The East India Company (1661–1698): Territorial Acquisition and the ‘Amsterdam of Liberty’

Abstract

The final chapter highlights the differences in global corporate governance, providing a case study of how differing governing models could ensure corporate success rather than failure. It continues the story of the EIC’s evolving religious governance in the second half of the century. It investigates how, following the acquisition of Bombay in the 1660s, company leaders such as Strenysham Master, Gerald Aungier and Josiah Child, developed the company’s religious governance to deal with administrating over a variety of peoples and faiths. Following 1662, in the post-Braganza era of the EIC, the flexibility of the corporate form was accentuated because of its adoption of an ecumenically broad form of governance, which allowed it to establish government over not only English Protestants but also Catholics, Armenians, Hindus, Muslims and Jews. The chapter also investigates the role of passive evangelism in the EIC’s religious governance as a way to encourage conversion. In doing so, the company hoped to bring local Indians not only into the Protestant faith, but under the English government.

In opposition to the religiously oppressive manner of corporate territorial expansion in New England, the EIC’s ecumenical governance in India embraced, out of necessity, a broad sense of religious sufferance to govern over religiously cosmopolitan environments in the subcontinent. Central to the development of the EIC’s ecumenical model was its leadership’s unhappy endurance of the diverse religious communities that made up India’s cosmopolitan society. The tentative religious and political acceptance of the presence of peoples of numerous faiths became a policy of sufferance that EIC officials employed, offering begrudging inclusion into political life and religious freedoms in its territories. Unlike the pastoral governance discussed in Chapter 3, the EIC in the years that followed the acquisition of territory in India was forced to expand its legislative and governing authority beyond its factories and ships into the international religiously cosmopolitan geographies.¹ Following the territorial acquisitions of religiously cosmopolitan environments in India, the EIC established various methods to govern over the behaviour of those in its jurisdictions. The adoption of ecumenical governance by the EIC, unlike the theocratic model of the MBC, evolved from an inward to an ecumenically outward form of governance. In doing so, the company secured its commercial and governmental mission through policing political and religious behaviour through various levels of political, legal and religious inclusion.

As the EIC obtained governmental control over new territories, its leaders had to develop new methods of religious governance that embraced inclusivity, ensuring that they successfully secured their authority. In the Atlantic world, the presence of a substantial English population was considered the most effective way of ensuring governmental security. However, unable to establish English-populated plantations like those in the Atlantic, the EIC turned to local populations to settle its territories. To encourage migration, EIC leaders developed sufferance as a policy of governance, often in line with or in opposition to other forms of Indian and European religious governments established in the subcontinent.² However, ecumenical governance and its policy of religious sufferance did not arise from any liberal ideology, but through treaty obligations and necessity. EIC officials were only able to secure their territories and control the behaviour of Muslim, Hindu, Catholic, Orthodox Armenian and Jewish communities by offering freedom to practise their faith.³ Moreover, as the company succeeded in encouraging religious groups to settle in Bombayand Madras, EIC leaders were forced to expand civic representation to police the religious and political behaviour of these communities.⁴

Firstly, this chapter investigates the role of one individual, the EIC governor Josiah Child, in the development of ecumenical governance, and his ideas surrounding emulation of the Dutch models of religious governance. Moreover, it assesses the influence of South Asian religious cosmopolitanism and governance in the policing of religious behaviour through government in EIC jurisdictions. It does so by looking at key moments of religious governance in the East, such as Aurangzeb’slevy of the jizya and establishment of the Inquisition in the Portuguese Estado da India. Furthermore, the chapter highlights how the EIC responded to external events on the ground in the East, politicising religious freedoms to encourage migration to their territories. It examines how company officials developed ecumenical governance to encourage religious migration not only in opposition to European and Indian examples, but also through religious and commercial patronage.

The chapter then considers how the EIC in dealing with the behaviour of its own personnel acclimatised to the religiously cosmopolitan governments of the Indian Ocean. This is achieved by an examination of EIC officials and employees’ struggles to adapt its ecumenical governance to deal with practical environmental factors of daily religious life in India. Furthermore, the chapter examines the development and importance of passive evangelism as a policy regarding the religious behaviour of the EIC following the company’s territorial acquisition. Moreover, it places the role of passive evangelism in the wider politics of the EIC, claiming that the adoption of this policy was done to secure an effective relationship with various multi-faith communities of merchants, artisans and elites that made up Indian commercial society. Finally, the chapter also investigates the role of the company’s ecumenical governance in securing favour amongst religious communities by offering religious freedoms and political representation and power in company government in India, securing the political behaviour of the various religious groups under its control.

Ecumenical Governance, Josiah Child and the Dutch Model

Catherine of Braganza’sdowry, on her marriage to Charles II in 1662, brought England its first major jurisdictive acquisition of the English in the Indian subcontinent: Bombay. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, England had a modest foothold in India, controlling Bombay, Madras and Calcutta. These territorial acquisitions marked England’s initial forays into governing a growing and religiously cosmopolitan population in the subcontinent. The company’s religious concern no longer focused on its Protestant plurality, but it also came to rule over Muslims, Hindus, Parsi, OrthodoxArmenians, Jewsand Catholics. Considering this, its officials developed and adapted a policy to include these new populations to be able to police and govern over their religious and political behaviour. It was in the context of the cultural exposure of EIC officials to the religious world of the Indian subcontinent, as well as the pluralistically Protestant community that they had created over the previous 60 years, that it began to form a policy of religious governance that embodied ecumenicalism centred around sufferance. It was this policy that led to the future Governor of the Company, Sir Josiah Child, to comment in 1665 that although the company strived for uniformity in England, they allowed ‘an Amsterdam of Liberty in our Plantations’.⁵ The flexible ecumenical governance of the EIC allowed the company to secure its authority in India in the second half of the century. Having its foundations in early EIC interactions with Mughal and Maratha politics as well as growing out of the company’s diverse community of Protestant personnel, it also was able to react to the demands of local religious groups to have a voice in English territories. Company officials were quick to present this policy of sufferance as their own invention of benevolence, which offered religious protection in the face of what they presented as Mughaland Iberian religious injustice. Although this dichotomy between EIC governance and others was a fallacy adopted by the company to secure its own position, it was widely believed by the English to also be true.

Throughout much of the century, EIC officials would seek to replicate and adapt the governmental methods of their European counterparts to establish an effective way to control the religious behaviour of those people who came under the EIC’s expanding jurisdiction. Scholars have traditionally treated Child’s assertion as a much broader English trend, suggesting that the success of the EIC was down to the company’s willingness to adopt and adapt Dutch governing practices establishing ‘an Amsterdam of Liberty in our Plantations’.⁶Child’s interest in the Dutch lay in their commercial success and the ability of the Dutch to control territories, such as Batavia, from fortified positions in religiously cosmopolitan environments. From the middle of the century onwards, EIC officials increasingly looked at the Dutch ‘policy of dominions’ as the model to adopt and adapt to meet the strains of governing the company’s religiously cosmopolitan territories.⁷ For Child, the establishment of a model of religious governance that effectively policed the behaviour of people would not only ensure the security of the company in Asia but also trigger a reformation in practical charitable behaviour in England. Ecumenical governance would spur the success of the EIC abroad, which according to Child had ‘a tendency to public good’ that would help the poor of England.⁸ Child remarked that the Dutch, unlike the English, through the successful governance of trade in their territories abroad had established methods to ‘provide for, and employ’ their poor.⁹ The Dutch at Batavia established a thriving commercial and cosmopolitan hub in Asia. In the land under their control, the religious behaviour of Protestants, Catholics, Jews, OrthodoxArmenians, Hindus, Muslims, Confucianism and Buddism was all policed through a policy of sufferance. For Child, this had been one of the reasons for the commercial success of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and the betterment of the Dutch nation.

