British Empire
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘British Empire’
Hannah Mullens describes her battle to reach out to wealthy Indian ladies with nothing to do, nothing to think about and nowhere to go.
From the 1850s, Calcutta-born Hannah Mullens (1826–1861) travelled all over India trying to bring literacy, self-respect and spiritual consolation into the dreary leisure of zenanas, the cloistered women’s quarters of well-to-do Indian families. The following account is taken from a letter she wrote from Nagercoil on India’s southernmost tip, then in the Kingdom of Travancore.
Emperor Akbar’s court physician told his nobles that beneath the waters of a lake was a dry, cosy room, and dared them to find a way in.
In April 1594, Persian physician and inventor Hakim Ali Gilani (?-1609) laid a challenge before the open-mouthed courtiers of Emperor Akbar, then in Lahore. He showed them a small pool, and assured any man brave enough to dive in that there was a perfectly dry, cosy room waiting for him beneath the dark surface.
A witness appeared before a Calcutta court, only to find that judge and learned counsel were determined to discredit her.
While visiting London in the early 1800s, Mirza Abu Taleb Khan was brazenly but quite legally defrauded of ten shillings by a litigious tailor, and he had heard hair-curling tales of similar judicial malpractice in Calcutta. He had also heard, however, of one occasion when the attorneys were given a taste of their own medicine.
When he left Calcutta in February 1799 for a tour of Europe, Abu Taleb Khan scarcely expected to spend so much of his time in England trying to keep out of the courts.
On January 21st, 1800, Mirza Abu Taleb Khan arrived in London, full of eager anticipation. What he never foresaw was the trouble he would get from litigious shopkeepers and tradesmen, who repeatedly defrauded him with the help of a corrupt judicial system. If the Indian ever felt he was being targeted he was quickly disabused: the natives of Jane Austen’s London were being skinned daily too.
In 1585, English merchant Ralph Fitch found himself at the heart of Mughal India, as a guest at the court of Emperor Akbar the Great.
In 1600, Ralph Fitch was among the advisers engaged in the founding of the East India Company, thanks to his account of a daring tour of Syria, Iran and India from 1583 to 1591 that had gripped Queen Elizabeth I and all London. In July 1585, Fitch had arrived in the Indian city of Agra, which with nearby Fatehpur-Sikri lay at the heart of the realm of Akbar the Great (r. 1556-1605), third Mughal Emperor.
In 1756, the Nawab of Bengal allowed his frustration with British merchants in Calcutta to get the better of him.
With the Seven Years’ War brewing in Europe, no one was more pleased than Louis XV of France when in June 1756 the Nawab of Bengal, Siraj ud-Daulah, grew frustrated with the British in Calcutta and seized Fort William and all its wealth. The horrific sequel has been told in many ways: what mattered then was how it was told the following December to Admiral Watson, the man whose job it was to respond.