Eighteenth-Century Travel Narratives

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An Eighteenth Century Narrative of a Journey from Bengal to England: Munshi Isma'il's New History

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SOURCE: Digby, Simon. “An Eighteenth Century Narrative of a Journey from Bengal to England: Munshi Isma'il's New History.” In Urdu and Muslim South Asia: Studies in Honour of Ralph Russell, edited by Christopher Shackle, pp. 49-65. London: University of London, 1989.

[In the following essay, Digby examines Munshi Isma'il's New History, one of the earliest travel narratives written by an Indian, describing his voyage to and experiences in England.]

According to Sir Thomas Roe, ambassador of King James I of England and VI of Scotland to the court of the Mughal Emperor Jahāngīr, a proposal was mooted in 1616 that an Indian ‘gentellman’ should accompany Roe on his return to England, ‘to kisse his Majestie's hand and see our countrye’.1 Like a project to despatch an ambassador to Portugal in the reign of Jahāngīr's father Akbar,2 the idea was not implemented; and Jahāngīr's own memoirs contain only a single brief mention of the English.3 Although detailed information regarding Western Europe was available at the Mughal court and to other Indian princes from Europeans who could communicate in Persian or Turkish,4 Indo-Muslim sources of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries evince a profound ignorance of the geography of the world beyond the countries adjacent to India, and of Western European countries in particular. This was in spite of the fact that representatives of these nationalities were causing trouble at the extremities of the Mughal empire, and in spite also of a taste for European luxury manufactures both at the Mughal court and at lesser local Indian princely courts. These were not clearly distinguished in popular consciousness from the Far Eastern luxuries which European embassies also brought.5 From the end of the sixteenth century there was some receptivity to European technical processes in contrast to the almost total failure to grasp the geographical knowledge of Europe which was simultaneously available.6

Thus it was possible for a nobleman at the court of the Emperor Aurangzeb (r. 1658-1707) and of his early eighteenth century successors to write a work in which geographical information from eleventh and twelfth century Arab sources was combined with tales of the ‘Wonders of Creation’ (‘ajāib ul maxlūqāt).7 In this work the impossibility of navigation from the south of the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean was firmly restated, notwithstanding the passage of European vessels by this route through the previous two centuries.8 According to the author, Amīn ud Dīn Khān, the island of Bartāniyā (Britannia, Great Britain) is situated in the Atlantic Ocean. The entry regarding it is preceded by a notice of an island where women ruled and ebony was so plentiful that it was used for firewood. It was followed by a notice of an island populated by diminutive cannibals who professed allegiance to the pre-Islamic prophet ‘Ād. The only information regarding Bartāniyā itself is that it was a very large island, and was the last place of human habitation towards the west.9 Further evidence of the feebleness of geographical knowledge in the late seventeenth century is provided by Mughal historians writing in the Deccan.10

Scanty record survives of the earliest Indian seaborne travellers to England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.11 Traces remain of ‘the first Indian convert to the Church of England’ brought from western India and baptized in London in 1616,12 and of a Parsee visitor in the seventeenth and an Armenian from Calcutta by the middle of the eighteenth century.13 Rather rare advertisements testify to the presence of Indian servants and slave-boys in late seventeenth and early eighteenth century London.14 At least during the eighteenth century the sight of lascars or Indian seamen, mostly Muslims from Bengal, had become familiar in London.15

A tantalizing reference by the youthful Armenian adventurer Joseph Emin suggests that as early as the 1740s boys worked their passages aboard East Indiamen from Bengal with the intention of becoming chimney-sweeps in London.16 Probably other immigrants from India, like Emin himself, joined the pool of unskilled labour in the London slums. More commonly later in the eighteenth century, Britons returning to the United Kingdom with large or small East India fortunes brought Indian servants with them, who ranged in status from the butler and steward of Mr. Claud Russell, the employer of the subject of this article, to William Hickey's ‘little pet boy’ Nabob and thirteen year old ‘faithful creature’ Munnoo.17 Rather rarely, such Britons also brought home their Indian wives or mistresses. ‘During my time in London,’ Abū Tālib Khān noted, ‘I had the good fortune to form an acquaintance with two or three Hindoostany ladies, who from the affection they bore to their children, had accompanied them to Europe.’18

The random arrival of these visitors, usually uneducated, can have contributed little to the knowledge of Britain and Europe in India, and the record of this is usually lost. Tradition however credits one early eighteenth century sailor and his western travels with a considerable influence on his own isolated area of the Indian subcontinent, in which a strange flowering of European influence took place without the concomitant presence of the Sahibs as a new political force. This was in Kutch and has been attributed with some plausibility to the activities and the skills and knowledge acquired during a long residence in Europe and possibly subsequent returns there of Rām Singh Mālam (c. 1710-1765), who was shipwrecked off the African coast in youth and first brought by his Dutch rescuers to Europe. Rām Singh is credited with subsequent trips to Europe after his return to Kutch. Unfortunately no record other than popular traditions survives of Rām Singh's travels, but such a contact at least provides a possible explanation of the extraordinary flowering of European influence in this remote region of the subcontinent and the introduction of European techniques of manufacture in such industries as glassmaking and ironfounding.19 Testimony of this interest in Europe is preserved in the collection of European engravings apparently formed by the Raos of Kutch in the mid eighteenth century. These European engravings were carefully mounted to preserve them against the ravages of the Indian climate and notes were added about what they depicted. This included views of London besides other European cities.20

In this period also, partly as a consequence of the victories of Clive and the ascendancy of the English East India Company in the Carnatic and Bengal, educated Indian Muslims began to visit the United Kingdom, unhindered by the caste rules which deterred most of their Hindu compatriots from crossing the ‘Black Water’. Few of these appear to have produced records of their experiences in the United Kingdom. As in the case of the prints in the Kutch collection, evidence of the presence of one such visitor from the Carnatic survives in comments inscribed in Persian in a now rare engraved panoramic view of London. This may have been carried home to India around 1781 and later have been brought back to England from there, to find a home in the City of London Museum. The comments, written in Persian on the face of the engraving, record the equivalent of sterling costs in hūns, a coinage current in South India, and this provides a clue as to the locality from which the traveller came. There are notes of ferrymen's wages on the river Thames, the height of the dome of St Paul's Cathedral and the length and breadth of Blackfriars Bridge.21

