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How did you discover the existence of Ahmad Khan and the story of this journey that took him from Gujarat to London at the end of the eighteenth century, via Paris?
I discovered Ahmad Khan by chance, in 2015, while I was working at the Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in La Courneuve. I was thumbing through, for another project, a bundle titled “Memoirs and Documents Asia” – a kind of potpourri containing eighteenth‑century documents on Asia. I happened to come across papers that referred to the presence of two Indian travelers in Lyon in 1794.
I was surprised by this information, which I had never heard of, and it sparked the research. I realized there were already a few works on these individuals, but none took into account the entirety of their journeys. From India to London, and then their return, from the perspective of the connected approach I adopted. So it is a prime example of scientific serendipity that gave rise to my investigation.
You mention the archival trace of two Indian travelers, and you tell us in your book that there were actually four who left India for Europe. But your work focuses mainly on one of them, Ahmad Khan. Why?
The book centers on a single protagonist, Ahmad Khan, because when he arrives in Paris in the spring of 1794, he tells his story to the Committee of Public Safety. But within this account, he places himself within a broader group of travelers who had left India a few years earlier.
This group is made up of the sons of Mu‘azzaz Khan, the last nawab (governor exercising authority on behalf of the Mughal emperor) of Baroche, a port city in Gujarat. Ahmad Khan presents himself as one of them. He recounts leaving for London with three other brothers, with the aim of pleading their case before the British East India Company. They accuse him of having deprived them, about twenty years earlier, by conquering their city.
Four historians are particularly mobilized in your introduction: Carlo Ginzburg and Carlo Poni, who link your project to microhistory; Sanjay Subrahmanyam, who steers it toward connected history; and Dipesh Chakrabarty, who places it in the wake of postcolonial studies. How do you situate your work within these historiographical legacies?
Indeed, that is one of the book’s aims: to cross these approaches. My book is a multisited inquiry that belongs to what is often called today “global microhistory” – a phrase I prefer to render as “microhistory in motion.” It is about tracing a small group of individuals across their peregrinations through the archival traces they left. Through these few individual trajectories, I try to pose more general questions, to understand how they make for a case: that is the inheritance of microhistory.
Connected history, for its part, seeks to follow actors and phenomena beyond the boundaries of historiography. It aims to restore connections artificially “disconnected” by divisions into national histories or cultural areas. Through Ahmad Khan’s trajectory, it is thus a matter of letting historiographies speak to each other—Mughal imperial history, the history of British conquest in India, Ottoman history, Atlantic revolutions. The objective is to account for multiple perspectives, avoiding an eurocentric bias.
The reference to Dipesh Chakrabarty and his book Provincialising Europe goes in the same direction. More specifically, it helps to highlight the fundamental issue of language and translation in this kind of research. Against the false transparency born of forgetting the plurality of languages, it is a matter of restoring the translation operations that lend language its “translucent” character. This makes it possible to grasp the uniqueness of an experience formulated in languages other than European ones — namely Persian.
The “Age of Revolutions” in the subtitle of your work points to a time as well as to a geography: that of Atlantic history. Yet your study concerns the Eurasian world…
The notion of an “Age of Revolutions” is indeed primarily mobilized in Atlantic history, but my idea was to take a side step and widen it toward Asia. This is how I am influenced by Christopher Bayly’s work on the “global eighteenth‑century crisis,” in which he links the Atlantic revolutions to the difficulties faced by the Safavid and Mughal empires from the 1720s onward.
For me, it is also about stressing the geopolitical shift that the East India Company’s conquest of Bengal in 1757 signaled. Bengal was one of the richest provinces of the Mughal Empire, home to more than 20 million people. This change of sovereignty over a populous and prosperous region has repercussions far beyond Asia. The journey toward Europe recounted in my book is one of them.
So you discovered Ahmad Khan’s existence through a document attesting to his passage through France in 1794. How and why did he reach there?
We can trace his itinerary thanks to the account he gave upon his arrival in Paris in 1794, in the petition he addressed to the Committee of Public Safety.
