noble Science.” 8. SOAS, respectively, Ms. 11952 and Ms. 12198. The latter (Rudimenta) comprises a brief grammar (ff. 1r–14r) and a Latin–Portuguese–Persian dictionary that covers c. 5,000 words (ff. 16r–109r). There is further mention of a Vocabulario Persiano i Italiano composed by the Jesuits in Lahore and once housed in Melchisédec Thévenot’s library. See León Pinelo, Epitome de la Biblioteca Oriental y Occidental, I, 320. 9. The primary and secondary sources concerning the engagement of Catholic religious orders and their agents with indigenous languages across the early modern world are overwhelming. For an overview focused on the Jesuit case, see Brockey, “Comprehending the World.” The present chapter does not consider the missionary-linguist per se. 10. Karomat, “Turki and Hindavi in the World of Persian”; Hakala, “On Equal Terms.” 11. Dursteler, “Speaking in Tongues.” Also see Dursteler, “Language and Gender.” 12. Dursteler, “Speaking in Tongues,” 76. The dragomans’ nuanced work with written documents proves Dursteler wrong in this respect. See Rothman, The Dragoman Renaissance, ch. 6. 13. Among many other studies on translation offices and practices across early modern East Asian states, see Crossley, “The Structure and Symbol”; Wang, “Chosŏn’s Office of Interpreters”; Toby, State and Diplomacy, 142–45. 14. The available works concerning the major European imperial formations tend to focus on particular combinations of empires and settings from, say, New Spain and Dutch Brazil to French Louisiana and colonial New York. We therefore lack broader studies either by empire or region. 15. See, inter alia, Puente Luna, “The Many Tongues of the King.” 16. Turgimão comes from the Arabic tarjuman (as does the widespread “dragoman”) and was used by the Portuguese mainly in Islamic contexts between North Africa and the Arabian Sea. Topaz derives from dubash, tupasi (“two languages”) and had two interrelated meanings in Portuguese: interpreter and mestizo. Jurubaça has its root in the Malay jurubahasa (“language expert”) and was to prevail among the Portuguese in Southeast Asia and the South China Sea. 17. Pinto, The Portuguese and the Straits of Melaka, 209. 18. “Regimento da Lingua da Cidade, e dos Jurubaças menores e Escrivaens,” 1627, Fontes para a história de Macau, 378–86. 19. The classic work on this group is Pissurlencar’s Agentes da diplomacia, which includes abundant sixteenth- to early nineteenth-century documentation. More recently, see Flores, “Religião, ‘nação’, estatuto”; Flores, “Le ‘língua’ cosmopolite.” 20. Among several possible examples, see the Portuguese versions of two treaties signed in Goa by the Estado da Índia and the Sultanate of Bijapur, respectively dated October 22, 1576, and April 3, 1633. Collecção de tratados, I, 179; ACE, I, 568.

256

Notes to Pages 136–138

21. An interesting parallel can be drawn with medieval Iberia, namely with James I’s recounting of the 1231 surrender of Minorca. According to his autobiography, the king made “all the principal and best men of the island swear upon the Qur’an.” See Vicens, “Swearing by God,” 130. 22. Fisher, “Teaching Persian as an Imperial Language.” 23. Pellò, “The Husayni Brahmins and Other Poor Persian Speakers.” 24. Regarding the somewhat ironic lack of linguistic and cultural preparedness in early modern Portugal to deal with the Islamic world after several centuries of shared history, see Subrahmanyam, “Intertwined Histories”; Barros, “From the History of Muslims to Muslims in History.” 25. See Viterbo, Notícia de alguns arabistas, 64, 72–78. 26. On this, see the excellent work by Gilbert, In Good Faith. 27. García-Arenal and Rodríguez Mediano, The Orient in Spain, 225–44. Additionally, Urrea became a member of the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome and devoted time to translating the classic works of Arabic science. See Ben-Zaken, Cross-Cultural Scientific Exchanges, 190, n. 81. 28. Viterbo, Noticia de alguns arabistas, 65–68 (quotation 68). Rombo’s letter (67–68) is undated but mentions 1548 as the year of the author’s departure to India. 29. Acquaviva to the provincial of India, Fatehpur Sikri, 27 September 1582, DUP, III, 5. 30. Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World, 74–75. 31. See Lucchetta, “La scuola dei ‘giovani di lingua’ veneti.” 32. Dursteler, “Speaking in Tongues,” 67. 33. Roughly one quarter of the enslaved people living in sixteenth-century Lisbon were originally from Asia. See Fonseca, Escravos e senhores, 104. 34. Flores, “Marathi Voices,” 366. 35. On Krishna and Dadaji, see Pissurlencar, Agentes da diplomacia, 1–21. Albuquerque and Ataíde have been studied by Aubin, Le latin et l’astrolabe, II, 251–73. On Khwaja Pir Quli, see Thomaz, “Hwaje Pir Qoli et sa brève relation de la Perse.” 36. Subrahmanyam, The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 107–12; Biedermann, (Dis)connected Empires, 99–106; Xavier, A Invenção de Goa, ch. 2. 37. See, for instance, Faria, “Os concílios provinciais de Goa.” 38. . . . com discrição, abater alguns jemtios omrados. . . . Fr. Juan de Albuquerque to King John III, Goa, 28 November 1548, DI, I, 327. 39. Royal letter, Goa, 25 June 1557, APO, fasc. 5, pt. I, 319–20; royal provision, Lisbon, 12 January 1591, ibid., fasc. 5, pt. III, 1277–78. 40. Still, the rule was loosely applied in Portugal, as several Jews were exempted from displaying the sinal. See Tavares, “Judeus de sinal em Portugal.” We likewise lack evidence of its actual implementation in Goa. 41. Royal provision, Almeirim, 25 January 1571, O livro do ‘pai dos cristãos’, 77–78. The budget of the Estado da Índia for 1581 determined that the interpreters of the forts (passos) that surrounded Goa “shall be Christians and men of good reputation; neither gentiles nor Brahmans will serve in any circumstance.” See Matos, O Estado da Índia nos anos de 1581–1588, 162.

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42. Pereira, História da Índia, liv. 2, cap. iv, 333–34 (334–38 for the letters). 43. See, respectively, APO, fasc. 5, pt. II, 905–8 (treaty of 1575); ibid., 921–30 (treaty of 1576). Provision by Viceroy Duarte de Meneses, Goa, 6 January 1587, ibid., fasc. 5, pt. III, 1123–24. 44. Couto, Da Ásia, déc. IX, cap. xiv, 102. 45. Agreement between the Estado and Mealecão (‘Ali bin Yusuf ‘Adil Khan), Goa, 24 April 1555, 2 May 1555, and 9 October 1556, APO, fasc. 5, pt. I, 267–78; agreement between the Estado and the raja of Bakla (Bengal), Goa, 5 May 1559, ibid., 398–402; Couto, Da Ásia, déc. 7, pt. I, liv. III, cap. ii; déc. 7, pt. II, liv. VI, cap. iii; déc. 9, caps. xiii, xiv, xviii, xix, xxvi, xxviii; AHU, CU, cod. 500, f. 21r; O tombo de Damão, 279–80 (279, n. 155). 46. Couto, Da Ásia, déc. 9, caps. xiii, xxviii. For this embassy, see Renick, “Akbar’s First Embassy to Goa.” On ‘Aziz Koka and his dealings with the Portuguese, see Flores, Unwanted Neighbours, 110–18. 47. Two are preserved as brief summaries, but the other two—an imperial farman dated March 18, 1573, probably issued in Broach, and Akbar’s letter to the captain of Diu Aires Teles, Ahmedabad, December 13, 1572—survived in full Portuguese translations. For the Portuguese version of these texts and their modern English versions, see Flores and Saldanha, The Firangis, 63–64, 66. 48. Viceregal provision concerning Baltasar Pacheco, Goa, 13 February 1578, APO, fasc. 5, pt. II, 933. There is mention to a clerk in the service of Cristóvão do Couto in 1593– 1594, AHU, CU, cod. 500, f. 12v. 49. Duarte Delgado Varejão, “Certidão por que consta nominalmente quaes as pessoas que exerceram cargos no Estado da India nomeados pelo Viso Rei Dom Francisco de Mascarenhas,” Goa, 27 September 1587, Lilly Library, Boxer Mss. II, white box no. 1, unnumbered. 50. Goa, 30 April 1569 to 3 October 1571, ANTT, TSO, IL, proc. 12060. 51. ANTT, TSO, IL, proc. 12060, f. 32v. 52. Goa, 17 December 1571, APO, fasc. 5, pt. II, 825–31 (830–31). 53. AHU, CU–Índia, cx. 2, doc. 67; ibid., cx. 15, doc. 217; João Coutinho to Philip III, Goa, 8 February 1619, DRI, V, 96. 54. ACE, vol. I, 478, 565–68; AHU, CU, cod. 218, ff. 90r, 169r, 217v–18r. 55. On the relationship between business and government in the Arabian Sea, see Subrahmanyam, “Of Imârat and Tijârat.” On the “men of the pen” among the Safavids, see Mitchell, The Practice of Politics, esp. 88–95. For the importance of this group across the Islamic world, see Van Berkel, “The People of the Pen,” 384–451. 56. ANTT, CGSO, liv. 184, f. 34r. For two seventeenth-century cases of local Christians serving as interpreters of the Goa Inquisition, see Goa, 12 December 1610, ANTT, TSO, IL, proc. 04938, ff. 3r–7r (Brás Pereira); Lisbon, 17 March 1663, AHU, CU–Índia, cx. 45, doc. 182 (Manuel Fernandes). 57. Mendonça, Conversions and Citizenry, 267–70; Pissurlencar, Agentes da diplomacia, lii–iii, n. 1. 58. Similar to some of the clerks studied in the previous chapter, interpreters like Krishna and Baltasar Pacheco had military obligations in sixteenth-century Goa.

258

Notes to Pages 142–145

59. O’Hanlon and Minkowski, “What Makes People Who They Are?”; O’Hanlon, “The Social Worth of Scribes.” 60. Sousa, Oriente Conquistado, pt. II, conq. I, div. I, § 13, 829–30. 61. Linhares, Diary 3, 150. 62. Wagoner, “Fortuitous Convergences.” Also see O’Hanlon, Venkatkhrishan, and Williams, “Scribal Service People in Motion.” 63. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge, 17. 64. Collecção de tratados, I, 293. 65. Cotta to Alvor, Goa, 29 January 1683, BA, cod. 51-VII-23, f. 164r. On this Mughal prince and his dealings with the Estado, see Pissurlencar, “Prince Akbar and the Portuguese.” 66. That is the case with Babuji Shenvi (Bapogi Synay), who petitioned the crown to replace his deceased father as “translator of Persian language.” His father’s salary, Babuji Shenvi argued, represented the total income of “many families.” Goa, 3 October 1703–Lisbon, 6 November 1706, ANTT, Registo Geral de Mercês–D. Pedro II, liv. 17, f. 192r. 67. 36,000 réis in 1574, 1576, 1581, and 1588. See Godinho, Les finances de l’État portugais, 234; Matos, “O orçamento do Estado da Índia de 1588,” 245; Regimentos das fortalezas da Índia, 73. Their salary in 1593–1594 amounted to 50,000 réis. AHU, CU, cod. 500, f. 11r. 68. 460 xerafins (130,000 réis) in 1623 and 470 xerafins (141,000 réis) in 1635. See AHU, CU–Índia, cx. 11, doc. 110; Bocarro, Livro das plantas, II, 137. 69. Flores, “Religião, ‘nação’, estatuto.” 70. Norris, “Dragomans, Tattooists, Artisans”; Wang, “The Sounds of Our Country.” 71. Attributed to Dhanu, 1598–1599, Philadelphia, The Free Library of Philadelphia, in Calza, Akbar, il grande imperatore, 215 (ill. V.21), 273 (analysis of the painting by Yael Rice). 72. Gama to Philip IV, Goa, 24 February 1625, BNP, Reservados, cod. 1817, ff. 246v–47r. 73. Dom Jerónimo de Azevedo to Philip III, Goa, 22 December 1613, HAG, LM, liv. 12, ff. 47v–49v; Collecção de tratados, I, 194–95; Governor Fernão de Albuquerque to Sultan Ibrahim II, Goa, 8 May 1620, ACE, I, 499–500; AHU, CU–Índia, cx. 14, doc. 38, f. 22v. 74. Pissurlencar, Agentes da diplomacia, 30. There is record of several payments made to Ajju Nayak as língua do Estado in this period. AHU, CU–Índia, cx. 11, doc. 110, ff. 2r, 15r; ibid., cx. 14, doc. 38, ff. 17r, 22v; ibid., CU, cod. 219, f. 50r. He probably died c. 1629–1630. 75. Raman, Document Raj, 60–61, characterizes scribal and munshi apprenticeships as “usually kin-centered.” Also see Guha, “The Family Feud as Political Resource.” 76. A Brahman from Salcete called Mangoji tried unsuccessfully to secure Krishna’s job for his son in the 1640s. King John IV to the viceroy, Lisbon [sometime between 1644–1651], ANTT, LM, liv. 58, f. 54r. 77. Nauraspur, 9 October 1615, Collecção de tratados, I, 192–94. 78. Ibid., 194–96. 79. Raman, Document Raj, 29–31 (quotation 29). 80. The use of these Portuguese words and phrases was somewhat unstable in the early modern period and it is therefore difficult to ascribe them a single, precise meaning. Treslado (noun) / tresladar (verb) signifies “copy” / “to copy,” but also “transcription” / “to transcribe,”

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or even “translation” / “to translate.” The common denominator between these nuanced connotations is to “transport” a document from one idiom to another, or to “transfer” the content of a document to a blank page or volume, thus generating its replica. Letra, for its part, stands for both “letter” and “script.” To add to the confusion, the Portuguese documents often employ interchangeably letra persa (Persian letter), escritura persa (Persian script), and língua persa (Persian language). I have thus translated these words differently, depending on their specific contexts. 81. AHU, CU, cod. 218, f. 170v; viceregal instructions given to Krishna Shenvi as ambassador to Bijapur, Goa, 26 November 1646, in Pissurlencar, Agentes da diplomacia, 31–32. 82. Linhares, Diary 1, ff. 84v–85r, 88v–89r; AHU, CU–Índia, cx. 26, doc. 60; ACE, III, 549–51. 83. ACE, III, 574–77, 582–87, 589–90. 84. Pissurlencar, Agentes da diplomacia, 50. 85. ACE, II, 654–55. 86. Krishna Shenvi’s petition, AHU, CU, cod. 445, ff. 153v–54r; ibid., cod. 208, f. 67r. 87. Goa, 15 May 1663, AHU, CU–Índia, cx. 45, doc. 224; Pissurlencar, Agentes da diplomacia, 50. 88. On Ramoji, see Pissurlencar, Agentes da diplomacia, 22–78; Flores, “Religião, ‘nação’, estatuto,” 554–61. 89. ANTT, Registo Geral de Mercês–D. Pedro II, liv. 12, f. 213r. 90. Goa, 22 March 1667, in Pissurlencar, Agentes da diplomacia, 69–70. 91. Gracias, Uma dona portugueza, 115–20. The original dates of these two documents are not included in their Portuguese versions, but they were both translated in Goa on January 19, 1711. 92. Acting as the de facto língua do Estado from the very early years of the eighteenth century, Vitoji was formally appointed to the position in 1711, following the death of Hari Shenvi. ANTT, Registo Geral de Mercês–D. João V, liv. 6, f. 215v. 93. Trautmann, Dravidian Kinship, esp. chs. 5 and 6. 94. The royal confirmation of Rama Krishna Shenvi’s appointment in 1699 acknowledges the exceptionality of the choice. ANTT, Registo Geral de Mercês–D. Pedro II, liv. 12, f. 213r. On the legal framework for office transmission in early modern Portugal and the tensions it provoked, see Hespanha, Como os juristas viam o mundo, 214–17. 95. Pissurlencar, Agentes da diplomacia, 69–70. 96. On this phenomenon, see Guha, “Transitions and Translations”; Guha, “Bad Language and Good Language”; Eaton, “The Rise of the Written Vernaculars.” 97. Published in Pissurlencar, Agentes da diplomacia, 50. 98. Cotta to Alvor, Goa, 26 August 1682, BA, cod. 51-VII-23, f. 112r. Sadly, the numerous references made to interpreters in Cotta’s letters never include names. 99. Cotta to Alvor, Goa, 31 January 1683, ibid., f. 170r. One wonders who this interpreter was: not Narayana Shenvi or Vitoji Shenvi, in all likelihood, since both served as línguas do Estado in 1683 and had mastered written Persian. 100. Anonymous, Vida e acções, 67, 68.

