India between empires: the long 18th century

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Hello, Greg here.

Just a reminder before we get going that episodes of Your Dead to Me are released on Fridays wherever you get your podcasts.

But if you're in the UK, you can listen to the latest episodes 28 days earlier than anywhere else.

First on BBC Sounds.

Hello, and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously.

My name is Greg Jenner.

I'm a public historian, author, and broadcaster, and today we are joining a trading caravan and trekking all the way back to the 18th century to learn about Indian political and cultural life in this particular period.

And to help us, we have two very special guests in History Corner.

He's Associate Professor of the History of Early Modern and Colonial India at UCL.

He's a historian of economic and material life in early modern India with a special interest in trade.

You might have read one of his wonderful books, India and the Silk Roads or India and the Early Modern World.

It's Dr.

Jajit Lali.

Welcome, Jajit.

Hi, Greg.

Delighted to have you here, Anning Comedy Corner.

He's a comedian, presenter, and podcaster.

You'll have seen him all over the TV on The Mash Report, QI, Mock the Week, Live of the Apollo, the best ever series of Taskmaster, no arguments.

He's also the co-host of Pod Save the UK and a frequent guest on The Bugle podcast and Radio Force and News Quiz.

He's very busy.

And you might have seen one of his award-winning stand-up shows, including his most recent Nish, Don't Kill My Vibe.

It's Nish Kumar.

Welcome, Nish.

I'm thrilled to be here.

Genuinely, I'm so excited.

I will say, I've put myself in a bit of a difficult position here because I did study history to an undergraduate level.

So, like,

there's a lot of pressure on me to at least loosely sound like I know what I'm talking about.

And I am feeling the genuine hot flush of panic.

Just for the benefit of listeners, the three of us have sort of sat around, there's a circular seating arrangement, and it is genuinely giving me flashbacks to feeling underprepared in history seminars.

I feel underprepared and slightly damp.

And that was my state for most of 2005, 6, and 7.

Lovely.

How are you on 18th century India?

18th century India, I've got a loose bit of knowledge.

Basically, I've got some awareness of 1857,

the uprisings, and how that works.

That's the 18th century.

Oh my god, I've got it wrong immediately.

Get out, Nish.

This is going to be fun.

This is going to be an absolute disaster.

I've got almost no knowledge of the 18th century in India.

I know the white man turned up and was up to his usual malarkey.

Guilty, yeah.

That's my problem.

That's my broad, that's my broad knowledge of this period of Indian history.

The only bit of it that I, this specific Indian history I studied, we did a bit of mogul stuff because, you know, the British

state getting warmer.

In the British state education curriculum, we like to do stuff before the British turn up just to

set at the scene that it was bad.

And we didn't make things that much worse in the grand scheme of things.

And then I did a lot of stuff about the partition of India.

Okay, yeah.

But that's, that was, that was an elected choice in my A-levels.

That's the only time I studied the British Empire in my the course of my A-levels.

I don't think that can be the case 22 odd years later.

I don't believe history students are still getting to the end of their A-levels without touching the sides of some of the British Empire stuff.

You'd hope, right?

But

I will say this sad intake of breath from the two historians I'm in a room with is really concerning me because I had sort of assumed that things had the dial had shifted.

It's a process.

So, what do you know?

This brings us to the first segment of the podcast.

It's called the So What Do You Know?

This is where I have a go at guessing what you, our lovely listener, will know about today's subject.

And if you're listening from outside of India, this one might be a bit of an unfamiliar topic.

18th century India usually only comes up for British audiences through TV dramas, about the East India Company specifically, like the Tom Hardy show Taboo, or the recent one Nautilus.

If you're a fan of Indian cinema, maybe you've seen the films Panipat about the 1761 battle between the Maratha and the Afghan army, or there's Bajirao Mastani, a tragic love story set at at the Maratha court, or there's Kerala Vama Patashi Raja featuring the king of Katagam and his fight against the East India Company.

I don't know if I'm murdering these lovely words, but I'm trying my best.

But what was really going on in India in this period?

How big a role did the British actually play, as Nish has alluded to, and how easy was it to get your coffee fix in 18th century Delhi?

Let's find out.

Right, Jajit, can we start with some basics?

Because I certainly feel out of my comfort zone here.

When exactly are we talking about, and why is this such an exciting moment in Indian history?

Well, I love the 18th century so much that I like to think of a really long 18th century.

So longer than just 1700 to 1799, I really want everyone to get their value for money.

So for me, the long 18th century probably started around the 1680s when the Mughals are expanding the empire into the south, into the Indian Peninsula.

We can say it probably ended around about the 1820s, maybe even the 1840s, when the last of those great post-Mughal kingdoms were conquered by the East India Company.

And in between that, there's a whole lot of stuff going on.

It's a really exciting time of economic and cultural change and political change.

I suppose another reason why I'm interested in a long 18th century is because we think of that kind of time period when we think about British history.

So Britain from the Glorious Revolution through to the Industrial Revolution or Queen Victoria's reign.

And I think that's quite a useful framing for comparison to what's going on in India.

And one final reason why I like this long 18th century

is because

we associate that period with the Enlightenment, with coffee houses, all kinds of new material culture.

And a lot of that stuff is going on in India too.

It helps to think about all of that, I think.

Okay, so 160 years into a century.

That's a bit sneaky.

Historians do like to do that.

We do like to have very long centuries.

Well, I'm about to enter my 40s and I will be continuing to be in my 30s for another 30 years.

The long 30th year.

Yeah, I'm a big fan of

the long decade, the long century.

Time is elastic.

Okay, so we've got our sort of our frame of reference.

And I mean, you are a politics head.

I mean, you co-host a politics podcast.

You study politics at university.

You are perhaps one of the most political comedians on the circuit, I think.

So, do you know what political entities are in India at this time?

What empires, what states, what kingdoms?

