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COLONIAL PROXEMICS: THE EMBASSY OF SIR THOMAS ROE

TO INDIA

Pramod K. Nayar
Published in Studies in Travel Writing 6 (2002): 29-53.

Colonialism was primarily about land, cartography and the ordering of

space(s).

It marked out several kinds of spaces: market, administrative,

cultural/museological, exotic/travel, resource, and study spaces. These spaces

were classed, racialised, and gendered. While studies of the geographicaltopographical aspects of colonialism have multiplied over the past decade, little
attention has been paid to that most immediate geography of colonial
experience: the spatial dynamics of personal interaction between the
arrivant/coloniser and the resident/native.1 Admittedly, the first British arrivals
in India were not, in the strict sense of the term, colonial. However, as I shall
demonstrate, their interaction, attitudes, descriptions and spatial dynamics with
Indians were anterior moments of a colonial spatiality that emerges in the late
eighteenth century.
For my purposes I have relied on Thomas Roes account of his stay in
India during 1615-19, The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to India..2 William
Hawkins, Roes precursor as ambassador to the Mughal court had failed to
achieve any substantial results in matters of trading privileges.

(In fact,

Hawkins was eventually ordered not to appear in the court. He had to leave
India without a reply to the letter he carried from James I to Jahangir.) Roe
endowed the English ambassadors position with significance. It was Roes
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efforts and diplomacy that resulted in the establishment of full-fledged trade
relations (sanctioned by royal writ from Jahangir himself) between the English
traders and India. More significantly for our purposes, the spatial dynamics of
exclusion and inclusion that Roe engaged in become a paradigm for similar acts
in the later Indo-British encounter. The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to India
is in several respects a dramatic text, full of theatricality, role-playing and
power-games between Roe and the Indians. The proxemics of the text serve to
highlight these dramatics.
Spatial practices in The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to India are
dramatisations within the theatre of power. Spatial dynamics of the Roe-India
interaction (India here being metonymically symbolised in the person of
Jahangir and members of his court) undoubtedly an encounter between two
elites may be profitably read in terms of proxemics. Proxemics, as Heidi
Nast and Steve Pile describe it, is a technology of spacing the body. Proxemics
teases out the simultaneously fixed and fluid nature of spatial arrangements by
suggesting that networks shift, alter and stabilise around effects of power,
meaning, subjectivity and objectivity.
explicit, open or conscious.

These effects of power are rarely

Proxemics thus describes the unconscious

relationship between the body and space.

In proxemics specific physical

locations are subordinated to the relations between locations and bodies, and
terms like near, close, distance or far away assume significance. Scale
involves specific relationships between bodies, places and power.3 Evidently,
proxemics treats spaces as lived spaces, where these are enacted, corporealised through the bodys deployments and interactions with other bodies.
Henri Lefebvre in The Production of Space sums up this role of the body in
real-ising space when he writes:
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Before producing effects in the material realm (tools, objects), before

producing itself by drawing nourishment from that realm, before reproducing
itself by generating other bodies, each living body is space, and has its space: it
produces itself in space, and it also produces that space.4

Thus space and spatiality are recursive, made, altered and mapped by
interactions of social actors. Social relationships enacted within spatial settings
are both the effects and agents of space.

If one perceives the social as

constituted by structure (context, setting) and agency (intentionality of social

actors in the context), then agents are not simply effects of spatial contexts, but
agents that effect changes in space too. Agents thus demarcate spaces where
power relations are played out in terms of practices. These may be practices
that include or exclude other agents from the circumscribed space. Thus the
body is a crucial technology for spacing, it embodies geography and
topography.
Roe adopts three specific modes of body-spacing: proximity, separation
and purification.

He maps out areas of his power within the apparently

unalterable structure of Mughal space where Roe, even as ambassador of

England, actually occupies an insignificant position and power through
proxemics. In terms of scale (in a proxemical sense), Roe moves from the
body through spaces of the house and finally to the durbar/court of the
Emperor. Each of these scales is a network of power embodied in proxemical
relations between people/bodies, selves, and positions.
The mapping, performance and sacralisation of English space, as
enacted by Roe in Jahangirs court and elsewhere in India, has a specific
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context. Roes century (his dates are 1581-1644) was a period of great social
transformation, what Lawrence Stone (referring to the period 1540-1640)
terms the century of mobility. This was not entirely a pleasant time for the
aristocracy, for its exclusivity was being steadily eroded by the influx of new
peers.5 The aristocracy began to see this influx as one of contamination of
their sacred spaces. This was also the time of the great rebuilding of English
landscape, when the aristocracy and the upper classes rebuilt their homes, with
an increasing emphasis on privacy, and producing two-storied houses with
sectioning of the house for specific functions. Country houses, parks (usually
built after eviction of whole villages and subsequent attachment of the land to
the aristocrats house as a park) began to dot the English landscape. A
sacralisation of space based on function, notions of privacy and privilege was
thus already underway in England.6
As Frank Whigham has demonstrated, individual status, lineage and
personal privileges in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century England had to be
enacted through certain manners and tropes, and did not rest simply on birth.
That is, identity and social standing could no longer rely on birth, but had
become a manner of doing, and showing.7 This notion of performance
(and the related one of theatricality) ties up with the notion of lived and
enacted space.

It is also related to what Stephen Greenblatt terms

improvisation, where the individual demonstrates an ability both to

capitalise on the unforeseen and to transform given materials into ones own
scenario. Roes spatial acts are a good illustration of Greenblatts arguments
about the improvisation of power where the European exhibits an ability to
insinuate [himself] into the pre-existing political, religious, even psychic
structures of the natives and to turn those structures to their advantage. 8
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Roes staged and improvised spatial dynamics in India, situated within
existing structures of Mughal power and spatial behaviour, is in conformity
with the strategies nobility and gentry had to adopt to reaffirm and delineate
identities back in England.
The theatrical performance of space involves three primary spatial
practices in Roe. In this essay I shall look at the following aspects of colonial
proxemics and theatricalisation of Indian space: the sacralisation of private
space around the body of Roe and his team, spatial orientation(s) and the
politics of location, and spatial practices that realise space.

The Sacralisation of Space

This sacralisation is the delineation of territory, a purification that relies on

the rejection/exclusion of the abject, a boundary-marking that becomes almost
sacrosanct, and, in the case of the Roe-Jahangir/Mughal encounter, a political
game. As we shall see, the rules of territorial visitations, and situations of
infringement and trespasses assume the status of a battle for space, and, in this
inaugural interaction, a political space where Roe is England itself, and
Jahangir symbolises India.

The sacralisation has three constitutive acts:

mapping, contact zones, and abjection and exclusion.9

(a) Mapping: This is the assertion of territorial space of the Englishmans

luggage (treated metonymically as an extension of his person) and residence.
Roes very first communication to the native officers after his arrival at the port
of Surat on 20 September 1615 maps out territorial privileges and sets up a
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spatial dynamics for the rest of the encounter.