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Notes to Pages 149-155

101. . . . pera esprever cartas a reys e governadores. . . . ANTT, TSO, IL, proc. 12060, f. 8r–v. This generic description does not allow for a proper identification of the manual in question, but several of these Islamic books passed on to Christian hands and eventually found their way into early modern European libraries. See León Pinelo, Epitome de la Biblioteca Oriental y Occidental, I, 334, 344, 347. 102. This is true for the late eighteenth-century correspondence exchanged between the Mhamai-Khamat family of Goa and the Sephardic Jews of Livorno. See Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers, 179–80, 189–90. 103. Lobo, Corte na aldeia, dialogue II, 22–35, dialogue III, 35–54; Fernández Abarca, Discurso de las partes. See Carvalho, “A retórica da cortesia.” For the rich Spanish production of epistolary manuals in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, see Castillo Gómez, “Del tratado a la prática,” esp. 82–90. 104. Nappi, “Full. Empty. Stop. Go.”; Wang, “The Sounds of Our Country.” 105. Cotta to Alvor, Goa, 21 August 1682, BA, cod. 51-VII-23, f. 108v. 106. Flores, “Marathi Voices.” 107. The discussion around early modern indigenous intellectuals would certainly be enriched by a global consideration of the phenomenon. For a possible parallel with Spanish America, see Ramos and Yannakakis, eds., Indigenous Intellectuals. 108. Krishna had a clear signature, whereas Vitoji’s was blurred. For his part, Ramoji signed both in Roman and Modi characters, which probably constitutes a statement. See images of their signatures in Pissurlencar, Agentes da diplomacia, between 623–25. 109. For a set of telling cases, see Ghobrial, “Migration from Within and Without.” 110. See Xavier, A invenção de Goa, 127–28. 111. On this case, see Flores, “Religião, ‘nação’, estatuto,” 554–61. 112. Pissurlencar, Agentes da diplomacia, 69 n. 1. 113. On the reaffirmation of the religious identity of Brahmans, see Chatterjee, “Scribal Elites in Sultanate and Mughal Bengal”; Guha, “Serving the Barbarian.” 114. O’Hanlon and Minkowski, “What Makes People Who They Are?”; O’Hanlon, “Speaking from Siva’s Temple.” 115. For an analysis of the extant depictions of dragomans, see Rothman, The Dragoman Renaissance, ch. 4. 116. Inquisition’s file of Miguel Rodrigues, Goa, mid-eighteenth century, ANTT, CGSO, maço 36, no. 13, ff. 2r–v. 117. Father Luís de Fróis, Goa, 16 November 1559, Documentação, VII, 349. 118. On this, see Pearson, Coastal Western India, ch. 5; Souza, “Glimpses of Hindu Dominance.” 119. Flores, “Religião, ‘nação’, estatuto,” 560.

Chapter 7 1. Howell, Epistolae Ho-Elianae (“To the Knowing Reader of Familiar Letters”), unnumbered.

Notes to Pages 156–161

261

2. There is an extensive literature on early modern correspondence in Europe. See, inter alia, Bethencourt and Egmond, eds., Correspondence and Cultural Exchange in Europe. For the Iberian context, see especially Bouza, ed., Cultura epistolar en la alta Edad Moderna. 3. Eggert, “Friendship with Foreigners.” 4. See Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers, esp. ch. 7; Aslanian, “‘The Salt in a Merchant’s Letter’”; Sood, “‘Correspondence Is Equal to Half a Meeting.’” 5. Gama to Ajju Nayak, Lisbon, 24 March 1629, ANTT, MMCG, cx. 2, tom. IC, 91. 6. On this council, see Luz, O Conselho da Índia; Borges, “Um império ibérico integrado?” ch. 2. 7. Lisbon, 10 February 1612, ANTT, Chancelaria de Filipe II–Próprios, liv. 31, ff. 48r–v. 8. De Weerdt and Morche, eds., Political Communication in Chinese and European History, 16. 9. Gama to Krishna Shenvi, Lisbon, 2 April 1631, ANTT, MMCG, cx. 2, tom. IC, 91. 10. Dom Vasco Luís da Gama to Dom Vicente Nogueira, Lisbon, 12 September 1649, Um diálogo epistolar, 279–80; Nogueira to Gama, Rome, 22 November 1649, ibid., 298. 11. See Coelho, O primeiro marquez de Niza. The correspondence John IV exchanged with the Marquis of Niza when the latter was ambassador in Paris is available in Cartas de el-rei D. João IV. 12. Most of the correspondence exchanged between the two is published in Cartas de D. Vicente Nogueira and Um diálogo epistolar. 13. On Vicente Nogueira, see Montcher, Mercenaries of Knowledge. 14. On his and other “dead” early modern Iberian libraries that we know of today through catalogues and other written evidence, see Carvalho, “‘El club de los señores de las bibliotecas muertas.’” 15. Nogueira to Gama, Rome, 30 March 1648, Um diálogo epistolar, 166–67. On the Republic of Letters and the “Orient,” see Hamilton, Van den Boogert, and Westerweel, eds., The Republic of Letters and the Levant; Miller, Peiresc’s Orient. 16. Gama’s interest in prophetic and apocalyptical texts explains his desire to own a copy of Hieronymi Vecchietti Florentini ab Aegypto Doctoris theologi De anno primitivo ab exordio mundi ad annum Iulianum accomodato et de sacrorum temporum ratione libri octo (Augsburg, 1621). See Um diálogo epistolar, 43. 17. BPE, cod. CVI/2–2. 18. See the letter from Vieira de Figueiredo to Vasco Luís da Gama, 6 August 1662, discussed in a meeting of the Overseas Council (Conselho Ultramarino), Lisbon, 27 March 1664, in Boxer, Francisco Vieira de Figueiredo, 82–83. 19. Cartas de el-rei D. João IV. 20. Gama to Nogueira, Paris, 27 September 1647, Um diálogo epistolar, 122. 21. Krishna Shenvi to Vasco Luís da Gama, [Goa, 1655], ANTT, MMCG, cx. 2, tom. IC, 92. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid., respectively, 99–102 and 1–12. 24. Gama to Nogueira, Vidigueira, November 1652, Um diálogo epistolar, 434. 25. Ibid., 436.

262

Notes to Pages 161–167

26. ANTT, MMCG, cx. 2, tom. IC, 91. 27. Ibid. 28. Flores, “Marathi Voices.” 29. ANTT, MMCG, cx. 2, tom. IC, 89. 30. 3 October 1654 and 3 November 1654, ibid., ff. 83r, 85r, ACE, III, respectively, 575– 76, 574–75. 31. ANTT, MMCG, cx. 2, tom. IC, 87. For the Portuguese version of the agreement signed in 1655, see ACE, III, 582. 32. ANTT, MMCG, cx. 2, tom. IC, 88–89. Shah ’Abul Hasan was the son-in-law of Mustafa Khan, the powerful courtier of Bijapur. 33. Sultan Muhammad to Brás de Castro, [Bijapur], 3 November 1654, ibid., 83. The alqab corresponds to the set of epithets that identified the recipient of a farman in accordance with his status. For a discussion of this and other formal components of an Indo-Persian letter, see Chapter 8. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid., 89. 36. We find Krishna Shenvi at the court of Bijapur in 1638 as interpreter to the embassy of António Moniz Barreto. In that capacity, Krishna Shenvi translated documents from and to Shah ’Abul Hasan, who acted as the sultan’s “procurator.” The two thus certainly met. See ACE, III, 649, n. 1. 37. Wagoner, “Fortuitous Convergences.” 38. Davis, Trickster Travels, 232–33, 244 (quotation). 39. ANTT, MMCG, cx. 2, tom. 1C, 92. For details on the organization of the Mughal army and the prominence of the war horse in it, see Gommans, Mughal Warfare, 81–88, 111–21. 40. On Shahjahan’s “fixation” with Central Asia, see, for example, Foltz, Mughal India and Central Asia, ch. 7. 41. ANTT, MMCG, cx. 2, tom. 1C, 92. 42. See Guha, “Speaking Historically,” 1087. 43. Conversation also carved the way for enlightened interactions in the domain of science. See Yale, Sociable Knowledge. 44. Berry, Japan in Print, 210, 239. 45. De Vivo, Information and Communication in Venice, 93, 152, 155. 46. ANTT, MMCG, cx. 2, tom. 1C, 92. 47. Rothman, The Dragoman Renaissance, ch. 7. 48. Flores, The Mughal Padshah, 73, 100. 49. “We know that the king Mogor committed himself for many years to building a house [made] of emeralds . . . and eventually died without finishing it.” Lobo, Corte na aldeia, dialogue I, 13–14. 50. Della Valle, Viaggi di Pietro Della Valle. 51. On the early modern familiar letter in English context, see Fitzmaurice, The Familiar Letter in Early Modern English. 52. Sarzedas, Diário do conde de Sarzedas, 94.

Notes to Pages 167–175

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53. Linhares, Diary 1, ff. 49r–v. 54. AHU, CU–Índia, cx. 14, doc. 38, ff. 9r, 22v. There are other references to Mulla Da’ud in the same document, unfoliated. By then he received an annual salary of 324 xerafins, or 97,200 réis. 55. ACE, vol. III, 551, 568, 590; Pissurlencar, Agentes da diplomacia, 69–70. 56. Alam and Subrahmanyam, Writing the Mughal World, 313–14. 57. Published in Pissurlencar, Agentes da diplomacia, 50. 58. Sultan ‘Ali II to interim council of government of the Estado, [Bijapur], 20 November 1659, HAG, LM, liv. 26B, ff. 520r–21r. Narayana Shenvi translated two Portuguese letters into Persian in 1663, one of them addressed to the sultan of Bijapur. Goa, 15 May 1663, AHU, CU–Índia, cx. 45, doc. 224. 59. Examples in ACE, III, 551, 568, 590, all referring to the years 1653–1655 and to the professional partnership between Krishna Shenvi and Mulla Mu’inuddin. 60. Cotta to Alvor, Goa, 31 January 1683, BA, cod. 51-VII-23, f. 170r. 61. APO, fasc. 5, pt. II, 906–07. 62. Fernandes, O diário tangerino, 120–21. 63. Ricci, “Reading between the Lines,” 79. 64. Cotta to Alvor, Goa, 31 January 1683, BA, cod. 51-VII-23, ff. 170r–v. 65. Ibid., ff. 173r–v. On Manucci, see Subrahmanyam, Three Ways to Be Alien, 133–72. 66. Cotta to Alvor, Goa, 3 February 1683, BA, cod. 51-VII-23, ff. 173r–v. 67. Alvor to Cotta, Panelim, 3 February 1683, ibid., f. 173r. 68. Cotta to Alvor, Goa, 3 February 1683, ibid., ff. 175r–v. 69. Goa, 29 August 1655, ACE, III, 590. 70. Ibid., respectively, 596–97. 71. We borrow this sentence from Rothman, The Dragoman Renaissance, 190, and refer to her subtle analysis of two distinct approaches to the translation in Venice of a specific Ottoman document: a letter from Sultan Murad III to Doge Pasquale Cicogna dated 1594. 72. ACE, III, 590. 73. [Chaul], 16 June 1617, Collecção de tratados, I, 195–96. 74. On this, see Flores, “Marathi Voices,” 363.

