‘Courting India’ | British Academy Book Prize-winning author Nandini Das ‘wanted to give marginalised voices their due attention’

Nandini Das and her book 'Courting India'.

Every year, the British Academy — the UK’s national academy for humanities and social sciences — awards £25,000 to a “non-fiction book that has made an outstanding contribution to global cultural understanding for a wider public audience.” A professor in the English faculty of the University of Oxford, India-born Nandini Das was declared this year’s winner on October 31, 2023 for her book Courting India: England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire (Bloomsbury, 2023).

One of the most intriguing accounts of the English entry into the subcontinent, taking cues from a curious character, Thomas Roe, the first English ambassador in India, Courting India is both an unassuming and veritable literary work. Professor Charles Tripp, jury chair, notes that “by using contemporary sources by Indian and British political figures, officials and merchants (Das) has given the story an unparalleled immediacy that brings to life these early encounters and the misunderstandings that sometimes threatened to wreck the whole endeavour.” In an interview with Moneycontrol, Das shares her views on this exciting win and her forthcoming book. Edited excerpts:

What significance do you place in this recognition?

I am both delighted and deeply honoured to have received this award, particularly since Courting India was chosen from a stellar shortlist of books from which I’ve learnt an enormous amount. We live in a world that is currently at a point of crisis on multiple fronts, where the prospect of global cultural understanding seems an increasingly elusive goal. To think that Courting India may have contributed even marginally towards that goal at some level is a wonderful impetus towards my future work.

In your view, what indicated or signalled a crucial global cultural understanding?

From my perspective, the questions that drove the research that I undertook for Courting India were threefold. First among these was the intention to reassess this earliest stage of contact between the two nations on its own terms, without imposing proleptic knowledge of what the British Empire was to become. The second aspect that emerged as a result was an increasingly clearer picture of not just ‘what’ happened, but the ‘how’ and ‘why’, framed by expectations and assumptions on both sides. The third, significantly larger question is also, perhaps, the simplest one — how do encounters between cultures take shape? What Courting India hopefully illuminates is an example of that process — of [how] individual and collective memories and assumptions frame our engagement with each other, across differences of languages, religions, and cultures, and how both understanding and prejudice can grow in the interstices of such engagements.

‘It was the kind of day you were meant to remember.’ It’s a dramatic, almost novelesque, opening for a book on history. Could you share your research approach and writing process?

The research for Courting India was undertaken over more than a decade, in multiple archives, libraries, and languages. I’m very grateful that my publishers did not baulk at the thought of including the more than 1,000 notes that appear at the end of the book because it was important for me to acknowledge the sheer amount of individual and collective work that goes into creating historical understanding. At the same time, I wanted the text to be approachable, to do justice to the figures — both European and Indian — through whose eyes and writing we’ve access to this fascinating moment. I’m glad that this narrative approach has appealed to readers.

There’s a provocative sentence in the prologue: ‘The lack of acceptable evidence ensures that others are relegated to silence.’ At the risk of being an opinion-maker than a historian, how do you differentiate between extrapolating a thought from a piece of evidence and ensuring that what hasn’t been found is not silenced?

Perhaps, I should clarify — the point is not so much about extrapolation, as it is about accepted methodology. What I was saying here was that fragmentary historical records of individuals quite often do not find a place in the so-called ‘grand narratives’ of history. Yet it is individuals who drive the processes through which those grand narratives take shape. Most often, the voices that are erased are those of the marginalised, the dispossessed, [and] the minorities — made so either by their race, class, or gender. What I was keen to ensure in Courting India from the very beginning was that I was giving these voices due attention.

What made you feel interested in Thomas Roe’s personal and political journeys and his connection with Indian history?  

When I came across Roe’s journal from his embassy, and the accounts of his embassy by other contemporaries and fellow travellers, I was struck by how counter-intuitive that story was in comparison to our understanding of the British Empire in India. At the same time, Roe’s journal gives us unparalleled access into his thinking, and into the sheer messiness of individual experience — his prickly assertion of his English, Protestant superiority on the one hand, his wry humour and undoubtable honesty and sense of duty on the other. I wanted to find out more.

As your book stands testimony to the fact that history-writing has been prone to the obvious hero-villain binary, what do you do to ensure that nuance both has a place and is celebrated in historiography?

Ensuring the presence of such nuance and granularity has been absolutely central to my endeavours in Courting India. My approach to the material I examined is always driven by an interest in what made the individuals concerned tick, [and] what made them respond in certain ways. In other words, how individual negotiations and the backdrop of larger historical, political, economic, [and] cultural forces engaged with each other.

What are you working on next? 

My next book is a new history of 16th-17th-century England, written not from the perspective of kings and queens, but that of people moving in and out of the country. Some of them were voluntary migrants, others who suffered forced displacement. All of them helped to shape and define not just the history of the nation, but through England, the entangled fortunes of many of the nations and peoples across the globe, with whom England came into contact in this period and subsequently. It’ll be out with Bloomsbury in spring 2026.