The communication,

paraphrased by Roe himself in his account, deals with the first component of
the Indo-British proxemical encounter, the space of the Englishmans
belongings. Roe writes:

Understanding the custom of the Kings officers to search every thing that
came ashore, even to the pockets of mens clothes on their backs, for custom,
I, being an Ambassador from a mighty King, did expect to have all things
appertaining to myself and my followers free by privilege. (Roe, p. 44)

He is informed that the things would be sealed and taken without stop
(note the emphasis on the unimpeded movement of English bodies through
India) to his house. Here the Customer (the Customs Officer) would visit Roe,
not in the nature of a search, but only to be able to answer what I [Roe] had
landed; for myself and my followers, they should be free from all offer of
affront (p. 44). Roe agrees and arranges for the luggage to be taken there. A
spatial act is articulated here. As the officials inform Roe, the luggage would
normally have been searched first in the Custom House (the space of native
power) before being shifted to the residence since it was the custom of this
country that nothing could pass but by the custom house, and there to be
searched (44). The shifting of the luggage home first, and the examination
of the luggage in the confines of ones personal space rather than in an officially
designated one is a significant act: it marks a reversal of spatial authority.
However, this spatial act is not easily carried out, as Roe eventually discovers.
Roe notes that when a Principal Servant of the [native] Governor arrives the

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next day, he underestimates the status of the English Ambassador. Roe
writes:

At this name of an ambassador they laughed one upon another; it become

ridiculous, so many having assumed that title, and not performed the offices;
and though the [English] General did endeavour to make them better
understand it, they would not, and so never did offer to visit me. (p. 45, my
emphasis)

Roe notes that this insult to the person of the ambassador was only one more
in a long line of similar (proxemical) acts: I mention this only to let the
Company [the East India Company] understand how meanly an ambassador
was esteemed at my landing; how they subjected themselves to all searches and
barbarous customs (pp. 45-6). It is the gap between the accorded status and
the actual performance of office that Roe is referring to here. As we have
already noted about Roes age, it was important to enact and stage identities
publicly in order to retain them. The act of omission on the part of the natives
is a direct result, Roe notes, of similar omissions on the part of his
predecessors.
Thus it is the lack of respect for the space of the ambassadors body
and home that infuriates Roe. The natives ought to have made it a point to
visit the ambassador in his house to pay their respects. The discourtesy is thus
a spatial act of omission. As for the barbarous customs to which Roes
predecessors subjected themselves willingly, these were spatial acts of
commission and trespassed on sacralised territory when the natives searched
English bodies. Thus two sacralised spaces have been mapped: the territory of
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the English home and the English body.

Roes body-spacing suggests a

proxemical operation where the body is a mode in/through which space is

lived, practised upon and mapped out.
Further problems in demarcating his space are in store for Roe. His
convoy is stopped and the officials insist on searching the luggage (p. 47). Roe
threatens to return to the ship (which perhaps represents sovereign English
territory), and actually turns around to do so (p. 48). He is then assured that
his immediate convoy of five persons would not be searched. As for the other
members, he is told that they would only for a ceremony lay their hands about
the rest, not as to search but to embrace them (p. 48). However, the convoy
is stopped and the officials start searching. Roe is infuriated, and charging
them with his hand on his sword, informs them: I was free landed, and I
would die so, and if any of them dared touch any belonging to me, I bade him
speak and show himself (p. 50). After much argument the team moves ahead.
But the officials, instead of embracing, offered to feel his [one of the team
members] pockets, at which Roe loses his temper again (p. 51). Later, when
Roe goes to the Custom House to collect his belongings (they are not sent to
his house) he is told that it would have to be searched there first (p. 53). Roe
suggest s that he would let the luggage rot in the shed rather than have it
examined (p. 53). These aggravations and insults to English pride continue
for several days (p. 55).
Later when Roe visits the Governor, a servant offered to pull me,
whereat I laid my hand on my sword, and bade him not touch me; I knew my
way; and so went to the gate (p. 65). Roes request to Jahangirs brother-inlaw, Asaf Khan, reflects his obsession with the spaces of the belongings. Roes
list of demands emphasises spatial privileges above anything else: unimpeded
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movement of English goods and their immunity from being searched or
opened; presents from the English king would not be touched, opened, nor
meddled with; and English goods shall be despeeded to their [English] house
without let or hindrance and shall not be stayed on any pretence (pp. 152-6).
When Roe disembarks and heads towards the shore, there is a
ceremonial guard of honour on the route, with ships in their best equipage
giving me their ordinance as I passed, accompanied by trumpets and music
ahead my boat (p. 46).

The ritualistic, authoritative and theatrical

organisation of the space(s) of passage to land anticipates the theatricalisation

of the Raj that was to follow in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.10 Roe
then lands on Indian soil, and his first act is a proxemical exercise and a
prolepsis for similar spatial acts of power, subversion and resistance in his later
interactions with India(ns). Roe writes:

At my landing the chief officers of Surat with about 30 companions were

sitting under an open tent upon good carpets, in grave order. Coming almost
to them and they not rising, I stayed and sent them word I would not come
further if they sat still; whereupon they all rose, and I entered the tent and went
straight up and took my place in the midst of them, turning my face toward
the General and the English . (p. 46, my emphasis)

The emphasis on body location in the midst of them and the privileges of
order, precedence and right of movement are clearly visible in Roes
description. Then, having arrived at his house, Roe writes: I got my house,
resolving it to be my castle (p. 52). Roe has thus mapped out three sacralised

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spaces of his luggage, body and residence in the first few days of his stay in
India.

(b) Contact Zones: The contact zones where the native and the Englishman
meet in terms of visits, gift exchanges, closer views are clearly
demarcated. These spaces have certain privileges attached to them. There are
also certain rites of passage to be performed by the outsider (in Roes case,
the native officer/person) in this zone. The native may not touch the luggage
of the Englishman; the rights of visitation to the Englishmans house and norms
of behaviour are regulated by inflexible laws set forth by the Englishman.
These zones are the residences of Roe and that of the Governor, Zulfikar
Khan. The Governor asks Roe to visit him. Here the second spatial act of
power relations rites/rights of passage, visitations and behaviour therein
occurs. Roes response to this suggestion is to state that it was the custom of
Europe to visit those of my quality first, and I dare not break it in penalty of
my head. He can visit none but such as first did that respect due to his
Majesty [the King of England]. The Governor in turn informs Roe that it
was the custom of this country that all ambassadors did first come to the
Governors, and that his [Roes] predecessors had not only visited the
Governor first, but had also had their persons and goods publicly searched
(pp. 53-4).

Roe retorts that he would not be the first to call upon the

Governor, for to visit him in his place of audience was a proposition most
absurd (p. 55). The justification that Roe offers is: I was not sent to him, and
therefore would not see him (p. 54). The entire structure of power relations is
cleverly plotted by Roe in terms of spatial arrangements of contact zones and
rites of passage: visits are only for/between equals or from a lower to a higher
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authority. Thus Roe would, in his capacity as the Ambassador of the King of
England (who is metonymically displaced onto the figure of Roe) visit Jahangir.
This visit would mark a space where equals (King James I in Roe, and
Jahangir) meet.