Two accounts survive, written in Persian by Indian Muslims, of their visits to the United Kingdom in the latter part of the eighteenth century and at its close. They have been known since the time of their composition and were translated into English in the early nineteenth century. The first of these is the Šigarf-nāma-e Vilāyat (‘Wonder Book of England’) of Mīrzā I‘tisām ud Dīn. I‘tisām ud Dīn's travels took place between January 1766 and October or November 1769. The Šigarf-nāma suffers from the disadvantage that it was composed, or at any rate revised and completed, a decade and a half later in 1785, though the detailed narrative suggests that I‘tisām ud Dīn took notes upon the journey.22 The second account of such a visit is of Mīrzā Abū Tālib Khān Isfahānī, an inhabitant of Lucknow of Persian descent, who left Bengal in February 1799 and after a voyage around the Cape of Good Hope disembarked at Nantes in France. He also visited Ireland, after which he resided for many months in England. He returned overland to India, eventually reaching Calcutta in August 1803. His narrative, entitled Masīr-e Tālibī fī bilād-e afranjī (‘Tālib's travels in the land of the Franks’) was completed in 1804-05.

A two volume translation of Abū Tālib's work, by Major Charles Stewart, was published in London in 1810, and two years later the Persian text was printed in Calcutta.23 The narrative of Abū Tālib's predecessor I‘tisām ud Dīn remains unedited and unprinted, though several manuscripts have survived. An abridged English translation by Captain J. E. Alexander, also accompanied by an Urdu translation, was published in London in 1827.24

In constrast to these two accounts in Persian by Indian Muslims, that of Munshī Ismā‘īl, through the circumstance of its preservation in a great but inaccessible collection, has remained unknown until recently.25 Munshī Ismā‘īl, a Persian-language secretary from Kalnā in lower Bengal, left the Hooghly estuary in December 1771 upon an East Indiaman, sailed by the Cape of Good Hope and sighted England in June 1772. His time in that country was spent in London and Bath. He set sail from Portsmouth in March 1773 to return to India, and he reached Calcutta probably in November of the same year.

On his outward voyage from India, Munshī Ismā‘īl recorded that when he was on the island of St Helena (in March 1772), he resolved that he would write an account of what befell him.26 He also expressed the hope that he would be able to compose an account of the return voyage to Bengal. His account of the return journey is in fact disappointingly brief, but the phrasing of his account as well as the recorded place of residence of the scribe of the surviving manuscript, ‘the port of Hooghly’ (bandar-e Hūglī),27 suggest that Munshī Ismā‘īl composed the whole of his work during the course of his travels, and that it was copied for a patron immediately on his return. The circumstantial evidence is strong that this patron was James Grant (known as ‘the informer’ to distinguish him from another namesake in the East India Company's service).28 As we see below, Munshī Ismā‘īl enjoyed James Grant's protection and patronage on the last stages of his return voyage. In its date of completion this is therefore the earliest of the eighteenth century Indo-Persian narratives of travel to England.29

Both of the other travellers to England were men of high social standing among Indian Muslims. I‘tisām ud Dīn went to England as an emissary of the Mughal emperor Shāh ‘Ālam, in an attempt to gain the support of King George III for the cause of the Mughal emperor against the plans of the East India Company.30 Abū Tālib Khān was a former high official of the Navvāb-Vazīr of Awadh (Oudh), then at a loose end in Calcutta. He travelled on shipboard at the invitation of the Persian lexicographer Captain Richardson.31 He does not appear to have been dependent upon Richardson for financial support or for his social contacts when he reached England. Munshī Ismā‘īl was the humblest of the three travellers, brought to England as the Munshī (Persian correspondence secretary and language teacher) of a British servant of the East India Company in Bengal, Mr Claud Russell.

Nevertheless one should not exaggerate the lowliness of Munshī Ismā‘īl's status. His employer Claud Russell travelled with his Indian butler (xānsāmān) and steward (sarkār); two other servants accompanied the munshi himself and attended to his needs.32 It is a curiosity of these eighteenth century narratives of travel that the presence of such servants is usually mentioned only when their ministrations to the comforts of the travellers are recalled. Neither their names nor any details of their backgrounds are given, nor is it mentioned whether they returned home safely or were lost in far-off lands.

From his narrative it is evident that Munshī Ismā‘īl came from a family with pretensions to gentility and learning who held lands in rural Bengal, in the vicinity of Kalnā, Burdwan District.33 This suggests that they may have been Sayyids or Shaikhzādas who had been long established there. Munshī Ismā‘īl had previously looked for employment in Calcutta, and had returned home to his household when he failed to secure this.34 He did not renew the quest till the following year, when even ‘good families’ had been reduced to indigence by famine prices.35 He had only a brief experience of employment as munshi or Persian secretary by an Englishman before he was induced to undertake the voyage to England.36 It was not intellectual curiosity or the desire to see the world which impelled him to accept the offer to take him there. He confesses that he was terrified at the thought of undertaking such a journey. According to his own account he only overcame his reluctance to accept the offer when he recalled the wealth that another munshi had brought back who had gone on a much shorter sea voyage (from Calcutta to Madras?) with an Englishman.37

Munshī Ismā‘īl's narrative of his travels is less sophisticated than those of I‘tisām ud Dīn and Abū Tālib, and it is also shorter; but his naive vision gives his account its particular appeal and value. The level of his comprehension of what he witnessed of an alien civilization parallels that of medieval European travellers rather than their late sixteenth or seventeenth century successors. His narrative is a description of a real-life adventure and of the marvels which he witnessed in distant lands. When he draws a moral from these sights and experiences, it is usually an illustration of the operation of divine providence rather than an incitement to action. In this he stands in marked contrast to Abū Tālib Khān, in whose writing the germ of reformist ideas is perceptible. Abū Tālib wrote of ‘each useful thing of that kingdom’, and suggested that Indian Muslims might imitate certain useful European customs and arts.38 There is no such suggestion in Munshī Ismā‘īl's narrative.