It begins in 1772, when the British East India Company, via its Bombay presidency, takes control of the port of Baroche in Gujarat. It was a prosperous port, active especially in the cotton trade. The local nawab, Mu‘azzaz Khan, is then deposed, and dies shortly thereafter.
Their sons were young children then. But once they reached adulthood, about fifteen years later, they decided to go to London to assert their rights before the Board of Directors of the East India Company. Their aim was not so much to regain control of Baroche as to obtain financial compensation for the harm suffered.
That was a very daring move!
It may indeed seem audacious or desperate. Why go to London to complain to those who had wronged you? But, in hindsight, it was not as irrational as it might appear.
First, because in Mughal political culture the possibility of lodging a grievance with the sovereign over a supposed wrong was deeply rooted. It was therefore a fairly logical reaction on the part of these Indian elites.
Second, Ahmad Khan and his companions were perhaps aware that within the Company there were sharp divisions—especially between field agents deployed in India and those who remained in the central administration in the metropolis. The expansionist venture was debated. Some in London thought that the costs of conquests, both financially and morally, were detrimental to British commercial interests.
Undoubtedly, Ahmad and his companions were also informed of the unpopularity of the East India Company among a portion of the British public. They certainly hoped to exploit these cracks to obtain satisfaction.
Concretely, how do they manage to reach Europe from Gujarat?
The principal route to reach Europe from India in the eighteenth century is the maritime route via the Cape. This is the route taken by the merchant ships of the European powers. But the sons of Mu‘azzaz Khan apparently did not have the means or the networks to board a European vessel.
So they chose the land route: leaving Bombay, they travel via Muscat, cross the Strait of Hormuz to Basra, the entry point to the Ottoman Empire, and pass through Baghdad and Diyarbakir to reach Constantinople. Then, via Salonica, two of the sons arrive in Marseille. A journey of several thousand kilometers, either by boat to traverse the Indian Ocean or sail up the Tigris, or by caravans.
This route was also used by the European Companies because it could be faster than the sea route at certain times of year. But it was mainly the route of Muslim networks – it is largely thanks to the aid of Sufi networks that Mu‘azzaz Khan’s sons were able to cross the Ottoman Empire.
And finally, on the road to England, Ahmad Khan makes a stop that lasts much longer than expected in France…
The travelers landed in Marseille in the spring of 1793, then decided to ascend the Rhône valley toward Paris. The choice to cut through France rather than circumvent it is easily explained: it was the fastest and most direct route under normal conditions. But what was supposed to speed up the journey instead slows it down, because they arrive unknowingly in the middle of the Revolution and amid the unraveling of the war between France and Great Britain.
What stops them, however, is first the death of one of them, nearly a year after falling ill in Lyon. In effect, Ahmad Khan then falls into a “spatial-temporal fault.” He thought the hardest part of the journey to reach Great Britain was behind him, yet he remains stuck in France for almost two years – first in Lyon, then in Versailles.
But Ahmad Khan’s objective does not waver: he wants to continue his route and, to do so, he must obtain the support of the authorities he seeks. Unlike contemporary migrants, he is a temporary visitor who does not seek to settle but to reach London, and then return home after obtaining a remedy, he hopes.
However, when he finally arrives in Paris in the spring of 1794 and asks the Committee of Public Safety for the means to continue his journey, he is offered “hospitality,” which interrupts his travel. He thus finds himself forced to settle for many months in Versailles.
The archival traces left by Ahmad Khan take mainly the form of supplications addressed to French and Ottoman authorities. They are rich sources, but problematic. For the petitioner has every incentive to say what he thinks the authorities want to hear, rather than the truth.
Indeed, my work relies principally on two supplications. The one addressed by Ahmad Khan to the Committee of Public Safety in April 1794. And a second one he sent to the Ottoman chancery in the spring of 1796, as he was on the way back to India.
These supplications resemble each other, because, each time, the same story is told. Yet there are subtle variations between them, depending on the places, interlocutors, and the language in which they were written. I therefore had to undertake philological work to understand what those subtle variations imply about the position of the petitioners. One of the book’s challenges was to measure what could be drawn from such a fine textual analysis in terms of social history.