But a visit from Roe to the Governor would desacralise

Englands space and bestow importance to that of the Governors.

The

Governors visit to Roes house would be in the nature of a homage to the

King of England, and England itself. Such a visit articulates the importance of
English-space as a contact zone necessarily visited with respect by lower
powers. The spatial organisation that Roe sets into operation is essentially
proxemical: the Governor must bring his body to visit English space. Another
example of the rites of passage in the contact zone occurs in the incident of the
gift boxes. Prince Khurram opens the gift boxes and takes those objects that
he finds attractive. He does so without Roes formal invitation, and Roe
therefore objects strongly to this invasion (pp. 383-5).
Zulfikar Khan capitulates and agrees to visit Roe. Proxemics come into
full play here, and the two dimensions the body/belongings of the
Englishman, and the actual site he resides in conflate. The Governor arrives,
and Roe met him at the door, and so led him in. The Governor, writes Roe,

going rudely like a horse forward got before me, which thinking he did on
purpose, I crossed the way and was at the stairs foot before him; and so telling
him I would lead him in, a servant of his pulled me and said I might not go
before the Governor; but the Governor thrust him back and followed me. (pp.
59-60)

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The animal identity Roe imputes to the Governor functions here to signify an
absence of moral sense or social etiquette. Roes animalisation becomes a
powerful tool for spatial exclusion and regulation: the uncivilised native/animal
must be controlled and not allowed free movement in human/English space. 11
The reversal of the order of movement where Roe precedes the Governor
into Roes house threatens the very real power that Roe is eager to establish
over the Governor. Roe as the master of the house has both the right of
uninterrupted movement and an authority to circumscribe those of others.
Thus Roe quickly alters the spatial configuration in which the procession
moves and re-establishes the order of precedence. The interruption by the
servant when he actually trespasses on the person of Roe is therefore a grave
offence.
Roes forceful movement without obstruction through foreign space
(Surat port) signifies the Englishmans ability to navigate through unfriendly
territory, to inscribe his space within it there, to guard/defend those spaces as
his own, to formulate patterns of behaviour and rules for Indians/natives within
this sacred English space, and to extend the boundaries of this space into
native areas. However, Roe himself does not accept the rules of behaviour
within Indian space. When he visits the house of Asaf Khan, he is asked to
wait in an outer room. Roes description goes like this:

When I came I found him writing as he pretended for the king, desiring me to
stay in an outward room among suitors and servants, which I did awhile, much
against my stomach but presently went by his supper, which he meant to eat
with his friends while I attended.

When I saw it, I rose up full of just

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indignation, and departed his house, sending only this message, that if his
greatness were no more than his manners he durst not use me so. (p. 127)

Here the Indians guarding of his space, and the rights/rites of passage which
others/visitors are supposed to follow (wait in the outer room until called) is
unacceptable to Roe. This means that there is no free access into the Indians
for Roe either just as there is no free access for any other visitor. Roe chafes
at being treated like any other visitor: being ambassador, he has (or so he
believes) the right to unimpeded and immediate access to any space in India.
Thus the intrusion into Indian territory is first legitimised and then
transformed into expansionism. The proxemic movement and acts illustrate a
theme that it is to recur interminably in Anglo-Indian travel writing from the
seventeenth century when British travellers moved through India, conquering,
exploring, mapping, surveying, administering and imagining.

(c) Abjection and Exclusion: After mapping territories and contact zones, all
contaminants of English space must be excluded. This entails the retention of
purity by excluding those objects that, even while belonging to the self,
constitute real or perceived threats of corruption.

Thus, the relationship

between the self and the (r)ejected object is dialectical, where the
inside/outside boundary is marked by a state of tension. This tension is enacted
through exclusion and is completely performative. It is an improvisation based
on the need of the moment when the existing structures of, say, the Mughal
juridical system (in the case of Jones, the felon and the drunken cook see
below) are subverted for Roes delineation of pure Englishness free from the
taint of immorality and roguish behaviour of fellow English. If Roe seeks to
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treat the native as abject and re-locate him to the periphery of his [Roes]
world, he is also careful to see that no English impurity taints his space.
Nineteen prisoners from Newgate were on board Roes India-bound
ship. These men were to be left at Cape Town. Roe believed that no good
could be expected from such bad men. In his letters to Sir Thomas Smythe
(Governor of the East India Company in England) he wrote that these men
would be a bad influence on the others.

He also protested against their

abandonment at the Cape, because he did not expect them to follow the
Companys instructions (which was that they settle and discover the interior
and thus serve England). In his journal entry Roe writes:

These left at the Cape will go no further, but attend to opportunity of passage;
and they can do no good, being among the basest banished people, that know
nothing savouring of man, nor are no other way men, but they speak and walk
like men. (pp. 13-14)

This description is similar to the animal imagery that Roe employs in his
description of the Indian Governor. The animalisation is preliminary to a
banishment of the men, and is an exclusion based on the rejection of the impure
and the abject within ones selves. Roes response is to distance himself from
the English rogues in India. When the Prince informs Roe of the drunken and
ill-mannered behaviour of the English in Surat, Roe suggests that they be
punished in accordance with their crimes. Roes entry reads: I came to defend
my countrymen that were civil and honest in their rightful causes, and was as
desirous to punish outrages as to maintain sobriety (pp. 136-7). Edward
Terry, Roes chaplain, describes the incident when the drunken cook assaults a
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native. Terry reports Roe writing to the Governor to state that he [Roe] was
come thither to patronise any disorderly person, and then requesting the
Govenor to deal with the offender as he pleased. 12 In the case of Robert Jones,
Roe takes specifically spatial measures to (r)eject abject English impurity. Roe
writes: [Jones] departed my house without consent and lived a life scandalous
both to mine and my nations honour, from which I sought to withdraw him by
force and punish him exemplarily (p. 179, my emphasis). The spatial freedom
asserted by Jones (departing my house without consent) is a violation of the
spatial norms. This freedom is to be punished by its opposite: incarceration.
Roe attempts to have Jones punished by Jahangir, but Jones manages to scuttle
these attempts. Roe is angered enough to resort to a trick. He persuades
Jones to go to Masulipatnam as a preliminary to embarking for England. Roe
then instructed his people at Masulipatnam to arrest Jones on arrival. Jones
was arrested and sent to Newgate (p. 181). The entire effort then is to cleanse
the English space of those undesirables who set a bad example for other
English. Roe cleanses English space by excluding the abject English Jones. A
century later Roes actions were to be institutionalised. 13 Some sense of the
need to preserve a true Englishness in Roe is also evidenced by Roes
injunctions about quotidian practices. Strachan in his biography of Roe notes
that Roe insisted that his factors should sit on chairs in European fashion (and
not on the floor, like the Indians), that food was to be served in silver plates,
with everyone wearing European clothes and appropriate livery.14

Spatial Orientation and the Politics of Location

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Proximity and distanciation are the two main spatial motifs in Roe, and both
are intimately linked to questions of power.