Beyond my sort of loose understanding of the Mughal Empire and the coming of the East India Company, my actual knowledge of what's going on in India in this period is very, very poor.

Very poor.

And also, I think partly that's because my Indian family is from Kerala, which is the right of the southern tip of India.

And so, in some ways, it's slightly removed from some of these events.

They get very animated by communism, which continues to animate Kerala to this day.

And then they get, then a lot of them get very involved in the independence struggle in the kind of middle of the 20th century.

But no, my knowledge of what's going on politically and culturally in 18th century india is very poor okay listeners will know we've done a moghals episode before and if you want to listen to that you can it's a good one but by the 1700s they were in trouble jack ji i mean this sort of superpower this this glorious empire was on the way down.

Yeah, it's definitely a bit of a turning point compared to what came before.

So a bit of a recap since you need to fill in some of the blanks.

The founder of the Mughal Empire, he's born in Central Central Asia and he's a descendant of both Genghis Khan and Timur or Tamerlane as some people might know him, these two great world conquerors.

His name is Babur and he defeats the sultans of Delhi to establish what we call the Mughal Empire in North India in 1526.

And despite some setbacks, and there's a brief period of kind of Mughal interregnum where the Mughal Emperor is in exile in Iran.

Apart from that, the empire basically grows in fits and starts through to about the end of the 17th, early 18th centuries, to the death of the sixth Emperor Aurangzeb.

We used to talk about decline quite a lot and what historians have really tried to emphasise is that there's a process of change and transformation that occurs

after

the empire starts to retreat territorially.

The Emperor Aurangzeb, he dies and there's a period of factionalism at court.

There's a lack of clear leadership and that's when I think the imperial centre starts to lose a grip over some of the outlying provinces.

Fast forward a couple of decades, 1739, and that's when Nadir Shah marches from Iran into North India and he sacks the capital city.

He carries off all kinds of treasure, including the Kohnu Diamond, which is now in the Crown Jewels, back to Iran.

It has a really interesting history of how it ends up in the Crown Jewels, but that's for another show, maybe.

It is.

And it's that invasion of 1739 that really emboldens people who are hungry for a bit of power of their own to maybe show a little bit less deference to the imperial centre,

start going it alone a little bit.

Because of course that that invasion really dents the prestige of the Mughal dynasty and the Mughal family.

So I would say there are two really important turning points.

I mean historians hate turning points, but there are two really important turning points.

One is the death of Aurangzeb in 1707, and I guess the other would be another Shah's invasion in 1739.

And we also have an Afghan ruler, Ahmed Shah Abdali, as well.

He's sort of coming in from a different direction.

Same direction.

Same direction.

Same direction.

Ahmed Shah actually is part of that invasion in 1739.

So he's a military general who is co-opted by Nader Shah.

And in 1747, when Nader Shah is assassinated,

spoiler.

Ahmed Shah Abdali creates his own kingdom in Afghanistan and he creates his own empire.

We call it the Durrani Empire.

It means pearl of pearls.

Where is that happening?

The capital is in Kandahar.

It then expands into bits of what is now Iran and into North India.

Wow.

And he in Amit Shah

conquers bits of India.

He has these series of raids into North India, including in 1757, he reaches the imperial capital at Delhi, and he sort of holds the imperial nobility to ransom.

Wow.

That takes some serious Kandahar to Delhi is not a short journey.

No, it's not a short journey.

I'm not a geographer, but even I know that's a long way.

It is a long way.

And a lot of treasure gets, falls off the wagons on the way back from Delhi to Kandahar.

It's fallen off the wagon a euphemism for stolen.

Yeah.

Like how Derek Trottle sold some things that had fallen off a wagon.

Back of a lorry, yeah.

Okay, good.

So we've got various independent states throughout India because the Mughals sort of retrench, not necessarily decline, but as they, you know, their territories

reduce perhaps.

So we've got independent states in Bengal, we've got Awad, we've got Hyderabad, we've got Sikhs in Punjab.

There's different powers rising or perhaps just rising to prominence.

Yeah, and there's a real range of different kinds of people who are seizing the moment there.

So some of the...

the states that you've mentioned, Bengal, Hyderabad, others, these are created by real insiders.

So these are

men who were appointed as provincial governors of Mughal provinces who slowly, slowly start to sort of cut their ties, maybe stop paying tribute, maybe being less deferential to the imperial centre and basically create sort of hereditary or personal kingdoms of their own.

Is that because they're post after Aangzeb dies?

No, it's really after 1739.

It's really after Nader Shah's invasion.

Right.

What's going on in Kerala at this point?

What are my my ancestors up to?

Yeah, it's really hard to slot that into the story.

What are my lads up to?

Yeah, there's a lot of really exciting stuff, but it's not really post-Moogle.

It doesn't really fit into that story.

It has a really exciting, independent story of its own.

I'm always trying to figure out what's going on with my lads.

We're always off doing our own thing.

Let's talk about one of the rising powers then.

This would be the Maratha.

Is it in the Deccan Peninsula?

That's in a sort of centre of the Indian subcontinent.

They've got a leader by the name of Shivaji, is that right?

What would you like to know about him, Greg?

I would like to know.

Well, I mean, actually, I'm going to ask Nish, why do you think he has fallen out with the Mughals?

Well, he, Shivaji's, as a name, suggests that he's Hindu.

So is it a religious schism with the Mughals?

Interesting, yes.

No.

Oh.

Listen, it's nice to have laughs.

I should laugh at people's mistakes.

No, no.

It's not.

It's not what I wouldn't know.

That's a mistake.

I think that's a sincere word.

No, no, listen, I'm here to learn.

No, in fact, actually, Shivaji, like many people of many different faiths in this period, serves masters of other faiths.

Right, yeah.

These kinds of distinctions between different religious groups are being made in this period, but they're maybe not as hard

and rigid as they've become today.

Yeah, right.