It was the cosmopolitan environment of Batavia, rather than the religiously tolerant Amsterdam, that the VOC was forced to adopt as a form of governance that Child saw as embodying ‘liberty’.¹⁰ Not only intimately aware of the VOC’s operation at Batavia, Child sought to explain the evolution of EIC governance in India as a characteristic that was in general common in English commercial expansion, in the East and West. EIC territories in India were a few of the many English ‘Amsterdam[s] of Liberty’ that were built on a model of religious sufferance that was as much English as it was Dutch. Child acknowledged that although uniformity was strived for in England, English territories abroad were a patchwork of religious identities and governance. In particular, he drew attention to the MBC; although noting it as England’s ‘most prejudicial plantation’, Child also disingenuously hinted that its success lay in its government’s recent willingness to accept Nonconformists of any kind.¹¹ Child goes on to say that the MBC by nature of the population and their religious politics had established an unprejudiced trade across the Atlantic that was ultimately to the benefit of England.¹²Child’s ‘Amsterdam of Liberty’, although a Dutch model, was not necessarily purely Dutch. It was more an example of a flourishing form of European corporate ‘ecumenical’ governance that evolved under both English and Dutch companies outside Europe, and by the end of the century, they could have easily been renamed ‘Batavia’, ‘Boston’ or ‘Bombay’ of liberty. It was in the religious cosmopolitan environments of India that the EIC’s ecumenical governance evolved both in conversation with and parallel to Indian and European forms of governance.

Ecumenical Governance in Opposition to Mughal Religious Government

Although the influence of the Dutch on EIC officials’ ideas towards religion and religious governance was considerable, the policy of sufferance was also shaped by sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Indian leadership. As James Tracy in his investigation of the Dutch at Surat has highlighted, Europeans who operated in India and Asia had a sophisticated and lucid understanding of Asian politics.¹³ Conflict and religious turmoil in India provided the EIC with the setting to appear to offer themselves and their government as a ‘benevolent other’ to peoples fleeing what the English perceived to be persecution and conflict. From the late 1650s till the first decade of the eighteenth century, India became embroiled in a series of religious struggles and conflicts between the Mughal and Maratha states.¹⁴ By the middle of the seventeenth century, Mughal, leadershipunder Aurangzeb, provided the means for the EIC to advertise its governance as being a religiously benevolent alternative to the local Indian as well as Iberian governments.¹⁵ The company’s policy towards religious governance was not only fuelled by the external forces of Indian and European politics, or Protestant evangelical requirements, but by the internal pressures of Indian people who now fell under EIC jurisdiction. Moreover, during the seventeenth century, people of varying religious, national and cultural backgrounds influenced the direction of corporate governance in EIC India. Over the second half of the seventeenth century, Indian legal, social and political agency in English jurisdictions was secured by the power of religious and cultural groups. These groups conversely undermined and strengthened English attempts to police their religious and political identity and behaviour.

Following its territorial acquisitions, the EIC’s model of ecumenical governance evolved to deal with the pressures of governing the religious behaviour of various peoples in religiously cosmopolitan environments. As the company gained control of both Madras and Bombay, its officials were faced with the new pressure of having to govern peoples who embraced numerous faiths and cultures. Both Hindus and Muslims made up significant proportions of the population of these settlements, whilst in Bombay there was, and Madras to a certain extent, a visible Catholic population, along with the followers of numerous other faiths including Jews, Jains and Armenians. At the time Madras was incorporated in 1687, Englishmen and women were an insignificant part of a population of over 10,000 people.¹⁶ It has been estimated that at the time there were only 150 English people resident in the city, with the numbers in Bombay not being much better, especially when viewed in the context of mortality rates. Company estimates put the English population of Bombay between 1673 and 75 as being around 427 Englishmen, women, and children; however, in this period a massive 41% of that figure had died.¹⁷ As these figures show, the English presence in the EIC jurisdictions was minimal in comparison to local Muslimand Hindu populations. In response, company officials adopted the ecumenical model to secure their commercial aims by encouraging migration into their territories.

Through the adoption of ecumenical governance and sufferance, the EIC leaderships hoped to ensure religious, political and commercial success in territories. In 1684, the Governor of Bombay, Richard Keigwin, wrote The Articles of Agreement between the Governor and Inhabitants of Bombayguaranteeing ‘the inhabitants the liberty of Exercising their Respective Religion’.¹⁸ This statement had been part of a series of moves that had been initiated by both George Oxendenand Gerald Aungier from the late 1660s offering widespread religious suffrage; however, the timing of Keigwin’s articles helps to illustrate the much wider reasoning for the EIC’s religious policy. Although the articles formally publicised the EIC’s government in Bombay, they also arose out of a policy of freedom as a ‘direct result of diplomatic circumstances’ that had been mandated through treaties with the Portuguese.¹⁹The Braganza treaty had formally handed Bombay and Tangier over to the English and with it the English ‘absorbed a portion of its population’.²⁰ Following the English annexation of the territory, a substantial population of Catholics remained. Although their presence would be a source of contention for the EIC, the company was directed through the treaty to ensure that all Catholics resident in the ceded territory would have the freedom to practise their faith openly under the islands’ English government. By the time Keigwin was publishing the articles, the policy of religious sufferance was well established in Bombay, although, having been drawn up during a time of religious dislocation encouraged by conflict, these articles are illustrative of the much wider post-Braganza EIC policy of religious sufferance, which was also being trialled in non-corporate jurisdictions elsewhere.²¹ Furthermore, their publication was an advertisement for the ecumenical governance of the EIC to Hindus and Muslims fleeing from the conflict between the Mughal and Maratha states.

The EIC entered an environment that had a long and conflicted tradition of Islamic and Hindu religious politics. The companies’ leaders had to negotiate this complex context to build their own forms of religious control. It has previously been easy to fall into a trap in South Asian history of over-emphasising historical moments in India’s religious and political past such as Aurangzeb’spassing of the jizya, and thereby misrepresenting the reasoning behind what to modern readers would be an innocuous decision. Described by one historian as the only ‘really exceptional act’ of his reign, Aurangzeb’sreintroduction of the jizya, a poll tax upon non-Muslims (which had been abolished by Akbar for being prejudicial) in 1679 is one such example where overemphasis has led to misrepresentation in the historical discussion.²² Whether seen as financially forcing Hindus to convert to Islam, or a policy to encourage support from loyal Muslims in his empire, Aurangzeb’s motivations to reintroduce the jizya have long been debated by historians examining its role in the conflicts of the Indian subcontinent in the late seventeenth century.²³ However, despite its contested position in Indian politics during this period, the jizya does conversely offer the intellectual space to see the adoption of religious sufferance by EIC officials as a tool of governance. The company as an olive branch offered religious freedom to Hindus who migrated to Bombay and Madras; religious sufferance became an integral part of the EIC response to Aurangzeb’s reintroduction of the tax.²⁴ Religious sufferance actively encouraged Hindus to migrate to safety in land under EIC jurisdiction, fleeing the financial burden of the jizya, but also bringing with them, to the great benefit of the English and the company, their own financial and commercial links.

In the second half of the century, local conflicts amongst Indian leaders increasingly influenced the commercial, political and religious conversations and policies of EIC. Through the 1660s, relations between Aurangzeband Shivaji became more and more acrimonious, as each launched small raids against the other and by 1669 the two were in full-blown conflict that would last for three decades. Exacerbated by the growing cultural divide between the two courts, the conflict between the two has been said to be fuelled by Aurangzeb’spolicy of ‘Muslim sectarianism’.²⁵ In 1667, George Oxenden wrote back to Londonfrom Surat detailing the growing violence of Aurangzeb’s government, describing how the Mughal government was ‘now lying a heavy persecution, upon the Banians and Gentues… upon all that are not of his erroneous opinion’.²⁶ In the wake of the Mughal governor’s ‘furious zeal’ and Aurangzeb’s religious politics, the EIC leadership and lands and religious government began to be seen as an alternative. Company reports of the policies and actions of Aurangzeb and his court became the subject of concern, intrigue and misconception for Englishmen and Europeans in India.

Ecumenical Governance in Opposition to Iberian Religious Government

The ecumenical governance of the EIC and the policy of religious sufferance provided the leadership of the company with the governmental apparatus to present itself as being the compassionate alternative to other traditional European parties in the area, particularly the Catholic Portuguese. Although the presumed severity of the Catholic inquisition in Goa has come under scrutiny, its imposition was real in the mindset of the local population and EIC officials, who sought to use it to encourage resettlement to English-owned territory.²⁷ As the religious administrative centre for the Portuguese, Goa had been a bishopric since 1534. The inquisition formally began in 1560 with the arrival of the first Archbishop Gaspar de Leao Pimental, although an outward policy of aggressive evangelism began in 1542 with the arrival of the Jesuit Francisco Xavier.²⁸ The most influential and long reaching policy began seventeen years after Xavier’s arrival and involved the forcible conversionof Hindu orphans. By 1559, the law gradually became more wide-ranging, encompassing not just orphans but also children whose fathers had died; such children were taken, and in the process, the Church could confiscate the parents’ property.²⁹ The religious governance of the Portuguese in India presented EIC officials with the opportunity to present their religious, commercial and political governance as an alternative to their European brethren. The taking of orphans by the Inquisition not only caused friction between the Portuguese and the Hindu communities, but also caused tensions between the Portuguese authorities and local Hindu rulers, in particular Shivaji, something that the leadership of the EIC were keenly aware of. EIC officials observed events unfold between the two powers, hoping to benefit from the dispute. In 1675, one Englishman wrote of how ‘Sevagee and they [the Portuguese] daily quarrel’ and in great detail wrote of its causes noting how the ‘chiefest cause of his hatred to them’ was the ‘forcing’ of ‘orphans of his cast to turn Roman Catholics’.³⁰ For the EIC this information was important in understanding the position of the Portuguese in India, but also integral to how the EIC would advertise its own ecumenical governance.