Roe employs several spatial

techniques in improvising his identity, all of which are either co-opted or

inserted into existing patterns of behaviour.
Proximity is linked to intrusion into private space and sharing of others
personal spaces. As we have already noted, Roe was desperate to delineate his
personal space. Into this space he would brook no intrusion, and certainly not
intrusion by natives. This personal space was the body and the residence of the
Englishman. Thus a certain minimum space (the contact zone of interaction)
was marked out, and the boundary deemed unalterable, except by invitation of
the host. The first transgression of this boundary occurs through a tactile act
of familiarity that seeks to alter the distance between the Englishman and the
native, and perpetuates a crisis of proximity. The Customs Officials, having
been thwarted in their attempts to search the luggage of the Englishmen, assure
Roe that their search would not actually be a search. Rather they would
embrace the items (p. 48). This proximity, accepted and permitted by the
owner, alters the role of space and boundaries.

Here the spatial act of

commission (intrusion), and the tactile one are proxemical in nature because
they have to be sanctioned by the host-body. The native officers, however,
misuse the right to proximity. For, in the act of embracing, they institute a
search of the pockets (p. 51).
Here two related themes come into play. First, alteration of
proximity/distance is a privilege extended by the host to the guest, suggesting a
spatial dynamics of power. This dynamic will recur throughout Roes stay in
India. Second, even within the alteration of proximity, with the sanctioned
entry into the contact zone, there is a certain code of behaviour. Proximity
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should not alter the norms of propinquitous behaviour. The pocket search
masquerading as an embrace is therefore a violation. The permission to be
closer in spatial terms does not sanction any other/further movement into the
hosts territory.
When Roes relationship with Jahangir is established, issues of
proximity and separation become even more important. These interactions are
real spatial practices that are predicated upon the prevalent power equations
between host (Jahangir-India) and guest (Roe-England).15 For instance, the
Mughal Emperor allows Roe to move into his inner circle (we shall see more
about this later). This proximity is indicative of a change in the relationship
between the two men.

Two interesting events signify the change from

distanciation to proximity. The first is when Prince Khurram, after his several
problems with Roe, gifts his cloak to the latter. While Roe is unwilling to
accept this, he is informed that it is the highest favour to give a garment worn
by the Prince, or, being new, once laid on his shoulder (p. 334). This is in
sharp contradistinction to the proxemics of proximity that we see at the
beginning of Roes visit to India.

Whereas the Customs Officers had

transgressed proximity when they searched the pockets of the English (and
thereby laying their hands on property that did not belong to them), Roes
sharing of a personal item/possession the Princes cloak signifies a shared
space that is mutually accessible.

The change of ownership from Prince

Khurram to Roe suggests that the intimate space of the cloak is now available
for both of them to access without further permission, and is a sign of shared
proximity and space.16

More importantly, it suggests an alteration of

relationship: the Prince has, with this act, granted Roe the privilege of
symbolically accessing his personal space. Roes reluctance to accept this
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privilege perhaps stems from the fact that he had never taken a step in this
direction except in the form of a formal exchange of gifts, where the latter
items were specifically earmarked for the purpose. The Princes more personal
gift is a telling comment on the way spatial practices differed: the personal giftitem deemed priceless and the commercial gifts of the East India Company,
whose prices and worth are calculated and decided depending on the potential
usefulness of the recipient.17 As we shall see, Roe preferred to move into the
Others space on his own terms, to take the first step (literally) in that
direction, rather than await permission to do so. Jahangir also lavishes gifts
upon Roe, the most important of which is the gift of his own (Jahangirs)
portrait (p. 244). The English equivalent to this proxemics of sharing occurs
between Jahangir and Roe when he (Roe) is asked to present his pictures
as Jahangir describes them from England.
One of the pictures is that of a lady, supposedly a friend, now dead
(actually Roes wife, who is still alive, but he never admits this). Jahangir asks
Roe to gift him the picture. Roe replies: I esteemed it more than any thing I
possessed, because it was the image of what I loved dearly and could never
recover. After much persuasion Roe agrees to give the picture to him. Then
Jahangir bows to Roe and announces that Roes willingness was enough for
him, that seeing I had so freely given him that I esteemed so much, he would
not rob me of it (pp. 254-5). Jahangir suggests that his painters should make
copies of Roes pictures so that his wives could wear them about their person
(p. 255). The use of woman (or rather, the image of the woman) as symbolic
currency enables the sealing of proximity. The near-exchange of the picture, a
very personal possession, enables the relationship to strengthen. Here Roe is in
a position to replicate what the Prince had done to him: offer a personal item
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which is the key to a shared intimacy. The woman is the possession (actual or
symbolic) whose ownership marks the transfer of power (the power vested in
Roe to gift the picture, and Jahangirs request, in the manner of a subordinate
which reverses the role of patron). 18 This is a theme that recurs in another
context in Roe.
Roe was opposed to the entry of Englishwomen into India (in his
journal he refers to the danger, the trouble, the inconvenience ... of [such]
liberties as Englishmen bringing their wives along to India (p. 442). However,
he was not averse to utilising their presence for his own purposes.

For

instance, Mrs. Towersen, the Armenian widow of Captain William Hawkins and
now the wife of Gabriel Towersen, was related to certain influential families in
Agra. After her arrival, Roe hoped to use her contacts to reach Nur Jahan,
Khurrams beloved (and later his wife). In his letter of 11 October 1617 to
Thomas Kerridge, chief factor of Surat, Roe refers to the mediation by a third
person in his interaction with Khurram (p. 428).19
Later Jahangir sends a woman to Roe and insists that Roe should
accept this gift (the woman is a felon). The embarrassed Roe, after much
persuasion (the officers would take no refusal), is enforced to let one come
into [his] bedside with her. The next day Roe returns the woman to Jahangir,
claiming that his all-male household was not a suitable place for her. However,
Roe is anxious to ascertain that the return of the gift is not ... displeasing to
the king, she having been so near his person (pp. 174-5, my emphasis). In all
these cases, the woman is the boundary figure (to borrow Anne
McClintocks term).20 She is the symbolic currency that, circulating between
(the bodies of) friends and acquaintances (literally, when one notes the
language of Roes letter to Asaf Khan having been so near his person),
19

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enables the building of trust and relationship. Thus the womans movement is a
spatial practice that enables alteration of power relationships.
The second event is the proximity that Roe attains to Jahangirs wives.
When Jahangir is distributing gifts, Roe is near at hand. He writes:

At one side in a window were his two principal wives, whose curiosity made
them break little holes in a grate of reed that hung before it to gaze on me. I
first saw their fingers, and after laying their faces close now one eye, now
another, sometime I could discern the full proportion ... When I looked up they
retired, and were so merry that I supposed they laughed at me. (p. 321)

The metonymic viewing of the wives is a progressive access into forbidden

space that of the zenana, a theme that will figure prominently in later
European (and English) colonial discourse. The progressive displacement from
fingers to eye to full proportion is the reduction of distance. The movement
from invisibility to near-visibility is the alteration of distance from far to near,
and dependent upon the relation between Jahangir and Roe. Thus, like touch
(the embrace), the sense of sight is also a spatial practice. This spatial practice
has an interesting dimension that reveals the anxiety of the Westerner under
Eastern eyes.
The proximity of the screened woman is a powerful erotic situation for
Roe. As Nandini Bhattacharya suggests, the sexual dimension is closely linked
to the commercial-materialist one (for Roe is also aware of the jewellery on
these women). Bhattacharya argues that this is an erotic gaze of reciprocal
curiosity.21 However, this appears to me to be a misreading of the situation.
Roe is here not seeing as much as being seen. The gaze directed at Roe
20

Draft
disturbs him. Roes suspicion that the queens were laughing at him suggests
that he was far from comfortable under the scrutiny, a gaze that he could not
return.