This work is complicated, because these supplications were not addressed directly by Ahmad Khan to the authorities he sought. They passed through an intermediary – most often, Pierre-Marie Ruffin. He translates into French, from Persian (the administrative language of the Mughal Empire, but also a lingua franca across Eurasia), Ahmad Khan’s supplication to the Committee of Public Safety; while he writes in Persian the supplication to the Ottoman authorities.
Pierre-Marie Ruffin is the other hero of your book. Can you tell us more about his background?
Ruffin is what one calls a drogman – a word derived from the Turkish tercüman, itself derived from Aramaic via Arabic. This term also gave rise to the French word “truchement.” It was used to designate interpreters in the Levant.
Né en 1742 à Thessaloniki, où son père était lui-même drogman, Ruffin fut formé à l’École des jeunes de langues de Paris, dans l’actuel lycée Louis-le-Grand, mais aussi sur le terrain à Constantinople. En 1774, il est rappelé en France pour occuper le poste de secrétaire‑interprete du roi dans les langues orientales. À partir de cette position, il cumule les fonctions. Attaché à la Bibliothèque royale, il est aussi le « Monsieur Levant » du ministère de la Marine, chargé de la correspondance avec Constantinople et l’Afrique du Nord. En 1784 enfin, il est nommé professeur de langues turque et persane au Collège royal.
Lorsque Ahmad Khan arrive à Paris en 1794, Ruffin est donc tout indiqué pour agir comme intermédiaire et interprète. Mais il fait bien plus que cela: il accueille Ahmad Khan chez lui, à son domicile personnel, à Versailles. Il lui donne également des leçons de français – on conserve d’ailleurs une grande partie du matériel pédagogique élaboré par Ruffin à destination d’Ahmad Khan. La relation entre Ahmad Khan et Ruffin est au cœur de l’ouvrage. Elle est particulièrement riche, car la médiation purement linguistique se double d’une relation d’hospitalité – d’un accueil à un hôte –, et d’une relation pédagogique – de maître à élève.
Ahmad Khan parvient finalement à atteindre Londres en 1795. Qu’obtient-il, une fois là-bas ?
Lorsque Ahmad Khan arrive à Londres en janvier 1795, il constate qu’un autre de ses frères, Ahid ud-din, perdu de vue à Constantinople, est arrivé avant lui. Il est passé par une route autre qui s’est révélée plus rapide. Via Smyrne, Leghorn (Livourne) et Toulon – au moment où ce port était occupé par la flotte britannique.
À Londres, il exerce des pressions sur la Cour des directeurs de la Compagnie des Indes orientales et obtient d’elle une indemnisation financière.
Cette décision semble surtout résulter de la volonté de se débarrasser de ces requérants indiens susceptibles de provoquer agitation et polémiques. Par leur pouvoir de nuisance, ils parviennent ainsi à obtenir quelque chose: une petite pension d’environ 200 roupies par mois pour chacun des quatre frères.
Cette histoire est intéressante, car elle montre une capacité d’action insoupçonnée de la part d’individus qui, bien qu’issus des élites indiennes, peuvent aussi être considérés comme subalternes, du fait de la situation coloniale dans laquelle ils évoluent.
Les protagonistes de mon enquête sont les fils d’un nawab, donc ils appartiennent à l’élite indienne. Notamment, le fait qu’ils maîtrisent la culture écrite en témoigne. Mais ce sont aussi et surtout des acteurs qui ont été dépouillés de leur capacité d’action par la conquête britannique. Ils se retrouvent à quémander protection et réparations. C’est donc, malgré une histoire « par le bas », celle que j’ai voulu écrire.
Pour l’élite colonisée, accéder au centre décisionnaire s’avère crucial. Dans la culture politique moghole, c’était un aspect important: l’élite dialoguait en permanence avec le pouvoir central. Or ce lien de communication politique entre élites et pouvoir central est rompu avec la prise de pouvoir de la Compagnie des Indes orientales. D’où, sans doute, ce projet – se rendre à Londres pour faire valoir ses droits et poursuivre ainsi cette tradition de dialogue avec le pouvoir central.