Munshī Ismā‘īl's descriptions of the places which he visited and the people whom he encountered, when stripped of purely conventional rhetorical embellishment, are usually regrettably brief. Sometimes, when the detail is not too meagre, his narrative evokes scenes which have not been presented in the same terms or from the same point of view by any other source of the period.

His narrative begins with a picture of the manner in which the official correspondence of the East India Company was conducted. Close to the grandiose Residency of the Company at Murshidabad, which was still the capital of the impotent successors of Sirāj ud Daula, a group of munshis were sitting on a mat under a fragrant tree awaiting calls upon their services.39 Their Persian correspondence was directed and overlooked by three or four civil officials of the East India Company, Englishmen or Scots who, in spite of the lack of any adequate or accessible grammars of Persian, had managed to acquire from these munshis or their like some proficiency in Mughal documentary Persian and in the crabbed šikasta hand in which most documents were written.

In the previous two decades very few servants of the East India Company had possessed a good working knowledge of Persian, but this had become a desirable acquirement for those with ambition among them.40 The services of a competent munshi were at a premium, particularly if he could be employed in a period of leisure from official duties. A sea-voyage round the Cape of Good Hope to England might last for five months, as in the case of Munshī Ismā‘īl's own voyage, or longer. Even the wealthiest passengers suffered from cramped accommodation, gross physical discomfort and a monotony which could in some degree be alleviated by a course of study.41 Twenty-five years after Munshī Ismā‘īl, when that highly educated oriental traveller Abū Tālib sailed for Europe, he took the opportunity of this prolonged period of forced leisure to acquire a fluency in English which he had not previously possessed. He was taught on the voyage by John Richardson, the compiler of the first large Persian-English lexicon,42 and the consequence was that during his stay in England he was able to conduct intellectual conversations with Anglican bishops and ladies of high society.43 In the early nineteenth century it became common for cadets of the East India Company's services to carry in their luggage grammars of Persian and of the vernacular languages of India, in order to make progress in these languages during the months of the sea-voyage before they took up their appointments. In 1771 the chance which Munshī Ismā‘īl was offered during his search for employment amid the munshis attending at the Company's Residency at Murshidabad, was that of accompanying a British servant of the East India Company to England, teaching him Persian or assisting him in deciphering documents on shipboard or when he wished for his company during his furlough in England.

Claud Russell, who engaged Munshī Ismā‘īl's services, was at this time thirty-nine years of age. He was born in Edinburgh in 1732, son of a Writer to the Signet, i.e. a lawyer. His early career in India had been on the Fort St George (Madras) establishment. He had been seconded to Fort William (Calcutta) in 1765, and in 1770 he had been appointed Accountant and Collector-General in Calcutta. In April 1771 he had been ordered back to Fort St George, but pleading ill-health he had resigned instead in order to go to Europe. He had the prospect of a fresh appointment on his return to India.44

Munshī Ismā‘īl had previously obtained two months' temporary employment with David Anderson, the Assistant of the East India Company at the Murshidabad Durbar, when Anderson's regular munshi had fallen ill and died. Anderson was evidently prepared to recommend Munshī Ismā‘īl to Russell, and himself urged Munshī Ismā‘īl to accompany Russell to England. The munshi did not accept the offer immediately but went home to attend to the affairs of his family, who were in distress. He states that Russell at this time turned down the services of several other munshis. A further summons from Anderson at Murshidabad came to him, and he accepted the employment. He received as advance the sum of 100 rupees, equivalent to £12/10s. in the English money of the time. Russell had already departed for Calcutta. The munshi bought provisions, evidently with a further advance from Anderson, who also arranged for a boat to take him down to Calcutta.45

En route on the waterways of the Ganges delta, the boat moored at the landing stage of Ganj Kalnā on the western bank of the upper reaches of the Hooghly channel. For two days it was placed in the care of a local official while the munshi made his last farewells to his family. The boatmen from Murshidabad were not familiar with the waters so far downstream. The munshi considered that they propelled the boat recklessly; and when they reached Bāranagar, not far above Calcutta, they were dismayed by the effect of the ebb and flow of the tide. They reached Calcutta just before a heavy storm broke.46 The munshi appears to have been more alarmed by this part of the journey than by anything which befell him on his subsequent travels.

The river journey must have taken place at the end of September 1771, about two weeks after the munshi had first met Claud Russell. He states that he spent two months in Calcutta in fine and comfortable lodgings. He sometimes went sightseeing with his employer, as he was later to do at the Cape of Good Hope and in England. On 27 November Russell and the munshi embarked on separate river-craft, the munshi presumably with his own two servants and provisions. The following day they looked round the Company's military post at Budge Budge, a few miles downstream. After another night on their boats and two days at the roadstead of Hijli, at the point on the western shore where the Hooghly debouches into the sea, they embarked on the Morse, an East Indiaman commanded by Captain John Horne, who weighed anchor on 3 December. The only observation which the munshi makes on the initial six-week sea-voyage from Bengal to the Cape of Good Hope is that he was unable to keep the fast of Ramazan or regularly to perform the five Muslim prayers of the day, presumably because of conditions on shipboard.47

His description of Cape Town and its environs dates from a period when there were amicable relations between the English and its Dutch rulers. The munshi himself was lodged in the house of a Dutch official. After mentioning the gardens and orchards around Cape Town, he has some uncomplimentary observations on a local population, who must be identified as the Hottentots, whose colour ‘though fairly black is less so than that of the Habšīs (Abyssinians)’.48