Thus, while eroticism may be figured into the concealment and

metonymic viewing, the economy of the gaze is solely from the womans side.
And this is why the proximity is actually a distance, for the proximity does not
sanction a clear gaze for Roe, but rather makes him the object of someones
gaze.
Roes insistence on proximity and free access is a re-formation of the
order of both the Indian spatial organisation and the English use of the same.
As noted above, the queens gaze unsettles him, and adds to his anxiety about
the European in Indian space. It is a reversal of this gaze, a reconfiguration of
the situation of the European in Indian space, that Roe now seeks to perform.
Thus, having already cited the slavishness of the English in allowing
themselves to be searched in public by the native officers, Roe sees his task as
changing the pattern, and disrupting the continuity. He seeks to end the
tradition of English subjecthood through reordered spatial practices.

He

writes: if it seem to any that shall hear of my first carriage that I was either
too stiff, too punctual, too high, or too prodigal, let them consider I was to
repair a ruind house and make straight that which was crooked (p. 46). His
habitual defiance and reordering of spatial practices (exemplified in his refusal
to be searched, modes of entry and movement, access into Indian spaces,
sacralisation of his own spaces) thus marks the fracturing of the continuity, and
sets up new precedents for later English in India. After noting Roes insistence
on correct location vis--vis Indians, one may move on to the manner in
which Roe alters spatial arrangements through specific spatial practices.

21

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Spatial Practices

Two modes of reordering Indian spaces occur in Roe: ritual gestures, and the
reconfiguration of space. It is important to note that Roes reordering is an
attempt to locate himself and the person of the English ambassador in a
position of privilege in the Mughal court. Since the rules of courtly interaction
and protocol for European/ foreign ambassadors (especially of England, after
Hawkins disgrace) in the durbar were still being negotiated and not yet
codified, Roes attempts attain importance in setting a precedent.
Roe is very conscious of the theatrical and ritualistic construction of
space. One of his early comments on the Mughal Emperor is to do with the
theatricalised visibility of the Emperor to his subjects. Roe writes:

He [the Emperor] comes every morning to a window ... and shows himself to
the common people ... after supper he comes down to ... a fair court where in
the midst is a throne wherein he sits ... There is no business done with him
concerning the state, government, disposition of war or peace but at one of
these last two places [the Durbar or the Ghazal-khana], where it is publicly
propounded and resolved, and so registered, which if it were worth the
curiosity might be seen for two shillings. (pp. 106-7, my emphasis)

He adds:

As all his subjects are slaves, so is he in a kind of reciprocal bondage, for he is

tied to observe these hours and custom so precisely, that if he were unseen one
22

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day, and no sufficient reason rendered, the people would mutiny, two days no
reason can excuse but that he must consent to open his doors, and be seen by
some, to satisfy others. (pp. 107-8, my emphasis)

Later, Roe describes the actual spatial arrangement of the court:

The king sits in a little gallery over-head; ambassadors, the great men and
strangers of quality within the innermost rail under him, raised from the
ground, covered with canopies of velvet and silk: the meaner men representing
gentry, within the first rail, the people without, in a base court, but so that all
may see the king. this sitting has so much affinity with a theatre, the manner of
the King in his gallery; the great men lifted in stage as actors, the vulgar below
gazing on, that an easy description will inform of the place and fashion. (pp.
108-9, my emphasis)

These ritual gestures of ordering space designate certain spaces for

people, spaces that are dependent upon rank (as Roe notes). The arrangement
of the Mughal durbar and the placement/positioning of people (all natives)
within it was governed by strict rules of protocol.. 22 Roe believes that he
should be placed in close proximity to the Emperor/figure of authority, and
endeavours to alter the ritualistic construction of space around the Emperor.
The spatial organisation, however, also entails certain ceremonial gestures to
be undertaken by the men when in the presence of the Emperor. Here Roe
modifies the code of conduct by his refusal to perform what appear to be
obsequious gestures, while simultaneously altering his spatial location. For

23

Draft
instance,

his

refusal

to

genuflect

on

entry

into

the

Emperors/Princes/authoritys presence.
Visiting the Prince, Roe engages in his first real reconfiguration of
Indian space. It is also to do with the issue of visibility to the public eye.
Roes proxemics, having moved from the scale of the body and house to a
public arena, is an attempt to rewrite networks of power, to alter the eddy of
power flows around himself and the nobles in the court. It is directed at
modifying his status from spectator to spectacle. The description is worth
quoting in full, for it sets out the themes that figure prominently later on.

Coming toward him through a lane of people, an officer came and brought
me word I must touch the ground with my head, and my hat off. I answered: I
came in honour to see the Prince and was free from the custom of the servants.
So I passed on, till I came to a place railed in, right under him, with an assent
of 3 steps, where I made him reverence, and he bowed his body; and so went
within it, where stood round by the side all the great men of the town with
their hands before them like slaves. The place was covered overhead with a
rich canopy, and underneath all carpets. To describe it rightly it was like a
great stage, and the Prince sat above as the mock kings do there. When I was
entered I knew not where to be placed, but went right up and stood before
him, where there is an assent of 3 steps ... standing in that manner below, I
demanded licence to come up and stand by him. He answered: if the King of
Persia, or the great Turk were there, it might not be admitted. I replied that I
must be excused, for I doubted not he would come down and meet them at his
gate ... then I demanded a chair, but was answered no man ever sat in that
place ... after some questions, he said: to give me content, although I might not
24

Draft
come up where he sat, he would go into another place, where I should come
unto him ... (pp. 92-3)

The comparison, to Roes disadvantage, with the King of Persia and the great
Turk clearly indicates that the ambassador of the King of England was not
important enough to merit a place next to the Mughal emperor. This is
significant because Roe is under the impression that his actions may set
precedents for future ambassadors. (We have already noted Roes comments
on his predecessors all of which suggest that he saw himself as setting a rolemodel for his successors.) Thus Roes spatial practices, which he hopes
convey/create a certain image of importance about the English, was in essence
a negotiation for a position of power that he really did not possess in Mughal
India.
Later, a similar incident occurs. Roe writes:

I came to the assent of the inmost rail before the Prince, whom I saluted after
my own manner, and offering to go up, I was stopped and showed a byeentrance, at which the meaner sort comes in. The Prince seeing all this, and
not correcting it, I turned about to depart, whereat he called, and the way was
open for me to take and choose my place. (p. 135)

These early spatial practices set the precedent for Roes defiance of native
practices. One notes several features about the above incidents. In the first
description Roe demands his rightful place adjacent to the Prince, an act that
would induce proximity in spatial terms, and symbolise the equivalence of
power while also separating him from the servants (as he describes the others
25

Draft
around the throne). In the second incident Roe has made his salutation in his
own manner, thus refusing to perform any native practice. (Ansari points out
that, in the Mughal court, unless special permission was granted, even foreign
ambassadors were expected to pay their reverence according to Mughal rule.23)
When asked to move through a side-way, he prefers to leave rather than take
such a route. And then the Prince has to ask him to come back. Finally, Roe is
not about to stand in any designated place: he will take and choose [his]
place. These spatial and ritualistic practices thus stamp his authority on native
spaces. He is able to suggest that the ruler is more prescient in recognising his
stature. Roe describes how Jahangir gives him better spatial privilege when he
visits the Durbar. Roe writes: [The King] seeing me a far off, beckoned with
his hand, giving sign I should stay the ceremony of taking leave, but come up
to him, where he appointed a place above all other men, which I after thought
to maintain (p. 115).
Such instances recur elsewhere in the account (pp. 144-5, 151, 244).
Having noted the importance of public visibility in the Mughal court, Roe seeks
to create his own space:

I bade the interpreter say that I came the day before to see his Majesty and his
greatness and the ceremonies of this feast: that I was placed behind him, I
confessed with honour, but I could not see abroad, and that therefore I desired
his Majesty to licence me to stand up by his throne, whereat he commanded
Asaf Khan to let me choose my own place. (p. 149)

26

Draft
Later, when asked by court officials to go down and stand by the door among
the Kings servants, Roe refuses and says: if it were his [Jahangirs] pleasure
I should go home, I was ready, but one foot back I would not (p. 151).
The reason for this insistence on standing inside the circle, near the
king, is also to do with the culture of spectacle in Roes England. Whigham
notes: the continual performance and judgement by ones peers and
superiors, whose own reputations are seen to rest not only on performance but
also on their abilities to judge ... [where] estimation is radically dependent on
the eye and voice of the audience.24 Thus while Jahangirs acknowledgement
of Roes proximity is important for the personal esteem of the English
ambassador, it is equally crucial that there be public recognition of this spatial
proximity. Roe writes: I went so much higher and nearer the king, and
standing awhile without molestation, alone and everybodys eyes cast upon
me, I saw place [sic] wherein stood only the Prince and young Rana (p. 151,
my emphasis).
With this spatial act Roe has staged several things. First, the esteem
of the English ambassador has been validated by the Mughal Emperor himself
(the suggestion is that Jahangirs powers are somehow coeval with those
invested in Roe by the King of England, and that Jahangirs granting of spatial
privileges are a recognition of this). Second, his coevalness with other Mughal
confidantes, and above several members of the aristocracy has been
acknowledged. Finally, he has achieved public recognition of the esteem of the
English ambassador.

The spectacle of power and the insinuation of the

Englishman into the existing spatial structures is thus effected here.

Later, Roe does some actual rebuilding and alteration of Indian space.
Given a house to live in, Roe rebuilds some of the house and lives there with
27

Draft
many more servants than any other ambassador in Europe (p. 134). When a
fire threatens to destroy the house where the English live, Roe is strengthened
in his resolve. He writes: I resolved to pull down, which I did in one day; and
in ten after I had finished 7 good rooms, whereby the English shall now be
sufficiently housed for 20 years (pp. 175-6). One notes Roes stress on the
longevity of the new house, where the reconstitution of space functions as a
memorial too. The English thus alter Indian space more or less permanently
when they map, frame and build here. The spatial reconstruction of India is
underway, and is emphasised in Roes February 1617 letter to the East India
Company. Roe, commenting on the need to have a fort in India to protect the
English goods and persons, writes:

The motions of building a fort have begot such jealousies in these moors that
upon bringing brick ashore to found a ships bell, it rang to court, our people
disarmed in Surat, and I am not yet clear of liberties lost upon it, though I have
made the Prince ashamed at the weakness of the suspicion to confess a handful
of men could take a part of their country by force. (p. 467)

Further, Roe admits: There is no place to be obtained. They are weary of us

as it is; and indeed we see we have impoverished the ports, and wounded all
their trades ... and if you began to build and plant here, quarrel would arise
(p. 468).25
Another instance of Roes improvisation where he utilises the existing
structures of Mughal juridical system to fashion his own identity occurs in the
incident of the felon. Jahangir, having condemned a man, sends him to Roe for
the latters use as a slave. As Roe notes, such an act from the Emperors part
28

Draft
suggests a high favour. However, Roe refuses, saying: in England we had
no slaves, neither was it lawful to make the image of God fellow to a beast.
The result is a fashioning of identity by subtly capitalising on an unforeseen
event and Roes utilisation of the same to further a particular image of
Christianity, England and himself. He notes that Jahangir took his (Roes)
action in very good part (p. 150).
Roes spatial practices are so effective that Jahangirs letters of 1617-18
to James I appear to be almost the direct result of Roes own politics of
location in India. Jahangir writes:

I have given my general command to all the kingdoms and ports of my

dominions ... that in what place soever they [the English] choose to live they
may have reception and residence of their own content and safety, and what
goods soever they desire to sell or buy, they may have free liberty without any
restraint; and what port soever they shall arrive that neither Portugal nor any
other shall dare to molest their quiet, and in what city soever they shall have
residence, I have commanded all my governors and captains to give them
freedom answerable to their own desires: to sell, buy, and to transport into
their country at their pleasure. (p. 558, my emphasis)

And in a subsequent letter:

It is my pleasure and I do command that to all English merchants in all my

dominions they be given freedom and residence; and I have confirmed my
word that no subject of my kingdoms shall be so bold to do any injury or
molestation to the said English, and that their goods and merchandise they
29

Draft
may sell or traffic with according to their own will and to their own content.
(pp. 559-60)

