In the first instalment of this blog, Ladan Niayesh identifies two key terms derived from Persian and Arabic that were first used by Europeans in the early modern period to refer to types of gift given and received during their encounters with Eastern courts. First, peshkash, a present made to a ruler in recognition or anticipation of a privilege to be granted, for example a new appointment. Second, khilat, a gift presented by a ruler or another ‘acknowledged superior’ to someone of a lower rank, closely associated with the public display of authority and munificence.

            Both types of gift were important to the English East India Company’s exchanges with Mughal authorities in India from the outset, as Thomas Roe’s visit to the court of Emperor Jahangir (r. 1605-27) shows. Arriving in December 1615 in the north Indian city of Ajmer, where Jahangir’s court was then based, Roe’s aim was to secure permission to trade for the Company, which had been founded in 1600. Though not the first Englishman at Jahangir’s court – several representatives of the Company had already been received by the emperor – Roe’s visit signalled the intensification of English diplomatic efforts towards the Mughals; serving as ambassador to King James I, his arrival at Jahangir’s court marked the beginning of direct diplomatic relations between the English and Mughal thrones.[i]

            A few days after his arrival at Ajmer, while still recovering from the arduous journey across land from Surat, Roe was summoned before Jahangir. Gifts of an English horse-drawn coach, a scarf and a sword were presented to the emperor, before Persian translations of King James’ letters to him were read. At a second audience a few weeks later, Roe then presented Jahangir with an English-made clock. For reasons which we will explore below, closely related to the role of gifts in diplomatic relations, the English request for trading rights in Mughal territories was not immediately granted. Roe was forced to spend the next three years at Jahangir’s court, during which time he also presented the emperor with a miniature by the celebrated miniature portrait artist Isaac Oliver, before an imperial edict (firman) confirming English trading rights was finally secured.[ii] By this point, the gift-giving had been reciprocated, Jahangir presenting Roe with a gold cup inset with rubies and emeralds. During his stay at the Mughal court, Roe was also gifted one or two of the emperor’s horses and presented with copies of Oliver’s miniature that Jahangir had requested his court artists to produce.

            Important in these exchanges were not just, of course, the items gifted but the processes of their giving and reception, which were rich in symbolism and ceremony. Roe presented his gifts to Jahangir in the emperor’s audience chamber (durbar), where visitors were usually received, Jahangir looking down on his guests from a throne on an elevated platform, surrounded by members of his court. The later performance of khilat, when Roe was presented with the gold cup, involved the conferring on the Englishman of a golden cloak lifted from Jahangir’s shoulders, a ceremony denoting the acceptance and integration of Roe into the Mughal polity on the part of its highest authority.

What emerges most clearly from the English sources relating to Roe’s stay at the Mughal court, however, is an understanding of gift-giving and receiving as transactional; gifts were considered not as disinterested offerings made through largesse but as contributions towards specific ends, sometimes even as a form of payment. What was gifted was ultimately more important than the processes of giving and reception and what they signified. At Ajmer, Roe worried that the gifts that the English crown had asked him to present to Jahangir – notably the horse-drawn coach – were insufficient to impress the emperor and decided to add the scarf, the sword and later the miniature from his personal possessions, hoping that the latter would pique Jahangir’s curiosity and be appreciated for its rarity.[iii] In parallel, he lamented that he had nothing to offer other influential members of Jahangir’s court, including the empress, Nur Jahan. Roe was right to be concerned. Jahangir, we are told, accepted the presents courteously, and later made use of the coach, but decided that Roe’s presents were insufficient, asking the Portuguese Jesuits at his court why, if the King of England was a great monarch, he had ‘sent presents of so small value’ and letting it be known that what he really expected was some jewels.[iv] By requesting his court artists to make copies of the miniature, the emperor indicated to Roe that the artwork was not so rare or interesting after all, and demonstrated that his artists were equal or superior in talent to their European counterparts.[v] 