From Cape Town the Morse reached St Helena after fifteen days' sailing. The description of St Helena is one of the most vivid portions of the munshi's narrative. As he explained at the beginning of the work, it was there that he decided to write an account of his travels. He was lodged at the settlement of Jamestown. His description of this settlement, with its fort and ordnance lodged in a crack between two precipitous hills, well matches the view of Jamestown painted by Thomas Daniell in 1794; and his references to the springs of fresh water and the firewood brought down from the hills are confirmed by other accounts. The variety of banana which he mentions as growing there and common in Bengal may have been one of the many edible or useful plants which in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were imported from India to St Helena. It seems likely that the unpalatable vegetable which he also mentions, which made him eat pickles (ācār) to rid himself of the taste, was in fact the yam, described variously by English visitors to the island as ‘tasting between a potato and an artychoke bottom, but ruff on the palate’49 and ‘a coarse unappetizing root considered suitable for negro slaves and pigs.’50 The island suffered from recurrent chronic shortages of locally-grown foodstuffs, during which the yam tuber provided a staple diet to the extent that St Helenians were nicknamed ‘Yamstock’. A further gift of cash from Russell enabled the munshi to purchase meat and fish from the local inhabitants. Russell himself probably dined at the Governor's table and was entitled, as a servant of the East India Company, to purchase government stores.51 Their sojourn at St Helena lasted three and a half weeks. A reason for this long stay was that the Morse had been leaking. According to the munshi, with the English passengers were also furious, the captain for reasons which he declines to explain, and they decided to take their luggage and effects ashore.52 The Morse sailed from St Helena without Russell and the munshi on 21 March. There was another ship, probably the Northumberland from Canton bound for London, which had reached St Helena four days before the Morse. Russell negotiated passages for himself and his entourage on board this vessel, which sailed on 6 April.53

The ship was heavily laden with China goods, including tea and porcelain, to the extent that the passengers below deck were obstructed by the cargo; but Munshī Ismā‘īl was made more comfortable than on the previous ship, as he had been allotted a place to himself, and the steward fulfilled instructions to supply him with provisions. He records the sight of flying-fish as one of the spectacles of God's creation. After sailing for six days the vessel struck anchor at Ascension Island. He describes the hunting of turtles there and the placing of bottles with messages by a flagstaff in the water. His account is paralleled by those of European travellers of the period.54

After leaving Ascension Island the ship was becalmed in the tropics for fifteen days. Then an incident occurred which excited some alarm, the approach at night of a large unidentified ship. The English passengers came to the deck to observe the spectacle, and the captain ordered the guns that East Indiamen carried to be run out. Eventually a boat was lowered with the first mate and an interpreter. It was learnt that this was a Spanish man-of-war; but it was homeward bound with peaceful intentions. The munshi states that it had 130 guns, which would make it a very large ship for this period.55

The passage through the North Atlantic was rainy and windy. Nearly eight weeks after they had left St Helena, the south-western coast of England was sighted, close to a town that the munshi thought was itself called Inglan (‘England’, possibly Falmouth or Plymouth). Claud Russell disembarked there, leaving Munshī Ismā‘īl and their personal servants on board. Three or four days later the ship reached the Thames estuary, but because of the low tides it was five or six days more before the ship could berth. After a further four days on shipboard Russell summoned the munshi. He landed with the other Indian retainers at Ulich (Woolwich), whence he was taken off to London, to the lodging house of a ‘Mr William’. He went there by coach, accompanied by his own servants.56

In London, Munshī Ismā‘īl's lodgings were within about half a mile of the Haymarket, but the transcription of the manuscript leaves us in some doubt about the name of the street. It might have been either Broad Street or Brewer Street, both at the southern end of Soho, an area which had been built over by the early eighteenth century.57 By the time of the munshi's visit to London it had passed out of fashion as a residential area, but it was conveniently close to the currently fashionable squares and streets.58

The London which Munshī Ismā‘īl describes is that of the terrace developments which were taking place at the west end of the city through the eighteenth century. The houses, according to him, were all five storeys high and were distinguishable from one another only by the number-plates at their doors. Fear that he would be unable to find again the house from which he had come made him afraid to wander out alone.59 This is an alien's view of the baffling uniformity of design of English terraced Georgian townhouses, in which at this period all classes from the lesser aristocracy to moderately prosperous tradesmen preferred to dwell.

His indulgent employer was clearly keen that the munshi should see the sights of London. He does not mention by name Ranelagh Gardens and the Spring Gardens at Vauxhall, but these favourite resorts were probably the ‘pleasant gardens and wonderful tableaux’ which he recalls. After some time he made an expedition to the nearby open countryside in the company of his landlord Mr William. Probably this was to the north or west of the latest newly-developed streets and squares, to the open fields in Chelsea or beyond the corner of Hyde Park. At the fringe of the inhabited area they went into a coffee-house for refreshments.60

Munshī Ismā‘īl's account of the coffee-house, and of the inquiries which he made regarding how such a splendid establishment was maintained, are one of the most interesting parts of his narrative. His companion Mr William explained to him the connection between coffee-houses and news-sheets, a connection which is well attested by English social historians and in the literature of the period.61

The last portion of Munshī Ismā‘īl's description of London concerns its amenities. He praises the paving and lighting of the streets. He mentions ‘three sound and elegant bridges’ across the Thames. These must have been London Bridge, Westminster Bridge and Blackfriars Bridge, the last only completed in 1769.62 His descriptions of the paving and streetlighting of London can be matched in other eighteenth century descriptions by foreign travellers,63 but he has a noteworthy account of the wooden water-wheels, which pumped piped water from the river to the houses, ‘in motion night and day from the ebb and flow of the tide’.64

After some comments on the abundance of horses in England—‘more numerous than the cows in Bengal’—and on the abundance of wares displayed in the shops on either side of the streets of London, Munshī Ismā‘īl next describes his journey to Bath. He was impressed by the efficiency by which the coach was supplied with relays of horses at the staging-posts.65 This as well as other observations remind us that the munshi had never travelled beyond Bengal and Bihar on the lower Ganges, where transport was largely riverine, in contrast with the drier areas of the Indian plains where a relay system had been maintained for centuries.