So we can kind of look back and we can sort of over-determine these kinds of religious conflicts.

That's not to say that there aren't religious conflicts, but they are really, these religious boundaries are becoming ossified in this period.

In fact, he serves a number of Muslim masters.

His family are from fairly humble stock.

Within a couple of generations, they've served Muslim rulers in the south of India, in the Deccan.

And they've risen up the ranks.

They've been made landed gentry of a sort.

When the Mughals start moving into the south, into the Deccan, they start trying to expand their empire into the peninsula.

Shivaji thinks this might be a good moment for him, so he tries to sort of broker an agreement with the Mughals.

But I don't think the Mughals take him perhaps as seriously as they should have taken him.

And I think that's where one of the falling outs happens.

Wouldn't be the first time that the Mughals

think of outsiders in this manner.

I mean, they write about Afghans in this way.

They write about various groups who, over the 18th century, are coming to power in and around Delhi.

They see them as sort of people people who are outside of the Mughal order, who people are uncivilized or a bit rough around the edges.

In the end, it doesn't really matter because what Shivaji does is he has himself coronated as a king.

And in 1674, he assembles a group of Brahmin priests who perform all the necessary rituals in order to have him crowned as a Chhatrapati, a lord of the umbrella, which is kind of like a kind of lordly title.

It's a baller move.

Get yourself crowned king.

I'm amazed it doesn't happen more often.

Listen, if you're listening right now and you own your own home, congratulations to you.

Why not declare yourself the king of it and see how you go from there?

It's as made up as the actual king.

So Shivaji founds essentially the Maratha kind of empire.

I mean, it rises, it grows, it expands, it suddenly becomes a dominant power in the central region, the Deccan Peninsula.

And what's the political arrangement?

So, yeah, the empire is expanding, and I think the Marathas really seize the moment after Aurangzeb's death and the political instability in the imperial court, as well as the lack of clear leadership to expand in the south.

A really key development is the sharing of power with the Peshwas.

And the Peshwas are basically, they're like the prime ministers, and they basically become the de facto rulers of the Maratha lands, which are kind of expanding through the 18th century.

And they do lots of really great stuff.

So, they, I sound like I'm on their payroll, They

attract talented, literate elites.

They entice them to work in their bureaucracy.

And the bureaucracy is becoming kind of more streamlined and more efficient.

And it's also under the Maratha Peshwas that relatively poor banking and credit facilities in the south are improved.

And that's really important for trade and for the health of the economy as a whole.

Let's talk about the Rajput Empire as well, because this is another power rising and suddenly having a good time.

Where is this in the geography of India?

In the north?

The Rajputs that most people think about when they think about the rajputs i'm sure lots of people are thinking about the rajputs a lot of the time um

are the ruling houses

oh my goodness how many times today oh five times at least it's a slow day today

So the grandest of all the Rajput royal houses are the ones that are in what's today Rajasthan.

One of the preeminent Rajput kingdoms is Merwar or Udepur, which was ruled by the Sasodia dynasty.

Incidentally, Udepur is where the James Bond film Octopusy was filmed.

If you go there, you can pretty much see it on loop every single night.

One of the boldest casting choices in human history.

They needed to cast an Indian.

Who did they go to?

One of the actors from the second biggest film industry in the world, I think, at the time?

No, tennis player.

Tennis player.

The main Indian dying octopus is Vijay Amritraj.

He's a tennis player.

As well as the Udepur Rajput court at Marwar, there are the Rattars with their capital at Jodhpur, and then the Kachwahas in neighbouring Jaipur.

Udepur and Jaipur and Jodhpur, these are the places that lots of people go to on holiday.

They're on countless documentaries.

They give us that image of royal India as sort of castles and palaces and elephants.

So they are the Rajput sort of dynasties that we think of.

Let's add another empire into our catalogue of empires, the Sikh Empire, which I guess is almost into Afghanistan as well.

I mean,

we're in northwest India now.

The Sikh Empire does abut Ahmed Shah's and his descendants' kingdom.

So at its height, the Sikh Empire reaches towards what is now called the Northwest Frontier.

But the Sikh Empire is one that's formed quite late in the 18th century.

In fact, right at the end of the century, which is why I like the idea of a long 18th century.

What's happening beforehand is also, I suppose, really important.

So if you don't know the Sikhs are followers of the teachings of Guru Nanak and his descendants.

Guru Nanak was actually alive at the time that the first Mughal emperor came to march down to North India and conquered India from the Delhi Sultans in 1526.

And after his death the Sikhs are led by a succession of other gurus and some of them choose to militarize the Sikhs.

The Sikhs are in conflict with the Mughals but also other powers and sometimes amongst themselves in the early 18th century.

The Sikh rulers form a number of different kingdoms of their own based around their military units or missiles.

And then it's in 1799 that these missiles are united by Ranjit Singh into the Sikh Empire.

So it's 12 missiles that combined into an empire.

So Maharaja Ranjit Singh captured Lahore in 1799.

That's your big year that you wanted to sneak into the long 18th century, right?

Yes, and he is alive until...

Wait, what year have we snuck in?

1799, which, you know, right at the tail end.

But then,

come on, that's in, that's in the century.

It's like when a movie comes out in 1999, you're like, it's an 80s movie.

It's an 80s movie.

Sure, but he keeps ruling for ages, right?

Yeah, he dies in 1839.

And his descendants are also on the throne for a couple more years, but that's when the East India Company sort of swoops in.

We'll get to that bit later, Jackie.

But yeah, he sort of rules for almost four decades.

He's kind of parallel to i guess almost the beginning of queen victoria isn't he he really sort of sees a huge amount of history there and now it's time to introduce the the cameo that we've all been waiting for into the the story who am i talking about nish the east india company yes the whites are here

it wasn't just actually the british it was the dutch as well right oh good knowledge yeah yeah it was there was a dutch east india company as well

yeah yeah

why did none of these people have their own names

what would you what would you have pitched as a a name?