In Goa, the Portuguese and the Inquisition were also aware of the EIC actions and would express concern at the attempts made by the English to present their territories as being havens of religious tolerance. One year after the transferal of Bombay to the EIC, inquisitors in Lisbon presented a petition to Pedro II on the behalf of their counterparts in Goa.³¹ Amongst several grievances was a complaint about the effects of the EIC’s religious governance in Bombayon Goa. They argued that the EIC’s ecumenical governance, which allowed ‘everyone to live freely as they want’, was impeding the ability of the Inquisition to govern in Goa. In response to this, the Lisbon Inquisition requested Pedro’s ‘favour and help’ supporting their colleagues in Goa and lobbying the English to allow the Inquisition to continue its work in Bombay. The EIC’s ecumenical governance was sufficiently effective at encouraging sizeable numbers of ‘delinquents against the Catholic faith’ to migrate to Bombay concerning Portuguese officials in Goa and drawing the attention of Catholic authorities in Europe.³²

Following the acquisition of Bombay, further reports emerged that sought to point out the persecution that went on under Portuguese governance. These were to maintain the moral high ground; they detailed several horrific actions against the local Indian populations and placed the EIC as a benevolent other. George Oxenden explained the practice in the language of slavery, reporting that under the ‘tyranny of the Jesuits’ the children never returned to their families and were brought up Catholic, concluding this was a ‘bondage very grievous to them’.³³ Reports painted a picture of whole families being whipped, and evicted for being unable to pay their rents, whilst others starved or fled, ‘not having authority or justice to relieve them’.³⁴ As Portuguese evangelism became ever more aggressive, it also became unpopular amongst the other Europeans who were in India, not only Protestantsbut also Catholics. Several letters during the early 1660s highlight this, as in the report of the presence of French Capuchin friar, Father Ephraim at Madras; he had repeatedly been imprisoned by the Portuguese in the 1650s.³⁵ By encroaching upon both the religious and property rights of Indians and Europeans, the Portuguese provided the company with the perfect opportunity to portray themselves as the benevolent other, allowing Hindus to escape the Catholic inquisition in neighbouring Goa. In two letters to Surat, the Deputy Governor of Bombay, Henry Young, expressed his deep concern over the practices of Roman Catholics in forcibly converting Indians not just in Goa but also in Bombay, which he suggested was ‘scaring off the island to their Inquisition’.³⁶ However, the company was quick to ensure that non-Christians on the island understood that the EIC would ‘not favour them [the Catholics] in the least’, and would actively seek to prevent them from evangelising.³⁷ The EIC responded by banning evangelism, passing orders that no one, whether Catholicor Protestant, was to ‘christen nor punish’ any ‘Gentiles without a licence’, in an attempt to prevent Catholicreligious expansion in Bombay.³⁸ Moreover, it was an attempt to force Catholics to recognise the EIC’s authority and the company’s ecumenical governance.

However, the presence of Catholicsin Bombay continued to be a problem for the company. One repeated concern was that ‘our Servants and other English’ were being married, buried and baptised by ‘Romish Priests’ and such a thing was ‘so scandalous to the professors of the Reformed Religion’.³⁹ The company again ordered that all such practices in the city cease, going so far as to order that if any married couple ‘do no educate the Children in the Protestant Religion’ they were to ‘be sent home’.⁴⁰ The EIC policy of sufferance was proclaimed as providing an alternative space for Indians to escape Indian and European governance. On top of this, it also provided the opportunity for the company to exaggerate and advertise English Protestantism evangelism, as a passive and benevolent counter to the aggressive and prejudicial ministry of the Portuguese Catholics. As one agent at Gombroon would write, ‘I want not to daily solicit and encourage both Armenians and Banians of all sorts to embark’ to Bombay, which had been made all the easier by Aurangzeb’sreligious policies leading to people ‘imploring’ the company in Bombay for ‘assistance and protection’.⁴¹

Ecumenical Governance and Religious-Commercial Patronage and Religious Migration

Following the acquisition of territory in India, EIC officials sought to secure their position by encouraging, through the company’s ecumenical governance, Indian people of varying faiths and professions to migrate to areas under their jurisdiction. For the EIC to succeed in India, the company relied heavily upon its relationship with wealthy indigenous merchants, encouraging them to settle in their lands. These merchants not only assisted the company in its commercial endeavours but they were also valuable in securing the long-term aims of the company by throwing their support behind the EIC, attracting migrants and keeping the local population happy.⁴² From the mid-1650s, the local templesin Madras began to appear in company records, with the company dealing with wealthy local merchants to bankroll, build and maintain them. By the end of the century, Beri Timmanna, a future Chief Merchant of the Company, had funded both Chennakesava Perumal and Mallikesvarar Templesin Madras.⁴³ Through this policy, EIC officials hoped to influence the control of funds from these religious sites, as well as encouraging their building, by absorbing traditional Indian forms of templepatronage, granting control of them to Indian chief merchants.⁴⁴ Similarly, following the death of Kasi Viranna in 1680, the company built a mosque for the Muslim residents of Black Town in Madras.⁴⁵ By building these temples, the EIC hoped to encourage the migration of various Hindu worshippers from all over India, including worshippers of Vishnu from neighbouring Andhra, and Tamil-speaking followers of Shiva from further south.⁴⁶ Furthermore, the EIC also built and maintained a Portuguese Catholic church within its fort in Madras prior to building St Mary’s.⁴⁷ Through the migration of Indian peoples of varying faiths, including wealthy merchants, weavers and numerous professions, EIC officials sought to cultivate the company’s influence and power. By developing relationships (which were at times both advantageous and turbulent) with influential Indian merchants and migrants and their contacts, company officials sought not only to ensure their authority was imposed but also to encourage further migration.

The EIC’s policy of temple building was part of a broader policy in its ecumenical governance that involved using temples to encourage migration, through the gifting of patronage to wealthy merchants. However, at times this policy caused disputes between the EIC’s chief Indian merchants and local peoples, illustrating how the company’s policies often misunderstood concepts of local religious control. It was at these temples in the 1650s that the local Brahmins seeking to show their support for company officials hired a witch to ‘obtain the affections of governors’ by performing a ritual to ‘abase and destroy or hinder the proceeding of adversaries’.⁴⁸Timmanna and his associates became embroiled in a local dispute with the people of Madras and those who lived in surrounding villages, who were disgruntled at being forced to pay taxes for the maintenance of the two temples.⁴⁹ Triggered by the EIC’s involvement, this marked a considerable shift in local governance concerning the maintenance of temples, where funds went from being raised by local communities levying voluntary taxes on themselves to company-sponsored elites and families controlling the temples.⁵⁰ However, the complaints of the local painters, weavers and Brahmins also shed light on how the EIC, through their Indian chief merchants, sought to expand control of the company’s jurisdiction by acquiring control of temples outside its jurisdiction. For example, in their complaint, they expressed concern that the temple at Triplicane, which had gradually come under the control of local company merchants like Timmanna (who was a trustee of the temple), and like those in Madras, he was seeking to gain substantial revenues from it.⁵¹ The local Brahmins wished to see the company punish its chief merchants for their transgressions, writing that those who procure honour for ‘our nation’ and the company should ‘be honoured, and those who on occasion dishonour [it] should be punished’.⁵² The Brahmins’ letter highlights the success of EIC officials in establishing the company’s governing authority over the people of Madras, for although the reference to ‘our nation’ may be seen as a subtle jibe at the EIC, the company’s influence is recognised. The success of both the company and the local religious and mercantile elite was intertwined. Any attempt to dishonour the company was also an attempt to undermine the nation, and so the company rewarded or punished those who did so.

