In 30 Seconds
Story
The English came to the Mughal coast as supplicants and found the door guarded by the Portuguese. For a century Portugal had claimed the Indian Ocean as its own sea, licensing all shipping, and its power at Goa and its influence at the Mughal court made it determined to strangle any rival at birth. The first English attempts to open trade at Surat, the great port of Gujarat and the funnel of Mughal maritime commerce, broke against this wall.
Captain William Hawkins arrived at Surat in 1608 aboard the Hector, the first Company ship to touch the Indian mainland, carrying a letter from King James I to the Mughal emperor. Hawkins made his way to Agra, where his fluent Turkish delighted the emperor Jahangir. He was taken into favour, given a mansab and even a wife, an Armenian Christian lady of the court, and for a time it seemed the English had won their entry. But Portuguese intrigue and the shifting moods of the court wore his position away, and Hawkins left India in 1611 with promises that had evaporated behind him. The lesson was noted in London. Charm at court could not outweigh power at sea.
Power at sea was duly supplied. In September 1612 Captain Thomas Best anchored off Surat with two ships, the Red Dragon and the Hosiander, and secured provisional trading terms from the local Mughal governor. The Portuguese responded by sending a fleet of four galleons and a swarm of smaller craft from Goa to destroy him. Between late November and December 1612, in the shallow waters off Suvali, which the English tongue flattened into Swally, Best’s two ships outsailed and outgunned the Portuguese squadron in a series of sharp engagements, inflicting humiliating losses while Mughal observers watched from the shore.
The battle of Swally was small as naval actions go, but its audience made it decisive. The Mughals had no fighting navy, and the empire’s rulers had tolerated Portuguese arrogance largely because Portugal controlled the pilgrim routes to Mecca and could touch the empire where it was devout. The spectacle of the Portuguese beaten in Indian waters by a newcomer changed the calculation. If sea power was for hire, better to balance one European against another. Early in 1613 an imperial farman authorised the English to establish a permanent factory at Surat.
A second victory sealed the arrangement. In 1615 Captain Nicholas Downton, with a small squadron, beat off a far larger Portuguese armada in the same waters, confirming that Swally had been no accident. That same year the Company persuaded King James to send a proper royal ambassador, Sir Thomas Roe, to negotiate at Jahangir’s court, an embassy whose story belongs to its own chapter. By 1619 English factories stood at Surat, Agra, Ahmedabad and Broach, the modest beginnings of a commercial network.
Surat became the Company’s first Indian headquarters and remained so for half a century. The factory there was not a manufactory but a fortified warehouse and residence, where factors bought indigo and cotton cloth for the fleets and lived under a discipline half monastic and half mercantile, with common prayers, a common table and frequent deaths from the climate. Their letters home mix piety, commerce and complaint in equal measure. Around them thrived one of the great ports of the world, where ships from the Red Sea, the Gulf and Southeast Asia crowded a roadstead that handled the wealth of Gujarat.
The pattern set at Swally deserves attention, because it became the template of empire. The English did not defeat an Indian power to enter India. They defeated a European rival, in view of Indian authorities, and were admitted as a useful counterweight. For the next century and a half, European wars fought in Indian waters and on Indian soil would decide which foreigners held the trade, while Indian rulers granted, revoked and balanced. Only much later did the counterweight discover that it had become the scale itself. The road that ended at Plassey began in the surf off Suvali, with two English ships and an audience on the shore.