On arrival at Bath he was given lodgings on the top floor of the house which his employer had taken. A brother of Claud Russell was also there. The latter was an employee of the Levant Company, and Munshī Ismā‘īl was able to conduct conversations in Arabic with him. The munshi also mentions expeditions with Russell into the verdant countryside, as well as the beneficial effect of the hot springs of Bath, which he compares to the well-known hot springs of Sītākunḍ in eastern India.66

At this point in his narrative he inserts a description of the parliamentary system of government as it had been explained to him. He was impressed by the freedom of the country from forcible and arbitrary exactions by the sovereign. He identifies the members of the House of Lords as amīrs (‘chiefs’), and those of the House of Commons as vakīls (agents or representatives) of the zamīndārs (landholders). When a deficit occurred in the royal expenses beyond the fixed sum of money allotted annually, these two assemblies were summoned to discuss what was needed, and they then agreed on the taxes to be raised. Hence ‘degrees of punishment and exaction … are not brought into operation, nor the forbidden pattern of confiscation and violence without representation.’67 It is curious to find in the munshi's account in Persian, written only a few years before the American War of Independence, this echo of the cry that there should be no taxation without representation.

In Munshī Ismā‘īl's exposition the middle classes, traders and artisans find no mention. He himself came from a society which was predominantly agricultural, where the greatest source of revenue was from the produce of the land. The munshi's view of the British constitution, while it may have been influenced by his personal experiences of the chronic insecurity, misery and scarcities of Bengal during the transitions of the mid eighteenth century, also reflects the complacency of an informant from the British possessing classes during the Whig ascendancy. ‘The peasantry (ra‘āyā),’ he remarks, ‘do not suffer from the oppression and blows of the landholder. According to the King's law every man is himself free, but without power over others. A balanced connection has become established whereby the King fears the ministers, the landholders the peasantry, and the populace the law. Through the interposition of this moderating chain of behaviour each man is accountable, and none causes pain or injury.’68

The munshi spent four pleasant months in Bath; but ‘like other fresh immigrants’ (possibly a reference to the other Indian members of Russell's entourage and his own servants), he suffered acutely from the cold of the English winter. He therefore ‘asked his employer's permission to depart’. He evidently went to London, possibly because a passage could more easily be secured for him there, as he refers to ‘leaving the English capital’. He sailed from Portsmouth for India on 20 March 1773, aboard a vessel which can be identified as the Europa.69

Munshī Ismā‘īl, perhaps disheartened by his experience of an English winter or by the end of any immediate expectation of largesse from Russell, made no serious attempt to record the next portion of his travels.70 The narrative of his return journey lacks interesting details comparable to those he gave on his earlier voyage to the Cape of Good Hope, St Helena, Ascension Island and the encounter with the foreign man-of-war. A description of the ‘isle of Portugal’ is vague, possibly a conflation of memories of the cliffs of the Portuguese coastline with other memories of a call of the Europa at the Cape Verde Islands, where the inhabitants would have appeared as black as he describes. After this he provides an ornate description of a waterspout, and of the ship firing cannon to divert it.71

As was common on the outward-bound passage to India, the Europa evidently did not put in to St Helena or the Cape of Good Hope, but sailed to Johanna Island in the Comoro group near Madagascar, where outward-bound Indiamen often took on supplies. The Europa was sailing to Bombay, whereas both the munshi and James Grant, the returning Bengal civilian for whom the manuscript of the munshi's account was probably copied, were bound for Calcutta. At this period landing at Bombay would have involved them in a long, arduous and somewhat risky journey overland across India, or another sea-voyage around Ceylon and up the Bay of Bengal. They therefore disembarked at Johanna Island and waited nearly three weeks for a ship to take them directly to the Hooghly roadstead.

The munshi's spirits appear to have been revived by the equable climate of Johanna Island and the patronage of James Grant. He recorded the pleasure he derived from the sight of the green hills of the island covered with coconut groves. He also mentions fishing or hunting a ‘kind of water-worm’ called (or mistranscribed) falūs.72 Possibly he was referring to the spermaceti whale, or to its ambergris. Ambergris was the most valuable product exported from the Comoros, and many travellers refer to its collection of the shores on these islands.

The ‘country’ vessel on which James Grant and the munshi now embarked was commanded by a Frenchman and was carrying a cargo of cowrie-shells used as currency in Bengal. The munshi gives no further details of the voyage. He reached Calcutta ‘on the same day and month of the year’ as he had set out from there two years earlier.73 As most of the dates of the munshi's narrative are according to the Christian calendar, this was probably on 27 November 1773; but if his reckoning was according to the Muslim lunar calendar it would have been three weeks earlier, on 20 Sha‘bān 1187/6 November 1773.

After landing he set off immediately to visit his family, giving his thanks to God, ‘Who brought him to the object of his desires, without Whose aid a weak man like himself could not have undertaken such a journey.’74 The transcription was done in a small neat nasta‘līq hand by one Ghulām Hasan, probably a professional copyist, who describes himself as ‘resident (sākin) of the port of Hooghly (bandar-e Hūglī). As we have suggested, it is likely that this copy was made for James Grant. For this Munshī Ismā‘īl may have left his original holograph behind for copying before he went to his reunion with his family. We have no means of knowing whether he ever came back to collect it, and we have no record of his subsequent career. We would not even know the name of this early Asian visitor to England if the scribe had not given it in the roundel on the flyleaf, for the author omitted to mention it in the customary manner in the proem of his narrative.