EIC officials were initially unwilling to take on the task of governing over Bombay in addition to its other outposts in Madrasand Surat, seeing it as a financial drain. Company leadership quickly realised, both in India and England, that only by attracting substantial levels of Indian migration would the newly acquired territory be commercially viable and English authority in the region secured. The company made attempts to encourage English people to settle in Bombay as they had in their Caribbean or New England colonies, offering land to ‘persons as shall be willing to come’; this also included free passage to those men who wished to leave England and have families.⁵³ The company also encouraged those ‘whether in the Company service, freemen, as also all others of the reformed religion’ to stay in India, by attaching indentures to marriage licences.⁵⁴ Company leaders believed that by forcing people to stay they were acting like ‘the successful examples of New England, Virginia, Barbados & Jamaica’, which would lead to the establishment of good, reformed Christian governance in India through plantations and investment in company land.⁵⁵ However, this failed, and despite aspirations to increase the English population through resettlement and marriage, the English population’s unwillingness to leave England in large numbers and settle in India ensured that their population remained fairly small. Unable to establish an English population like that of Massachusetts in India, company leadership turned instead to populating its jurisdictions with ‘itinerant South, Central and East Asian artisans, soldiers, merchants, and laborers’.⁵⁶ In a letter from London in the previous year, the company ordered its officials in Surat, for the organising of ‘better settling of commerce’ and ‘good government’ in Bombay, to ‘endeavour to encourage the natives that are there and invite others to come thither’.⁵⁷ To do so the company sought to promote its ecumenical governance, encouraging local artisans, merchants and labourers to resettle on their lands and be ‘under our own Government’.⁵⁸ By encouraging a variety of peoples and faiths to settle in Bombay, the company adopted sufferance as its key characteristic, offering religious freedoms in return for labour, loyalty, taxes and commercial knowledge.

Indigenous migration and the commercial wealth that came with it were intrinsically linked to the EIC’s introduction of sufferance, which provided English officials with the authority to offer substantial religious freedoms. Henry Gary wrote to Lord Arlington of the economic benefits of granting religious liberty to the people of Bombay. Proclaiming that by building Indians ‘pagodas and mesquitas to exercise their religion publicly’, the English would transform Bombay into a ‘very famous and opulent port’.⁵⁹ The building of places of worship was an important element of company officials’ policy of religious sufferance. Company officials saw it as a way to physically advertise a developing policy targeting Catholics, Hindus, Jewsand Muslimsin Bombayand Madras, whereby the company would ‘suffer them to enjoy the exercise of their own religion without the least disruption or discountenance’.⁶⁰ Gary suggested that there would be a benefit to the company in building temples and mosques, as the funds ‘reaped by it would be so considerable’ that even if only ‘by a voluntary tribute everyone would give’, the company would be able to maintain the garrison of the city.⁶¹In 1654, Timmanna was acquiring five pagodas a month on duty from just one of the temples, a value of roughly £24 a year, which would have had significant purchasing power in the Indian market.⁶² Furthermore, it was certainly enough to cover the cost of maintaining temples. More importantly, though, control of the temples gave the EIC greater influence and administrative power in the area. Hindus and Muslims were not the only faiths that the EIC leadership sought to encourage to resettle on company lands by building places of worship. Christian communities that included Catholics and Armenians, alongside Jews, were highly sought after in order to provide company interpreters and middlemen. Even as some advocated building temples and mosques, the Lieutenant Governor of Bombay also wrote to Surat to suggest that land could be given to the Armenians for them to move to and build a ‘church for the service of God’.⁶³ Whether it was a figment of their imagination or reality, the fact was that EIC officials perceived the company’s ecumenical governance as an incentive for varying religious communities to migrate and escape the presumably dogmatic local and European regimes that surrounded the company’s territories. By offering religious freedoms in addition to financial incentives, EIC officials hoped to encourage the migration of Hindu, Muslim, Armenian, Jewish and Catholic merchants, traders and artisans into the company’s territory to secure its commercial mission.

Ecumenical Governance and Regulating Behaviour of English Personnel

As EIC officials dealt with establishing the broad religious policies, they also had to ensure that their ecumenical governance was observed practically through the good behaviour of company personnel and the permanent and practical presence of a church. During the first half of the seventeenth century, the EIC had to a greater or lesser extent tried to ensure that on its ships and in its factories, its religious governance was observed through congregational meetings. In 1661, Oxenden declared it was his ‘chiefest care to promote his [God’s] service and worship’, whereas one of Aungier’s first acts in Bombay was to ensure that the Sabbath was observed.⁶⁴ However, company officials found it progressively difficult to do so, due to the lack of designated spaces for worship. The company’s policy of encouraging temple building is made even more startling by the fact that in 1663 Madras still lacked an Anglican church. Company officials were not unobservant of the irony of this, writing that they found it ‘very preposterous’, which was made all the worse by the fact that local Catholics had a church along with a churchyard to bury their dead, whilst the English were ‘forc’t to carry our dead corpses out of the town’.⁶⁵ The lack of allocated space for Protestant worship in the company’s new territory presented company officials with problems in observing religious life as well as enforcing the company’s ecumenical governance.

For much of the seventeenth century, company officials in India were tasked with either designating specific rooms in factories for worship or building chapels and churches. A complaint arrived from Fort St. George in 1660 that the English had helped two French friars build a church to ‘boldly perform their idolatrous rites’, rather than building one to ‘serve God in a better manner’.⁶⁶ After some anti-Catholic rhetoric, the writer goes on: ‘Twill be better for person that profess the Protestant religion… to serve God in some public place… that so strangers may see and hear we do it orderly, reverently and decently’.⁶⁷Likewise, Streynsham Master, the EIC agent in Madras, would later describe the ‘irreverence and disregard of religion’ that had been shown to their faith shown by his predecessor, who had refused to build a church.⁶⁸Master also commented on the ‘French Padrys Church’, suggesting that they had been much more successful in converting the local Indian populations and that the French had ‘enlarged’ their congregation to the detriment of the EIC.⁶⁹ The reason for the success of Catholicsin Madras, as well as other towns in India, was that the EIC were slow to build a ‘church for the Protestants’.⁷⁰

Until St. Marys church was completed in Madras in 1680, church services were conducted within the confines of the company’s factories, often taking place in small rooms that had multiple functions. In Madras, the chapel was often used as a ‘dining roome’, leading one commentator to state that ‘nothing can be more Scandalous’ in India.⁷¹ Such use of these areas was not only a danger to the reputation of the EIC but also Protestant faith amongst the local populations. Similarly, in Balasore, one EIC agent wrote that there was no place to entertain local dignitaries or hold events other ‘than the hall’ which, for the need of space, ‘must be our Church’.⁷² As areas that had various roles, chapels in factories were communal spaces that were shared between English Protestants, converts, dignitaries and Indian workers. Although in some factories such as in Bengal there was a ‘very beautiful chapel for divine service’, in general, there was no area where ‘at prayer we may not be disturbed or gazed on by the Workmen and Coolies that are continually about the factory’.⁷³ Factories were areas in which space was shared between English company servants and indigenous workers, meaning that private worship was either difficult or impossible to conduct.

Even when company officials had come to terms with the religiously cosmopolitan environment, and eventually established a space for worship, EIC officials had to find practical solutions to deal with environmental issues that affected the governance of its ecumenically diverse English and European employees. An essential element of most Protestant sects was the active observation of group worship; however, like all aspects of life in India, this raised practical problems due to denominational divisions that often flared into arguments between factors. After being accused by Joseph Hall of disobeying the company’s orders, by only observing divine worship on the Sabbath and not every day, Shem Bridges, the local company chief, eloquently observed that in India it was difficult to find a religious direction that pleased all, writing ‘it will be difficult to calculate an Ephemerides that will serve all Meridians’.⁷⁴ This observation astutely recognised the difficulty the EIC’s leaders and the company’s ecumenical governance faced in trying to cater for the religious sentiments of the broad Protestant communities that had been established by the company earlier in the century. But as he points out, navigating one’s way through religious life in the English factories in India could be difficult, just as with choosing the right course at sea. Bridges’ language more broadly highlights the geographic separation from daily religious life and governance that company personnel underwent in its service.