I don't know.

I'm trying to think of a Dutch reference, and all I can think of is Dennis Bergkamp, the Arsenal and Holland footballer.

The Dennis Bergkamp Empire.

You're right about the Dutch.

There's actually several European nations who are elbowing their way in.

They're not invited in, right?

So, I mean, can you sort of run us through some of them?

It all began, of course, with Vasco da Gama's famous voyage to Asia.

He gets to India in 1498, and a year later, he's already back in Portugal.

And in the decades that follow for much of the 16th century, the Portuguese are exploiting this new knowledge of how to get to Asia.

They're creating a trading enterprise that runs between Portugal and Asia.

Not just India, other places too.

And other Europeans want to get in on the act.

So that's when a group of English merchants get together and form the East India Company in 1600.

And then in the Netherlands, the Dutch East India Company is created in 1602.

And then there's a whole bunch of others as well.

Some of them are private enterprises, some of them are state-run enterprises, and sometimes there are things in between.

Yeah, why are all these companies packing heat?

Like, that's what that's the thing that I've always struggled to wrap my mind around, you know, like

because, especially as we sort of live in an era where now large multinational corporations are starting to sort of almost supersede the nation-state.

Like, are we going, are we about to go back to like Amazon having a private drone army or something?

Like, no.

Although data is a lot of people.

In the interest of BBC impartiality, other companies could have a drone army.

The Metamarines.

Yeah.

One country we haven't mentioned, actually.

Nish, do you want to guess?

Another European power?

Whenever you talk about European colonisers, the Belgians are always acting up.

The Belgians are always acting up.

They're always gifting countries to their stupid kings.

But I don't think there's any Belgian.

I don't believe there's any Belgians that turn up in India, but obviously I could be.

Well, it's not Belgium and isn't the Netherlands.

The French?

There we go.

Yeah, it's the French.

The French are in India too, which is not just, it's not well known here in the UK.

Well, that's why they're Pondicherry.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, right, right, right.

I've been to Pondicherry, and you're like, why is this stuff in French?

And you're like, why?

Let's not start asking those questions because, you know, I got a British passport.

I'm in trouble if we start pulling at the thread of why there is a European influence in different parts of India.

I mean, JG, there are obviously huge conflicts in Europe between Britain and France, between various powers.

And then, of course, they're also

meeting each other in battle in India.

Are those things linked?

Are they separate?

You know, what's going on?

Yeah, so there's the War of the Austrian Succession, which is fought in Europe between 1744 and 1747.

And then there's the Seven Years' War between 1756 and 1763.

That is seven years.

And these conflicts roughly overlap with what are known as the Carnatic Wars, which are fought in India between 1746 and 1763.

And yeah, there is a sort of spillover of these European rivalries and conflicts into the international arena in this period.

The East India Company is a private company.

It has shareholders.

But it's also a national interest and it's closely related to the state.

So the East India Company can't avoid getting embroiled in some of these conflicts.

And some of these wars that are fought in the south of India are basically proxy wars between the British and the French.

There's also another European country that pops up, quite a surprising one.

These people.

No offence.

You've already guessed at Belgium, which I thought was a pretty slightly outlandish guess, but do you want to go even more unexpected?

The Spanish?

I mean, that's too sensible a guess, argument.

Right, yeah, yeah.

Oh, it's weirder than that.

I think so.

What does Luxembourg turn up for us?

Dust up.

Charmingly.

No, um, Denmark.

How does Denmark even get there?

I mean, I'd love to know.

It's a long old commute, isn't it?

All the way around.

Yeah, Denmark show up.

And their plan, Nish, is quite a charming one in some ways.

They took advantage of the Anglo-French wars and rivalry, and they offered merchants the ability to fly, well, the ability to sail under the neutral flag of Denmark so they wouldn't be attacked by either side.

They were basically a maritime VPN service.

But the important thing to stress, and I think you want to stress,

you're a historian of trade, aren't you?

I mean, the Mughal Empire was already plugged into global trade networks.

It's not that European powers showed up and said, oh, let's do trade.

Yeah, it's happening before the 18th century and it's happening before the Europeans show up.

So India is really plugged into trade networks in every direction.

So there's the caravan routes, which I've worked on a bit, between India and Central Asia, Iran, parts of Russia, so towards the north, and then going towards the west, there are all the ports in the Arab Peninsula, the Red Sea region, and East Africa.

And then, of course, there's Siam and the Spice Islands to the east.

And these are just some of the places where you either find Indian goods or you find Indian merchants.

It says in the script here that they were trading with as far away as Bristol.

How do we know that?

How is Bristol trading with India in the 18th century?

Well, by the 18th century, there's definitely trade, I think, between

England and India.

There's trade between England and India,

direct trade, once the East India Company is formed.

There are times when goods are not allowed into Britain.

So there's this real craze for cotton cloth, cotton textiles from India, calicos,

and it's such a there's such a kind of fever for it that it's there's a there's a fear that it's putting British textile manufacturers out of business.

And so goods are smuggled in from the coast.

Bristol is an important port.

But also Mexico City, right?

You know, so there's this idea that there's trade happening between India and Mexico City, which is literally the New World, you know, in the 16th and 17th century parlance.

Yeah, there's lots of really exciting new research which has been not just about trade between Asia and Europe, but trade at a more global level.

And the Spanish are moving goods between Asia and the New World, sometimes by crossing the Pacific and sometimes by using the route that goes around Africa into Europe and then to the Americas.

And what we're starting to kind of realize is that the reach of some of these goods are really global.

So it's not just the rich in England who are decorating their country houses with fine Chinese wallpapers and Indian textiles and so on.

It's also this, you know, kinds of cloth that are used in the transatlantic slave trade between Africa and the Americas and Indian cloth is a medium of exchange in the transatlantic slave trade.