Munshī Ismā‘īl appears to have been a shy and self-effacing man, little prepared to take the initiative or to set out upon adventures unguided. He did not dare to wander around the streets of London for fear lest he lose his way. His knowledge of English was more limited than that of the other two late eighteenth century Indian Muslim travellers I‘tisām ud Dīn and Abū Tālib Khān.75 Munshī Ismā‘īl was capable of exchanging courtesies and greetings with Mr William, landlord of his London lodgings, and he could understand Mr William's account of how news was reported in the coffee-houses and news-sheets were printed and circulated.76 It is possible that Mr William, with whom Claud Russell had arranged his accommodation, himself had East Indian connections and some knowledge of oriental languages. Munshī Ismā‘īl's knowledge of the British constitution could have been acquired through the medium of Persian or Hindustani conversation with Claud Russell.77 It is doubtful if the Arabic conversation between the munshi and Russell's brother afforded any serious exchange of information.78

Munshī Ismā‘īl gives no record, of the kind which is to be found in I‘tisām ud Dīn's and Abū Tālib Khān's accounts,79 of the impression which he as an Indian visitor made upon the local population. Munshī Ismā‘īl is also very reserved in his comments on the people whom he met on his travels. Abū Tālib was free with his criticisms of the British national character, as well as lavish in praise of its virtues. He mentioned the behaviour of those who were disobliging to him as well as of those who showed him kindness or affability. I‘tisām ud Dīn expressed his lively resentment against his travelling companion Captain Swinton, Lord Clive and others, whom he did not hesitate to accuse of fraud and deceit.80 But Munshi Ismā‘īl has only praise for those whom he met, except on the one occasion when he refers to the ‘blameworthy acts’ of the captain of the first ship on which he sailed; and there he will not write about such things.81

This account has remained unpublished either in the original or in translation. Its earlier failure to attract scholarly attention appears to reflect the hazards of the survival of the only known manuscript. This, together with at least one manuscript of the same provenance (from James Grant), entered the collection of the bibliophile Sir Thomas Phillipps in 1856, where it escaped scholarly attention for over a century. In 1968 it was acquired by the present owner at a sale of a portion of the Phillipps Collection.82

Notes

  1. Sir William Foster, ed., The embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to India, 1615-19, revised edn (Oxford 1926), p. 212. Roe's syntax does not make it entirely clear who volunteered to go on this embassy. It was probably Mīr Jamāl ud Dīn Injū, then Sūbadār of Patna, the compiler of the dictionary Farhang-e Jahāngīrī, and a man of wide intellectual interests.

  2. In AD 1582, in response to the Jesuit mission to his court, Akbar had approved the despatch of a return embassy to Spain and probably other European courts; but one of his two emissaries fled when he reached the western coast of India and the other got no further than Goa; see J. S. Hoyland and S. N. Banerjee, trans., The commentary of Father Monserrate, S. J. (Oxford 1922), pp. 163, 191; P. du Jarric, trans. C. H. Payne, Akbar and the Jesuits (London 1926), pp. 114, 259-60. For Jahāngīr's unfulfilled intention to send an ambassador to Portugal, see F. Guerreiro, trans. C. H. Payne, Jahangir and the Jesuits (London 1930), pp. 77, 110. These projects were apparently not of sufficient importance to find a mention in the Persian histories of the Mughal emperors' reigns.

  3. Syud Ahmad, ed., Toozuk-i-Jehangeerie (Ghazipur and Aligarh 1863-64), p. 134; A. Rogers, trans., H. Beveridge, ed., The Tūzuk-i-Jahāngīrī or memoirs of Jahangir (London 1909), I, p. 247. William Hawkins mentions that Jahāngīr called him ‘by the name of English Chan, that is to say, English lord’, W. Foster, ed., Early travels in India (Oxford 1921), p. 83.

  4. Du Jarric, p. 55 [Prince Murād questioning the Jesuits about Portugal]; N. Manucci, trans. W. Irvine, Storia do Mogor (London 1907), II, p. 137 [Manucci giving Shivajī, who had only heard of the King of Portugal, information about ‘the greatness of European Kings’]; F. Bernier, trans. A. Brock, ed. A. Constable, Travels in the Mogul empire, A.D. 1656-1668 (Oxford 1914), pp. 324, 353 [Bernier discussing European anatomy and philosophy with his patron Dānishmand Khān]; H. Das, The Norris embassy to Aurangzib (Calcutta 1959), p. 308.

  5. A. Topsfield, ‘Ketelaar's embassy and the Farangī theme in the art of Udaipur’, Oriental Art, XXX, 4 (Winter 1984-85), pp. 359-63.

  6. See A. Jan Qaisar, The Indian response to European technology and culture [A.D. 1498-1707] (Delhi 1982): geographical knowledge is not discussed in this study. The actual availability of such geographical knowledge at the Mughal court is strikingly demonstrated by the depiction, in one of the allegorical political portraits of Jahāngīr, of the emperor standing upon a terrestrial globe of European manufacture, but with place names inscribed in Persian; see R. Ettinghausen, Paintings of the Sultans and Emperors of India (New Delhi 1961) Plate 12 [on which the labels Rūs and Purtuqāl are clearly visible]; M. C. Beach, The imperial image; paintings for the Mughal court (Washington 1981) pp. 74, 169-70. Monserrate states that the emperor Akbar, during a conversation, consulted an atlas [probably presented by the Jesuits] to see the relative positions of India and Portugal; Commentary, p. 124.

  7. Mu‘īn ud Dīn Husainī Haravī called Amīn ud dīn Khān, Ma‘lūmāt ul āfāq [‘Knowledge of the horizons’, Storey, Persian literature, II, No. 213] (Lucknow 1870). For details of this Mughal dignitary's career, see Storey, loc. cit.

  8. Op. cit., p. 87.

  9. Op. cit., p. 109.

  10. Bhīm Sen, who lived in Aurangabad, thought of Ceylon as an almost unreachable island of wonders, Nusxa-e dilkušā, trans. V. G. Khobrekar and others (Bombay c. 1972), p. 196. Khāfī Khān and the Mughal authorities at Surat appear to have had no knowledge of the island of Madagascar as the base of European piracy in the Indian Ocean, cf. Muntakhab ullubāb (Calcutta: Bibliotheca Indica, 1860-1874), pp. 423-25.

  11. By contrast there is evidence of Indian students brought to Portugal in the first half of the sixteenth century; see Luis de Matos, Imagens do Oriente ni sécolo XVI (Lisboa 1985), intro., pp. 48-51. Harihar Das, ‘The early Indian visitors to England’, Calcutta Review, 3rd series, XIII (1924), pp. 83-114.

  12. W. Ashley-Brown, On the Bombay coast and Deccan; the origin and history of the Bombay diocese (London 1937), pp. 64-65.