Shared space was not the only issue facing religious worship in the EIC factories in India: company personnel also had to deal with the climate. As is so often the case, temperature presented northern European Protestants with a problem, as Englishmen and women struggled to cope with the heat and humidity of living in India. Bridges pointed out that only one service on a Sunday could be expected ‘in these hot countries, for neither a man’s spirits nor voice can hold touch here with long duties’.⁷⁵ These environmental impracticalities encouraged ministers and company servants to adapt their methods, encouraging shorter sermons, which even then according to some were still ‘thought to be too much by some’.⁷⁶ The effect of this, according to Bridges, was that despite company orders for all ‘men or company to hear divine service’, many refused to turn up to church, with one individual even breaking the Sabbath to work.⁷⁷ Bridges’s comments highlight how travelling to India not only put geographic distance between the company’s personnel and the religious government of England, but also through the environmental, practical and geographic factors of the subcontinent complicated the company’s ecumenical governance on the ground.

Ecumenical Governance and Passive Evangelism

Following its territorial acquisitions in India, passive evangelism continued to be the mainstay of the EIC’s Protestant propagation in India. During the latter half of the century, the company’s policy of passive evangelism was to be placed at the heart of its ecumenical governance. As the jurisdiction of the EIC expanded over a substantial multi-ethnic and multi-religious population, its policy of sufferance became an important element in continuing the spiritual mission of the company. Unlike the aggressive evangelism of Jesuits and Portuguese Catholics who had gone before them in Bombayand Madras, the EIC continued to maintain its policy of passive evangelism.⁷⁸ Having set it up in direct opposition to the Roman Catholicconversion methods, EIC officials were acutely aware of and quick to prevent the continuation of any such practices. The Deputy Governor of Bombay, Henry Young, in 1669 expressed concern and a need to be ‘more cautious and circumspect’ regarding the Portuguese Catholics and their methods, if the company was to succeed in Bombay.⁷⁹ Furthermore, he warned of the practices of Catholic ministers, complaining that they ‘use compulsion’ in converting local Indians, which was damaging relations with the local population.⁸⁰ A month later, Young and some associates continued to complain about the effects of Catholic practices in Bombay, suggesting that they were forcibly baptising Indians.⁸¹ The effect of this on the company was twofold. Firstly, it immediately caused the company serious problems as it directly undermined the EIC’s policy of encouraging migration. Not only did the Catholics’ actions directly oppose the EIC’s use of sufferance, but they also acted to ‘keep people from coming on’ to the islands.⁸² Secondly, Young questioned the conversion itself, and as such both the eternal soul of the individual and the evangelical aim of the company were placed at risk. For the Protestant Young and his associates, ‘no Christian’ was made through being ‘forcibly [mock] baptized’, as the act did not include the ‘confession of faith… or profession to forsake the Devil… or to fight under [the] Christian banner’.⁸³ In response to the actions of the Catholic priests, Young ordered that they cease, pointing out that it was damaging relations with the local Indian population. Moreover, he commanded that all who came into the jurisdiction of the EIC in Bombay were ‘not to christen nor punish’ any ‘Gentiles without a licence’.⁸⁴ In doing so, Young not only forced the Catholic community to concede the supremacy of the company’s Protestant government and its policy of sufferance, but also ensured that the EIC’s method of passive evangelism would have priority when trying to convert local Indian peoples.

More often company officials complained of the presence of both Portuguese and Indian Catholics converts in Bombay, whom they feared undermined the company’s position as they secretly rejecting their authority, and remained loyal to the King of Portugal. With the acquisition of Bombay, a substantial population of Catholics fell within the jurisdiction of the EIC. English officials’ fears seemed to be initially realised when Governor Gervaise Lucas was forced to take away land from Portuguese settlers in Bombay for refusing to swear an oath of allegiance to the English Crown.⁸⁵ The actions of Lucas and the practice of forcibly annexing Portuguese catholic’s land led Oxenden to complain in 1668 that the former Governor had caused serious issues for the company in the long run. He still wished that ‘the island were free of them all’, going on to describing the Portuguese as ‘a proud, lazy nation’ and that he wished to ‘have better commonwealthsmen in their rooms’.⁸⁶Aungier complained that the Portuguese Jesuitsin Bombay had been refusing to marry Catholicsto Protestants, and had openly been trying to encourage bad blood between the English and the Indians. The governor argued that there was no doubt the ‘villainous obstinacy’ that had been caused was done so by the ‘pitiful, ignorant malicious politicians, the Inquisitors of Goa’.⁸⁷ Although the EIC had always been wary of the Catholic presence in the Far East, its acquisition of Madras and Bombay aggravated traditional opinions and mistrust of Catholics that had their origins in England and Europe. Furthermore, it also forced company personnel and the structure of the EIC’s ecumenical governance to deal with the political and religious inclusion of European and Asian Catholics into company life.

As far as the EIC was concerned, being Catholic alone was enough to place one under suspicion, no matter an individual’s nationality. From 1660, the company reputedly received complaints that two French priests were working ‘within a Protestant’s jurisdiction’ to subvert company authority.⁸⁸ Despite this, no action was taken against the priests, as company agents seemed to be divided on the issue of the priests’ loyalty. According to Thomas Chambers, one of the company factors at Madras, the priests had remained there in his opinion honestly offering ‘to take an oath to be true and loyal to the King and Company, as Catholics used to do in England’.⁸⁹ In India, just as in England, Catholics were an ever-present threat in the minds of the population. However, unlike in England, concerns about their presence were often outweighed by the benefits they brought to the English territories in India. According to one factor, these priests served the Portuguese Catholic community in Madras, and if the priests were forced to leave so would the Catholics, he feared, and the company would lose a percentage of its military manpower, not to mention their commercial knowledge.⁹⁰ However, the issue came to a head when agents in Madras suggested that the two priests had tried to instigate a violent rebellion by influencing the Portuguese living under the company’s government.⁹¹ This in particular draws attention to the complex attitudes English officials had regarding the presence of Catholics in England’s territories abroad. This manifested itself in a perplexing combination of suspicion fuelled by religious discrimination and religious and political acceptance instigated by the demographic pressures of controlling seventeenth-century Bombay and Madras. Likewise, the story highlights the complicated relationship that Catholics, both in England and abroad, had with English expansion during the seventeenth century.⁹² Although company agents were divided amongst themselves in discussions on the loyalty of non-English residents, overall, the EIC ensured that their officials remained wary of religious and national loyalties, whilst at the same time, they tried to ensure the local populations’ loyalty to the company.

For the religious and secular leadership of the EIC, Protestant evangelism was perceived to be an important factor in securing the company’s relationship with the Indian community and was presented as a positive alternative to other European commercial companies. For the company in India, the Portuguese provided them with a European contemporary who accentuated the difference between the Catholic evangelism taking place in Goa and their own passive evangelism. The EIC’s primary objective was to demonstrate their difference through its religious governance, which was unlike the zeal and heavy-handed evangelism of Catholic religious government; to this end, the chaplain would establish a well-governed, Protestant, godly society.

The evangelical mission of the company that sought to establish English civility in India through the conversion of Indian peoples to Protestantism struggled in the face of South Asian theological flexibility. Company agents often wrote of their fascination and frustration with the doctrinal malleability of Indians, able to assimilate certain Christian practices and teaching into their wider faith. Just as with the MBC and the Native Americans, the subject of the appropriation and adaptation of Protestant doctrines within indigenous religions became a matter of concern for the EIC as well as a possible tool for the evangelical aims of the company’s religious governance. For the company, it was bewildering that ‘by the principles of their own religion they [Hindus] are allowed our sermons (though not our prayers)’.⁹³ However, one EIC agent believed this religious flexibility provided the company with an opportunity. He advocated that the company should utilise the ecclesiastical openness of Hinduism to passively evangelise, through the effective policing of its personnel’s behaviour, indigenous population. By the good behaviour of its personnel, bolstered by the hope that some local people would attend church and hear sermons, agents hoped that the company through this ‘true pious fraud’ would ‘deceive (or rather undeceive) them into our profession’, converting them to Protestantism.⁹⁴ For EIC leaders, this ‘pious fraud’ was the backbone of their passive proselytising agenda and a core element of the company’s ecumenical governance. By at first ensuring the good behaviour of EIC personnel, and then slow exposure of Indians to the practices of the Protestant faith, the company’s officials believed themselves to be involved in some form of religiously true and sanctioned trickery where they would encourage the local people to believe they had fallen rather than been pushed into the Christian embrace. Despite the problems Protestant interaction with native faiths posed, it was the aim of the EIC to ultimately through evangelical chicanery or as one contemporary described it by ‘guile catch them in the net of the Gospel’, and through this cunning method it was believed Hindus, Muslims, Parsis and numerous other peoples in India were to be brought into the fold of English Protestant civility.⁹⁵ However, this doctrinal flexibility also posed problems for the company, as the adoption of Protestantreligious practices by Hindus did not necessarily mean complete conversion. Perceived by company officials as pretending ‘to have become a voluntary Christian’, those who ‘relapsed’ back to their old faiths were a troublesome repercussion of the company’s ecumenical governance and its evangelical policy, which like these converts had ‘not as yet been perfected’.⁹⁶