But there are also fairly ordinary Mexicans who are buying Indian and Chinese goods.

Amazing.

What kinds of mainly textiles?

Or textile spices, a combination of a bunch of things?

Textiles and spices, definitely.

Indigo is a big one, isn't it?

Is that going global?

Indigo?

Because that's a...

Oh, I've got a good story about indigo.

Oh, go on then.

Yeah, give us your.

I don't know if it's a good story.

No, you've got to deliver now.

Oh, I know.

So indigo, it's called indigo because

it comes from India.

You got go India.

To get it.

There is an airline in India called indigo.

Yeah, indigo indigo.

You want indigo, you got go indie.

So the

for listeners, I'm considered to be an intelligent comedian.

So that tells you what the intellectual capacity is for the rest of my profession.

Okay, so indigo, yes.

Europeans are buying indigo from India in the 17th century.

It's all going great.

And then they decide to transplant indigo production to the Americas, so to the Carolinas, to the Caribbean.

And there they quote unquote improve how the dye is produced.

So you have to grow a plant and then you have to turn the plant into a dye.

And that, combined with other factors, puts lots of indigo production and indigo producers in India out of business.

There's also like a terrible famine in the 17th century and all kinds of other factors but that doesn't mean that people who are using indigo dye within Asia stop needing indigo dye and one of the things that happens in this period is that new places start to produce indigo dye in this period.

So in parts of Punjab near Afghanistan there are relatively new, in fact probably entirely new indigo fields, fields planted with indigo and dye that's being produced there for the caravan trade to Afghanistan and Iran and Central Asia.

And this is also happening in other places where indigo can be produced and where rulers want the revenues that come from the tax on valuable goods like indigo.

Amazing.

There's also saltpeter is a big export as well, which is used in gunpowder, right?

Yeah, that's why you need it.

Yeah, if you want to blow things up, you need saltpeter.

Another one would be the growth of the coffee house culture.

We've done an episode on the history of coffee quite recently, if listeners want to kind of check back in on that.

But coffee house culture is an arrival into India in the 18th century.

Coffee is one of many new goods that are making their appearance in India in the 17th and 18th centuries.

So we know by the 18th century that there are coffee houses in places like Delhi.

I want to work on this a bit more, actually.

I want to know more about these coffee houses.

Were they like the original coffee houses in the Ottoman world, which gave us the kind of prototype for the coffee house, or were they different?

Or was it like Gunther working there?

And like everyone hanging out talking about whether Ross and Rachel were on a break.

What bits of coffee house culture

did people have a muffin

with their coffee?

I mean those are all the really important questions.

Yes, was Phoebe on guitar?

Phoebe playing guitar.

That's what we need to know.

These are the questions we need to know.

And the interesting thing that, I mean, I'm going to have to use the dreaded C word now, capitalism.

The 18th century is the era in which people would often say capitalism is invented.

Some would say slightly earlier, but there's the idea that this is the era of like

hardcore finance almost as we think of it, like, you know, where corporations and nation states are using money

almost as a weapon somehow.

But what does capitalism mean and how is it arriving into India?

Or has it been there all along?

Well, we think of capitalism as this uniquely European invention, that it's something that emerges in Europe.

You know, these Tuscan bankers are creating banks and that's the kind of master narrative.

But one of the things we've known for quite a while now is that there are similar developments in banking and finance and trade and the market that are happening fairly simultaneously across Europe, but also the Middle East and parts of Asia, including India.

And this is not a new development in the 18th century.

This is something that has been unfurling for a long time, for at least two centuries by the 18th century.

But I think it comes to a kind of crescendo in the 18th century.

Two things stand out.

One is that the market has really encroached people's lives much more by the 18th century.

People's awareness of the value of real estate and their assets, for example, has intensified by this period.

People are really fighting over them and they're getting bits of paper signed and notarized because they know what the market for property is like, for example, and that's just one example.

I suppose the second thing that comes to mind is the growing power of merchants and bankers.

And they don't form a bourgeoisie like they do in Europe, but they are becoming more important and their relationship to the state is becoming much closer.

And that's partly because of what's happening in India in the 18th century.

So you have these new rulers and some old rulers too, rulers of these states who are building up their kingdoms.

And what do they need?

They need money.

and how are they going to get money?

They're going to get money by having a bureaucracy that doesn't leak money and by increasing the amount of production and trade that's happening within their kingdom.

So they bring land under cultivation, they try and attract new kinds of cultivation there that maybe didn't happen previously, try and create new trade routes, maybe have new kinds of manufacturing.

And merchants and bankers are financing that.

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And they're also sometimes their family members are part of that bureaucracy too.

And as well as banking, as well as merchants and as well as insurance firms and so on, that sort of thing.

We also get another profession beginning with M, an important profession, a beloved profession.

Do you want to guess what that would be, Nish?

Mirthmakers.

The first comedians emerge.

There are lots of those actually in the 18th century.

Really?

Yeah.

Fantastic.

I don't know if there are more, but they're definitely more prominent.

Wow.

No, I said beloved.

So

no, mercenaries.

We get the mercenary class who show up.

Nish, have you ever heard of Amir Khan?

Amir Khan?

Yeah.

But you meet the incredibly famous actor.

Not that one from the Khan.

And not the boxer either.

Have I heard of Amir Khan?

Of course I've heard of Amir Khan.

No, this is the third most famous Amir Khan.

After the Pugilists as well.

Jajit, who was Amir Khan the Afghan mercenary?

He's a big deal, right?

Yeah, he began his rise by serving the Marathas, who gave him a royal title and they gave him some land that he formed into a kind of principality.

He then joined the Maharaja of Jodhpur's service, Jodhpur again,

but his scheming got him into trouble, which is unsurprising given that he was implicated in poisoning one of the king's favorites.

And so he's expelled from Jodhpur in 1815.

But he wasn't unusual.

