Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adichie had once delivered a talk titled ‘The Danger of a Single Story’ where she had said, “The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with them is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.” And in the same veins of what she had said, Jonathan Gil Harris has written his book, The First Firangis, which attempts to trace the origins and stories of the first foreigners who had come and settled in India, in the 16th and the 17th century. They were slaves, soldiers, artisans, pirates trying to escape poverty or religious prosecution in their own countries. And some even came seeking sheer adventure.
Their experiences are recounted alongside Jonathan’s, who has been visiting India for the past 15 years and decided to shift base to the country in 2011. He describes The First Firangis as a masala book, “That’s because it is partly an academic book and also a popular one. It is partly history and also an autobiography. I think there is a way in which we are all masala (a mixture) in terms of our identity as an Indian — one single thing which is a concoction of cultures, languages and tradition,” he says.
Jonathan, a professor of English and Dean of Academic Affairs at Ashoka University, found it quite difficult to research for the book as there weren’t clear historical records of those who migrated to India — in some cases, these people were illiterate and poor or else they did not write their life stories simply because they didn’t want to enter the public record. “But in Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri (autobiography of Mughal emperor Jahangir), I found a reference to one firangi, Hunarmand, an extraordinarily gifted jeweller and artisan who designed some of Jahangir’s thrones. After researching, I discovered that he was actually from the Basque region of France and had come to India in the 17th century. In a way, my primary archive was my own body, I couldn’t recreate the full stories of these migrants because I didn’t have full records. What I could do is consult my own body and its experiences of adapting to all sorts of Indian phenomenon to understand how these migrants, 400 years ago had to adapt in order to become Indian,” he adds.
The author, who specialises in Shakespeare, says that in a way his book is a departure from his previous writings, but it still has references to the Bard who had always written about the idea of foreigners. “In my book, I write about one Sebastiao Goncalves Tibau, a salt trader at the Bay of Bengal, in an island near the mouth of Ganga, who happens to get elected as the Delta Raja. I look at his life on the island through the prism of Shakespeare’s play, The Tempest, which was written around the same time (1613),” he adds.
Jonathan’s book tries to assert that India has been at the crossroads of so many waves of immigration which aren’t simply about military might or economic oppression. The stories that these firangis help us realise is that there are other ways too, in which cultures can come in contact with each other. The author says, “India is and has always been a plural multicultural society. But some of the ideas today, claim to reach back to the concept of traditional pure Indianness by committing violence against this pluralism. India has an extraordinary record of tolerance for difference and that is a tradition that we really need to cherish at a time, when I fear, it is coming under a bit of attack.”