For some, these incidents were compounded by the Protestant plurality that was represented in EIC’s personnel. As in England, there was a diversity of Protestant denominations represented in the company’s operations in India, so much so that factors did complain that officials in London were sending out ministers who did not conform to their beliefs. Although the Protestant plurality of the EIC had been well established by the middle of the century, many governors and officials continued, with limited success, to try and establish uniformity. Aungier bemoaned the factionalism of denominational and doctrinal differences in the company, relating it to issues in London. Aungier suggested that the religious division in England over the years had contributed to the onset of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. Warning the members of company that it risked a similar fate, Aungier declared, ‘nothing hath proved more fatal to Commonwealths than confusion in matters of religion’.⁹⁷ Following the appointment of four ministers to Surat and the Coromandel Coast in 1668, the factors at Bombay wrote back to the General Court, vexed that prior to ministers being sent out the council had recognised that ‘that the principles of religion owned and practised by your servants in Surat and at Bombay differ much from the opinions professed by the gentlemen you have sent us’.⁹⁸ Again, one year later, several of the factors were so bemused by the company’s attitude towards its religious responsibility and the selection of ministers sent out to uphold it that they advised the company that in the future all ministers should carry the approval of the Archbishop of Canterbury.⁹⁹Aungier ordered that it was everyone’s duty in the company to treat its chaplains ‘with all civility and due respect’ and to ‘embrace them with the arms of brotherly love’.¹⁰⁰However, despite Aungier’s pleas, sometimes the denominational differences in the EIC’s religious government flared into arguments, highlighting the difficulties in policing its personnel’s behaviour.

After his yearlong residency at Masulipatam, the Rev. Walter Hook (one of the four ministers mentioned above) was sent to Fort St. George, where his refusal to read from the Book of Common Prayer or follow the traditional Church of England liturgy caused dissension in the factory.¹⁰¹ The argument that took place over two days concluded with the chief factor, Mr. Jearsey, walking out of church and establishing his own prayer meetings in his house. Despite that argument and any ecclesiastical differences initially reported in earlier letters, Smithson writes that the minister, Hook, ‘had gained very much the affections of most English here’.¹⁰² Externally, the altercation was practically dealt with by the president at Madras, George Foxcroft, who pointed out that Hook could not be dismissed and that all sides were to blame, ordering peace and unity through a group meeting and essentially instructing all parties to ‘deal with it’. Despite his despair at denominational confusion in the English community, even Aungier seemed to resign himself to its existence.¹⁰³ He acknowledged that the differences between them were ‘in outward Ceremony only’ and that they were ‘one body of the Christian congregation’.¹⁰⁴ Although some had bemoaned the Protestant plurality that had been established in India, those who had been its detractors had to come to terms with the diversity of Protestantism represented in the company, in order to establish unified support for the company’s ecumenical governance and its aims.

Ecumenical Governance and Local Political Engagement

Not only did the ecumenical governance of the EIC attempt to unify English Protestants abroad, it also worked towards solidifying the political ties of Indian groups to the company. In the lead-up to the handover of Bombay, EIC intelligence reported that groups of local inhabitants had offered to ‘deliver up the island in spite of the Portingals’.¹⁰⁵ These local inhabitants on several occasions continued to vocally exercise themselves politically under English rule, both within and across their religious communities, reinforcing as well as pushing the boundaries of the EIC policy of religious sufferance. One year before King Charles II signed the charter handing over control of Bombay to the company in 1667, 123 Christians, 84 Hindus and 18 Muslims presented the King with a petition outlining the abuses of the Portuguese. It detailed that under Portuguese rule, there was no religious toleration and only Roman Catholicism was acceptable. The petition then goes on to ask the King to prevent the government of Bombay from allowing any discussion to ‘alienate us from your government’.¹⁰⁶ Under the governorship of Gerald Aungier, in 1673 the council of Bombay proposed that for the better regulation of government, encouraging migration and appeasing religious groups, they should offer them their own councils. Aungierwrote that Muslims, Hindus and Portuguese should have their own chief and council and ‘may be impowered to have a peculiar regard and care of their own cast to accommodate and quiet all small differences and quarrels which may happen amongst them’.¹⁰⁷ By politically solidifying religious sufferance in the governance of Bombay and other towns that came under the EIC’s jurisdiction, company officials not only secured their own aims but also met those of local Indian and European peoples.

In April of 1685, the company, fearful that Catholicsin Bombay would leave their territories, and after repeated request from leading members of the Portuguese Catholic community, reinstated legal rights concerning the care of orphansin Bombay to the chamber of the Portuguese.¹⁰⁸ The ‘chamber of the Portuguese’ wrote to company officials in Bombay arguing that the EIC had neglected their responsibilities, and that no one had taken ‘due care’ of the ‘Orphans or their affairs’ in the port.¹⁰⁹ To rectify the issue, and ensure the better care of orphans, Portuguese leaders in the city requested that ‘all Orphans together with an account of their estates’ be put in the care of the chamber.¹¹⁰ Under their protection, the chamber would find the orphans suitable guardians, whilst protecting their estates, and ensuring they were not embezzled from. Furthermore, the chamber would find marriage partners of ‘suitable breeding according to their birth and quality’ when the orphans came of age.¹¹¹ With no structure in place to deal with the issues being raised by the Portuguese, EIC officials agreed to reinstate all previous rights concerning the care of orphans to the city’s Portuguese chamber. However, they limited the chamber’s authority on the condition that each year on ‘Thursday in Easter week’ the orphans would be required to appear before the chamber and be permitted to raise ‘just complaints against their guardians’.¹¹² Conscious that an exodus of Portuguese Catholics from the territory would destabilise the company’s position in Bombay, EIC officials treated the community as it did the Hindus and Muslims, offering limited legal and governmental rights and incentives in order to ensure that they continued to remain under English jurisdiction.

Again, the EIC officials utilised stories of persecution emerging from the subcontinent to publicise the company’s ecumenical governance and the political representation it offered. Reports from Surat informed the company officials across India of the ‘insufferable tyranny the Bannians endured in Surat by the force exercised by these lordly Moors on account of their religion’.¹¹³ The level of persecution that the letters paint suggests it was quite extensive, including accounts of forced circumcision and conversionto Islam, bribery, racketeering and ‘pulling down the places of their idolatrous worship, erecting muskeets in their room’.¹¹⁴ Even the company seems to not have escaped the growing pervasiveness of Aurangzeb’s religious policies. In 1667, an Englishman named John Roach was imprisoned in Surat and the authorities there unsuccessfully tried to convert him, whilst a Persian scribe and former employee of the company was also forcibly circumcised for eating ‘part of a watermelon’ that belonged to a local religious leader.¹¹⁵ Influenced by reports such as these, company officials across India, in particular at Bombay, sought to proclaim that they would ‘treat all that shall come to them with civility and kindnesses’ by offering religious and political safety and rights, which would encourage migration to company territories.¹¹⁶ For the company, its ecumenical governance offered it the best way to liberty of conscience for encouraging Hindus and Muslims to migrate to Bombay and Madras, whilst at the same time opening up the opportunity to draw them into Protestant ‘civility’.

Migration did not necessarily have to mean long-term relocation, but also included encouragement for religious pilgrimages and the lucrative financial as well as religious endorsement that came with support for pilgrims who travelled through their territories. English officials very quickly after acquiring Bombay noticed the financial possibilities that pilgrims offered the company. Once again, Gary rushed to bring the company’s attention to the financial possibilities that came with pilgrims, observing that a pilgrimage was not ‘accomplished without the expense of an offering’.¹¹⁷ This was to not only be accomplished by building temples but also by protecting the ones that were already in existence. One example arose in Bengal in late 1685, when the EIC council ordered that they would not ‘suffer any prejudice to be done to Churches, Mosques, [or] Pagodas’ where ‘God is worshipped, or pretended to be worshipped’.¹¹⁸ By legislating for the building and protection of places of worship and holy sites, company officials hoped that pilgrims could be further encouraged into EIC lands. The connection between the EIC’s ecumenical governance and its profit-making mission was further knitted together through policies to protect religious buildings and sites, as well as financially exploiting religious pilgrims. Links between pilgrims and profitability had long been common knowledge.¹¹⁹ In 1671, the council in Bombay would further legislate to ensure the safety of pilgrims in its lands, providing them with security sanctioning the Muslim pilgrimage to the tomb of Makhdum Fakih.¹²⁰ Although EIC officials sought to encourage pilgrimages into and through its territories, the company did not, however, amount to total religious freedom. For the company’s leaders, its policy of religious sufferance maintained and ensured that whilst pilgrims had the freedom to go on a pilgrimage, the authority of the Protestant company and its ecumenical governance would always hang over them.