I mean, there are lots of mercenaries.

There's what I've called a whole market for violence, which already exists by the 18th century.

But in the 18th century, when there is all this competition over land to you know fashion your own kingdom and make your own state when so much is at stake those kinds of actors are becoming more powerful more important and it's not uncommon for some of them to be given land in return for their loyal service and to form principalities of their own making this even more complicated this whole patchwork of different states i mean in the end it doesn't work out for him right

I think he sort of just like goes to Tonk, which is his principality, and he just retreats and has a nice retirement.

Oh, really?

Okay.

I don't know, actually.

It's just with you don't associate mercenaries with like winding down.

He doesn't.

When you hear mercenary, you don't think gentle retirement, getting into gardening.

They do, they're up to something.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

You sort of feel with mercenaries, it's probably going to end quite badly.

So, we've talked about monarchs, we've talked about merchants, we talked about mercenaries, we've talked about mirthmakers, thank you, Nish.

Let's discuss how society was structured.

Was there a rigid class system?

Did it change during the 18th century?

Well, what most people think of when they think of India and a rigid class system isn't class, it's probably caste.

And this is the subject of quite a lot of debate.

So we know that caste

is associated with what we today call Hinduism.

We know that the Vedic texts talk about a fourfold moral order, which is comprised of Brahmins who are a priestly caste, kshatriyas who are rulers and warriors, veshyas who are involved in commerce, and then shudras who are various kinds of labouring groups.

That much we know.

What's debated is

when this system came to dominate Indian society

and

how much it dominated Indian society.

So at one extreme is the view that it's existed from time immemorial, it's always been really important.

At the other end is the view that,

at the other extreme is the view that it's the East India Company, it's the British who completely misunderstand caste and they make it much more of a thing than it ever has been or ever was.

But in between that is probably where the consensus is about caste, that actually it's through the 17th and the 18th centuries that caste is coming to become more important in more places, in more parts of India than it ever was before.

And Shivaji's coronation is a good example of this, right?

Because he...

he's from fairly humble stock, but he wants to be a kshatriya because kshatriyas are the warrior caste.

The Rajputs are all kshatriyas.

So if he wants to be recognised as a kind of prestigious king, he has to be a kshatriya.

Who does he get to invest him as a kshatriya?

Brahmins, who are the priestly caste.

So this whole coronation sort of reifies and consolidates caste and caste, the caste order.

Can we talk quickly about gender relations and the idea of perhaps masculinity, femininity?

Do we see any changes or evolutions in how relationships between men and women might be expressed?

There's some really great new work which suggests that there's not only a relationship between rulers of states, kings, kshatriyas sometimes, and merchants, but also between them and Brahmins.

And that what's happening in this period is that caste society is being made and the kind of caste order that's coming into being is much more patriarchal.

That women are seen as a kind of property and that their bodies, their bodily freedoms are becoming much more regulated as a result.

But the evidence comes from Rajasthan and I think whether we can generalize that picture across all of India, well, we have to wait and see.

What we do know about other parts of India is that, you know, like in much of the pre-modern world and like you know, today, women are really vulnerable if they don't have independent means.

And so, we see women in this period, increasingly as we get through the period, trying to build up their personal wealth.

Royal women, gentry women, occasionally some ordinary women too.

So, they are investing in property or in trade and so on in order to, in cultivation in order to amass a a fortune of their own.

The political and economic dynamism of this era was reflected in the arts.

In what way?

Well, there are lots of different arts.

The one that we know most about is painting, probably,

because it survives in a way that more ephemeral art forms like music maybe don't survive.

Comedy, yes.

Sorry.

Well, when it's written down,

people write about it sometimes.

Terrible two stars.

Yeah, exactly.

The lasting memory is a one one and a half star review I got from the Herald Sun in Australia in 2014.

And in painting, we see in this period a real growth of regional styles.

One of the things that's happening in the early part of the century is that lots of imperial artists who are working in the imperial workshops basically need a new job because things aren't so great in the centre.

And so they look for patronage opportunities further afield.

In fact, this process is starting maybe in the late 17th century before Aurangzeb's death.

And those painters, they end up in regional courts, they train others and so on.

And what you start to see is a blending of the imperial style, which

lots of rulers really like.

They have seen it at the imperial court, they associate it with Imperial Majesty with regional traditions or local traditions of painting.

And so you get this kind of hybrid styles that are very, very unique to different particular places.

You also get a sort of proliferation of the kinds of things that people are painting.

What kind of stuff are we painting?

Nudes.

What kinds of nudes?

Actually, there are nudes.

Are there?

There's got to be nudes.

Artists are turning out pictures of famous people.

So of the ruler, his clansmen, other notables in society.

This is something that they pick up from Mughal tradition.

There are hunting scenes.

Lots of the Rajput rulers paint lots of hunting scenes.

There are paintings of important manuscripts.

That's where you, you know, things like the Kama Sutra, but also other manuscripts.

Paintings of like the Indian ragas,

and also paintings of the kingdom itself.

Right, so sort of nature imagery, something like that.

Yep.

And at Udipa, there's Amar Singh II.

He's well known for patronising architectural paintings.

He's kind of interested in buildings and whatnot.

Yeah, he localizes lots of those other kinds of compositional forms to his kingdom.

So you'll see the landscape of his kingdom in the hunting scenes scenes or in some of these important texts that are illuminated and illustrated.

But also, he just has pictures of his palaces, his

lakes, the dam, and in the state, and all kinds of things painted as well.

And they're really impressive pictures.

Damn fine taste.

It's too cheap.

Have you seen my dam?

It's an incredibly boring conversation piece.

Look at this painting of a dam.

Oh, my God.

He's going on about the dam again.

Oh god.

Damn, not the dam again.

There's also a poetry scene, Nish, but it's a battling poetry scene.

It's a competitive

rat battles.

Oh, that's exciting.

Yeah, it's exciting.