In both the letters one notes emphasis on spatial acts: the freedom and
protection for the English to reside, transport, travel through Indian territory.
As we have seen from the analyses above, these freedoms are anticipated in the
spatial practices of Thomas Roe.
One may conclude the analysis of Roes spatial practices in India by
looking at two other interesting details from his life. His great passions were
navigation and cartography. His reading on the journey to India consisted
primarily of the great volumes of geographical discovery and travel: Richard
Hakluyts Principal Navigations, Samuel Purchass Pilgrimes and Joseph de
Acostas The Natural and Moral History of the East and West Indies.26 His
comments on the existent maps of the sub-continent are also illustrations of
symbolic spatial practices. He notes in his letter to Lord Carew: I have one
observation to make of the falseness of our maps, both of Mercator and all
others, and their ignorance of this country. He then proceeds to rectify this
defect, thus suggesting a symbolic correction of the mapped spaces of India
(pp. 112-3). Roes own effort in this direction was the first British map of
India (1620), which formed the basis for all future maps for the next hundred
years.27 Thus an interest in geography, cartography and navigation was a
central interest for Thomas Roe. His spatial practices in India, which are
prolepses for later British conquest, military movements, transportation
systems and mapping, are embedded firmly within this context of personal
intellectual interests and a larger national one of voyaging and cartographic
enterprise.
30

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31

Notes

See, for instance, Simon Gikandi, Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of
Colonialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996) Lesley B. Cormack, Charting an
Empire: Geography at the English Universities, 1580-1620 (Chicago: Chicago University
Press, 1997), Richard Phillips, Mapping Men and Empire: A Geography of Adventure
(London: Routledge, 1997), Anne Godlweska and Neil Smith (eds) Geography and
Empire (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), and Bruce McLeod, The Geography of Empire in
English Literature, 1580-1745 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
2

Roes journal was culled from the British Museums Mss 6115. The last part of the

journal does not appear to have survived. Editors have therefore utilised the text available
in Samuel Purchass compilation, corroborating it with documents of Roes contemporaries
like Edward Terry. See Samuel Purchas, Hakluyts Posthumus. For the extracts from
Roes journal see Purchas, Vol. IV, pp. 310-468. All references are to the Foster edition:
Thomas Roe, The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to the Court of the Great Mogul, 16151619 [1899], ed. William Foster (Nendeln/Leichtenstein: Kraus Reprint, 1967), 2 vols; and
will be given in parentheses.
3

Heidi J. Nast and Steve Pile (eds), Places through the Body (London: Routledge, 1998),

pp. 407-8.
4

Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space [1991], trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford:

Blackwell, 2000), p.170, emphasis in original.

5

Between 1540-1640, the number of peers rose from 60 to 160, baronets and knights

from 500 to 1400, and squires from 800 to 3000. See Frank Whigham, Ambition and
Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory (Berkeley: University of
California Press (1984), pp. 6-9.

W.G. Hoskins, The Making of the English Landscape [1955] (London: Hodder and

Stoughton, 1992), pp. 125-34.

7

Whigham, Ambition and Privilege, pp.32-43.

Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 227-30.

9

I take the notion of contact zone from Mary Louise Pratts Imperial Eyes. The contact

zone is, in this case, a space where privileges, national-cultural identities are placed for
the Other to register, and behave accordingly. Thus while the contact zone is a space for
knowledge-gathering about the Other, it is also the space where boundaries (especially
cultural) are emphatically present.

In the contact zone, the Other is granted some

privileges and disallowed others. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and
Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992). The notion of the abject is adapted from the
work of Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on
Abjection. trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).
10

For a discussion of the theatricality of British power in India see Bernard S. Cohn,

Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1997). Kate Teltscher argues that Roes emphasis on the theatrical
nature of Mughal court and practices are meant to suggest an unreality to the latter. His
own refusals to perform certain native rituals and forms of greeting are an attempt to mark
him out as an independent observer of the excesses. Kate Teltscher, India Inscribed:
European and British Writing on India, 1600-1800 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997),
pp. 20-22.
11

For a reading of the animalisation of specific human races and classes and their

consequent spatial exclusion as the uncivilised abject of/from civilised spaces see David
Sibley, Geographies of Exclusion: Society and Difference in the West (London: Routledge,
1995), pp. 27-8.

Roes animalisation of the native is also historically located in the

contemporary discourse of the vernacular medical books of the sixteenth century. These
self-help guidebooks portray an anxiety about losing human rationality and becoming
beast-like. Literary texts like Arden of Faversham (1592), A Yorkshire Tragedy (1608), A
Woman Killed with Kindness (1603), and medical treatises like Thomas Paynells
Regimen Sanitas Salerni

(9 editions between 1528 and 1634), Thomas Elyots The

Castel of Health (17 editions between 1534 and 1610) and William Turners A New Book
of Spirituall Physik for Diverse Diseases of the Nobilitie and Gentlemen of England (1555)
are examples of texts that articulate this anxiety. Thus norms of behaviour were structured
around ideas of the true human and its opposite the beast. Roes reduction of the
native into an animal thus relegates Zulfikar Khan to the periphery of the human world.
For a discussion of the medical-ethical discourses that circulated in Renaissance England,
and which provide the intellectual frames of Roes imagery, see Margaret Healy, Bodily
Regimen and Fear of the Beast: Plausibility in Renaissance Domestic Tragedy, in Erica
Fudge, et al (eds) At the Borders of the Human: Beasts, Bodies and Natural Philosophy in
the Early Modern Period (London: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 51-73.
12

Edward Terry, A Voyage to East India (London: TW, 1655), p. 174. Terry also makes an

interesting observation on the kinds of English who went out to India and on their
behaviour there. He refers to a young gentleman, brother of a Baron of England [who]
behaved himself so ill ... and others who have been well born, when their friends knew
not what to do with them, have been sent to East India (p. 176). Terry also uses animal
imagery to describe such debased men. He writes about the cook: it will not be amiss to
enquire who was the heathen dog at this time, whether the debauched drunken cook who
called himself a Christian, or that sober and temperate Mahommedan who was thus
affronted (p. 174). There is also a reference to one Herbert who had been shipped to
India as a neer-do-well by his friends. This young man, described by Terry as the most
hasty and choleric young man that ever I knew, was a major nuisance to the factors at

Surat (Roe, p. 393). The practice of sending young men, especially those suspected of
derangement or criminal tendencies, to the East also had much to do with the prevailing
belief in travel as palliative for madness. Thus the deranged were frequently sent on
voyages, primarily to avoid their continual embarrassing presence in the otherwise clean
family space. For a reading of the role of travel and madness in early modern Europe see
Jonathan Andrews, Letting Madness Range: Travel and Mental Disorder, 1700-1900, in
Richard Wrigley and George Revill (eds), Pathologies of Travel (Amsterdam: Wellcome
Institute Series in the History of Medicine, 2000), pp. 25-88.

