Jonathan Gil Harris is a firangi who has “become Indian”. Having lived here several years, he finds himself re-shaped by his Indian experience. Coping with the Indian weather and battling its germs, tackling Indian food and Indian clothes, learning Indian languages and acquiring new skills, Harris finds his body altered in fundamental ways. The bodily transformation that India invariably wreaks on migrants is the basis on which he examines the lives of his precursors. “My own experience of becoming Indian” showed him how the ‘first firangis’ were imprinted by the external elements they encountered in the subcontinent where, as it happens, all of them left their bones.
Of course, India does not erase all traces of past lived experience — in the author’s case, his upbringing in New Zealand, his English education and decades of teaching in America. Rather, the firangi is a “multicultural palimpsest” of old and new bodily aptitudes, “a khichdi”. Without entirely shedding tendencies and aptitudes of their previous lives, they transform their bodies, consciously or unconsciously, to adapt to their new environments. Harris’s firangi is, hence, “a migrant to India that has somehow become Indian yet continues to be marked as alien”. His ‘first firangis ’ include not only European Christians, but also a Chinese, an African and a Jew from Persia, who would not generally be classified as ‘firangi’ .
They arrived in India around the 16th century, often to escape poverty and religious persecution. Some came as slaves and servants, some as adventurers or fugitives from the law. Most had little expectation of returning to their native lands and were obliged to submit to local conditions. By contrast, William Dalrymple’s marvellously-depicted ‘white Mughals’ were influential personages in colonial India in the 18th and early 19th centuries who were absorbed into a well-established system. The First Firangis looks at what it meant for a migrant to “become Indian” before the time of the ‘white Mughals’.
Harris presents short biographies of 14 firangis in segments introduced with accounts of his own ‘becoming Indian’ experience: of arriving and dealing with the sensory assault of the subcontinent; of acculturation in new communities and familiarising with strange terrains; of mastering foreign tongues, re-clothing the body and acquiring novel skills; of getting acquainted with jugaad, the Indian penchant for makeshift solutions; of weathering the weather.
The stories that Harris weaves are all the more remarkable for centring on mere bit-part actors in the annals of history, teasing out facts about whom must have been a herculean undertaking. Each of the characters could well be the subject of a stand-alone historical novel; the lives of some read stranger than fiction. Garcia da Orta, the well-known physician who compiled a historic treatise on tropical medicine gleaned from dialogues with local hakims — who was commemorated with a coin in 20th century Portugal — was in reality a Sephardic Jew who fled Portugal in the face of the European Inquisition. Persecution nonetheless caught up with him in Goa — his sister was burnt at the stake — forcing Orta to spend much of his life in Ahmednagar as the sultan’s personal doctor. Another religious fugitive, Thomas Stephens, said to have studied at Winchester and Oxford, became known as the Marathi poet Patri Guru who composed an epic poem ( Kristapurana) in Konkani which is regarded as an important contribution to subaltern literature. Thirteen-year-old Niccolo Manucci stowed away on a ship to escape straitened family circumstances in Venice to eventually become a Siddha practitioner at St. Thomas Mount in Madras, embodying the knowledge gathered during 50 years of medical observations in India.
Many of Harris’s firangis are men of war, by choice or compulsion: Chinali, a Chinese sailor of indeterminate origin, became the trusted lieutenant of Kunhali Marikkar, a legendary warlord on the Malabar Coast who harassed and resisted Portuguese colonisers. De Lannoy, a Dutch sea captain taken captive by Marthanda Varma of Travancore, managed to win his captor’s trust and was placed in command of his army. Known locally as Dillanai, he helped reorganise the fortifications of Travancore and modernise its army, with lasting effect. Another firangi captive, Malik Ayaz, a Slavic slave, became admiral of the Gujarat navy and governor of Diu which he transformed into a prosperous port city. An Ethiopian slave, Malik Anbar, introduced ‘barga-giri’ — a novel guerrilla martial art adopted later by the Marathas — that impeded Mughal annexation of the Deccan.
Sundry oddballs too make their appearance: Thomas Coryate, an eccentric middleclass Englishman, whose love of the theatrical led him to acquire fluency in several languages and masquerade as an alms-seeking fakir . The Silk Route also brought an Armenian Jew who, for the love of a boy, cast off his clothing for good and became a mendicant. He is venerated today as the Sufi poet Sarmad.
Based on hard research yet presented in a fast-paced conversational style, The First Firangis raises larger issues of the syncretic role of migrations, mixings, adaptations and transformations in the human history of the subcontinent.