That's very exciting.

It's basically eight-mile, but probably it's slightly fancier, I guess.

Yeah.

Everyone's in a court.

It's not quite as scuzzy as a Detroit basement.

Well, as the arts, we've also got patronising of science and scholarship as well.

I mean Jai Singh II is renowned for the patronage of thinkers and

people who study things.

Yeah, Jai Singh builds these impressive observatories.

They don't really look like observatories as we would sort of imagine an observatory, like one building with a telescope.

They're often made of a collection of different buildings, a couple of stories high, that are used to calculate the movement of the celestial bodies.

And that's why they're called jantar mantaras, which means, literally means calculation instruments.

And he builds them.

There's one in Jaipur, there's another in Delhi, but he also builds others across Mughal North India.

So, to make all the calculations that he needs, Jaising employs scholars expert in knowledge found in Sanskrit, in Persian, in Arabic treatises on astronomy and mathematics, and they use their data to prepare a text that Jai-Singh dedicates to the Mughal Emperor, but it's used widely across North India and other parts of the Islamic world.

What's in the text?

It's a series of data tables.

Oh, wow.

That's kind of disappointing if you spend a quite a lot of money and then.

They're pretty important, though.

I know, but you're like, come on, it's a spreadsheet, mate.

Come on.

I was hoping for a picture of a dam.

I dedicate the spreadsheet to the emperor.

Shout out to my main man.

If you look at column B12, it's actually really interesting data.

So we have multiple.

It's a rough audio book to listen to as well.

Really rough audiobook.

So we've got scholarship, we have multilingual manuscripts.

We have, you know, I said Persian, Arabic, English?

English, German, French,

Latin, Bengali, Hindi.

Okay, so

it's a really multicultural, multi-faith, multi-sort of traditional world we're talking about here.

India is all sorts of things happening simultaneously.

Well, Jessing, definitely, yeah.

Oh, really good.

This is just at his court.

Well, there are other observatories and other kinds of learned astronomers doing important things in other parts of India.

It's just that we know much more about Jessing because he makes these massive observatories and he writes this much more interesting book than we're giving him credit for.

He's also into city planning, Jessing.

He's big on kind of the ideal city.

Nish, what would be your ideal city?

If you could start from scratch and

if you could build Nextropolis.

Nextropolis.

I think when you go through...

the grid systems in American cities, you think, well, that does make a lot of sense.

If you can plan that out, it does mean that you're never fully lost, but then you do lose something of the charm of the thing that I think is interesting about London is it's never been planned.

And actually, I would say Mumbai has the same energy.

There's no one has planned these cities.

Like these were cities that sort of just grew sort of organically.

And it looks like a kind of wild tree stand when you actually look at it from above.

Whereas North American cities were sort of, you know, they operate on a grid system and i can see the logic of that but i do sort of like

i like i enjoy the charm of a city that's that's sort of like a wild bush essentially that's just like grown outwards from a river like i so if if i'm honest whilst on paper i can see the grid system would really help me i would call i i quite like the wildness of streets that just curve around.

If you're in the middle of London and you follow a street that you think is parallel, you get lost so quickly because when you look at it from above, you realize some, let's face it, probably drunk guy, just drew a sort of line that loops off into the middle of, like, it just sort of curves neatly off.

So, yeah, if I would definitely say green space, I think, is essential, especially if

you want a lot of housing.

And the easiest way to build a lot of housing is to build sort of apartment blocks.

And so if you're doing that, you absolutely need to have public green space.

You've got to have a cinema.

But I suspect that's obviously.

we're 100 years off anyone having that conversation.

So

I could understand that that might not have made the cut.

You've got to have a cinema, you've got to have parks, you've got to have a theatre, preferably around 800 to 900 seats, depending on your population size for me to do tour shows in.

And you've also got to have some kind of transportation system.

This isn't rail.

All very sensible.

All I heard, really, though, was you wanted your wiry bush.

That's all I heard.

As soon as you said that, my brain just went, Nish is wiry bush.

And that's what we're calling the city.

So I'm really sorry, Nish.

That was a lovely answer.

JG,

actually, J-Sing's city was a grid system.

It was a grid, yeah.

Was it really?

What you didn't say was a grid where

every bit of the, every quadrant relates to one of the planetary bodies in Vedic scientific treatises.

And where...

The intention is to produce and cultivate particular affects and particular, you know, something in the inhabitants of those quadrants.

Right, okay.

Which is because the city is a sort of microcosm for the kind of moral and cosmic order.

Right, okay.

Why didn't you say that?

So, you would have said, so New York would be a lot more chill if they built it on those cosmic orders.

Very little related to the world.

In New York, very little of that is related to that.

Yeah, yeah, very little of that is related.

Unless there's a bit of the Vedic text that I've not come across that involves someone openly urinating on a rat's house.

I don't know which bit of the Vedic text that's it, but there's very little moral and cosmic things going on in that city.

Amazing.

The nuance window!

Well, it's time now for the nuance window.

This is the part of the show where Nish and I pull out our paintbrushes and poetry books for two minutes while Dr.

Jajit takes centre stage to tell us something we need to know about India in the 18th century.

My stopwatch is ready.

So take it away, Dr.

Jaijit.

Well, I think what has become clear by now is that the 18th century was a really exciting, really dynamic time.

It's full of lots of opportunities,

some hazards too, but this isn't how we've always seen the 18th century.

And to grasp just how much our understanding has changed, I think it pays to go back to the period itself.

Now, from the point of view of Mughal writers, anyone who rocked the boat was tarred as a rebel and often seen as being a ruffian from outside the Mughal order.

Another important set of source materials we have on the 18th century are those histories that are written by men working for the East India Company after the colonial conquest had begun.

And these writers had a vested interest in helping the company legitimate its new spoils.

And so they portrayed it as, they portrayed the company as the font of order and peace and prosperity.