The removal of such

unwanted elements from the body politic may also have been influenced by contemporary
politico-medical discourses about exogenous (external) sources and origins of the
body(politic)s illness and the endogenous (internal) poisons that caused the same. In the
case of the former, the need was to safeguard the orifices of the body against invasions.
In the case of the latter, however, purging was the certain cure. For a discussion of this
ideology of purging/purification of the spaces of the body(politic) see Jonathan Gil Harris,
Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic: Discourses of Social Pathology in Early Modern
England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Further, such a geographical
displacement was actually suggested by statesmen as a cure for Englands vagrancy
problem, and (more interestingly, for our reading of colonial spatiality) to help Englands
colonial expansion. Richard Hakluyt suggested in his Discourse of Western Planting
(1584) that this enterprise [Western voyages] will be for the manifold employment of
numbers of idle men, Richard Hakluyt, Discourse of Western Planting, in E.G.R. Taylor
(ed.), The Original Writings and Correspondence of the Two Richard Hakluyts (London:
Hakluyt Society, 1935), 2 vols., II, pp. 211, 234 and 235. Sir Humphrey Gilbert identified
one advantage of oversees colonies thus: a great number of men which do now live idly
at home, are burdens, chargeable, and unprofitable to this realm, shall hereby be set to
work. The Vagrancy Act of 1597 provided that dangerous rogues be banished overseas,

and the Privy Council order of 1603 exiled them to East and West Indies, France,
Germany and the Low Countries.

See A.L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy

Problem in England, 1560-1640 (London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 150, 162.

13

The belief that English vagrants, hysteric widows, drunks, army deserters, criminals, the

insane and the lower class created an unfavourable impression about the English became
more important after the transformation of the English presence in India from a trading
post to administrative power. By the mid-eighteenth century, efforts focused on getting
such abject English off the Indian streets in order to preserve the image of the clean
Englishman and woman. To this end, Sailors Homes, asylums and jails were established.
After a years incarceration in the asylum these flawed English would be sent home, and
the British Indian space would retain its pristine purity. Thus the sacralisation of space
and its purification relied heavily upon the exclusion of abject bodies. The Jones incident
of spatial displacement and control is an early example of the geography of exclusion that
operated within Indo-British interaction.

For an account of one example of such

exclusionary practices targeting the bad English in India see Waltrand Ernst, The
European Insane in India, 1800-1858: A Case Study in Psychiatry and Colonial Rule, in
David Arnold (ed.) Imperial Medicine and Indigenous Societies (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1988), pp. 27-44.

See also Ernsts Mad Tales from the Raj: The

European Insane in India, 1800-1858 (London: Routledge, 1991).

14

Michael Strachan, Sir Thomas Roe, 1581-1644: A Life (Salisbury: Michael Russell,

1989), p. 87. During Roes period the image of the culturally corrupt traveller, one who
abandoned his own culture to adopt fashions/languages and forms of behaviour of the
Other, was very common. As Sara Warnecke has persuasively argued, this moral flaw (of
inconsistency of the English character) came in for severe criticism in the conduct and
imaginative literature, and (more trenchantly) from the aristocracy, of the period. Roes
attempts to retain a noticeably English form of behaviour may be seen as the result of this

anxiety on the part of the upper classes about Englishness.

See Sara Warnecke,

Images of the Educational Traveller in Early Modern England (Leiden: EJ Brill, 1995), pp.
217-239.
15

Real Spatial Practices are defined by Steve Pile, adapting the work of Henri Lefebvre,

as the organising principles of production, reproduction and consumption which form the
unconscious ... of society, but also the particular locations and spatial sets characteristic of
each society.

Because spatial practice always returns to the same place, it not only

ensures continuity and some degree of cohesion, but is also constituted through
contradictory tendencies for fragmentation and disintegration. See Steve Pile, The Body
and the City: Psychoanalysis, Space and Subjectivity (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 156158. It is important to note here that Roe does not seek a disintegration of Mughal spatial
practices. Indeed he is careful to retain the pattern, but effecting his own penetration into
the pattern, and thus reforming it.
16

The sharing of a personal object in close proximity as a seal of friendship marks the gift

motif in the contact zone. This particular rite of passage in Roe and the economy of gift
exchange will figure as a theme in Anglo-Indian fiction, culminating in the famous scene in
Forsters A Passage to India, where the friendship between Aziz and Fielding is initiated
when Aziz lends Fielding his collar stud.
17

For an analysis of the unequal nature of gift exchange in the colonial encounter see

Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago:
Chicago University Press, 1991), pp. 109-110.
18

We are once more at an inaugural moment in the themes of the Indo-British encounter,

where the womans picture plays a crucial role in setting the tone for the relationship
between the native and the Englishman. We recall here that the friendship between Aziz
and Fielding in A Passage to India is sealed when Aziz shows the photograph of his nowdead wife to the latter.

19
20

See also Strachan, Sir Thomas Roe, p.107.

Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest

(London: Routledge, 1994).

21

Nandini Bhattacharya, Reading the Splendid Body: Gender and Consumerism in

Eighteenth Century British Writing on India (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998), pp.
38-9.
22

Hosagrahar Jyoti comments on how the original spatial arrangements of Mughal

Durbars persisted in the Grand Durbars of the English in nineteenth-century India. In the
structure of the Mughal Durbar, proximity to the central seat indicated status and authority.
Seats were reserved according to social hierarchy, and railings separated classes and
ranks. See her City as Durbar: Theatre and Power in Imperial Delhi, in Nezar AlSayyad
(ed.), Forms of Dominance: On the Architecture and Urbanism of the Colonial Enterprise
(Aldershot: Avebury, 1992), pp. 83-105.

For a detailed description of the changes in

arrangements of the court during the reign of various Mughal emperors see Muhammed
Azhar Ansari, Social Life of the Mughal Emperors (1526-1707) [1974] (New Delhi:
Gitanjali, 1983), pp. 95-124.

Nandini Bhattacharya, reading Roes description of the

theatricality of the Mughal court, suggests that Roe identifies and denigrates it as a
laughable caricature of sovereignty ... as ... make-believe (Reading the Splendid Body, p.
43). If this is the case, then one is puzzled by Roes repeated attempts to be a member of
this ritualised theatre. For Roe is determined to stand right next to the Emperor in the
spectacle. If Roes idea was to denigrate the theatre, then his spatial behaviour would
surely have been otherwise. I suggest that Roes aim here was to be visibly close to the
ruler. Marking his space publicly was an attempt to convey the message (to his opponents
and detractors at Jahangirs court) of his proximity to the King. In other words, Roe does
not caricature the spectacle; he only becomes a part of the cast.
23

Ansari, Social Life of the Mughal Emperors, p.101.

24

Whigham, Ambition and Privilege, pp. 38-45.

25

Roes building of a house is more significant than it appears here. One of the most

important modes of marking possession in Roes England was to build a structure. Under
English law, building a fixed dwelling place upon a territory created an unassailable right
over that territory. While other European nations/cultures (Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish,
French) required written records, the ordinary action of building a dwelling place created
the right of possession in England. (William Blackstones Commentaries on the Laws of
England cites this law as late as the 18th century.) Also, building a house marked a kind
of permanence.

Thus Roes rebuilding of the house must be read in terms of a

ceremonial statement of possession, and holds tremendous significance for our reading of
the spatial practices of the early colonial period. For a brilliant analysis of such practices
of possession see Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europes Conquest of the
New World, 1492-1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
26

Strachan, Sir Thomas Roe, pp. 64-9.

27

Strachan, Sir Thomas Roe, p. 114.

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Studies in Travel Writing, Number 6 (2002)