  13. M. M. Murzban, The Parsis in India (Bombay, 1917), I, p. 5; E. J. Emin, ed. A. Apcar, Life and adventures of Emin Joseph Emin (Calcutta 1918), passim.

  14. R. Visram, Ayahs, lascars and princes (London 1986), pp. 13-14.

  15. By 1783, according to M. D. George, London life in the eighteenth century, (London 1925), pp. 138-40; but I‘tisām ud dīn's reference [trans. Alexander, p. 39, see 24 below] to the familiar sight of lascars ‘of Jahangirnagar and Chatgaon’ dates from 1766-67. Later, in the early nineteenth century, attention was devoted to their presence and predicaments in London and other English ports; see also N. Benjamin, ‘The British and Indian sailors (c. 1790-1885)’, in P. M. Joshi and M. A. Nayeem, ed., Studies in the foreign relations of India (Hyderabad 1975), pp. 485-96. For case-histories of the misfortunes and maltreatment of lascars in London in the ninettenth century [which must have been paralleled in the century before] see the Rev. George Salter, The Asiatic in England (London 1873).

  16. Emin, op. cit., p. 27.

  17. W. Hickey, Memoirs of William Hickey, ed. A. Spencer (London 1918-25), II, p. 228; IV, p. 376.

  18. Abū Tālib Khān, Masīr-e Tālibī, trans. Stewart (see below, 23), I, p. 198.

  19. L. F. Rushbrook Williams, The Black Hills; Kutch in history and legend (London 1958), pp. 138-42.

  20. B. N. Goswamy and A. L. Dallapiccola, A place apart; painting in Kutch, 1720-1820 (Delhi 1983), pp. 33-35.

  21. The engraving is entitled ‘A General View of London and Westminster—Printed for R. Sayer and J. Bennett—Jany 1777’. The apparently unique surviving example of this print is preserved in the City of London Museum. One of the Persian annotations upon it bears the date AH 1194 (= AD 1780-81). Mr. A. H. Morton kindly drew my attention to this print. The information in the annotations, as he remarks, ‘does not seem bookish’, and is unlikely to have been acquired other than by conversation and experience in London itself.

  22. Mīrā I‘tisām ud Dīn Šigarf-nāma-e Vilāyat [Storey, I, No. 1595], completed in AH 1199/AD 1785; Ms., Royal Asiatic Society, London, Hindustani 2 [mis-catalogued, in fact the original Persian text, not a Hindustani or Urdu translation].

  23. Mīrzā Abū Tālib Khān Isfahānī, Masīr-e Tālibī fī bilād-e afranjī [Storey, I, No. 1178(2)], completed in AH 1219/AD 1804-05; ed. Mīrzā Husain ‘Alī and Mīr Qudrat ‘Alī (Calcutta 1812); trans. C. Stewart, Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan in Asia, Africa and Europe, 2 vols. (London 1811).

  24. J. E. Alexander, Shigurf namah i velaët; or excellent intelligence concerning Europe; being the travels of Mirza Itesa Modeen [sic], translated from the original Persian manuscripts into Hindoostanee, with an English version and notes (London 1827).

    One further eighteenth century Indo-Persian account of a voyage to Europe and the United Kingdom is recorded as existing in manuscript, see Storey, I, No. 1596, p. 1144:—Mīr M. Husain b. ‘Abd ul-Hasanī (?), Risāla-e ahvāl-e mulk-e Firang o Hindostān, ‘an account of a journey in 1188/1774 via Calcutta to Lisbon and London, and of a year's residence in the latter place, followed by a sketch of European astronomy’, manuscript in the Mulla Firuz Library, Bombay; Rehatsek, p. 189, No. 33; p. 99, No. 51. I have been unable to consult this.

  25. Munshī Ismā‘īl, Ta'rīx-e jadīd (not recorded by Storey), evidently completed around November 1773; Ms., Simon Digby Collection, No. 107, formerly Sir Thomas Phillipps Collection, No. 18225; see notes 28, 29, 82 below. An edition of this text with translation is in course of preparation.

  26. Ms., folio 11A.

  27. Colophon: Ms., folio 49B.

  28. James Grant was absent from India, evidently on leave in 1772. Grant's return passage to India on board the Europa, the vessel in which Munshī Ismā‘īl sailed, is mentioned in a despatch from East India House to Fort William, see R. P. Patwardhan, ed., Fort William—East India House correspondence VII, 1773-1776 (New Delhi 1971), p. 13. The conjecture that the manuscript was transcribed for James Grant is corroborated by the presence of another manuscript formerly in the Phillipps Collection, of Tāj ud Dīn Malikī's Mufarrih alqulūb [a Persian translation of the Hitopadeśa], Phillipps No. 18259; Sotheby & Co., (Bibliotheca Phillippica, N. S.), Medieval manuscripts, Part IV, Sale of 25 November 1968, Lot 154, second item. This manuscript states in its colophon that it was copied for James Grant in AH 1199/1784-85. It came into the Phillipps Collection from the same provenance as Munshī Ismā‘īl's Ta'rīx-e jadīd, as both manuscripts bear pencilled annotations by Sir Thomas Phillipps (W. Rodd 1856).

  29. A date of composition is given in the roundel on the flyleaf (folio 9A) as AH 1185 (= AD 1771-72), which is the year when his travels began. The author's name and a title for the work also appear only in this roundel, which is in the hand of the scribe of the manuscript.

  30. Šigarf-nāma, Ms., f. 6A-B; trans. pp. 4-10.

  31. Masīr, p. 20; trans. Stewart, I, pp. 18-19. For biographical details see Masīr, pp. 9-19; Storey, loc. cit.

  32. Ms., folio 37A

  33. Ms., folios 17B, 20B.

  34. Ms., folio 12B.

  35. Ms., folio 12A. For the Bengal famine of 1770, see N. K. Sinha, The economic history of Bengal, II (Calcutta 1962) pp. 48-67.