Chapter 8 1. Muhammad ‘Adil Shah to Governor Brás de Castro, Bijapur, 13 March 1654 (translated in Goa, 29 March 1654), ACE, III, 567–568 (567). It is not clear whether the recourse to the rhetoric of love is by the secretary who penned the letter in Bijapur or by the língua who translated it in Goa. On the importance of this topic with respect to early modern European political culture, see Cardim, “Amor e amizade.” 2. Several letters sent by Muhammad to Castro between 1654 and 1655 are preserved in Portuguese translation in HAG, LM, livs. 24 and 25. See ACE, III, 574–77, 589–90. 3. For an overview, see Fragner, “Farman.” More importantly, if geared toward Safavid Iran, see Mitchell, The Practice of Politics, esp. 6–16. For the analysis of a significant case of

264

Notes to Pages 175–180

courtly correspondence involving Emperor Akbar and his foster brother Mirza ‘Aziz Koka in 1593–1594, see Ghosh, “Epistolary Strategies of Negotiation.” 4. For some examples, see A Calendar of Documents, I, 146, 195, 212. 5. We know, for instance, that the manual titled Makhzan al-insha (Treasure House of Insha), authored by Kamal al-Din Husayn Va‘iz-i Kashifi of Herat (d. 1504–1505), was still in use in the seventeenth century in the Mughal chancellery. See Mitchell, “To Preserve and Protect.” 6. For the English translation of portions of Abu’l Fazl’s collection of insha’, see Abu’l Fazl, Mukatabat-i-‘Allami. For a collection of personal letters, namely Chandar Bhan’s midseventeenth-century corpus, see Kinra, Writing Self, Writing Empire, 174–80. 7. Stern, The Company-State, 13. 8. Alam and Subrahmanyam, “Introduction: Coercion, Communication, and the East India Company,” xv, n. 20. 9. Siebertz, “How to Obtain a Farman from Shah Jahan.” 10. Dutch translations of early eighteenth-century farmans to VOC officials are extant. A collection of farmans and other Persian correspondence exchanged between the sultans of Golconda and the Dutch c. 1627–1679 was translated by Daniel Havart and is kept at the Utrecht University Library. See Bes, Dutch Sources on South Asia, 144, 262. 11. BL, Add. Mss. 29095. 12. Nationaal Archief, Overgekomen Briefen en Papieren, VOC, inv. 1099, ff. 323r (farman), ff. 324r–25r, 327r. 13. For instance, Father João Leitão’s anxiety regarding the paucity of farmans from Emperor Aurangzeb in favor of the Society of Jesus brings to mind similar laments from VOC and EIC officials throughout the seventeenth century. See Leitão’s letter to the provincial of India, Agra, 16 July 1684, BL, Add. Mss. 9855, ff. 157r–v. 14. On this, see Morel, “Words of Majesty”; Sowerby, “Negotiating with the Material Text”; Ogborn, “Writing Travels.” 15. Evans, Royal Voices, 5. 16. Mitchell, The Practice of Politics, 17–18. See the letter from Akbar to Philip II, Fatehpur Sikri, Rabi‘ al-Awwal 990 (March–April 1582), included in vol. I of Insha’i Abu’l Fazl. For its English translation, see Rehatsek, “A Letter of the Emperor Akbar,” 136–37. 17. The best work along these lines (and well beyond diplomatics) is that of Mohiuddin, The Chancellery and Persian Epistolography. 18. For a calendar (and a study in its own right) of Mughal farmans and imperial diplomacy, see A Calendar of Documents. 19. Richards, “The Formulation of Imperial Authority”; Moin, The Millennial Sovereign; Mitchell, The Practice of Politics. 20. On this topic, see Mitchell, “Provincial Chancelleries.” 21. Bocarro, Década 13, pt. I, cap. lxxxi, 355–57. 22. Ross, Preface to Calendar of Persian Correspondence, I, vi. 23. Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value.” 24. The recent scholarship on early modern objects is massive. Findlen, ed., Early Modern Things, provides a comprehensive view of this field.

Notes to Pages 180–184

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25. For an excellent analysis of these elements, if for a different time and place, see Bruzzi and Dewière, “Words of Paper.” 26. See Orgel, Spectacular Performances; Wall-Randell, “What Is a Staged Book?” 27. . . . è stata voltata dalla lingua persiana al meglio che si è potuto, perche nel proprio idioma suona molto bene, et elegantemente. Mirza Zulqarnain to the superior general, Agra, 19  November 1619, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Roma, fondo gesuitico, 1228, no. 16. Corsi was in Mughal India from 1600 and his mastery of Persian is well documented. On Zulqarnain, see Hosten, “Mirza zu-l-Qarnain.” 28. Portuguese and English versions of these farmans are published in Flores and Saldanha, The Firangis, 61–85, 91–92. For both the Persian text and the English translation of all extant Mughal farmans on the Jesuits, see Felix, “Mughal Farmans.” 29. Felix, “Mughal Farmans,” 11–24, provides the English translation of five farmans issued by this emperor in favor of the missionaries. The only known Portuguese version of a farman by Jahangir on the Jesuits and the Portuguese is housed at ARSI, Goa 46 I, ff. 80r–v. It dates from March 1610 and concerns Father Manuel Pinheiro, who was to travel between the Mughal capital and Goa on the emperor’s behalf. 30. ARSI, Goa 46 I, ff. 131r–v, published in Persian and English by Felix, “Mughal Farmans,” 25–26, and available at http://www.asnad.org/en/document/356/. 31. Mohiuddin, The Chancellery, 45–49. 32. Ibid., 62. 33. Raguagli d’alcune missioni, 17–21. 34. Cartas do Japam, 62–64. 35. Guzmán, Historia de las missiones, respectively 255–56, 244–45. 36. Guerreiro, Relação anual, II, 395–96; Jarric, Histoire des choses, III, 224–25. Guerreiro’s work was published in Castilian and German soon after its Portuguese edition. 37. Commissariat, “Imperial Mughal Farmans in Gujarat”; Mukherjee and Habib, “The Mughal Administration.” 38. On this, see Županov, Disputed Mission, ch. 3. 39. I borrow this phrase from Postlewate and Hüsken, eds., Acts and Texts. 40. Sultan Salim to Qulij Khan, [Agra], 18 January 1604, in Flores and Saldanha, The Firangis, 84–85. 41. Mohiuddin, The Chancellery, 136–39. 42. Pinheiro to the provincial of India, [Lahore, 1605], DUP, III, 60–61. Also see Pinheiro to the provincial of India, Lahore, 12 August 1605, ibid., 41. 43. Pinheiro to the provincial of India, [Lahore, 1605], ibid., 61. 44. Gayk and Malo, “The Sacred Object.” On this theme, see the pathbreaking works by Bynum, Christian Materiality; Bynum, Dissimilar Similitudes. 45. Andrade to the provincial of India, Agra, 14 August 1623, DUP, III, 169. 46. Xavier to the provincial of India, Agra, 24 September 1608, ibid., 117. 47. Bynum, Dissimilar Similitudes, respectively 47, 55. 48. Flores and Saldanha, The Firangis, 84. 49. This is a side note by the missionary (probably Corsi, as I have argued earlier) who translated and dispatched to Rome the letter from Mirza Zulqarnain to the superior

266

Notes to Pages 184–189

general, Agra, 19 November 1619. Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Roma, fondo gesuitico, 1228, no. 16. 50. Lobo, Corte na aldeia, dialogue III, 54–55. 51. On the internal debates and different stances about the Mughal insha’ style, see Alam and Alavi, A European Experience, 14–16; Kinra, Writing Self, Writing Empire, 176–78. 52. Flores and Saldanha, The Firangis, 85. 53. Mohiuddin, The Chancellery, 71–72. 54. ARSI, Goa 46 I, f. 131r. Afzal Khan Shirazi (d. 1639) was grand vizier in 1635, while the emperor’s father-in-law is obviously Asaf Khan (d. 1641). 55. Pinheiro stressed this fact in a marginal note to his own translation of the nishan (Flores and Saldanha, The Firangis, 85), as well as in the two aforementioned letters he addressed in 1605 to the provincial of India (DUP, III, 41, 60). For a slightly different version, also aimed at stressing the Jesuits’ political influence, see Guerreiro, Relação anual, I, 297–98. 56. . . . estas cousinhas ca importão muito, posto que la se rião. Pinheiro to the provincial of India, Lahore, 12 August 1605, DUP, III, 45. 57. Ibid. 58. Guerreiro, Relação anual, I, 11. Also included in Jarric, Histoire des choses, III, 39–40. For an English translation, see Flores and Saldanha, The Firangis, 78–79. 59. Flores and Saldanha, The Firangis, 81, 84. 60. Ibid., 66, 79. 61. Couto, Ásia, déc. 9, cap. xiii, 82–84 (84). 62. Flores and Saldanha, The Firangis, 66. 63. Ibid., 78. On the medieval and early modern European debates about the Empyrean Heaven, see Grant, Planets, Stars, and Orbs, 371–87. 64. Flores and Saldanha, The Firangis, 63–64. 65. Guerreiro, Relação anual, II, 395. 66. Akbar’s full title was Jalal-ud-din Muhammad Akbar Padshah Ghazi, whereas the 1572 farman in translation has Solaldim Mamide Aquibar. 67. Pope Gregory XIII (g. 1572–1585) introduced the Gregorian calendar in Europe in February 1582, whereas Akbar implemented the so–called Ilahi era—a Persian solar calendar marked by the emperor’s reigning years—in March 1584. The calculation of time and the management of different calendar systems occupied a central role in the political life of Mughal India, as well as in the Ottoman Empire and Safavid Iran. On this, see Blake, Time in Early Modern Islam. 68. Flores and Saldanha, The Firangis, 66, 68. 69. Ibid., 81, 85. 70. Guerreiro, Relação anual, I, 11. 71. See, respectively, Carlebach, Palaces of Time, 115–40; Rodríguez Mediano, “Sacred Calendars.” 72. Toby, State and Diplomacy, 90–97. 73. Felix, “Mughal Farmans,” 26; ARSI, Goa 46 I, ff. 131r–v. 74. Sowerby, “Negotiating with the Material Text,” 204–7, 210. 75. Goa, 6 November 1630, Linhares, Diary 1, f. 106v.

Notes to Pages 189–193

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76. Goa, 16 November 1643, ACE, II, 476 (476–78 for the Portuguese copy of the letter). 77. Goa, 20 May 1644, ibid., III, 21. 78. Balabanlilar, Imperial Identity, 49–51; Lefèvre, “In the Name of the Fathers.” 79. On the Mughal seals, see Gallop, “The Genealogical Seal”; Felix, “The Mughal Seals.” 80. Farman of Akbar to the officials of the empire, [Agra], July–August 1602, ARSI, Goa 46 I, f. 46r. Its Portuguese translation was inserted in a letter from Father Manuel Pinheiro to Father João Álvares (in Rome), Lahore, 9 September 1602, ibid., ff. 43r–46v. For a modern English translation, see Flores and Saldanha, The Firangis, 81, as well as (with errors) Camps, Jerome Xavier, 201. 81. ARSI, Goa 46 I, f. 131r; Mohiuddin, The Chancellery, 65. Shahjahan means “King of the World.” 82. On this fascinating figure, see Flores, “Between Madrid and Ophir.” 83. Manuel Godinho de Erédia, “Discursso sobre a Provincia do Indostan chamada Mogul ou Mogor . . . ,” 1611, BNP, Reservados, cod. 11410, ff. 51r–56r (51r). A second copy of this text is kept at BL, Add. Mss. 9854, and published in DUP, III, 134–42, but it does not include the drawing of Jahangir’s seal. 84. The first mistake, common to other early modern European authors, consists in numbering the small circles from Timur to the reigning emperor, when the seal should be read in the opposite order. The second flaw relates to Jahangir’s title: Erédia includes Padshah Ghazi, but the emperor’s full title was simply Jahangir Nuruddin Muhammad Salim. Padshah Ghazi was used by his father, but not by him. 85. Couto, Ásia, déc. 9, cap. xiii, 84; Gallop, “The Genealogical Seal,” 86–87; Felix, “The Mughal Seals,” 114–15. 86. The Portuguese translation of the farman and its seal were prepared by the língua do Estado Vitoji Shenvi in January 1711, and can be found in Gracias, Uma dona portugueza, 118. 87. For a consideration of these aspects with regard to Islamic calligraphy, see Roxburgh, “The Eye is Favored.” 88. Saldanha, Iustum Imperium, 255; Jesus, “A governação do Estado da Índia,” 89. On the English, see Sowerby, “Negotiating with the Material Text,” 210. 89. A few eighteenth-century Mughal leather pouches (stamped, painted, and with gilt) are preserved in the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. See Flores and Silva, Goa and the Great Mughal, 18, 218. As for Ottoman exemplars, see Nockert, “The Ralamb Caftan and Ottoman Textiles,” 267–77 (274–76). 90. For a holistic approach to one of these objects, see Zeir, “Kharita.” On letter cases and the political and cultural meanings of textiles in Mughal context, see Houghteling, The Art of Cloth, 81. 91. Cotta to Alvor, Goa, 31 January 1683, BA, cod. 51-VII-23, f. 170r. 92. References to payments made to the invisible artisans who fabricated some of these pouches in Goa during Linhares’s viceroyalty are extant and include a description of the objects, as well as the identity of their intended recipients. AHU, CU, cod. 218, ff. 167r–v, 181r, 182v–83r, 184v, 293r–v. On the diplomatic uses of similar bags in other early modern contexts, see Sowerby, “Negotiating with the Material Text,” 213.

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Notes to Pages 194–201

Chapter 9 1. Linhares, Diary 1, f. 73v. 2. Ibid., f. 80v. 3. Ibid., ff. 82v–83r. The identity of the Mughal envoy is revealed in AHU, CU, cod. 218, ff. 167r, 293v. 4. There is an interesting parallel to be explored between Mughal India and Qing China in this regard, for the Portuguese ambassadors to Emperor Kangxi (r. 1662–1722) adopted similar precautions. See Wills, Embassies and Illusions, 1–37. 5. Cañeque, The King’s Living Image, 120. 6. ACE, I, 287–90. The viceroy included a copy of the minutes of this meeting in his diary. See Linhares, Diary 1, ff. 83r–84v. 7. In the late sixteenth-century, the Portuguese veteran soldier Francisco Rodrigues Silveira went so far as to praise the effective recognition of the Grão Mogor’s authority in the most remote imperial lands with the arrival of his messengers and the gaze of “the seal of arms of their lord.” Silveira, Reformação da milícia, 160. 8. Mohiuddin, The Chancellery, 73–74. 9. For a suggestive Portuguese description of the submissive way Burhan I received an ambassador of Shah Tahmasp I (r. 1524–1576) half a league away from his palace in 1546, see Aguião to Castro, Chaul, 4 June 1546, CSL, III, 221–22. 10. Linhares, Diary 1, f. 83v. Also see Saldanha, Iustum Imperium, 670, 672. 11. On the association of cartography and power in the case of Philip IV, see Crespo and Wyttenbach, “Los mapas del Rey Planeta”; Kagan, “Arcana imperii.” 12. On this, see Ramaswamy, “Conceit of the Globe”; Koch, “The Symbolic Possession of the World.” 13. ACE, I, 289. 14. Ibid., 289–90. 15. Flores, Unwanted Neighbours, 129–40. 16. ACE, I, 290. 17. Flores, Unwanted Neighbours, 137–38. 18. ACE, I, 290. On the people in the service of the viceroy and the tanadar mor (chief constable) who might have been mobilized to escort the Mughal envoy, see Bocarro, Livro das plantas, II, 136–37, 144. On Fort Daugim and its garrison in this period, ibid., 132–33. Shahjahan’s representative probably traveled by boat down Mandovi River between Bicholim and Fort Daugim (Map 2). 19. ACE, I, 290; Linhares, Diary 1, f. 84v. 20. Linhares, Diary 1, f. 85r. 21. Ibid., ff. 84v–85r. This farman leaked to the Dutch and a translation eventually found its way into VOC papers. Nationaal Archief, Overgekomen Briefen en Papieren, VOC 1099, f. 323r. The Dutch also had access to a letter from Linhares to Mir Musa, Goa, 5 July 1630, and equally prepared and stored its translation. Ibid., ff. 324r–25r. 22. Nishan from Prince Khurram to Viceroy Coutinho, [Ahmedabad], 4 October 1618, ACE, I, 24–25.