That conquest would help Indians out of the chaos that supposedly reigned supreme.

So these two very different groups of writers, some writing in Persian in and around the Mughal court, those writing in English on behalf of the company, gave us a very similar and very negative picture of the century.

And that picture more or less persisted until around about the late 1970s, when historians started to turn their attention to all these new regional courts that we've been talking about.

And they started to look at new kinds of sources in order to do that, including those Udaipura paintings, in fact.

Now, the first part of this work was really about state building, it's about revenue management, and so on.

And it showed that these new rulers and their collaborators, like merchants and bankers, were creating a political order and islands of economic prosperity at a very regional level.

More recent work in the wake of the cultural turn has focused on court culture, art, poetry, music, intellectual life, and it's shown us just how vibrant these regional centres were.

What's maybe been missed in some of this is detail about the lives of fairly ordinary people and how that was changing.

That kind of social history is something I've been fascinated by ever since I wrote my first book, and I'm sure the archives can tell us much more.

Wonderful.

Two minutes on the dots.

Well done.

Wow.

That was bang on.

Yeah.

Give a lot of lectures.

Two-minute ones.

Nish, final thoughts on 18th century India for you.

This has been great.

Like this is a, you know,

yeah,

this is really filling in like a total gap in my historical knowledge and really like

reframing the way I think about the sort of East India Company.

And even what I was saying, I think one of the things I think is interesting about

this idea of this independent sort of capitalism springing up is that even in kind of

what you would identify as politically progressive history of the region, we still talk about it as we still have this like victim narrative around it that Western capitalism in cohorts with Western governments took over these countries and we only focus on them as conquered lands essentially even when we're trying to write positive histories about them and actually it really benefits to understand that there was a whole independent culture and country that was evolving uh and to look at it through a non-european lens even when the european lens is trying to be progressive and post-colonial and anti-capitalist so what do you know now

So it's time now for this audio know-now.

This is our quickfire quiz for Nish to see how much he has remembered and learned.

Oh boy.

Nish, are you feeling confident?

You have taken

a lot of notes.

Expensive notes.

How many pages are we talking here?

We're talking one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, oh no, eight, nine, oh, wow, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen.

Thirteen pages.

How positive, aren't you?

You have excellent pages.

Well, I've just literally like, I've got no idea what's going on.

I've got to write everything.

Sally Phillips, I think, did 12 pages.

You've gone 13.

Suck it, Phillips.

You've gone.

You've written your own doctorate over here, this thesis.

Amazing.

Okay, we've got 10 questions for you.

So, question one.

Which famed Indian empire was founded by Babur in the early 1500s?

The Mughal Empire.

Ah, very good.

Straight in.

Question two, which surprising European country had Indian trading outposts and let merchants borrow its flag?

Denmark.

I love that story.

That's a wild piece of knowledge, man.

That's a really wild piece of information.

Question three, name two commonly exported Indian goods in the 18th century?

Textiles and spices.

Very good.

You could add indigo and saltpeter as well.

Question four, what profession did Amir Khan, the third most famous Amir Khan, belong to?

Mercenary.

He was.

He loved it all day long.

Question five, which northern empire made by uniting 12 missiles was formed by Maharaja Ranjit Singh in 1799?

The Sikh Empire.

Very good.

Question six, what kind of paintings were popular at the Udapur court?

Let me have a little look at my notes.

It was actually,

it was just mentioned, TikTok, TikTok.

paintings of landscapes it was landscapes buildings and dams of course oh yeah the dams yeah question seven which Rajput ruler was known for his patronage of art astronomy and learning that was my main man Jaya Singh it was the second very good question eight what was the name of the 17th century Maratha leader who had himself crowned king

that would be

Shivaji very good

I mean the note system is working very well

really

question nine what was distinctive about Jay Singh's plan for the city of Jaipur?

Uh, it was divided into the four Vedic quadrants.

Nine, yeah, nine divisions, yeah, I will give you that.

Yeah, uh, I mean, this for a perfect 10 out of 10, and I've even got a bonus question for you.

Question 10: In which Rajput capital was the 1983 James Bond film Octopussy film,

it was in Udaipur.

It was, that's 10 out of 10.

Can he get 11?

Or a bonus point: which Indian tennis player starred in the movie?

Bijay Amrit Raj.

11 out of 10, he's done it.

What What I will say is, this has been, it's showed me in some ways my intellectual capacity has not moved on from when I was a student because this is basically what I was like as a student.

Knew nothing, knew absolutely nothing, and then was able to retain quite a lot of information in quite a short-term period and then did really well on exams.

I fear that if we met tomorrow and you asked me those same questions, I would only get the one about October Secret.

That's the beauty, it's recorded.

Yeah.

You can listen to it again and again.

Every day.

You can just play it to people and say, I know this stuff because that's me on the recording.

But that whole episode in Microcosm is what I was like as a student.

Like, absolutely knew nothing.

And then right at the end, would just quickly retain a lot of information, regurgitate it, and then move on.

You are not the only comedian to have said that.

Well, thank you so much, Nish.

Thank you so much, Ajayjeed.

And listener, if you want more Indian history, check out our episodes on the Mughal Empire or on the history of Bollywood Cinema.

That was a fun one.

And if you want a different perspective on the 18th century, why not listen to our episode on black people in Georgian England?

But I'd just like to say a huge thank you to our guests in History Corner.

We have the incredible Dr.

Jagit Lally from UCL.

Thank you, Jagit.

Thanks, Greg.

It's been an absolute hoot.

And in Comedy Corner, we had the fantastic Nish Kumar.

Thank you, Nish.

Thank you very much for having me.

It was very educational.

I hope to remember some of it.

Octopusy.

And to you, lovely listener.

Join me next time as we shine new lights on historical periods.

But for now, I'm off to go and make my fortune by investing in indigo.

Hopefully I'm not hundreds of years too late.

Bye!

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