THE FIRST FIRANGIS:Remarkable Stories of Heroes, Healers, Charlatans, Courtesans & other Foreigners who Became Indian by Jonathan Gil Harris

Author:Jonathan Gil Harris [Harris, Jonathan Gil]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Aleph Book Company
Published: 2014-12-31T18:30:00+00:00

In the Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri, we hear about a Mughal courtier named Sikander Zul-Qarnain who has been made faujdar (commander) of Sambhar, a lake-town in Rajasthan. Zul-Qarnain, we are told, is the Christian son of Iskandar, an Armenian who had served Akbar; he has inherited his command from his father, the previous faujdar of Sambhar. The Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri tells us too that Akbar had given Iskandar in marriage to the daughter of one Abdul Hai Firangi, also an Armenian Christian. (‘Hai’ was a common Mughal term for Armenian.) All we are told of Abdul Hai Firangi’s daughter is that she ‘was in service in the royal harem’, and that ‘by her’, Iskandar had ‘two sons’.

Some more light is cast on Abdul Hai in the Ain-i-Akbari. Here, if it is indeed the same Abdul Hai, he is referred to as the qazi of the Imperial Camp—in effect, Akbar’s chief justice. He is also referred to as khoja and amir, titles that roughly translate as ‘sir’ and ‘lord’ and indicate his high status in the multicultural Mughal court. But there is no mention of his daughter in any of the Akbar-era chronicles of the Mughals. To obtain information about her, we have to turn instead to a Latin letter written in 1628 by the Italian Jesuit priest Francesco Corsi to his handlers in the Vatican. Corsi lived in Agra from 1604 until his death in 1635; he is a fairly reliable reporter, as he evidently had come to know Abdul Hai Firangi’s family well. Unfortunately, he never met the Armenian’s daughter, who died before Corsi’s arrival in Hindustan, and he tells us next to nothing about her. But Corsi does tell us her name: Juliana.

As the daughter of a high-ranking courtier, Juliana must have been housed in one of the plusher apartments of the royal harem. This would have made her, if not a surrogate member of Akbar’s family, then a part of the larger network of wards for whom he took responsibility. And it was probably in this capacity that Akbar offered her as a bride to her fellow Armenian Christian, Iskandar, in about 1590. Corsi refers to Iskandar as ‘Mirza Sikander’: the Persian honorific mirza means ‘prince’, a title befitting Akbar’s award to Iskandar of the faujdari of Sambhar, a strategically important town located next to the Mughal Empire’s largest salt mine. ‘Sikander’ is the Persian version of Alexander the Great, though Iskandar was not a warrior like his namesake but a merchant. According to Corsi, Iskandar was born in Aleppo. But he had also lived in various cities of India—possibly including Goa, as he was proficient in Portuguese. Indeed, Akbar’s strong support for the émigré Armenian Christian community had much to do with the transnational web of trading connections that Armenian merchants had established from the Levant through Persia to Portuguese India. Once he found service with Akbar, Iskandar may have used these connections to help turn the salt mine of Sambhar into a profitable venture for the empire as well as himself.

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