IN the late 15th century, the renowned Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama discovered the sea route connecting the European markets with the exotic and high-in-demand Indian products: spices, herbs, gemstones, jute, and Chinese silk. To achieve greater efficiency in trade, in the coming centuries the European maritime powers would vie for control over trade nodes and trading posts.

At the same time it must be noted that India was also being flooded with immigrants coming from East Africa, Central Asia, Persia and Southeast Asia. All of them were hoping to tap into the riches of India and find better economic opportunities. Jonathan Gil Harris’s The First Firangis: Remarkable Stories of Heroes, Healers, Charlatans, Courtesans & Other Foreigners Who Became Indian is meant to appreciate the multiculturalism and diversity by recounting the remarkable stories of 16th- and 17th-century heroes, healers, charlatans, courtesans and other foreigners who became Indian. Though these historical narratives are real, Harris analyses them in such a spectacular manner that the history book seems like a compilation of short stories.

Unlike William Dalrymple’s ‘White Mughals’ who came from a privileged background and had influential positions in the East India Company or the British military, these foreign immigrants came from far more humble origins and ambitions. Many of them were escaping poverty to seek employment as physicians, artists or military commanders in the courts of Indian rajas and sultans. Some were criminals, while others were fleeing Europe due to religious persecution. A few were even adventurers who wanted to see exotic India. Not just this, but many were slaves as well. Harris notes that unlike the ‘White Mughals’, these individuals served an Indian master.

Once these individuals had reached India, they had no choice but to evolve and adopt the local culture, otherwise they perished. Harris addresses this phenomenon by a very peculiar name: bodily transformation. Harris explains: “Moving from a cold to a hot place changes our bodies’ diurnal rhythms, leading many of us to nap during the hottest afternoon hours and stay up late to savour the cooler hours of the night. Sweating more means we crave saltier food to replenish electrolytes lost through dehydration. Eating the cuisine of a different country changes not just our taste buds but also how our bodies smell.” In this sense, once a foreigner travelled to India, not only did he have to adjust mentally, but physically as well.

Any reader with little etymological understanding of the word ‘firangi’ might assume it means a Frank or a European. Harris’s first primary job in the book is to break this paradigm. He explains that in the context of India, the word has been used by countless writers and it fails to describe or specify any particular ethnic or religious identity. Harris writes, “[Firangi was] first employed by the Mughals as a blanket term for any Christian, ‘firangi’ has been subsequently applied to white Europeans, brown Armenians, ‘black’ mixed-blood Portuguese Indians, Muslim Africans, and now foreigners residents in India”. In all the narratives, the firangis who crossed borders and seas willingly or unwillingly evolved to adapt to the local culture and environment to become something other than what they were.

All of these stories are enriching and spellbinding, and each one of them has something unique to offer. My personal favourites were of a Sephardi Jewish physician and botanist Garcia da Orta who came to India fleeing the infamous Inquisition; a Tartar slave turned military general and admiral, Malik Ayaz, who served Sultan Mahmud Begarha of Gujarat; and an Armenian Jew Muhammad Sa’id Sarmad Kashani, the syncretic yogi-qalandar buried in Delhi.

Orta arrived in India in service of Martim de Sousa as the ship’s doctor. Unlike his superior, Orta decided to stay back and make India his new home. The curious botanist commissioned his own private garden in Goa. He was bewildered by the local fruits, spices and cuisines; he particularly grew fond of mangoes. His interests lay in the physiological effects of these substances; by participating in his self-designed experiments he welcomed foreign Indian elements that forever destabilised his Portuguese identity and body. He is renowned for his authorship of 59 dialogues titled, Colloquies on the Simples and Drugs of India, which helped in making India more livable for its colonial European settlers.

While studying the local ingredients, Orta had a remarkable, “preference for Arabic knowledge and practice, particularly that of Avicenna, the 10th-century physician of Uzbeki-Persian origin known in Arabic as … ibn Sina”. Harris asks why Orta would prefer the knowledge of a Muslim over the more traditional European Galen’s sciences and corpus. Was he simply a more tolerant individual? And where did he get this basic understanding of Arabic from?

Next Harris conjures an intricate chain connecting the multicultural seven-centuries-old Judeo-Islamic Iberian intellectual past with Orta’s lineage. Turns out his parents originally were from Valencia, Spain and were not Christians but Jews. After the Reconquista and the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492, Orta’s parents converted to Christianity on paper and fled to Portugal. Orta’s Jewish name was Abraham (or Avraham), and while he studied the traditional European sciences, his father taught him the Judeo-Islamic sciences and perhaps also introduced him to Arabic. In the second and third decade of the 16th century, the Portuguese monarch, under pressure from the Spanish crown, decided to expel Jews. The community had no choice but to either go into complete hiding or disperse, “extending throughout North Africa and the Ottoman Empire to the Arabian Peninsula and the Indian Ocean”.

Thus Harris concludes that Orta’s desire to travel to India was not patriotic in nature, but rather he was fleeing religious persecution. He was followed by his elderly mother and two sisters who also fled the Inquisition and travelled to Goa, India. In Goa, Orta lived multiple lives. He publically served the powerful Christian governors, but in his professional dealings he socialised with Muslim hakims and Hindu physicians. At the same time, “in his domestic life, he was part of Goa’s undercover Jewish world”. Sadly, the inquisition that the Orta family had fled reached Goa. In the year 1569, Orta’s sister was burnt at the stake and in 1580 Orta’s remains were posthumously disinterred and incinerated.

A reader can well imagine that compared to the intolerant Europe during the Middle Ages, India was a multicultural haven housing numerous faiths. And this was one of its many qualities that attracted these firangis. Each story that Harris discusses is thoroughly researched and reconstructed using scholarly evidence or sound assumptions.

Cultures and identities are not stagnant; Harris beautifully highlights this point in his last chapter titled ‘How to be Authentically Indian’. The cultural, linguistic, climatic and even genetic makeup of the Indian subcontinent has never been a constant; note that the word India itself has Greek origins. The region has been prone to invasions from dual fronts: the Hindu Kush and the Arabian Sea. As each invader came, not only did they transmit their cultural and linguistic influences in the Indian milieu, but they also were transformed by it and became an integral unit of the structure. Harris argues that as such this morphing entity called the Indian identity has never been a constant, and still is not. Indian identity has been a fusion of past, myth and present woven into multiple matching and contradicting narratives of different regional and social groups. Interestingly, it still is, and this is its beauty.

The First Firangis: Remarkable Stories of Heroes, Healers, Charlatans, Courtesans & Other Foreigners Who Became Indian

(HISTORY)

By Jonathan Gil Harris

Aleph Book Company, India

ISBN 978-9382277637

504pp.