As much as the EIC responded to the international and multi-religious dimensions of seventeenth-century India, this also meant it encompassed the paranoia that surrounded religious faith and national loyalty. The presence of both Catholicismand Islam presented EIC officials with a double-edged sword. In dire need of people to populate Bombay and its other cities, the company could ill afford to turn away people, whilst at the same time, the English were fearful that these populations held covert Portuguese or Mughal sympathies, and so consistently questioned their loyalty. Fearful of Muslim support for Aurangzeb over English interest, EIC officials in Bombaydebated whether Muslims should be able to buy any more land, as it ‘would be hazardous to the Island to suffer too many of one Cast of people’.¹²¹ The fear was that since there were ‘but a few English’ on the island, it would place the islands at risk of Mughal intervention.¹²² However, they were cautious not to damage the commercial mission of the company, ordering that skilled Muslim ‘weavers’ and their families could still settle.¹²³ On several occasions in 1673, the Bombay council even suggested that Muslims should be employed as soldiers in the garrison of the city. Indeed, the loyalty of these groups was not even questioned but expected, the council arguing that unlike the Portuguese soldiers, it was upon the ‘courage and good inclinations’ of Muslims and Hindus that they ‘may better rely’.¹²⁴ However, despite company officials’ willingness to employ Muslims as soldiers, they remained deeply suspicious of them. In Bombay, company officials not only ordered that Muslim pilgrims be disarmed on their pilgrimage through the territory but also attempted to place a noise restriction on the call to prayer.¹²⁵ The policy of sufferance ensured that the religious governance of the company was relatively successful, although it was susceptible to the influence of seventeenth-century Indian politics and English religious bigotry and mistrust.

Similarly, as local elites, both Hinduand Muslim, whom the EIC had previously supported in obtaining power, began to accumulate religious and political influence, company officials grew increasingly paranoid. In one case in 1696, the Governor of Madras, Elihu Yale, initiated steps to curb Beri Timmanna (Pedda Venkatadri’s brother) and his temple management of both the Mallikesvarar and Triplicane temples. Yale was fearful that Timmanna was using the holy sites to build relations with Indian nobles in the interior. By removing some of Timmanna’s privileges as one of the company’s chief merchants in Madras, Yale hoped that the authority of the company’s ecumenical governance would be suitably imposed.¹²⁶ This was not to be the case, as Timmanna utilised his position to combat Yale’s accusations, drawing upon his family’s role in building the temples and his position in Madras, thus successfully maintaining his hold on the temples. Although unsuccessful and at times half-hearted, the attempts by EIC officials to try and assert the company’s authority and its position as the highest governing body in clerical matters highlight that the company was concerned about how local Indians perceived its religious policies and ecumenical governance.

Ecumenical Government and the Exportation of English Customs and Prejudices

Religious sufferance in the company’s ecumenical governance did not, however, translate into religious understanding. Rather, the EIC desired to assert the authority and dominance of the English Protestant faith, thereby giving a governmental platform for English religious prejudices and fears to be acted out in a multi-religious environment that only inflamed them. From the late 1650s onwards, the transportation and enactment of English religious superstition and prejudices in the company’s religious governance can be traced through a series of sporadic but nonetheless frequent references by company officials to witchcraft. English ideas and concepts around witchcraft were exported around the globe, with the earliest known execution for witchcraft outside of the British Isles, taking place in New England in 1647 and culminating with the infamous Salem trials between 1692 and 1693.¹²⁷ Similarly, the arrival of semi-permanent English religious policy in India brought with it occasions in which company agents, as well as local people, accused or made accusations of witchcraft. In 1650, the president and agents at Surat informed the company in London of the behaviour of Captain Durson. Of all the grievances that had been levelled against him, the most serious was the fact that his chaplain, Robert Winchester, when docked at Moka refused to go back on the ship due to his ‘familiarity with witches and sorcerers’.¹²⁸ Accusations of witchcraft in India during this period took on much the same format as those in the previous decades in England. These accusations illustrated the arrival of English prejudices into the company’s ecumenical governance, especially paranoia surrounding its authority. As the company’s jurisdictional authority increased, so too did the need to mark its governmental identity, which under these new pressures straddled the religious worlds of both England and India.

Although the company’s ecumenical governance tried to be inclusive, paranoia and fear of a substantial (and possibly hostile) population meant that EIC officials’ fear of witchcraft was magnified by ignorance of local religious customs as well as local social animosity. Unfamiliarity with local religious customs no doubt played its part in accusations of witchcraft, like in England where it was usually triggered by the allegation of ‘maleficium’, in which animosity between the English and the natives and acts of social and physical malevolence often manifested as allegations of witchcraft.¹²⁹ Furthermore, a growing sense of jealousy amongst the local Indian population towards powerful elites whom the company supported also provided the perfect environment for witchcraft allegations to be made. In 1654, EIC officials in Madras received 51 charges against the Brahmins from local ‘painters, weavers &c’, the 36th of which accused the Brahmins of conducting harmful ‘charms, spells, roots and other witchcrafts’ against any who spoke out against them.¹³⁰ Although exacerbated by religious ignorance, the emergence of English witchcraft trials in India had more to do with the EIC’s ecumenical governance and the animosity it created by empowering certain groups’ elites through both commercial and religious patronage.

A decade after local painters and weavers accused the Brahmins of witchcraft, Madras was still the centre of further witchcraft trials. These accusations seemed to reach their climax during a court case presided over by Aungier and John Child in Bombay, where a ‘noted wizard’ was accused of murdering four people.¹³¹ Interestingly, the letters about the court case also seem to suggest that there were four more people imprisoned at the time for the same accusations, and that the ‘country people bring in daily their complaints of their losses and abuses recorded by them’.¹³² The jury was also informed by the man found guilty of murder and sorcery that there were ‘several as guilty as himself’, at which he gave the court their names.¹³³ The author of the letters described the incident bluntly, stating that to send a message and cement, the authority of the company that ‘burning would be far the greatest terror’, concluding, ‘so we burnt him’.¹³⁴ William Jearsey, a company agent at Madras, paranoid about Beri Timmanna’s growing power, accused him of being involved in witchcraft and employing ‘people to bewitch me to death’.¹³⁵ Either religiously paranoid about Timmanna’s weight amongst the religious community in Madras, or wishing to prey upon the fears of others, either way, Timmanna’s religious dealings with the Brahmins placed him in a central position to face allegations of witchcraft. However, despite the fact that Jearsey wished him hanged, Timmanna’s connections were too substantial, a fact that even Jearsey had to admit: ‘But I know him so serviceable to them [i.e. the company] that I would not, for any self-interest out him’.¹³⁶ The accusations and trials around witchcraft in this period highlight domestic responses of English ecumenical governance to religious paranoia. Furthermore, they also show how English mechanisms of governance were instituted abroad, which in multi-faith environments often did more to aggravate local animosities towards leaders than subdue them. The accusations of witchcraft and the effects of religious paranoia were also mirrored in Portuguese Goa, whose records similarly highlight moments when the authorities made accusations of ‘magic’ and punished local peoples.¹³⁷ Through its ecumenical governance, the company tried to control the behaviour and at times constrict or enhance the power of local leaders to ensure the governmental authority of the EIC in its new jurisdiction.