Notes to Pages 201-204

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23. The State Council members complained about Khurram’s “bad language” (ruim lingoagem) and advised the viceroy not to reply to the Mughal prince. Goa, 26 February 1619, ibid., 26. 24. Respectively, the “last [day] of the month Shawwal [Xaval],” or 4 October [1618], and “the 10 of the month called Khordad [Cordado],” i.e., 31 May [1630]. 25. Sobrescrita pello leal no serviço de seu Rey e de confiança e tão pequenino no serviço del Rey Asafacão. Linhares, Diary 1, f. 84v. 26. Mohiuddin, The Chancellery, 71–72. 27. Muy obedecido e leal a sua ley dinamamada [sic], o Rey Xajaahan. Linhares, Diary 1, f. 84v. 28. Hasan, The Central Structure, 102–03; Mohiuddin, The Chancellery, 35. 29. Formão del Rrey poderozo, que tem maiores poderes para o grande vizorrey. Linhares, Diary 1, f. 84v. 30. Linhares to Shahjahan, Goa, 6 September 1630, ibid., ff. 88v–89r. 31. On the political and symbolic meaning of the Portuguese royal title in the imperial context, see Saldanha, “Conceitos de espaço e poder”; Hespanha, “Fazer um império com palavras.” 32. On this embassy and the treaty signed between the Estado da Índia and the sultanate of Bijapur in 1579, see Subrahmanyam, “The Viceroy as Assassin,” 180–81. 33. The English translation of this letter is provided by Fischel, Local States in an Imperial World, 249, who additionally offers a stimulating reading of the text, related correspondence, and the underlying context (247–51). 34. The summary that follows draws on Eaton, Sufis of Bijapur, ch. 7. 35. Eaton situates the political rise of the Ethiopians in Bijapur c. 1660, but it surely occurred earlier (ibid., 188). On the Habshi presence and influence in the region, see Ali, The African Dispersal in the Deccan; Eaton, “The Rise and Fall of Military Slavery.” For a recent consideration of the several groups that formed the political elite of the Deccan states, see Fischel, Local States in an Imperial World, esp. ch. 3. 36. The idea that the sultan’s creed was the main “determinant of the orientation of the state” in the Deccan, to the detriment of the political element, has been recently questioned by Fischel, “Shi‘i Rulers, Safavid Alliance,” 345 (quotation). 37. For an overview, see Joshi, “Muhammad Adil Shah.” 38. Prakash, “The Dutch Factory at Vengurla”; Joshi, “Johan van Twist’s Mission to Bijapur”; Kruijtzer, Xenophobia in Seventeenth-Century India. 39. For a recent reappraisal of this figure, see Xavier and Županov, Catholic Orientalism, 249–63. 40. See the instructions given to Barreto, Goa, 11 August 1638, ACE, II, 549–55; and to Henriques, Goa, 2 December 1658, in Pissurlencar, Agentes da diplomacia, 37–50. 41. Instructions to Brito, Goa, 5 January 1657, ACE, III, 609–12. Concerning Martins’s mission, see State Council minutes, Goa, 20 March 1654, ibid., 325–28; instructions to Martins, Goa, 16 April 1654, ibid., 568–71. On the multifaceted Martins, see Souza, “Gonçalo Martins.” 42. On the establishment of the Jesuit mission of Bijapur in the 1650s, see Heras, “Some Unknown Dealings.”

270

Notes to Pages 204–207

43. Heras, “Three Catholic Padres”; Alam and Subrahmanyam, Writing the Mughal World, 251–55. 44. Provincial of India Jerónimo Fróis to Superior General Goschwin Nickel, Goa, 11 January 1654, ARSI, Goa 34 II, f. 441r. 45. 2 Muharram 1063 / 23 November 1653. The Jesuits kept Italian and Portuguese copies of this farman, but not the Persian original. See ARSI, Goa 34 II, respectively ff. 443r–v, 445r–v. 46. Portuguese references to Malik Yaqut in this period are abundant and can be found in ACE, III. The Jesuit provincial of India provides a brief account of Yaqut’s life, from childhood years spent in Golconda under the protection of Princess Khadija (the future wife of Muhammad ‘Adil Shah) to the high political favor he came to enjoy in Bijapur, where he was made “president of the eunuchs.” Fróis to Nickel, Goa, 11 January 1654, ARSI, Goa 34 II, f. 446r. 47. On Ikhlas Khan’s positive image in Goa, see the minutes of the State Council meeting held in Goa, 30 March 1637, ACE, II, 166. 48. State Council minutes, Goa, 3 December 1649, ibid., III, 129–30. 49. On the multiple forms of slavery in South Asia and the ways in which they diverge from the plantation system of the Atlantic World, see Chatterjee and Eaton, eds., Slavery and South Asian History. 50. Fróis to Nickel, Goa, 11 January 1654, ARSI, Goa 34 II, f. 447v. 51. The original text identifies this cloth as a volante, which consists of a thin and light piece of wool, cotton, or silk worn as a veil or adornment. 52. One wonders which route the procession took between St. Thomas Yard and the Fortress Palace. Muhammad’s farman and its retinue probably passed in front of St. Paul’s College and went down St. Paul’s Street (rua de São Paulo), where equestrian events usually took place. The escort might have then opted to take either Our Lady of the Mount Street (rua de Nossa Senhora do Monte) or Mandovim Street (rua do Mandovim, i.e., the custom house), before turning left to eventually enter the large square (terreiro do Vizorey) facing the viceregal palace (Map 2). On the early Portuguese topography of Goa, see Moreira, “Goa em 1535,” esp. 184, 189. 53. Like docel (or dossel), the word sitial refers to a canopy or baldachin. 54. Fróis to Nickel, Goa, 11 January 1654, ARSI, Goa 34 II, ff. 447v–48v. 55. From the Fortress Palace to the Jesuit professed house, the retinue might have taken the street that linked the viceregal residency to the royal hospital, with the shipyard (ribeira das galés) and St. Catherine’s Quay to its right. The procession likely turned left then, to finally reach the square (terreiro do galo, or dos galos, in Linschoten’s map) in front of the Church of Bom Jesus (Map 2). See Moreira, “Goa em 1535,” 183, 186–87. 56. The farman was probably exhibited in the library room, assuming that the professed house was erected according to the building plans sent to Rome in 1586 by Alessandro Valignano, which are now kept in BnF, Département des Estampes et de la photographie, FOL-HD-4 (6). On this building and its evolution, see Pereira, “Renaissance in Goa,” 385–93. 57. Fróis to Nickel, Goa, 11 January 1654, ARSI, Goa 34 II, f. 448r–v. 58. Ibid., f. 441r.

Notes to Pages 207–213

271

59. On Roth, see Camps, Studies in Asian Mission History, ch. 8. 60. ACE, III, 384–86. 61. Fróis to Nickel, Goa, 11 January 1654, ARSI, Goa, 34 II, ff. 441r–v; instructions to Morandi, Goa, 26 March 1655, ACE, III, 599. 62. On walking slowly as a sign of civility, see De Vivo, “Walking in Sixteenth- Century Venice,” 137–38. The viceroys of New Spain were supposed to “walk very slowly, in a orderly manner,” so that they showed authority. See Cañeque, The King’s Living Image, 121, the citation being from the instrucción given in 1603 to the Marquis of Montesclaros (g. 1603–1607). 63. See Locke, “Music, Horses, and Exotic Others.” The reference work for early modern Europe is Strong, Art and Power. On urban sounds in European context in this period, see Garrioch, “Sounds of the City” and especially Knighton and Mazuela-Anguita, eds., Hearing the City. Wade, Imagining Sound, explores the importance of the audible as a tool of political communication in the Mughal court. 64. See Flatt, The Courts of the Deccan Sultanates, 242–45. 65. Lopes, “O sistema defensivo de Goa,” I, 62–70. 66. See Jütte, “Entering a City,” esp. 208–15. 67. See Scholz, Borders and Freedom of Movement, 89. 68. Eaton and Wagoner, Power, Memory, Architecture, 289. 69. Cotta to Alvor, Goa, 29 January 1683, BA, cod. 51-VII-23, f. 167r; Alvor to Cotta, [Panelim, 30 January 1683], ibid., f. 167v. 70. . . . baixando e fazendo a sonbaia. . . . Muhammad to Castro, [Bijapur], 31 December 1654, ACE, III, 576–77. 71. The Portuguese sources mention the gifts from and to Mirza Muhammad and Shaikh Mu’inuddin, but there is no specific reference to gifts from and to Shahjahan. AHU, CU, cod. 218, ff. 84r, 91v–92r, 121r, 184v, 293r–v; Linhares, Diary 1, ff. 88r–v. 72. On robes of honor and the robing ceremony in the context of a wide medieval and early modern geography that stretched from Morocco to China, see Gordon, ed., Robes of Honour. 73. Muhammad to Castro, Bijapur, 3 December 1654, ACE, III, 575–76; Muhammad to Father Gonçalo Martins, Bijapur, 15 July 1653, ARSI, Goa, 34 II, f. 446v; Muhammad to Viceroy Sarzedas, Bijapur, 29 August 1655, ACE, III, 590. 74. On the features and powers of early modern miniature portraits, see Koos, “Wandering Things.” 75. Whitehead, “Some Notable Coins”; Gulbransen, “Jahangiri Portrait Shasts.” 76. I thank Laura Parodi for her valuable help on this issue. Sultan Muhammad counted several painters in his service, including European ones, but I will not elaborate here on the possible identity of this portrait’s author. 77. Couto, Da Ásia, déc. 9, cap. xxiii, 202–03, provides the only known copy of Philip II’s letter to Barreto. Bouza, Palabra e imagen, 95–96, explored this episode in a Spanish courtly context. 78. Heal, The Power of Gifts, 166–67. 79. Galastro, “Wondrous Welcome.”

272

Notes to Pages 213–219

80. On the reception of Mughal ambassadors in the viceregal palace, see “Da missão do Mogor,” [1616], BA, JA, cod. 49-V-18, f. 345r; “Tratamento que se faz ao Embaixador de ElRey Mogol,” Goa, [1704–1707], Collecção de tratados, V, 10–12. 81. Cañeque, The King’s Living Image, 124–28, 133–34 (quotation 124). 82. Malecka, “Solar Symbolism of the Mughal Thrones,” 28. 83. Jerónimo Fróis to Alessandro Gotifredo, Goa, 27 October 1652, ARSI, Goa 46 I, ff. 168r–v. Gotifredo served for less than two months as superior general (from January 21 to March 12, 1652), which means that Fróis’s letter must have been handled in Rome by Goschwin Nickel, Gotifredo’s successor. 84. Botelho to Bento Ferreira, Agra, 1 February 1652, DUP, III, 219. 85. Fróis to Gotifredo, Goa, 27 October 1652, ARSI, Goa 46 I, ff. 168r–v. 86. See Blair, “Color and Gold.” 87. Father João Leitão to the provincial of India, Agra, 16 July 1684, BL, Add. Mss. 9855, f. 157r. In this same period and for similar purposes, the Dutch factory in Hyderabad employed a “Mulla or Persian writer” called Shah Qasim. See Kruijtzer, “Daniel Havart,” 494. 88. . . . acommodando se o estilo mais ao natural da naçam, que as urbanidades europeas. . . . Fróis to Nickel, ARSI, Goa 34 II, f. 448v. 89. . . . mais ao pé da letra do que concertado na substancia. . . . Fróis to Nickel, ARSI, Goa 34 II, f. 448v. The farman is dated July 15, 1653, ibid., f. 446v. 90. Fróis to Muhammad, Goa, 10 January 1654, ARSI, Goa 34 II, ff. 448v–49r. This copy of the document (the only one extant) fails to include the date according to the Islamic lunar calendar. For some reason, the Gregorian calendar date has been scribbled out. 91. On this, see Mitchell, The Practice of Politics.

Conclusion 1. Subrahmanyam, Explorations in Connected History: Mughals and Franks, ch. 7, esp. 197–202. 2. Subrahmanyam, The Portuguese Empire in Asia, chs. 6 and 7. 3. Juliana has attracted much scholarly attention in the last decade. See, especially, Zaman, “Visions of Juliana.” The foundational study in Portuguese on this figure is Gracias, Uma dona portugueza. 4. See the Portuguese translation of Shah Alam II’s farman to Governor Francisco da Cunha e Meneses, 10 October 1791, in Pissurlencar, Agentes da diplomacia, 148–49 (reference to a similar farman addressed to Meneses’s successor in December 1796, ibid., 149, n. 1). Governor Meneses opted for nurturing Shah Alam’s phantasy and consequently acknowledged the Mughal emperor’s authority in his response letter, Goa, 18 May 1793, ibid., 149–50. On the English case, see Fisher, “The Resident in Court Ritual”; Zins, “La politique des rites publics.” 5. On Voulton and this text, see Subrahmanyam, Explorations in Connected History: Mughals and Franks, 190; Lockhart, “De Voulton’s Notícia.” 6. For the literary dimension of this phenomenon, see the recent work by Dudney, India in the Persian Word of Letters. Regarding Persian and the eighteenth-century documentary

Notes to Pages 219–224

273

cultures of India, see Deshpande, “The Marathi Kaulnama.” On the twilight of Persianate India, see Eaton, India in the Persianate Age, 392–97. 7. Flores, “Marathi Voices,” 354. 8. The Portuguese text of this treaty is in Pissurlencar, Agentes da diplomacia, 131–33 (133 for the reference to the languages of the treaty). 9. Wagoner, “‘Sultan Among Hindu Kings’”; Eaton, India in the Persianate Age. 10. Alam and Subrahmanyam, Writing the Mughal World, ch. 6; Alam and Subrahmanyam, “Mediterranean Exemplars.” 11. Faria, Discursos varios politicos, discourse II, ff. 62r–86v, esp. 85r–v (quotation 85v). On the global intellectual interests of the learned Manuel Severim de Faria, see Brockey, “An Imperial Republic.” Faria’s stance on language and “nation” is in line with that of his sixteenthcentury predecessors (F. Oliveira, J. Barros, and P. M. Gândavo) as discussed in this book’s introduction. 12. See Saarela, The Early Modern Travels of Manchu, esp. 1–15 (quotation 3) and 222–31. 13. Afinogenov, Spies and Scholars, ch. 10. 14. The closest figure to such profile at the Portuguese Academy of Sciences was Friar João de Sousa, an Arabist born in Damascus in 1735. See Figanier, Fr. João de Sousa. 15. Rothman, The Dragoman Renaissance, ch. 7. 16. Subrahmanyam, Europe’s India, ch. 1. 17. Xavier and Županov, Catholic Orientalism, ch. 8. 18. Bertrand, “The Making of a ‘Malay Text,’” 148. 19. For Erédia’s maps, see Portugaliae Monumenta Cartographica, IV, pls. 415 A and B; Manuel Godinho de Erédia, Tratado Ophirico [1616], BnF, Portugais 44, ff. 12v–13r. 20. Flores, The Mughal Padshah, 7, 68, 73–81. 21. On this work, see Gommans, The Unseen World, 45–51; Kruijtzer, “Daniel Havart,” 499–502. The obvious European “successor” to Havart’s manual is Francis Gladwin’s The Persian Monshee (1801). 22. See Cañizares-Esguerra et al., “Categories as Archives,” 18. 23. Cette relation du Mogor puisqu’elle est si belle, il la faudoit faire traduire et la bailer à un honneste homme pour y mettre les notes qui pourroient escheoir. Peiresc to Dupuy, Aix, 21 December 1626, Lettres de Peiresc aux frères Dupuy, I, 113. 24. . . . une petite relation de l’Estat du Mogor de l’an 1632 qui ne vous sera pas desagreable en simple patoys d’un bom marchand. Peiresc to Dupuy, n.p., 16 May 1633, ibid., II, 523.

