Courting India: England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire

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In Das’s telling, Roe was not a herald of the Company Raj to come as much as a product of 17th-century England, an island nation whose commercial ambitions were beginning to overshadow its royal court. Stretching from the dark waters of the Thames to the blossom-strewn floors of the Jahangiri Palace, Courting India covers a vast canvass with masterful aplomb. The power of good writing and a well-told story in getting people to understand each other should not be underestimated.

In Nandini Das's fascinating history of Roe's four years in India, she offers an insider's view of a Britain in the making, a country whose imperial seeds were just being sown. Though London was at the height of the Renaissance—the era of Shakespeare, Jonson, and Donne—financial strife and fragile powerbases presented risk and uncertainty at every turn.Courting India is an interesting account of the British arrival in India in the early 1600's from the perspective of Thomas Roe, James I’s first ambassador to the Mughal Empire, who arrived there in 1616. Roe entered the court of Jahangir, “conqueror of the world,” one of immense wealth, power, and culture that looked askance at the representative of a precarious and distant island nation.

Using an incisive blend of Indian and British records, and exploring the art, literature, sights, and sounds of Elizabethan London and Imperial India, Das portrays the nuances of cultural and national collision on an individual and human level. A profound and ground-breaking new history of one of the most important encounters in the history of colonialism: the British arrival in India in the early seventeenth century.Courting India is ostensibly a study of Sir Thomas Roe's time as the East India Company's representative to the Mughal court from 1615 to 1619, but it is so much more than that . It serves as a rich repository of cultural memories from the beginnings of the colonial encounter - memories that have continuing resonance and relevance in our own era as we grapple with the aftermath of empire. Courting India, by Nandini Das, is a brilliant and insightful study of Thomas Roe's embassy at the Mughal court. Thomas Roe was James I first ambassador to India where he spent four years (1616-19) at the court of Jahangir.

Fascinating and comprehensive account of Thomas Roe’s embassy from the impoverished James I to the opulent Mughal Court of Jahangir.

Their understanding of South Asian trade and India was sketchy at best, and, to the Mughals, they were minor players on a very large stage. This book does just that, drawing on the best of the academic and the literary traditions to shed light on how we are today.

Conflicts over precedence did nothing to advance his mission of securing trade rights, which was the real reason Roe had been sent across the Indian Ocean.And while Roe kept a journal and wrote letters, I didn’t get the impression that he was particularly interested in any of this, unless it pertained to him obtaining privileges for British traders. The result is a rich and radical challenge to our understanding of Britain and its early empire—and a cogent reminder of the dangers of distortion in the history books of the victors. The youthful ambassador was hindered by his perfect ignorance of any Indian languages, entangled in bitter rivalries with other English officials and undercut by the behavior of his own staff: On the very day of his arrival, Roe’s personal chef drunkenly attacked a Mughal nobleman in the streets of the city.