  36. Ms., folio 16B.

  37. Ms., folio 17B.

  38. Masīr, pp. 3-4.

  39. Ms., folio 14A.

  40. Hajji Mustapha (M. Raymond) refers to a time in Bengal in the 1760s ‘when, Governor Vansittart and Mr Hastings excepted, I was the only European that understood a little Persian’, A translation of the Seir Mutaqharin (Calcutta 1789), I, intro., p. 17. But in this period I‘tisām ud Dīn's disreputable travelling companion, Captain Archibald Swinton, had a sufficient knowledge of Persian to collect, or possibly to procure the manufacture of compromising documents; see Šigarf-nāma, trans. pp. 199-200. By a curious coincidence, a good manuscript of collections of the emperor Aurangzeb's letters, bearing the seal of Archibald Swinton Rustam Jang Bahādur, found its way to the Sir Thomas Phillipps Collection (No. 5145).

  41. Masīr, trans., I, pp. 48-50; C. Northcote Parkinson, Trade in the Eastern seas, 1793-1813 (Cambridge 1937), pp. 265-303.

  42. Masīr, p. 20; trans., I, pp. 18-19.

  43. Masīr, pp. 432-33, 455.

  44. I am most grateful to Professor Peter Marshall of King's College, London and Dr Richard Bingle and his assistants of the India Office Library and Records who have supplied me with biographical details of Claud Russell and other servants of the East India Company who figure in this narrative, as well as information regarding the sailings of East Indiamen.

  45. Ms., folio 20A-B.

  46. Ms., folios 20B-22B.

  47. Ms., folios 22B-24A.

  48. Ms., folios 24A-25B.

  49. F. Rogers in 1703, quoted in P. Gosse, St Helena 1502-1938 (London 1938), p. 119.

  50. P. Gosse, op. cit., p. 127. According to a letter of 1717, the diet of yams was often washed down by strong liquor; Gosse, op. cit., 135.

  51. Ms., folios 26A-29B.

  52. Ms., folio 26B.

  53. Ms., folios 29B-30A.

  54. Ms., folios 30A-32A.

  55. Ms., folios 32B-34A.

  56. Ms., folios 34B-38A.

  57. Ms., folio 38A. Both streets appear on Roque's map of 1746, published by John Pine and John Tinney. I am grateful to Miss Doris Johnson for this reference. That there were lodging houses in Brewer Street we know from a nearly contemporary reference. In the autumn of 1776 the Highland footman John Macdonald called on John Stuart of Allan Bank, a young Scottish gentleman staying in London for a few weeks, ‘at Mrs Elliot's in Brewer Street, where he lodged.’ John Macdonald, ed. J. Beresford, Memoirs of an eighteenth century footman, John Macdonald: Travels [1745-1779] (London 1929), p. 187.

  58. J. Summerson, Georgian London (Harmondsworth 1945), especially chapters 7 and 12.

  59. Ms., folio 39B. This South Asian visitor's impression of the monotonous and confusing uniformity of Georgian town-houses in London is quoted by Raymond Head, The Indian style (London 1986), p. 21.

  60. Ms., folios 40A-41A.

  61. Ms., folios 41A-42B. Cf. R. Bayne-Powell, Eighteenth century London life (London 1937), pp. 140-42. Munshī Ismā‘īl's reference to news sheets being produced by a printer (basma-sāz) is of interest in the context of the permeation of ideas in the Indian Muslim environment, as this is before the production in India of Charles Wilkins' movable nasta‘līq type. It seems to indicate a familiarity, not attested elsewhere in Muslim India, with eighteenth century Istanbul Arabic-script printing. For the word, see Sir J. W. Redhouse, A Turkish and English lexicon (Constantinople 1890), s.v. bāsma. I am grateful to Professor T. Gandjeï for pointing out this Turkish connection.

  62. Summerson, op. cit., pp. 123-24, 277.

  63. Archenholz, 1780, in M. D. George, London life in the eighteenth century, p. 102.

  64. Ms., folios 42B-43B. Cf. M. D. George, op. cit., quoting a source of 1783.

  65. Ms., folios 43B-44A.

  66. Ms., folios 44B-45A. The artist Thomas Daniell, who visited the Sītākunḍ in 1790, makes the same comparison with Bath, see M. Archer, Early views in India; the picturesque journeys of Thomas and William Daniell (London 1980), p. 103. For other descriptions of the Sītākunḍ, see ‘Abd ul Latīf Shushtarī, Tuhfat ul‘ālam [Storey, I, No. 1560] (Hyderabad 1294/1878), p. 501; C. J. C. Davidson, Diary of travels and adventures in Upper India (London 1843), II, pp. 45-47.

  67. Ms., folios 45B-46A; cf. the accounts of Parliament in Masīr, pp. 434-36, much abridged in Stewart's trans. I, pp. 303-04; and the account of constitutional monarchy in Šigarf-nāma, Ms., folios 98A-101B, omitted in Alexander's translation; cf. also Tuhfat ul ‘ālam, pp. 315-17. At this early date the topic of representative government evidently excited interest among educated Indian Muslims.

  68. Ms., folio 46A.

  69. Ms., folios 46B-47B.

  70. Russell in fact did not return to India until 1775, and the remainder of his Indian service appears to have been in the Madras Presidency, not Bengal.

  71. Ms., folios 47B-48B.

  72. Ms., folios 48B-49A.

  73. Ms., folio 49A.

  74. Ms., folio 49B.

  75. However I‘tisām ud Dīn mentions his own lack of inclination to study English, and the fact that in later years people in Bengal used to comment on the fact that he had gone to England but not acquired a sound knowledge of the language, Šigarf-nāma, Ms., folio 7B. Yet he knew English well enough to memorize a popular rhyme and reproduce jokes about Highlanders, ibid., folios 73B-74, 130B; trans. pp. 83-87, 178.

  76. Ms., folios 38B, 40A-42B.

  77. Ms., folios 45B-46A.

  78. Ms., folios 44B-45A.

  79. Masīr, p. 164; Šigarf-nāma, trans., pp. 38-40.

  80. Šigarf-nāma, Ms., folios 6-8; trans., pp. 6-10, 194-95, 217.

  81. Ms., folios 26B-27A.

  82. Sotheby & Co, Sale of 25 November 1968, Lot 227, first item.

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