How to Greet an Elephant: Three Cross-cultural Encounters and the First English Embassy to India

We welcome Prof. Nandini Das from Exeter College, University of Oxford, to present the paper 'How to Greet an Elephant.'

Tuesday, 12 March, 4:15 pm (GMT)

Abstract:

As James I’s ambassador, Sir Thomas Roe represented a kingdom that was beset by inner strife and financial woes, and deeply conflicted about its own identity. The court he entered in 1616, on the other hand, was that of the ‘Great Oliphant’ (elephant), the wealthy and cultured Mughal emperor, whose dominion in India was widely considered to be one of the greatest and richest empires of the world. Roe was an ambassador on the back foot. Drawn from Nandini Das’s recent book, Courting India, this is the story of that meeting and others around it, and of the entanglement of cultural memory and cross-cultural encounters. Attending to that moment reveals a world whose stakes are at once familiar and disconcerting. It is familiar because so many things start taking shape that will describe the contours of global geopolitics in centuries to come; disconcerting because so much that lies behind it all – its contexts, its imperatives – radically challenge our sense of the way Britain and its empire will see themselves in those centuries. It is no easy resting place, but it is an illuminating one.

Biographical note:
Nandini Das is Professor of Early Modern English Literature and Culture at Oxford University and Fellow of Exeter College, and holds an honorary professorship at the University of Liverpool, UK. She works on Renaissance literature and cultural history, with special emphasis on travel and cross-cultural encounters between Europe and Asia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She has written Robert Greene’s Planetomachia (2007), Renaissance Romance: The Transformation of English Prose Fiction, 1570-1620 (2011), and published widely on Renaissance literature and cross-cultural encounter. With Tim Youngs, she has co-edited The Cambridge History of Travel Writing (2019), and is editing the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Travel, Race and Identity in Early Modern England. She is volume editor of Elizabethan Levant Trade and South Asia in the Oxford edition of Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations, and as project director for the ‘Travel, Transculturality and Identity in Early Modern England’ (ERC-TIDE) project, she has co-written and edited Keywords of Identity and Lives in Transit, about early modern English concepts around identity and race and the lives they touched. Her most recent book, Courting India: England, Mughal India, and the Origins of Empire, received the 2023 British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding.