Meet the author: Prof. Nandini Das
Prof. Nandini Das, winner of British Academy Book Prize for her book Courting India: England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire, shares more about the book.
Nandini Das is Professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture in the English faculty at the University of Oxford. Brought up in India, she was educated at the Jadavpur University in Kolkata, before moving to England for further study. Among other books, she is co-editor of The Cambridge History of Travel Writing. A BBC New Generation Thinker, she regularly presents television and radio programmes, including Tales of Tudor Travel: The Explorer’s Handbook on BBC4.
The British Academy Book Prize rewards and celebrates works of non-fiction that have made an outstanding contribution to the public understanding of world cultures and their interactions, and are grounded in rigorous and high-quality research. The winner of the £25,000 prize in 2023 was Courting India: England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire by Professor Nandini Das.
This year the British Academy partnered with Panos Pictures, an agency specialising in global social issues, on an innovative project. Arko Datto, an award-winning photographer who lives in Kolkata, was commissioned to provide a contemporary response to the themes explored within the pages of Courting India, a profound and ground-breaking new history of one of the most important encounters in the history of colonialism. It tells the story of the arrival of English ambassador Thomas Roe in India in the early 17th century, an event which marked the very beginnings of Anglo-Indian history.
The photography commission invites the observer to consider the origins of the Mughal Empire through the modern lens, extending the conversation started by this remarkable book into an entirely new way of seeing the impact of a complex history.
Here, Nandini shares more about the book and the exhibition. Excerpts.
AABP: Being a professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture in the English faculty at the University of Oxford, what inspired you to write?
Prof. Nandini: I was born and educated originally in India, and study and teach English literature from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England – perhaps that is why I’m particularly drawn to stories that explore and navigate cross-cultural interactions. These narratives are abundant during this period when England was just starting to assert itself on the global stage. Some of these stories are fictional, others are based on real-life events, but each has been pivotal in shaping the world as we know it today. The account of Thomas Roe’s mission to the court of the Mughal emperor Jahangir is a prime example of just such an encounter, and one that I wanted to share with a wider readership.
AABP: Share your feelings on winning 11th British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding?
Prof. Nandini: I am both deeply honoured and thrilled to have received this award. In a world facing crises on many fronts, where achieving global cultural understanding feels increasingly challenging, the thought that Courting India may have played even a small role in advancing that understanding is a tremendous motivation for my future work.
AABP: What was the central heart or the crux which drew you to write Courting India?
Prof. Nandini: The history of this era is frequently framed through ‘big stories’ and ‘big ideas’—focusing on trade, sovereignty, and empire—with a forward-looking perspective on what the British Empire would eventually become. Simultaneously, the narrative often remains geographically compartmentalized, with events in India typically studied separately from developments in the American colonies or political movements in England. When I first encountered Roe’s journal from his embassy, along with accounts by his contemporaries and fellow travellers, I was struck by how counter-intuitive that story was in comparison to our understanding of the British Empire in India. I wanted to find out more.
AABP: What are the areas you have emphasised in the book?
Prof. Nandini: Courting India delves into a pivotal moment in the early seventeenth century, when King James I of England, urged by the East India Company, decided to dispatch an official ambassador to the Mughal court. This mission was crucial for securing an imperial ‘firman’—the all-important permission to trade. Our present-day assumptions about power dynamics between England and India, or England and the broader world, often skew our understanding of this period. Sir Thomas Roe, the ambassador chosen by both the Company and the King, did not have that luxury of hindsight. He was the struggling representative of a Britain grappling with internal strife, financial instability, and an uncertain national identity. His 1616 arrival at the court of the opulent ‘Great Mogol’—an empire celebrated as one of the wealthiest and most cultured of its time—was a study in contrasts. My goal was to uncover not just what Roe observed in India, but how he perceived it, why his interpretations were shaped in particular ways, and how this encounter fit into the broader tapestry of England’s evolving role on the world stage.
The relationship between England and India significantly shaped both nations and global geopolitics, and to understand the future trajectories of both countries, we must attend to its beginnings. Behind that, there is a larger, more general question that I hope Courting India will also encourage readers to consider, and that is about how our assumptions and expectations about other nations and other cultures are formed.
AABP: How long did the research take and where all did you source your documents to narrate the story.
Prof. Nandini: The research for Courting India spanned over a decade and involved exploring numerous archives and libraries. It incorporates texts in several languages – English, of course, but also Latin, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, Sanskrit, Persian, Hindi, and Marathi. I also make a lot of use of literature, visual arts, and material artefacts. One of the perks of the East India Company’s obsession with bureaucracy was the sheer volume of historical material at my fingertips: a huge archive of almost daily letters, expense reports, and journals, including Sir Thomas Roe’s own daily journal. On the Indian side, the Mughal emperor Jahangir’s memoir, the Jahangirnama, offers a striking counterpart, even when it is tellingly silent about certain things. The relative unimportance of the English for their Indian counterparts, for instance, is illustrated by the fact that Jahangir never once mentions the English ambassador, although he describes the arrival of other embassies in detail. There are plenty of fascinating stories, but the real eye-opener for me was comparing these with Mughal and other non-English records from the same period. It reminded me of a Victorian gadget I’ve always liked—the stereoscope. This nifty device lets you view two slightly different images, one for each eye, and when you focus just right, they merge into a single 3D scene. That’s exactly how it felt to place English and Mughal, or English and Portuguese, records side by side—suddenly, what Roe missed during his embassy comes into sharp focus.
AABP: What do you find most captivating area about Courting India?
Prof. Nandini: There are plenty of stories to pick from, but the one at the heart of the book is all about a bet or ‘wager’ between Roe and the Mughal emperor. But if you want to know who won, you’ll have to read the book!
AABP: Is Courting India – your first book? What can the readers expect next from you?
Prof. Nandini: Courting India is my first book for a wider readership: as academic researchers, we are usually used to having our monographs read by a small group of interested fellow-researchers. If the story of Thomas Roe’s embassy whisks you from James I’s England to Jahangir’s India, the book I am currently writing has an even bigger canvas. It tells the history of England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as it was shaped by people moving in and out of the country.
AABP: As a writer, what do you aim to achieve when you start writing? Who are your target audience?
Prof. Nandini: The same things that drive me as a researcher – to be able to take the traces of lives long gone, and give them new voice. I don’t have a single target audience in mind, but I want the book to be honest, and approachable, to as varied a readership as it can reach.
AABP: Do share your experience with your publisher.
Prof. Nandini: Finding a publisher and editor who believe in your book and support you is incredibly important, and I am fortunate to have found both in Bloomsbury.
AABP: What writing/publishing advice do you give to aspiring writers of any age?
Prof. Nandini: Find a story that you really want to share, and face up to complexities. It is significantly easier to reduce things to linear lines of narrative, and to binaries, but reality is rarely that simple, and neither should be the stories – whether fictional or non-fictional – that we choose to tell.
AABP: What do you feel about Arko Datto to reinterpret ‘Courting India’ – through photography.
Prof. Nandini: I am very grateful to the Hawthornden Foundation and the British Academy for suggesting this wonderfully generative and imaginative project. It has been exhilarating for me to see aspects of the book refracted through Arko’s lens as he moved through some of the same spaces that I had approached primarily through over four-hundred-year old records. At the same time, it has reminded me repeatedly – with precision, empathy, and humour – how closely the past and the present is interwoven into the very fabric of everyday life in present-day India.
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