The man who witnessed India’s history in the making
Venetian Nicolo Manucci’s story is distinct from those of other European travellers and adventurers who documented their stay in India. The young teenager, who arrived on Indian shores with little education and few connections, lived here till his death at the age of eighty-two. He was witness to some of the most dramatic events in the subcontinent’s history.
Living by his wits, he started his career as chief artilleryman in Dara Shukoh’s fratricidal battle against Aurangzeb for the Mughal throne. Thereafter, Manucci joined Rajput general Jai Singh in his campaign to subdue the Maratha leader Shivaji.
However, Manucci had no stomach for a prolonged military career. With a great capacity for learning and immense good fortune, he made his way into the Mughal court, incredibly, as a court physician to Aurangzeb’s son Shah Alam. In service of the future Mughal emperor, Manucci was to head back to the Deccan once again to meet the challenge posed by Shivaji’s son Sambhaji. Manucci would spend the rest of his life within European settlements in Madras and Pondicherry. And his in-depth knowledge of the Mughal court would prove useful in negotiations between the Europeans and the Mughal authorities.
Marco Moneta tells the gripping story of a man who was witness to the intrigues and rivalries in Mughal and European territories, and who not just survived but rose to a position of influence and respect in a hostile and alien world.
Marco Moneta
holds a PhD in philosophy from Florence University. Before devoting himself to academic teaching and historical research, he worked in the fields of industry and business consultancy. In 2006, he authored a volume on the great Italian poet and philosopher Giacomo Leopardi. From early 2000, he has been travelling in the Indian subcontinent for both research and pleasure. Over the last decade, his interests and research have been aimed at the interactions between Europeans and Indians in the early modern age. A Venetian at the Mughal Court is the first result of a work in progress on European travellers to South-East Asia in the seventeenth century.
Elisabetta Gnecchi Ruscone
is a social anthropologist. She holds a PhD from Australian National University. Since returning to live in Milan, she has been a lecturer in anthropology and has collaborated in curating ethnographic exhibitions. She has also published several works in English and Italian on her research into the cultures of Oceania. She has many years of experience in Italian-English translations, especially in the fields of arts and social sciences.
On 20 May 1498, Vasco da Gama, the hero of Luis Vaz de Camoes The Lusiads, after rounding the Cape of Good Hope, sailing along the African coast to Malindi and crossing the Indian Ocean, dropped anchor north of Calicut, on the Malabar coast. His was the first European ship to reach the Indian subcontinent, inaugurating a seaway that gave direct access to the Indies. The effect of Vasco da Gama's voyage was revolutionary. Indeed, Adam Smith considered this to be one of the most important events in world history, of the same import as the discovery of America, which had occurred only a few years earlier. Up to that moment, westerners had a fragmentary and often incorrect knowledge of East Asia. Except for a few individual medieval travellers who journeyed into the region Marco Polo in the thirteenth century, Odorico da Pordenone in the fourteenth century, Afanasy Nikitin in the fifteenth century and a few others the trading relations between Europe and the Far East mostly occurred indirectly, through the interposition of the Arabs and Ottomans, whether by land (the caravan routes) or by sea and then land (by way of the harbours of Bandar Abbas in the Persian Gulf and of Jeddah on the Red Sea). No Venetian tartane (a boat carrying goods) or great European sail ship had ever before ventured across the Indian Ocean. After the route opened, a large number of Europeans-merchants, soldiers, colonials, officials, adventurers and missionaries-streamed into India and settled there, setting up more or less legitimate commercial enclaves, generally fortified However, unlike what had happened in the New World, where they had been met by savage tribes, naked bodies and innocent minds, the Europeans who landed in the Orient encountered ancient and sophisticated civilisations. These were in no way inferior to the European ones in terms of power, age and splendour. Indeed, premonitory signs of these societies' level of development could already be perceived during Vasco da Gama's first journey. When he first reached Calicut, he was surprised and disappointed to discover that the objects he had brought as gifts for the Governor-cloth, hats, furs, jugs, butter, honey and coral-were ridiculed by the local inhabitants and sneered at by the courtiers, who mockingly informed him that their Lord would accept only gold or, at the most, silver!! Moreover, the crossing of the Indian Ocean, unlike Christopher Columbus' crossing of the Atlantic, is not defined as a passage to the unknown, but as an itinerary along existing and well-tested routes. In fact, in order to cross the ocean from Malindi, on the African coast, to the great pepper market on the Malabar coast, Vasco da Gama availed himself of an indigenous pilot, Ahmad ibn Ma jid, and of the pilot books produced by Arab hydrographers for pilgrims to Mecca.
Like the encounter with the New World, that with India was also an encounter with the other. But the other, in this case, had a different appearance. I say India because this was the first country that the Portuguese ships encountered after leaving behind the African coast, and because it is the focus of this book, but I should say the Orient since a similar argument could be made for China, Indonesia or Japan. Unlike the New World of which there were no previous images, the Indian subcontinent had produced a rich and ambivalent imaginary since antiquity. On the one hand it 'attracted and invited' with its mirabilia (marvels), while on the other it 'dismayed and intimidated" with its hidden mysteries. It was, therefore, an 'elsewhere' of which a representation already existed, however contrived and stereotyped.
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Hindu (908)
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