La Compagnie des Indes orientales se présentait volontiers comme la continuatrice de l’empire moghol, mais Londres se situe à des milliers de kilomètres de l’Inde. Dans son livre L’Empire de la supervision, Gildas Salmon analyse les enjeux de cette gouvernance à distance. Gouverner à distance, pour la Compagnie des Indes orientales, revient à tenir à distance: elle ne veut pas l’arrivée des élites indiennes en Grande-Bretagne et cherche à décourager l’entrepreneuriat de tels voyages. Par là, on voit que la colonisation passe aussi par un contrôle des mobilités.
Le fait qu’Ahmad Khan et ses frères aient obtenu des réparations est surprenant à plusieurs titres. D’abord parce que le rapport de forces leur était a priori défavorable. Ensuite parce qu’il amorce le débat sur les réparations du colonialisme, non pas avec la décolonisation, mais au moment même de la conquête coloniale.
Quand Ahid ud-din arrive à Londres, il réclame réparation pour le tort subi et produit pour cela un plaidoyer particulièrement argumenté. Dans ce texte, sans doute rédigé avec l’aide d’un avocat londonien, il décrit de manière très imagée et frappante la spoliation dont sa famille a été victime. Selon lui, une « énorme dette née de l’avarice, poursuivie par le rapine et maintenue par la cruauté, la violence et l’injustice » était due à sa famille. C’est un document assez remarquable, qui résonne avec toute une production pamphlétaire hostile à l’expansion de la Compagnie publiée dans les années 1770 et 1780.
Indeed, it is a very interesting case of a colonized person who raises, as early as the eighteenth century, the very contemporary question of reparations. Ahid ud-din asks to be compensated for damages his family suffered due to colonial spoliation. And, similarly, throughout the nineteenth century, despite the hostility of the Company, members of the Mughal elite would travel to London to plead their case.
After the London episode comes the return to India. It is through this point that you choose to begin your book by describing Ahmad Khan’s meeting with the Ottoman sultan Selim III. Why this choice that goes against chronology?
It seemed to me that Constantinople served as a turning point in this story because the travelers pass there both on the way out and on the way back. But also, because it allows us to shift the perspective and show that the Ottoman Empire was then in continuity with the world of this Indian elite. It is only later, upon arriving in Marseille, that they enter a different world.
Narratively, this gives the work a ring composition, to borrow Daniel Mendelsohn’s term: a device that relies on flashbacks to densify the narration. We send the reader back to the point where they started, but enriched with all the knowledge gathered along the way.
This passage through Constantinople is also a moment when suspicions about Ahmad Khan’s status and narrative arise?
When Ahmad Khan passes through Constantinople again on the return, he is hosted at the French embassy, thanks again to Ruffin, who had been named, in the meantime, chief secretary. He has the good fortune to reconnect with him.
The French envoy to the Porte displays him at the heart of the cortege that takes him to his interview with Sultan Selim III at Topkapi Palace in April 1796. This arouses the suspicions of the British chargé d’affaires in Constantinople, John Spencer Smith. For him, this Indian traveler, traveling under French protection, is eminently suspect.
Another narrative then takes shape that makes Ahmad Khan a spy on Paris’ payroll, tasked with delivering documents to Tipu Sultan, the sultan of Mysore, Britain’s arch‑enemy in India.
In fact, as I reveal in my book, Ahmad Khan is hiding something, but it is not what the English think.
Ahmad Khan is finally arrested and imprisoned by the British upon his arrival in Bombay in 1796. He undergoes several interrogations. After which, his trace is lost?
We have preserved the verbatim of the interrogations, which allows us to view his account from a different perspective. This time, he is no longer entirely master of it, as with the supplications submitted along the journey: he must try to shed the suspicions that cling to him.
Subsequently, Ahmad Khan disappears more or less. One could argue that he exists as a historical actor only when he enters networks of circulation. When he exits them, he vanishes from historiographical radar. Yet we do not entirely lose his trace, as I long believed: he remains within the Company’s orbit, and thus within its archives.
Moreover, the story continues into the contemporary era, for the descendants of the Baroche nawabs long received a pension—a downstream consequence of Ahmad Khan’s journey, granted by the Raj.