Throughout the second half of the seventeenth century, the company took steps to ensure that wealthy Indians could secure prestige through religious means; however, they had to fall in line with the company’s ecumenical governance. Following Timmanna’s death, his brother took control of the temple complex, during which time EIC officials made moves to ensure that the grievances of the local Indian population were being addressed by the company’s ecumenical governance. In 1678, both of Timmanna’s brothers, Pedda and Chinna Venkatadri, were forced to appear before a court in Madras. The latter was accused, imprisoned and fined for extorting substantial sums out of the local population under the pretext of ‘maintaining’ the temples.¹³⁸ Even though he was later released and the fine waived, the company maintained the ban on his activities.¹³⁹ The company’s policy of supporting the building of temples to encourage local migration not only highlights one element of its ecumenical governance but also links the relationship between English officials and the company’s wealthy native merchants. In 1676, one of Timmanna’sassociates, Kasi Viranna, would obtain total control of Triplicane from the Golconda government, amounting to a substantial incomefor Viranna each year.¹⁴⁰Viranna built the first mosque in Madras in 1680 and despite being a Hindu continued to maintain and receive finances from it for the rest of his life.¹⁴¹ Like many other merchants in Southern India, Viranna utilised his position in the company to develop financial portfolios that would merge their commercial aspirations with the local religious and political authorities in India.¹⁴² In doing so, they were able to accumulate substantial wealth and gain influence both amongst the company and the local Indian population. Although wary of their local merchants wielding too much control, seeing this as possibly damaging to its authority, the EIC at the same time also sought to keep the merchants happy to foster the company’s commercial objectives.

The company built upon the ideas of contemporaries, such as Abel Boyer, aiming to secure its commercial relationships with local Indian peoples by ensuring that they infused ‘credit with a greater sense of surety and constancy’ through moral and religious ties.¹⁴³ According to Boyer, credit, whether for the individual or the state, was the ‘opinion or confidence we have in another’s Ability, Honour, and Punctuality to Discharge or Pay a Debt’.¹⁴⁴ It was an individual or group of individuals’ ability, honour, punctuality and honesty that ensured a mix of reputation and expectation in dictating terms of credit. As such, the prestige of local merchants in obtaining control and building temples encouraged the positive perception of individuals associated with the company, which according to officials ‘increased the credit in local trade’ and thus was seen as beneficial to the company.¹⁴⁵ By ensuring that the local Indian merchants who associated with the company had moral and religious connections, the company anticipated that the so ‘ingrained moral virtues might stabilize public opinion’ towards the company and its credit.¹⁴⁶ This, however, was by no means to suggest that company officials did not take steps to ensure that local merchants such as Timmannaand Viranna and their associates did not supersede the authority of the company.

The company’s ecumenical governance was not only concerned with empowering local merchants and individuals, but also influential religious groups. Officials were incredibly keen to project the company’s policy of religious sufferance amongst the Armenian community, hoping that it would encourage their support and thereby provide the EIC access to the overland silk trade to the Levant that they monopolised. An agreement was reached between Josiah Child, John Chardin and Khwaja Panous Callender after protracted negotiations in London, in which the Armenianswere offered liberties ‘as if they were English born’, whereby they were to have ‘free and undisturbed liberty of the exercise of their own Religion’.¹⁴⁷ The company’s actions towards Armenians highlight how its ecumenical governance in many ways foreshadowed events towards religious freedom in England, as it would be another year before such a formal act allowed such religious freedoms to Protestant Nonconformists. Company leaders such as Gary, Cooke and Childs continued to hope that offering religious freedom and allowing space for the building of places of worship would make the EIC territories more appealing for religious and commercial migrants. Churches offered visual representation of the company’s policy of religious sufferance, whilst also underlining the aims of the company’s ecumenical governance to offer further freedoms and assurances to encourage influential religious groups to migrate to company lands.

Throughout this period, EIC’s ecumenical governance evolved both in opposition to and in tandem with local religious politics. Despite moments of criticism, English officials often wrote describing the religious freedom in Indian society and how this could be mirrored within the newly acquired jurisdictions of the EIC. The religious governance of the subcontinent had long-established precedents that European travellers often commented on; although for many EIC officials, this was not relatable to any significant extent until the company acquired territory following the Braganza treaty.¹⁴⁸ In a letter drafted but unsent whilst he was Agent and Governor of Fort St. George, Streynsham Master went into great detail to inform its unknown recipient of the extent of sufferance in matters of Indian governance.¹⁴⁹Master recalled his initial misconceptions and fears upon leaving England, writing that he believed the English (along with other Christians) in India ‘did not live agreeable to any rules of Religion’.¹⁵⁰ However, through his observations, he moves swiftly on to not only describe how his fears were ill-founded but also suggest that Indian religious governance had something to offer his readers in England and Europe. Reinforcing Jahangir’sremarks to Roe some 60 years earlier, Master declared that all faiths in India, not just Christians, were allowed to worship and perform an ‘outward show of Sanctity’.¹⁵¹ Particularly interested in Christians in India, Master described how Protestant, Catholic and Armenian communities all had ‘assemblies of their own Nations’, going on to briefly outline the individual ways in which these communities met.¹⁵² By connecting the denomination to nation, Master at once highlighted the religious diversity of the Christian community in Madras and India (as a whole). In doing so, Masters called attention to the unjustified fear that diversity would mean disloyalty, and that in India it was just the opposite, with all religious communities being considered loyal enough to be granted some level of autonomy.¹⁵³

Furthermore, the multi-national and multi-religious dimensions of life in India defined not only Indian religious governance but also how the company would govern in the region. By the 1690s, the company had effectively established ecumenical governance that mirrored the traditional religious autonomy of India. In Madras, the English mayor of the town was supported by numerous aldermen and burgesses, several of whom were from different Indian religious and ethnic groups: one Armenian, one or two Jews, Portuguese, Hindus, and one Muslim.¹⁵⁴In Bombay, the governors Cooke, Lucas and Gary, as well as presidents Oxendenand Aungier, adopted de facto religious tolerance, fuelled by the need for the company to appease religious groups within the port. Between 1672 and 1700 the company at Bombay received from many Hindus, Muslims and Catholics 50 petitions relating to political and legal representation, and territorial and business disputes. In the incidents involving political representation, the company often ruled in favour of the religious communities, ensuring that Muslimand Hindu communities in Bombay were afforded a certain amount of autonomy in company held jurisdictions.¹⁵⁵

At one moment, Master in his observations on religious governance in India paradoxically goes on to question European cultural superiority, whilst reinforcing the growing necessity for the English to emulate Indian practices whilst imposing their governmental authority in India. With a hint of respect and even admiration, Master wrote that under the customs and laws of India, Christians lived more comfortably ‘than in Europe’.¹⁵⁶ India was not only noticeably different from Europe, being far more pragmatic in many ways, but according to Master, the devotion of Indians to their faiths far exceeded that of the English. Ironically, Master concludes his discussion by suggesting that by mirroring the practices of Indian religious governance along with Indians’ devotion to religion, the English would once again gain cultural superiority as they who ‘serve God most & best’.¹⁵⁷

Conclusion

The EIC’s ecumenical governance evolved, in the years following 1661, out of a necessity to deal with the religious cosmopolitanism of the company’s newly acquired territories in India. Unlike the MBC’s theocracy, the EIC was obliged to adopt a broad, religiously inclusive ecumenical model that ensured the company’s commercial and governmental success in its territories. This was done by offering graduated levels of political inclusion to various religious communities in its territories in India. Through the company’s ecumenical governance, EIC officials hoped that Protestant ‘piety and morality’ would be observed in its territories and that ultimately the consequences of this piety and morality would not only ‘refashion settlers into obedient and productive subjects’ but also the local Indian peoples.¹⁵⁸In Bombay, where the minister was congratulated for his help in establishing ‘sobriety, religion, peace’, the effect of such ecumenical governance had been ‘the rooting out of sin and prophaneness and the encouragement of piety and virtue among us’.¹⁵⁹ Although this remained a long-term goal of the company’s ecumenical governance, it also had an immediate role in securing the commercial and political aims of the company leadership.

The peaceable securing of territory and trade was a priority for company officials in Bombayand Madras; and ecumenical governance, although remaining distinctly Protestant, would encompass the diverse religious groups that were represented in Indian society. This model not only offered EIC officials the means to achieve this goal, but its creation and evolution in India highlight the flexibility of companies in establishing forms of governance that expanded traditional ideas of the English government. Faced with ruling over a religiously cosmopolitan jurisdiction, the EIC’s religious and secular leadership was forced to adapt the religious governance of the company to meet the new civic, ecclesiastical and evangelical needs of English government in India. Just as in the first half of the century, the role of religious governance in policing EIC personnel was considered vital. However, following the acquisition of new territory containing multi-religious populations, the policing of company personnel developed more overtly than before in relation to passive evangelism. Company leadership continued to be obsessed with the behaviour of company personnel and how their behaviour would affect both religious and commercial relations with local Indian people.