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Index

Abdul Qasim, 223 ‘Abdul Wais, Chart 1, 86 ‘Abdullah Khan, 40 ‘Abdur Rahim Khan-i Khanan, 30–32, 55, 57, 181, 188 ‘Abdus-Sattar, 33, 220 Abu’l Fazl, 28–29, 175, 177, 186 Abu’l l-Hasan Qadiri, 93–94 Academy of Sciences of Lisbon, 221 Acquaviva, Claudio, 23, 54 Acquaviva, Rodolfo, 137 ‘Adil Khan, 200–201. See also ‘Adil Shah ‘Adil Shah(i): court, 41, 45–48, 51, 57, 69–72, 80–84, 87, 94, 100–104, 130, 144–45, 162, 164, 167, 169, 196, 203, 207–8; dynasty, 2, 58–59, 212, 229; library, 47; officials, 171; Sultanate, 21, 65, 105, 131, 208. See also Bijapur; Idalcão Agra, Map 1, 4, 20, 34, 45, 48–51, 55, 57–58, 62–65, 73, 76, 78, 95–99, 166, 176, 180, 182, 184, 213–14; Europeans in, 49 Aguião, Diogo Lopes de, 20, 101 Aguiar, António de, 47, 106 ‘Ahdnama. See treaties Ahmadnagar, 2, Map 1, 4, 5, 13, 19–20, 38–41, 49, 56, 64–65, 70, 77, 82, Chart 1, 86, 87, 95–96, 98–99, 105–7, 111, 115, 148, 190; ambassadors of, 68, 79; court of, 36, 46–47, 78–80; siege of, 19; Mughal influence in, 44; Mughal pressure on, 60; resources, 102; sultan, xi, 39–40, 46–47, 64, 77–79, 103, 189–90, 197; territory, 103; treaty with the Estado da Índia, 144. See also Nizam Shah(i) Ahmedabad, Map 1, 4, 42, 55, 57, 76, 87, 95, 98, 139, 187 Ain-i Akbari. See Abu’l Fazl Ajju Nayak, 47, 143–44, Chart 2, 146, 147–48, 153, 155–61, 166

Ajmer, Map 1, 4, 44, 50 Akbar, Emperor, 7, Figure 4, 51; accounts on, 44–45; assemblies, 52–53; conquests, 187–88; conversations with, 53; court of, 37, 41, 44–45, 52–53; intelligence gathering and record keeping, 28–29; letters from, 44–45, 142–43, 177; meeting with, 139; memory and knowledge, 32, 53; rumors on, 40; tughra, 188 akhbarat, 28, 95 Alagiyavanna Mukaveti, 123 Albuquerque, Fernão de, 82 Albuquerque, Francisco de, 138 Albuquerque, Juan de, 138 Albuquerque, Matias de, 40, 44, 115–17 alchemy, 58 Aleppo, 48 alevantados, 21, 56. See also renegades; runaways Alexander the Great, 37–38, 78, 215–16 ‘Ali I, Sultan, xii, 19, 139–40, 168, 204; court of, 19 alqab, 163, 172, 183–84, 201 Álvares, Dinis, 40–41 Alvor, Count of, 75, 119, 123, 149, 168–70 ambassadors, 24–25, 47–48, 72, 80–81, 93, 143, 196; of Ahmadnagar, 68, 79; of Akbar, 51–52, 54, 67, 210; of Aurangzeb, 119, 170– 71; of or to Bijapur, 43, 46, 48, 52, 67–68, 80–82, 115, 130–31, 168, 196, 202, 205; correspondence of, 155–80, 198–99, 202; Deccani, 48; English, 155; entries, 210–11; to Goa, 54, 58, 79, 115, 119, 196, 210; houses of, 58; of Jahangir, 48, 51, 67; linguistic skills of, 81, 88, 143–44; Mughal, 58, 67, 119, 139, 142, 167, 196, 198, 213; reception of, 115, 119, 210–11; recruitment of, 81; Safavid, 197–98. See also António de Azeredo; Baltasar de Azeredo;

312

Index

ambassadors (continued) Zahir Beg; António Moniz Barreto; António Monteiro Corte Real; Muqarrab Khan; Mustafa Khan; Naqib Khan; Hakim Kushal; Tahir Muhammad; Aquid Murad; Mirza Muhammad Raza; João da Rocha; Malik Yaqut Amphiteatro Oriental, 116–17 Andrade, António de, 52, 75, Chart 1, 86, 182–83 Anunciação, Leandro da, 81, Chart 1, 86 Apaji, 84–85, Chart 1, 86, 88 Aquid Murad, 79 Arabic, 136–37, 160, 168–69, 192, 223 Arakan, Map 1, 4, 74, 160 archive, 13, 16, 23–24, 88, 111; bilingual, 124–25; of the Casa da Índia, 26; chief custodian of, 13, 118–20; of Goa, 10, 67, 113, 117–19, 123–24, 162, 174, 198–99, 214; Jesuit, 23, 118, 214; officers of, 13, 118, 129; Portuguese, 16, 107, 193; indigenous, 123, 150, 161–62; Indo-Persian, 118; Islamic, 29; of the Mughal Empire, 27, 29–31, 35, 120; personal, 111, 115–18, 123–24, 150, 161–62; of Simancas, 25; of the Treasury, 129–30; of the VOC, 176; social history of, 7 Armenians, 37, 41, 48, 55–57, 180; as language brokers, 44; as spies, 44–45; at the Mughal court, 49–50. See also António Jorge da Cruz; Sebastião Dias; Mirza Zulqarnain artists, 48, 50, 87, 117, 223 Asaf Khan, 52, 62, 95, 202 Asirgarh, Map 1, 4 Assam, Map 1, 4, 92 astrologers, 34 Ataíde, Alexandre de, 138 Ataíde, Luís de, 19, 22, 25, 118, 139–40; intelligence gathering web, 20–22 Augustinians, 37, 74, 81–82, Chart 1, 86, 125, 169–71, 210. See also Manuel de Jesus; Sebastião de Jesus; João da Rocha Aurangzeb, Emperor, 2, 30, 56, 119, 149, 169; letters from, 149, 168–72, 189–90, 193; paperdependent empire, 30; petitions to, 214 Ausa, 103 Aveiras, Count of, 115, 127, 189 avisos, 19, 46, 75, 78, 84 Awadh, Map 1, 4 Azeredo, António de, 46 Azeredo, Baltasar de, 46, 72, 81, Chart 1, 86, 88, 145

Azevedo, Francisco de, 75, Chart 1, 86 Azevedo, Jerónimo de, 82, 123 Azevedo, Manuel de, 19–22, 41, 77, Chart 1, 86 Babur, xi, 1 Baffin, William, 192, 223 Bahuguna Kamath, 138, 150, 162, 173, 219 Baisunghar, 62–63; legend of, 92 Balaghat, 20, 37, 40, 101, 143 Balkh, Map 1, 4, 63 baneanes. See baniyas baniyas, 40, 66–67, 76–77, 81, 88; quarter in Goa, 66; spies, 73, 81, Chart 1, 86 Bardez, Map 1, 4, 124, 141, 203 Barreto, António Moniz (ambassador), 145, 203 Barreto, António Moniz (governor), 168 Barreto, Francisco, 212 Basatin al-Salatin. See Ibrahim Zubayri Bassein, Map 1, 4, Figure 3, 39, 74–75, 142, 217; captain of, Chart 1, 86; site of surveyance, 38, 74 bazaar, 33, 98 Belgaum, Map 1, 4 bendahara, 134 Bengal, 2–3, Map 1, 4, 6, 52, 62, 65, 73–74, Chart 1, 86, 99, 120, 218 Bernier, François, 57, 166 Bicholim, Map 1, 4, 80, 85, 150, 196, 199–200 Bidar, Map 1, 4, 103 Bijapur, xiii, 2, Map 1, 4, 5, 12, 13, 19–22, 55–57, 69, Figure 7, 71, 80–88, Chart 1, 86, 90, 93–95, 99–107, 111, 115, 118, 126, 130–31, 139–41, 144–46, 147, 162–64, 172, 177, 201–3, 207–9, 211–12, 216, 218; ambassador of, 43, 52, 67–68, 80, 130–31, 142, 196, 205; assault on Goa, 19; court of, 13, 36, 46–48, 71–72, 100–101, 105, 118, 162, 172, 205, 207, 215; Dutch presence in, 203; factions, 203; governors of, 80, 84, 130–31, 163; information center, 72, 80; Mughal assault on, 64–65, 70–71, 78, 103; nobles of, 104–5, 170; relations with the Estado da Índia, 80; resources, 102–4; submission to the Mughals, 65, 94–95, 203; multiethnic society of, 48, 82, 201; siege of, 19; treaty with the Estado da Índia, 43–44, 139–40; yogi of, 106. See also ‘Adil Shah(i); Idalcão, terra firme Bocarro, António, 118, 122, 178 Bom Jesus (church in Goa), 194, 207, 209, 213. See also Jesuits

Index books, 25, 32; of accounts, 123; acquisition of, 37–38, 47; circulation of, 37–38, 160; of History, 38, 47; on Oriental matters, 160; Persian, 47, 149; reading of, 32, 38, 53; religious, 58, 182; translation of, 38, 47, 58 Botelho, António, 34, 43, 57, 68, 207–8, 213–15 Brahmans, 14; conversations with, 42, 56; criticism, 142, 151; discrimination, 138; as informers, 99–107; as interpreters, 14, 73, 154–73; as línguas do Estado, 141–52; religious practices, 41–43; as scribes, 120–31, 135; social recognition, 151. See also Cristóvão de Meneses; Ajju Nayak; Saraswats; Dadaji Shenvi; Ganapati Shenvi; Krishna Shenvi; Narayana Shenvi; Rama Krishna Shenvi; Ramoji Shenvi Khotari; Santu Shenvi; Vitoji Shenvi; Vitthala Shenvi; Shenvis; Vyaparis Brandão, Duarte, 42 Brazil, 58, 115, 160, 217 Brito, Pero da Costa de, 57, 146, 204 brokers, 14, 66, 79–80, 88, 150, 172; cultural, 43, 134–35; female, 218; language, 44, 53, 76, 134, 139–41, 144, 219; political, 14, 43, 115, 135, 139. See also Brahmans; go-betweens; interpreters Bukhara, Map 1, 4, 177 Bulaqi, 62; legend of, 92; rumors and stories on, 62–63, 73, 77–78, 93–97, 102; potential ally of Goa, 63. See also Dawar Bakhsh Bulsar, 77 bureaucracy, 8, 11, 30–31, 113, 117, 125–26, 129–30; cultures of, 13, 134–35; languages of, 8, 143; Maratha, 173; Mughal, 29–30, 33, 104, 184, 201–2; practices of, 11, 112, 149, 165, 220. See also clerks; munshis; secretaries Burhan I, Sultan, xi, 46–47 Burhan II, Sultan, xi, 47 Burhan III, Sultan, xi, 64, 78; courtiers of, 79; letters of, 189; murder of, 77 Burhanpur, Map 1, 4, 20, 54, 64, 90, 96, 186, 196 Chart 1, 86, 242; capital of the Sultanate of Khandesh, 37; Mughal court, 67, 69, 72–73, 75; renegades in, 41 Busen, Henrique. See Hendrick Uwens Cabral, António, 139 Calendars, 172, 174, 188–89, 201; Gregorian, 163, 172–73; correspondence between, 172–73, 188; Islamic, 102, 172–73, 188, 201; Julian, 188 Canejão. See Khan-i Jahan

313

canopies, 200, 207, 213 captivity, 46 Carmelites, 81. See also Leandro da Anunciação; Fr. Lucas Carneiro, Miguel, 82, Chart 1, 86 Carvalho, Domingos Pacheco de, 141, 147 Casa da Índia, 26 Casa de la Contratación, 26 Casanatense Codex, 116–17 Castro, Brás de, 145, 162–64, 174, 203, 205, 211–13 Castro, Fernando de, 118 Castro, João de, 20, 101, 118; intelligence gathering web, 20 Castro, Mateus de, 203 chabutras. See terraces Chamargonda, 103 chancellery, 24; of Ahmadnagar, 47; of Bijapur, 106, 162, 165; Mughal, 172, 175, 178 chapa. See seals Chaul, Map 1, 4, 5, 19–20, Figure 3, 39, 53, 55, 66, 74, 101, 173; captain of, 38, 77, Chart 1, 86, 99; Lower Chaul (Chaul de Baixo), 38–39, 173; negotiations on its borders, 173; site of surveyance, 37–41, 74, 77–79; ouvidor of, 66; Upper Chaul (Chaul de Cima), 38, 173 Chittagong, Map 1, 4, 218 Chorão, Map 1, 4 ciphers, 24–26, 69 clerks, 11, 13, 117, 120–28, 134, 150, 250; of ambassadors, 130; Brahman, 122–25, 127–28, 145, 151; career, 126–28; families, 127–28; Hindu, 124; indigenous, 123–28, 131; linguistic skills of, 123–24, 128, 131, 140, 147; of Persian script, 140; rewards to, 128–30; of the State Council, 114, 128; in service of translators, 140, 168; training, 126. See also scribes Coelho, João, 126 coffeehouses, 33, 35 Coge Abraham, 43–44 conflict resolution, 65, 75–76, 189–90, 195 conversation, 42, 50, 57–59, 76, 165–66, 207; with Mughal emperors, 53, 58; learned, 57–58; through linguistic mediators, 44; through paper, 165; across religious divides, 42, 53, 56, 182–83; in streets, 33, 43, 98; and translation, 169 conversion, 50, 54, 62–63, 68, 123, 128, 138, 182–83; to Islam, 19, 44, 55–56, 83; policy of, 124–25, 141, 150; resistance to, 151