To make matters worse, embassies from the Portuguese at Goa and the Safavid dynasty of Persia arrived at Ajmer in early 1616, bearing much more impressive gifts than those that Roe had been able to produce. The Portuguese embassy was a particular problem, given that its object was to dissuade Jahangir from permitting English trade in the Mughal Empire. Before long, Roe was admitting defeat, reporting to the Company’s directors in London that, faced with Portuguese competition, ‘articles of treaty on equal terms I cannot effect; want of presents disgraced me.’[vi] Only with the arrival of a new English fleet at Surat in the final months of 1616, carrying more gifts for Jahangir, did the situation change, renewing hopes of a formal contract with the emperor. When the English delegation transporting these gifts arrived at Ajmer, however, Jahangir reportedly broke with protocol by taking possession of them without first summoning Roe to an audience. The emperor then insisted on keeping all the new objects from England for himself, including presents destined for other members of court, velvet and silk intended for sale, and a hat meant for Roe himself! It was in the diplomatic fall-out from this incident that permission for trade was finally secured, leading Roe, who had at first been angered by Jahangir’s breach of protocol, to conclude that, if the emperor kept his promises, he was ‘happily robbed’.[vii]  

For his part, Roe was not immune to diplomatic faux pas either, suggesting a degree of incomprehensibility on both sides. During his stay at Ajmer the English ambassador had little patience for the intricacies of Mughal court ceremony, seeing for example in the exaggerated servility of the Persian envoy towards Jahangir something undignified. When Jahangir offered him the golden cup, his first reaction was to refuse it, responding that ‘all he desired was that his countrymen, the English, might have a free, safe, and peaceable trade in his dominions.’[viii] Such a response reveals Roe’s lack of understanding of khilat: the ambassador did not realise that by offering a gift to Roe, accompanied by the symbolic conferral of the cloak from his own back, Jahangir was confirming his acceptance of the Englishman – and by extension of all Englishmen – in the Mughal polity. Preoccupied by his conception of the gift-as-transaction (or payment), usually from an inferior towards a superior, Roe failed to comprehend the meaning of the present that Jahangir offered. Only once the misunderstanding was cleared up, and assurances offered that a firman granting trading privileges would follow, were the cup and symbolic conferral of the cloak accepted.

Throughout his time at Ajmer, peshkash remained a more consistent preoccupation to Roe than khilat. Informed by his experiences at the Mughal court, Roe concluded that jewels, swords, knives, works of art, furniture and wine were all presents likely to win favour with Indian rulers. Quality of workmanship was important, he suggested, along with the novelty of the objects gifted. Above all, however, it was the perceived material value of gifts that mattered. To ensure the future of the English company in India, presents would have to be given generously and regularly, not just to the emperor but to his governors in each region of the empire where trade was conducted. ‘It is the custom to change the governors here every year,’ Roe cautioned. ‘New humours must be daily fed; and presents are here expected as due as the king’s customs.’[ix]  

As historians have established, repeated demands for gifts and payments to preserve trading privileges were, by the late seventeenth century, one of the key sources of antagonism between European and Mughal parties in India, provoking war between the English East India Company and the Mughals in the 1680s and contributing to the English decision to establish de facto control over parts of the Mughal Empire, most notably the province of Bengal, in the following century.[x] In this sense, the significance of peshkash to changing European-Mughal relationships of power is understood. In contrast, instances of khilat, in which gifts were offered by ruling authorities to their inferiors, merit further research – not least as, after 1750, Mughal structures of authority were undermined, and relationships of power between Mughal authorities and Europeans turned on their head.

[i] English archival material relating to Roe’s embassy, including the ambassador’s journal and letters, was collected together and published as W. Foster (ed.), The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to the Court of the Great Mogul, 1615-1619 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1899). The spelling and capitalisation of extracts quoted below has been modernised for ease of understanding.

[ii] On the miniature and its significance, see A. V. Dulac, ‘Miniatures between East and West: The Art(s) of Diplomacy in Thomas Roe’s Embassy’, Études Épistémè, 26, 2014 (https://doi.org/10.4000/episteme.343). Accessed 3 June 2022.

[iii] Dulac, ‘Miniatures between East and West’

[iv] Foster (ed.), Embassy, vol. 1, p. 119. Unfortunately, the Jahangirnama, the key Persian chronicle of Jahangir’s reign, makes no reference to Roe’s embassy. For Jahangir’s actions and views, we are therefore forced to rely on the English sources.  

[v] Dulac, ‘Miniatures between East and West’

[vi] Foster (ed.), Embassy, vol. 2, p. 346.

[vii] Foster (ed.), Embassy, vol. 2, p. 384.

[viii] Foster (ed.), Embassy, vol. 1, pp. 256-7.

[ix] Foster (ed.), Embassy, vol. 1, p. 94.

[x] See R. Ivermee, Hooghly: The Global History of a River (London: Hurst, 2020), pp. 70-88.   

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