314

Index

converts, 19, 37, 74, 88, 111, 120, 122–23, 126, 128–31, 139–41, 149–51; and the Inquisition, 41, 55, 149; linguistic skills, 131, 139, 149. See also Coge Abraham; Sebastião Dias; Simão Ferreira copyists, 112, 125 Corai, Michel Angelo, 48 Coromandel, 56, 74 Correia, Manuel, 84, Chart 1, 86 correspondence, 12, 14; commentary of, 163–64; composition of, 54, 130–31, 149–50, 164, 174, 199, 213–14; copies of, 161–62; cross-cultural political, 156–58; discursive power of, 178; incidents on conventions, 189–90; performances, 174–75; postal system, 25, 27; private, 154, 181; public reading, 43, 69; reading, 53; reception of, 156, 161, 167, 195–96; secret, 21, 69; translation of, 53, 130–31, 139, 142–43, 145, 147, 154, 162, 167–69; transport, 45–46, 74–75, 106, 193, 198 Corsi, Francesco, 50, 73, 84, 180, 184 Cortalim, Map 1, 4, 122, 129 Corte na aldeia, 150, 184. See also Francisco Rodrigues Lobo Corte Real, António Monteiro, 48 Costa, Francisco da, 75, Chart 1, 86 Costa, Jorge da, 82, Chart 1, 86 Costa, Juliana Dias da, 218 Costa, Victoriano da, 126 Cotta, Luís Gonçalves, 75, 115, 148–49, 169–72. See also secretaries; State Council Council of India, 157 Council of Portugal, 106–7 Council of Trent, 138 counter-espionage, 66–68 couriers, 74–75; indigenous, 74. See also harkaras, runners court factions, 62, 91, 203 Coutinho, João, 37, 201 Couto, Cristóvão do, 139–41, 144, 188 Couto, Diogo do, 46–47, 119–20, 191–92; as chief custodian of the Goa archive, 118–20; chronicler, 34, 47, 186–87 Couto, Maria, 147 Coutre, Jacques de, 21, 31, 48 Coutre, Joseph de, 48 Cruz, António Jorge da, 45–46, 57 Cruz, Belchior Dias da, 45 Cruz, Gaspar da, 38

Dadaji Shenvi, 141, 145–46 dak. See postal network Dakhani, 40, 45, 48, 148 Daman, Map 1, 4, Figure 3, 39, 74–75, 95, 139; captain of, 76, Chart 1, 86, 234; casados of, 75–76, 87; site of surveyance, 38, 74 Dara Shekuh, 35, 213–14 darshaniyas, 50 dating systems. See calendars Daulatabad, Map 1, 4, 20, 77–79, 88, 90, 99–100, 189, 242; Mughal conquest of, 64–65 Davidge, Richard, 176 Dawar Bakhsh, 62, 64. See also Bulaqi De Persiaanse secretaris. See Daniel Havart Deccan, 2–3, Map 1, 4, 5; cities of, 69, 148; information on, 2, 10, 36–41, 48, 56–59, 69–70, 80, 85–88, 91–96, 99–107, 113, 115–17, 127, 143–47, 219–20; languages of, 56, 142–43, 148; Mughal expansion into, 2–5, 57, 62, 65, 70, 90, 102, 105, 186; political culture, 133, 142, 164, 189–91; political landscape, 2–5, 10–15, 19–22, 45–50, 57–58, 64–65, 78, 92, 103–5, 127, 135, 145–46, 202; sultanates of, 2, 11, 37–38, 43, 49, 65, 72, 118, 127, 135–36, 149, 168, 175, 208, 215, 217–20; travels, 74, 115, 179; wars in, 55, 57, 70, 201 decrees; circulation of, 119–20; conservation, 119–20; lost, 119; translation, 120. See also farman; nishan defamations, 127 Delhi, Map 1, 4, 6, 30, 34, 73, 120, 169; sack of, 217 Dhaka, Map 1, 4, 73 Dias, António, 84, Chart 1, 86, 88 Dias, Manuel, 84, Chart 1, 86 Dias, Sebastião, 41, 55–57 dictionaries, 16, 26–27, 52, 106–7, 133, 150, 220. See also Jerónimo Xavier dimn, 184, 201–2 Dinis, Manuel, 115–16, 118, 131 diplomatic envoys, 57, 80, 82, 115, 139, 145–46, 201–11; reception of, 197, 200–201, 207. See also Mirza Muhammad; Manuel de Paiva; Vicente Ribeiro Diu, Map 1, 4, Figure 3, 39, 42, 55, 74, Chart 1, 86, 95, 127, 187; captain of, 38–39, 119, 139, 187; site of surveyance, 38, 74 Divar, Map 1, 4, 126

Index doctors, 22, 51, 82–84, 87, 143. See also Fernão Lopes Dupuy, Jacques, 224 Dupuy, Pierre, 224 Dutch East India Company (VOC), 5, 75–76, 87, 95; copies of farmans, 176; factory in Vengurla, 203; threat to the Portuguese in Ceylon, 160 Duval, Pierre, 70–71 emissaries, see diplomatic envoys English East India Company (EIC), 5–6, 75–77, 87, 95, 142; as diwan of Bengal, 218; farmans issued for, 176, 178–79 enslaved people, 49, 112, 205; as copyists, 125; and counter espionage, 66–67; as domestic servants, 137–38; female, 83; as messengers, 19–21; tales about, 83, 92. See also eunuchs epistolography, 121, 132, 174–75, 183–84; debates on, 184; Europeans engaging with Indo-Persian, 213–15; manuals of, 149–50, 155, 175, 223, 264; masters of, 121, 123, 169, 174–75, 179, 186. See also letter-writing; munshis Erédia, Manuel Godinho de, 190–91, 223 Erpenius, Thomas, 223 espionage, 42–48, 58–60, 67, 80–84, 102; funding of, 38, 84; Mughal, 29. See also spies Estado da Índia¸ 8; creation of, 2; intelligence system of, 12, 20, 22, 58–59, 88, 218–19; interpreters of, 101; memory of, 116; officers, 86, 113, 119, 125, 128–29; Persianate apparatus of, 11, 13–14, 67, 106, 218–20; secretariat, 66–67, 75, 101, 106, 115, 128–29, 148–49, 162, 169–72, 168; transformation, 217; viceroys of, 5, 22, 25, 28, 36–37, 60, 80, 113, 124, 136, 220 Ethiopia, 40 Ethiopians, 49, 203–5 ethnographic reports, 9–10, 13, 33; curiosity, 160, 166; composite authorship, 95–97; composition of, 117; political, 39, 54, 91–94, 158, 164–66 ethnography, 13–14, 53, 90–94, 116 eunuchs, 50, 105, 203, 205, 212 Evangelho, Diogo Nunes, 141, 144 Falcão, Aleixo Dias, 140 Falcão, Francisco de Sousa, 127 Faria, Gaspar Gomes, 77

315

Faria, Manuel Severim de, 221 Farmalub. See Fernão Lopes farman, 15, 120, 145, 147–48, 162– 64, 168, 172, 175–214, Figure 11, 185, Figure 12, 191, Map 2, 195; from Akbar, 180, 184, 188–90, 201; alteration through translation, 187–89; bilingual, 168, 178; ceremonies, 197, 200, 205–13, 220; circulation, 179; composition, 175–90, 220; copies of, 188, 214; emotions sparked by, 180, 182, 195, 200, 205; European perceptions of, 176–77, 193; exhibition of, 207, 210, 213; historiography on, 175, 177–80; from Jahangir, 180, 182–83; journeys of, 197–200, 205–10; materiality, 180, 193, 213–14; from Muhammad ‘Adil Shah, 194, 203–9; on neighborly relations, 162; performative qualities of, 175–76, 178; power projection, 175–76, 193–94; reception, 179, 194–97, 205–7, 209–11, 220; on religious affairs, 180–83; as representation, 183, 194; response to, 202–3, 214; from Shah Alam I, 147, 192; from Shahjahan, 176, 180, 184, 187–88, 190, 194–203; translation of, 162–64, 168, 176, 178–84, 187–93, 200–202, 214, 220 Fatehpur Sikri, Map 1, 4, 37, 44, 137–39 Fath Khan, 79 Fath Shah, 39 Fernandes, Afonso, 169 Fernandes, Diogo, 101 Fernandes, Pero, 34 Fernández Abarca, Juan, 150 Ferreira, Diogo, 126 Ferreira, Simão, 139–41, 149 Figueira, João Delgado, 41–43, 48 Figueiredo, Francisco Vieira de, 160 Firdausi, 38 Firishta, 39 Florence, 42 Floris, Peter, 223 Fonseca, Gonçalo Pinto da, 199 Fort Benastarim, 209. See also Fort Santiago Fort Daugim, Map 2, 195, 200, 209–10 Fort Naroa, 126, Map 2, 195 Fort Santiago, Map 2, 195, 206–7, 209–12 Fortress Palace, 22, 58, 113–15, Figure 8, 114, 117–18, 167, 172, 189, 194–96; receptions in, 115, 200, 211, 213; paper palace, 174; restricted access to, 124; royal hall of, 113, 115, 127, 200, 213

316

Index

fortresses, 60, 68, 134, 136; as seat of power, 103. See also Chaul; Fort Benastarim; Fort Daugim; Fort Naroa; Fort Santiago; Fortress Palace; Parenda Franciscans, 44 Friday prayer, 188 friendship, 14, 48, 57–58, 146, 154, 156–67, 164–66, 207 Fróis, Jerónimo, 205–7, 209, 211–14, 216 Gama, Francisco da, 41, 45, 47, 76, 143–44, Figure 10, 158; correspondence with, 155–61; uses of information, 157–58 Gama, Vasco Luís da, 155, 159–67, 172 Ganapati Shenvi, 142 Garcês, João, 44 Gearmain, George, 120 Genoa, 45 Ghafur, Chart 1, 86 gifts, 40, 52, 74–75, 82, 85, 97, 211–12; offensive, 92–93 Goa, Figure 1, 3, Map 1, 4, 42–43, Figure 3, 39, 60, Figure 7, 71; Archbishop of, 111, 126–27, 138; borders, 206, 209–10; Brahmans of, 122–31, 135–53, 203; casados of, 42; diasporas in, 44, 138; expansion, 217; information stored in, 198–99, 219; as a lettered city, 112; moradores of, 42, 46, 57, 76, 82, 113; noblemen of, 206; provincial councils in, 138; religious geography, 150; society of, 66, 68, 125, 210; siege of, 19, 140; thanadar of, 200, 206 go-betweens, 40, 133–34, 150. See also brokers Góis, Bento de, 54 Golconda, 2, Map 1, 4, 5, 48, 65, 102–3, 223; court of, 145 Gomes, Crespim, 42 Gonçalves, Francisco, 128 Gonçalves, Salvador, 128 gossip, 33–35. See also rumor Gouveia, António de, 58 Gramatica indostana, 33. See also dictionaries Guerreiro, Fernão, 67, 181, 188 Gujarat, 2–3, Map 1, 4, 12, 20–21, 41–43, 50, 55, 62, 65, 74–76, 82, Chart 1, 86, 87, 92, 127, 139, 178, 195–96, 199, 218; Jahangir’s journey to, 38; language of, 143; Mughal conquest of, 139, 186–87; rebellions in, 39–40; seaports of, 40; suba of, 186, 201 Guzmán, Luis de, 181

Haji Habibullah, 67 Hakim ‘Ali Gilani, 51–52 Hakim Kushal, 48 Hari Vaisya, 77, 88 harkaras, 28, 101. See also couriers; runners Hastings, Warren, 176 havaldar, 80, 84, 130–31, 163 Havart, Daniel, 223 Hawkins, William, 223 Heda, Cornelis Claesz, 48 Henriques, Francisco, 37, 140 Henriques, Pedro, 203 Hindi, 26, 49, 52, 56, 133, 137, 170–71, 180 Hindustan, Map 1, 4, 8, 10–11, 13, 15, 20, 36–39, 41, 56–59, 80, 91–92, 95, 107, 118, 133, 147, 165; language of, 56, 170, 191 history: writing, 27, 51, 121, 123, 181, 222. See also António Bocarro; Diogo do Couto homiziados. See runaways Hormuz, 37–38; acquisition of books in, 37–38 House of Mercy (Goa), 76 Howell, James, 155, 166–67 Hughli, Map 1, 4, 65, 73, 120; loss of, 65, 73 Humayun, Emperor, xi; deposition, 64, 98; exile, 20 Husain II, Sultan, xi, 39–40 Husain III, Sultan, xii, 79 Hyderabad, Map 1, 4, 217 Ibrahim II, Sultan, xii, 39, 48, 56, 82–83, 87, 163, 204–5; court of, 46–48, 93, 205; daughter of, 93; library of, 47 Ibrahim Zubayri, 83 Idalcão, 229; information on, 36, 118, 155–57, 166; king, 198, 206 sultanate, 76, 100, 203. See also ‘Adil Shah; Bijapur Idalxá. See Idalcão Ikhlas Khan, 57, 203–5, Figure 14, 204 imperial capital, 16, 33, 36, 41, 49–51, 55, 68, 73, 76, 87, 98, 186, 218. See also Agra; Delhi; Fatehpur Sikri; Goa; Lahore; Lisbon; Madrid information, 12, 21–23, 218–20; accumulation of, 117, 218; circulation of, 12, 21–23, 26–28, 70–85, 165–66; cross-checking, 70, 91–92, 100; loss of, 198–99; at the Mughal court, 32–33; between oral and written, 32–33, 35, 38, 69–70, 74, 199, 219; speed of, 70–71 information nodes, 21, 36. See also coffeehouses; rooftops; terraces; bazaars; musha‘iras

Index Inquisition, 15, 55–56, 77, 106–7, 122, 125, 139–41, 151; inquiries on the Brahmans, 41–43, 48. See also converts, João Delgado Figueira insha’. See epistolography insults, 92–93. See also defamations intelligence, 3–4, 10–13, 22, 25, 35, 58–59, 76, 90–107; Akbar obsession with, 29; colonial, 6; in correspondence, 69; destruction of, 31, 101; gathering, 19, 22–26, 36–40, 72–90, 135–36, 218, 223; geographical differences, 87; indigenous sources, 95–106; in IndoPersian advice literature, 28–29; as intercultural exchange, 88–89; by interpreters, 135–36; maps, 101; Mughal, 28–33; networks of, 20–24, 31, 38; oral, 70; political, 7, 61–62, 73–75, 92; records, 30–31, 101, 107, 113; transformation into knowledge, 90. See also Luís de Ataíde; Estado da Índia; Count of Linhares; spies interpreters, 11, 14, 37, 45, 48, 95, 100–101, 126; of ambassadors, 142, 145; archives of, 118, 161–62; ceremonies, 136, 140; chief interpreter, 73, 132, 135, 140, 143–52, 158, 169–72, 223; designation, 134, 144–47; distrust on, 171; as emissaries, 145–46; in Goa, 134–38; Hindu, 135, 148; in Macau, 134, 144; in Malacca, 134; missionaries as, 37; in Morocco, 136–37; office transmission, 144–47; as political brokers, 14, 135, 141; recruitment, 134–35, 138, 144, 147; reward, 143–45, 157–59; of the secretariat, 114, 128; skills, 115, 136–37, 141–43, 145–48; training, 134, 136–38, 143–45, 147. See also Armenians; Brahmans; Jesuits; Jews; Língua do Estado; García de la Peña; Aleixo de Sá; Dadaji Shenvi; Ganapati Shenvi; Krishna Shenvi; Narayana Shenvi; Rama Krishna Shenvi; Ramoji Shenvi Khotari; Santu Shenvi; Vitoji Shenvi; Vitthala Shenvi; translators invisible ink, 21 Iran, 81 Iranians, 37, 141, 162, 167 Islam Shah, xi, 20, 118 Isma‘il, Sultan, xii, 40 Istanbul, 45, 63, 177 I’timad ud-Daula, 52 Jahangir, Emperor, 28–29, 191–92; assemblies, 52; conquests, 62–65; conversations with, 44; death, 62, 96; journeys, 38, 49–50;

317

in-laws, 52; palace, 33; reading habits, 32–33, 53; spies of, 30–31 Jarric, Pierre du, 181 Jesuits, 14–16, 34, 40, 44, 54, 142; in Bijapur, 43; circulation of, 50; college in Goa, 118, 137, 207, 213, 215; communication machine, 186; as emissaries, 162, 199; Indo-Persian archive, 118, 180; letter writing, 54, 198–99, 213–16; as information channel, 53–54, 75; in the Mughal court, 37, 49–54, 58, 73, 180–81, 199, 218; provincials, 45, 54, 181, 188, 205–8, 212–16; reception of farmans, 203–9; seminary of, 137; in state affairs, 54; superior general, 23–24, 180, 205, 213–14; translation and publication of farmans, 176–77, 180–84, 190–91. See also Claudio Acquaviva; Rodolfo Acquaviva; António de Andrade; Bom Jesus; António Botelho; Francesco Corsi; Jerónimo Fróis; Bento de Góis: Fernão Guerreiro; Francisco Henriques; João Leitão; Gonçalo Martins; Antonio Monserrate; Francesco Morandi; Goschwin Nickel; António Pereira; Paulo Reimão; Matteo Ricci; Heinrich Roth; Gaspar Soares; Francisco de Sousa; Hendrick Uwens; Jerónimo Xavier Jesus, Manuel de, 169–71 Jesus, Sebastião de, 81, Chart 1, 86, 245 Jews, 43–44, 91, 130, 138, 189; at the Mughal court, 49–50. See also Coge Abraham Jinji, Map 1, 4 John III, King, 34 John IV, King, xi, 115, 145, 160–61; acclamation in Goa, 126 John V, King, 147 Junagadh, Map 1, 4, 5, 34, 38 jurubaça, 134. See also interpreters Kabul, 1, Map 1, 4, 6, 73, 104, 218 Kannada, 145–46, 148 karanams, 121, 123 Kashmir, 50 Kayasthas, 121, 123 Kerridge, Thomas, 192 Khambayat, Map 1, 4, 42 Khandesh, Map 1, 4, 37 Khandoba, 84, Chart 1, 86 Khan-i Jahan Lodi, 64, 97; execution, 96; rebellion against Shahjahan, 64, 97–99 Khawas Khan, 82–83, 102–4, 131 khil’at. See robe of honor

318

Index

Khizr, Chart 1, 86 Khurram. See Shahjahan Khusrau, 96 Khutba. See Friday Prayer Khwaja Pir Quli, 138, 141, 144 knights. See military orders knowledge, 5–7, 20, 221, 223; accumulation, 116; colonial, 90, 94; creation of, 24, 32, 90–94, 223; ethnographic, 117; expertise into, 40–43, 73, 199, 218, 221; information into, 13, 23; of languages, 46, 53, 56, 81, 121, 125, 133, 137, 142, 148, 170–71, 179; literary, 50–51, 137; on Mughal India, 57, 158; native, 94; of India, 114–15; of the Indo-Persian world, 91, 163, 223; political, 75, 86, 90, 135; scientific, 90, 94; written and oral, 38. See also, ethnography; intelligence; interpreters; language teaching; languages Konkan, 2, Map 1, 4, 36, 65, 103; havaldar of, 80, 84, 130–31 Konkani, 45, 115, 122, 148–49 Krieger, Georg, 48 Krishna Shenvi, 73, 95, 101, 140–41, 145, 148, 155, 223; informer of Francisco da Gama, 158–59; letters to Vasco Luís da Gama, 160–67; translations, 168–69, 172–73, 200 Krishnaji, 104 Kustantinu Hatana. See Alagiyavanna Mukaveti Laet, Joannes de, 223 Lahore, Map 1, 4, 6, 33–34, 40, 44, 49–50, 53, 55, 57, 62, 73, 85, 92; right to build a church in, 182–83, 186; subadar of, 183 Lahori Bandar, Map 1, 4 language teaching, 135–37, 149. See also knowledge languages, 8, 45–48, 56, 124–25, 132–39, 142–49, 168–69, 181, 219; oriental, 160. See also Arabic; Dakhani; Hindi; Kannada; Konkani; Maratha; Persian. See also knowledge Laval, François Pyrard de, 68–69 Leitão, João, 214 letter-writing, 54, 184–85; collective process, 131; global culture of, 156; Indo-Persian, 215–16; Mughal, 199 libraries, 24–25; Brahman, 122; of el Escorial, 25, 47; of Ibrahim II, 47; of the Marquis of Niza, 159–60; Portuguese royal, 116–17; university, 222–23

Língua do Estado, 14, 73, 132–52, Chart 2, 146, 158, 169–72, 223 língua, 134. See also interpreters Linhares, Count of, 26, 60, Figure 5, 61, 142, 189; clash with Shahjahan, 195–97, 200–201, 209; correspondence, 167, 196, 202, 214; diary, 60–62, 92, 101–2, 105–6, 142, 195–96, 200–201; enemies, 127, 142; informants of, 43; intelligence network of, 60–63, 66–67, 72–90 Lisbon, 23; Indians in, 137–38; reports sent to, 94–95, 105–6, 111–13; pamphlets printed in, 218 literary salons, 33, 57. See also musha‘iras Livros das monções. See monsoon books livros dos reis vizinhos, 117, 135 Lobo, Bartolomeu, 127–29 Lobo, Francisco Rodrigues, 166, 184 Lopes, Fernão, 70, 82–83, Chart 1, 86, 94 Lucas, Fr., 81, Chart 1, 86 Luís, Madalena, 147 Mackenzie, Colin, 101, 121 Madras, Map 1, 4 Madrid, 40, 106–7, 156–59 Mahabat Khan, 100 Mahabharata, 132; translation of, 143 Maharashtra, 2, 103, 146, 173 Majalis-i Jahangiri. See ‘Abdus-Sattar Malabar Coast, Map 1, 4 Malik Ambar, 49, 77–79 Malik Raihan, 57, 203–5 Malik Yaqut, 205–13, 215 Malta, 45 Malwa, Map 1, 4 Mandeslo, Johan Albrecht de, 70 Mandu, Map 1, 4, 20 Manucci, Nicolò, 170 manuscripts, 23, 27, 58, 116, 182; copy of, 112, 125; collecting, 37–38, 159–60, 223; oriental, 222 maps, 15, 53, 70–71, 101, 113, 117, 198, 223; native, 101 Marathas, 2, 64, 103–5, 121, 138, 144, 150, 173, 217; families, 104; language of, 144, 146–49, 168, 219. See also Maharashtra Mardin, 55 Margão, Map 1, 4 Mariner, Vicente, 132–33 Martins, Gonçalo, 162, 204–5, 214 Mascarenhas, Filipe de, 159

Index Mascarenhas, Francisco de, 55, 140 Masulipatnam, Map 1, 4 Matimia Bhandari Dubashi, 144 Mau’izah-i Jahangiri. See Muhammad Baqir Najm-i Sani medals, 206–7, 212. See also portraits Medici, 42 Melique, 55, 229; information on, 36, 69–70, 100; monitoring of, 22; sultanate, 55, 76–78, 100. See also Ahmadnagar, Nizam Shah(i) Melo, Simão de, 56 memory, 7, 219; individual, 119, 199; memorization techniques, 31–32; preservation, 24, 116, 199, 219 Mendonça, André Furtado de, 115 Mendonça, Luís de, 39–40 Meneses, Aleixo de, 125 Meneses, Cristóvão de, 111, 126–27 merchants, 40; Afghan, 67; Indian, 40; as intelligence resource, 40, 66–67. See also Armenians; baniyas Mesquita, Gaspar Pacheco de, 43, 73–74, Chart 1, 86 Mewar, Map 1, 4 military market, 103 military orders, 129–30 military resources, 102–6, 165 Mir Musa, 75–77, 196 Miranda, Duarte Borges de, 41, 55, 57 Mirza ‘Aziz Koka, 52–53, 139 Mirza Muhammad Raza, 115, 130, 196, 200, 209, 213 Mirza Zulqarnain, 180 Mogor. See Mughal Empire Monserrate, Antonio, 23–24, 28–29, 32 monsoon books, 94–95, 111–12, 174 Morais, António de Oliveira, 82, Chart 1, 86 Morandi, Francesco, 34, 208 Mughal Empire: bureaucracy, 29–30, 33, 104, 184, 201–2; conquests, 1–2, 5, 62–65, 164–65, 187–88; court, 61–62; factionalism, 62; geopolitics, 39–40; governors, 74–75, 77, 178, 195–96; information system, 30–32; military resources, 105–6, 165; nobles, 31, 52, 61, 64, 181; officers, 31–32, 56, 74, 104, 187; political communication, 27–28; political etiquette, 197; political fragmentation, 217–19; public sphere, 33, 95; ships, 65, 75, 190; threat to Goa, 2–3, 60–62, 65 Muhammad ‘Adil Shah, xi, 145, 163, Figure 14, 204; courtiers, 130–31, 201; Europeans

319

in his service, 82, 87; farman from, 163–64, 194–98, 205–15; letters from, 145, 162, 174, 189; portrait medal of, 206, 212; military campaigns, 203, 215–16; mother, 102; permission of a Catholic mission, 203–4; politics, 65, 203; robes of honor, 211; rumors on, 93–95; servants, 104–5; succession, 93–95; wives, 87 Muhammad Baqir Najm-i Sani, 28–30 Muhammad Hasan Qatil, 136 Muhammad Sayid, 92 Muhammad, Sultan. See Muhammad ‘Adil Shah muharris. See clerks Muhibb ‘Ali, 84, Chart 1, 86 Mulla Da’ud, 174, 200, 214 Mulla Hussein. See Simão Ferreira Mulla Mu’inuddin, 167–69, 171–72, 223 Multan, Map 1, 4 Mumtaz Mahal, Empress, 73 munshis, 121, 149, 174–75, 179, 186, 194; Catholic, 214; Mughal, 121, 123, 169, 199; skills, 121. See also epistolography; secretaries Muqarrab Khan, 58, 67, 178, 199 Murtaza I, Sultan, xii, 39–40 Murtaza III, Sultan, xii, 64, 103 musha‘iras, 34–35 Mustafa Khan, 69, 102, 104, 130–31, 196 Mutribi, 33 Mylapur, Map 1, 4, 242 Nagapattinam, Map 1, 4, 56, 74, 242 Nanda, Chart 1, 86 Naqib Khan, 51 Narayana, 131 Narayana Shenvi, 145–46, 148, 167–68 Nauraspur, Map 1, 4, 47–48 New Christians, 41, 44, 82, 139 news: accumulation of, 12, 78; circulation of, 12–15, 21–23, 25, 65, 70, 74–76, 89, 107, 219 commodification of, 23, 76; in conversations, 58; cross-checking, 53, 10; dispatches, 19, 41, 66; doubts on, 70, 74, 77, 100; from Europe, 25; exchange of, 156–63; fantastic, 93–94; on the Idalcão, 47, 71–72, 78, 84, 101–2, 154, 156, 165; impact of, 93; on the Mughals, 36, 45, 61, 70, 87, 95–96, 154, 156–58, 164–65, 223; oral, 53, 69–70; political dimension, 28–35, 84, 93, 96, 102, 107; on the Portuguese, 67–68; speed of, 71–73 newsletters, 28, 95

320 Newton, Isaac, 91 Nickel, Goschwin, 205 nishan, 182, 184, 201. See also decrees; farman Niyogis, 121 Niza, Marquis of. See Vasco Luís da Gama Nizam Shah(i) Sultanate, xi, 2, 38, 59, 78, 197; chancellery, 47; court of, 39, 77, 79; crumbling of, 64 Nizamoxá, 229. See Nizam Shah(i) Nogueira, Vicente, 159–60 Noronha, Constantino de Sá de, 123 Noronha, Miguel de. See Count of Linhares Northern Province. See Província do Norte Nunes, Bartolomeu, 76, Chart 1, 86 Nunes, Leonardo, 118 Nur Jahan, Empress, 50 oath, 136 olfactants, 207, 209, 213 Orissa, 2, Map 1, 4 Orta, Garcia de, 22 Ottoman Empire, 7, 22, 37, 57, 120, 126, 221; court of, 63, 92; language of, 137, 221 Pacheco, Baltasar, 139–41, 144, 168–69 Padshah Buranji, 92–94 Padshahnama, 64, 100 painters. See artists Paiva, Manuel de, 43, 76, Chart 1, 86, 87, 196, 199–200 Palácio da Fortaleza. See Fortress Palace palanquin, 113, 206–9, 212 Palermo, 45 Panelim, Map 1, 4 Panipat, Map 1, 4 paper, 113, 124; decorated, 214; lack of, 118 paperwork. See bureaucracy Parenda, Map 1, 4, 65; strategic significance, 100; siege of, 71, 100, 102 Pashtuns, 20, 64; revolt of, 97–99. See also Khan-i Jahan patronage, 14, 127, 154–67 Paul V, Pope, 45 Paulo Sancti, Francisco, 42 pearls, 66, 85; metaphoric, 14, 174 Pedroso, Jorge, 84, Chart 1, 86 Peiresc, Nicolas Fabri de, 42, 159, 224 Peña, García de la, 37–38 Pereira, António, 70, 75, Chart 1, 86 Pereira, António Pinto, chronicler, 19, 21, 118, 139

Index Pereira, Guilherme, 129–30 Pereira, Manuel de Lacerda, 39–40 Pereira, Silvestre Gonçalves, 45–46 Persian Gulf, 12, 36, 46, 140–41 Persian language, 37; in Goa, 132, 135–41, 219–20; at the ‘Adil Shahi court, 208; as political language, 1–2, 7, 9–10, 37, 133, 135, 219–20; teaching of, 137; translator of, 145, 147–49, 166–68 Peshawar, Map 1, 4 petitions, 15, 40, 129, 143, 147, 151, 153, 214 Philip II, King, 32–33, 54, 177, 212 Philip III, King, 37, 66, 157; court of, 51; interpreter of, 137; request for the translation of Persian books, 47 Philip IV, King, 106–7, 157; as planet king, 197–98, 202 physicians, 35, 52, 70, 82 Pinheiro, Manuel, 182–84, 190 Pipli, Map 1, 4, 74 Pires, Domingos, 44 Pires, Mateus, 168 poets, 30, 34 Pombal, Marquis of, 217 Ponda, Map 1, 4, 21, 80, 84; captain of 80. See Konkan portraits, 15, 113, 116–17, 190; in diplomatic meetings, 207, 212. See also medals Poser, Henrich von, 48 postal network, 25, 27–28 pouches, 15, 193–94 precious stones, 45, 66, 85 presents. See gifts processions, 15, 67–68; in Agra, 34; of imperial decree, 209–10 prophecy, 35, 76–77 Província do Norte, 5, 12, 37–40, 54, 60, 68–69, 74–75, 111, 217 Purchas, Samuel, 192, 223 purity of blood, 129–30 Qandahar, Map 1, 4, 6, 100, 103–4, 165, 218 Quelossim, Map 1, 4, 122 Qulij Muhammad Khan, 182 Qur’an, 136, 140, 164 Qazvin, 34, 51 Raichur, Map 1, 4, 210 Raja, Chart 1, 86 Rama Krishna Shenvi, 146–47 Ramayana, 132

Index Ramoji Shenvi Khotari, 143, 145–47, 149–53, 167 Rauzat ut-Tahirin. See Tahir Muhammad Raza Bahadur, 98 rebellions, 39 Reimão, Paulo, 75, Chart 1, 86, 92 religious discrimination, 138. See also purity of blood religious images, 182–83 renegades, 19, 41, 49; general pardons to, 41. See also António de Aguiar; alevantados; Manuel de Azevedo; runaways Republic of Letters, 159–60, 221–22, 224 Resende, Pedro Barreto de, 117 Ribeiro, João¸ 84, Chart 1, 86 Ribeiro, Vicente, 43, 69, 82, Chart 1, 86, 87, 196 Ricci, Matteo, 31–32 robe of honor, 197, 211 Rocha, Amaro da, 115–17. See also Amphiteatro Oriental Rocha, João da, 81–82, Chart 1, 86, 87 Rodrigues, Jerónimo, 42 Roe, Thomas, 192 Rombo, Diogo, 137 Rome, 45, 159, 179–80, 184–85, 213–14 rooftop, 34. See also terraces Roth, Heinrich, 207–8, 215 royal edicts. See farman royal hall. See Fortress Palace Rudimenta Linguae Persicae, 133. See also dictionaries rumor, 16, 26, 33, 35, 40, 52, 62, 65, 70, 77, 93, 95. See also Bulaqi; gossip runaways, 41, 82, 87. See also alevantados; renegades runners, 28, 74–75, 84; women, 84. See also couriers; harkaras Sá, Aleixo de, 128 Sá, Dinis de, 128 Sa’dullah Khan, 92 Sablière, Marguerite de la, 57 Saint Thomas Yard (Goa), Map 2, 201, 216 Salabat Khan, 39 Salcete, Map 1, 4, 122, 124, 141, 144–45, 150, 203 Saldanha, Aires de, 37, 54–57, 186–88 Salvador, Francisco, 126 Sampaio, Manuel Coelho de, 75, Chart 1, 86 Sande, António Pais de, 129 Sanskrit, 8, 121–22, 133, 143, 148

321

Santappa, Chart 1, 86 Santu Shenvi, 124 Saraiva, Diogo, 69, 77–79, 82, Chart 1, 86–88, 189 Saraswats, 142, 152. See also Brahmans; Shenvis sarnama, 183, 188 Sarzedas, Count of, 57, 118, 167 Satgaon, Map 1, 4 scribes, 13, 100, 120–28; of Akbar, 29; Brahman, 120–31, 135; indigenous, 111–12, 120–28; recruitment, 124, 135; skills of, 32, 124. See also clerks; munshis seals, 189, Figure 13, 192; of Ahmadnagar, 189–90; of Akbar, 192; of ‘Ali I, 139; of Bijapur, 163; in farmans, 184, 192, 202; placement, 189, 199; as instruments of dynastic propaganda, 190; of Jahangir, 190– 92, 223; Mughal, 190–92, 196, 199–202, 223; reception of, 196–97; representations of, 190–92; of Shahjahan, 202; thirst for, 176–77 Sebastian, King, xi, 43, 63; death of, 53 secretaries, 11, 13, 24, 75, 175, 126, 154–55, 174, 184, 193; of the State Council, 112–19, 126–29, 163, 168–70, 210. See also Luís Gonçalves Cotta; Manuel Dinis; Francisco de Sousa Falcão, Pedro Barreto de Resende; Amaro da Rocha; munshis; State Council Serpa, Salvador Fernandes, 42 Shah ‘Abbas I, 34, 45, 47 Shah ’Abul Hasan, 162–64 Shah Alam I, Emperor, 147, 192 Shah Alam II, Emperor, 218 Shah Bhramara, 92 Shah Madar, 56–57 Shah Nawaz Khan, 33 Shah Shuja’, 100 Shahjahan, Emperor, xi, 15, Figure 6, 63, 64, 92–94, 96–97, 99, 145, 165, 196, 200–201; as a bureaucrat, 26; in chronicles, 92; conquests, 64, 165; court of, 64; enemy of the Portuguese, 62, 200–201; fight against Khan-i Jahan, 97–98; political judgment on, 96–99; as prince Khurram, 37, 96–97, 201; procession, 34; revolt against his father, 96–97 Shahjahanabad. See Delhi Shahji, 64, 103–5 Shahnama, See Firdausi Shahpur, 49 Shahryar, 96

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Shaikh Mu’inuddin, 196 Sharif Khan, 52 shayks, 34 Shenvis, 142–43, 145, 147, 152, 156, 166, 188. See also Krishna Shenvi; Brahmans Sher Shah Sur, 64 Sherley, Anthony, 34 Shiraz, 140, 149 Sholapur, Map 1, 4, 65, 100, 103 Sidi Raihan, 57, 103, 203 Silva, Guiomar da, 147 Silva, Manuel da, 76, Chart 1, 86, 87 Silva, Pero da, 105 Sinais. See Shenvis Sind, 2, Map 1, 4, 40, 189 Sirula, Map 1, 4, 124 slavery, 205. See also enslaved people Soares, Gaspar, 181 Society of Jesus. See Jesuits soldiers, 48, 55, 77–78, 87, 103, 129, 200, 206 Sousa, André de, 49 Sousa, António de, 20 Sousa, Caetano, 123 Sousa, Francisco de, 122, 142 Souto Maior, Lourenço de, 38 Spalding, Augustine, 223 spies, 36–37, 75–90; at the Bijapur court, 19–22, 41, 46, 80–84, 100–102; at the Ahmadnagar court, 78–79; capture of, 66, 82–83; indigenous, 88, 100–106; linguistic skills, 40, 88; in marketplaces, 31; methods, 76, 79, 81–82, 87; Mughal, 26, 31; in noble houses, 31; in the Mughal court, 37, 41, 76; recruitment of, 41, 85–86, 101; rewards to, 41, 44–45, 72, 84–85; of the VOC, 66. See also Coge Abraham; Dinis Álvares; Apaji; Manuel de Azevedo; António Botelho; António Jorge da Cruz; Khandoba; Fernão Lopes; Duarte Borges de Miranda; Silvestre Gonçalves Pereira; Diogo Saraiva; Manuel da Silva; Vishvanatha Sri Lanka, Map 1, 4, 120–21, 123 Srinagar, Map 1, 4, 53 St. Paul’s College (Goa), 118, 137, 207, 213, 215 State Council, 15, 60, 66, 69, 75, 205; meetings of, 105, 113, 126–27, 162, 189, 197–200; secretary, 113–15 stories, 10, 16, 32, 35, 53, 56, 59, 62, 67, 160, 166, 222. See also tales Suárez, Francisco, 42, 48–49

subadars, 33, 181; of Ahmedabad, 139; of Gujarat, 55, 201; of Lahore, 182–83. See also ‘Abdur Rahim Khan-i Khanan; Mirza ‘Aziz Koka Surat, Map 1, 4, 65–66, 70, 74–77, 79, 82, Chart 1, 86, 87–88, 90, 92, 139; disaster of, 199; mutasaddi of 178, 196 Surs, xi, 20 Tabatabai, 39 Tack, Joan, 176 Tadika, Chart 1, 86 Tahir Muhammad, 67 tales, 27, 32, 45, 53, 58, 62, 92–93, 107, 120, 166, 220. See also stories Tamayo de Vargas, Tomás, 25 Tamerlane. See Timur Tanda, Map 1, 4 Tangiers, 169 Tavaji, 79, Chart 1, 86, 244 Távora, Rui Lourenço de, 157 Teixeira, Pedro, 38 Teles, Aires, 187–88 Tenreiro, António, 38 terra firme, 55, 58, 68, 80, 84, 130, 150, Map 2, 195 terraces, 31, 34 Terry, Edward, 192, 223 Thatta, Map 1, 4 Timur, 37–38, 190–91 Tiswadi, 2, Map 1, 4, 122, 128, 209 Tobias, Manuel, 44 topaz, 134. See also interpreters translation, 14, 133–34, 187–88; methods, 167–71; oral, 44; speed of, 167, 170, 200. See also correspondence; interpreters; farman; translators translators, 14, 37, 44, 132–37, 139, 141–45, 164, 167, 178, 187–88, 201–2, 221; linguistic skills, 124, 140, 149, 168, 170; missionaries, 180, 184, 189; Muslim, 169; of the Persian script, 145–48, 167–68, 219; recruitment, 124, 145–50. See also Brahmans; Cristovão do Couto; Simão Ferreira; interpreters; Baltasar Pacheco; Krishna Shenvi travel accounts, 166–67 treaties, 43–44, 65, 140, 144–45, 199, 201, 203; translation of, 139, 144 Trimbak, 103 tughra, 183, 188, 190, 201 turgimão, 134. See also interpreters Twist, Johan van, 203

Index Ulhoa, Francisco de, 40–41 Urrea, Diego de, 137 Uwens, Hendrick, 213 Uzbeks, 37, 40, 120 Valle, Pietro della, 166–67 Vasconcelos, Francisco Brito de, 77 Vecchietti, Giovanni Battista, 58 Veda, Chart 1, 86 Velho, Manuel, 75–76, Chart 1, 86 Vera y Figueroa, Juan de, 25, 72 viceroys and governors of the Estado da Índia. See Fernão de Albuquerque; Matias de Albuquerque; Count of Alvor; Count of Aveiras; Jerónimo Azevedo; Luís de Ataíde; António Moniz Barreto; Francisco Barreto; Brás de Castro; João de Castro; João Coutinho; Gonçalo Pinto da Fonseca; Count of Linhares; Francisco da Gama; Filipe Mascarenhas; Francisco de Mascarenhas; André Furtado de Mendonça; Aleixo de Meneses; Aires de Saldanha; Count of Sarzedas; Pero da Silva; Rui Lourenço de Távora Vidigueira, Count of. See Francisco da Gama

323

Vishvanatha, 84, Chart 1, 86 Vitoji Shenvi, 147, 167 Vitthala Shenvi, 142 Voulton, Joseph, 218 Vyaparis, 151, Figure 9, 152. See also Brahmans waqai, 28, 35. See also news reports waqainawis, 28, 31 war: intelligence and, 6, 48, 60, 100, 165; horses, 65, 210–11; Karnataka, 203, 215–16; prevention of, 195; Thirty Years, 54. See also Deccan Xajão. See Shahjahan Xavier, Jerónimo, 26–29, 50–53, 58, 183, 223; language skills, 53; Portuguese–Hindi– Persian dictionary, 26–27, 52, 133; Tratado da Corte e Caza de Iamguir Pachá Rey dos Mogores, 27, 53, 166 yogis, 93–94, 106 Zahir Beg, 202 Zatali, 30 Zhain Khan Koka, 52

Acknowledgments

Like the Count of Linhares, who ceaselessly received intelligence reports in his Goa palace from several spies placed in the subcontinent, I have profited from the help of many “informants” across the world. Materials, suggestions, corrections, and advice kept flocking over the years to my dematerialized desk due to the great generosity of a crowd of people. I, of course, run the risk of forgetting someone (and do apologize in advance), but want to thank wholeheartedly Manan Ahmed Asif, Lisa Balabanlilar, Zoltán Biedermann, Giancarlo Casale, Margarida Contreiras, Subah Dayal, Prachi Deshpande, Richard Eaton, Jos Gommans, Rajeev Kinra, Ebba Koch, Gijs Kruijtzer, Corinne Lefèvre, Guido van Meersbergen, Nuno Miguel de Pinho Lopes, Keelan Overton, Laura Parodi, Stefano Pellò, Pedro Pinto, Stephan Popp, Sholeh Quinn, Natalie Rothman, Camilla Russell, Tracey Sowerby, Belen Vicens, Philip Wagoner, and Ines Županov. I also wish to convey my gratitude to all my former PhD students (“researchers”) and postdocs from the 2010s at the European University Institute (EUI), Florence; special thanks are due to Tilmann Kulke and Uroš Zver, who completed their PhD dissertations on Mughal India under my supervision. Myriad seminars, workshops, and lunches with the Early Modernists of the EUI Department of History and Civilization—Giulia Calvi, Luca Molà, Antonella Romano, Stéphane Van Damme, and Bartolomé Yun Casalilla—have contributed enormously, if often indirectly, to this project. Preliminary versions of some sections of Empire of Contingency have been presented in several venues over a long span of time, and the feedback received was crucial to the book’s composition and final form. A group of historians went a step further and took the time to read drafts of different chapters of my manuscript with a critical eye. I am truly indebted to Fernando Bouza, Nandini Chatterjee, Filippo de Vivo, Roy Fischel, Sumit Guha, Tamar Herzog, Giuseppe Marcocci, Colin Mitchell, Bhavani Raman, Paolo Sartori, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, and Ângela Barreto Xavier for their precious input. Two anonymous scholars took the pains to read and review the

326

Acknowledgments

whole thing for the Press and I am very grateful for your endeavor. Rest assured that your valuable comments made this book a better one. To James White I owe a word of sincere gratitude for his excellent editing work, which has elevated my English to a higher standard. John Wyatt Greenlee drew the maps and charts with incredible patience and great mastery. The index was prepared with similar skill by Jose Miguel Escribano Páez. I am extremely grateful to the staff of Penn Press, in its various departments, for their labor and professionalism. Jenny Tan, in particular, showed tremendous interest and understanding from when I first presented this project to the Press. Institutionally, I have received support from the European University Institute and especially from the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT, Lisbon), which funded Project CEECIND/00754/2017 (https://doi.org/10.54499/CEECIND/00754/2017 /CP1387/CT0015) hosted by Centro Interuniversitário de História das Ciências e da Tecnologia (CIUHCT, Lisbon). Similar to most of the Portuguese characters that populate this book, I have never learned Persian, and therefore gave continuity to the old imperial habit of resorting to the expertise of others. As an improvised Persianate historian, I sought refuge in the immense knowledge of real munshis like Muzaffar Alam, Roy Fischel, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, who have prevented me from committing many mistakes (all remaining errors are, of course, my sole responsibility). Being the only one truly at ease with Persianate India and Portuguese India alike, Sanjay has helped me more than I can remember, from simple spellings to bold ideas. Muito obrigado! Scholarship, it is well known, does not always rhyme with friendship. But I am fortunate enough to count as friends many of those mentioned above.