Knowledge About India in Early Modern Germany

‘AUS DEN FÜRNEMBSTEN INDIANISCHEN REISEBESCHREIBUNGEN ZUSAMMENGEZOGEN’. KNOWLEDGE ABOUT INDIA IN EARLY MODERN GERMANY

Antje Flüchter

At the court of the Mughal, women played a very special and important role. They had great inﬂuence on the Mughal’s political decisions, forming, basically, the ‘Staatsrath’, and having titles such as Prime Min- ister, Vice-King or Secretary. Even stranger, the Mughal had a bodyguard of Tartarian women, who were armed with bows and sabres. This information can be found in the article ‘Mogul’ in the volume 92 of Johann Georg Krünitz’s Ökonomisch-technologische Encyclopädie, published in 1803.1 Any knowledge which found its way into memory media such as encyclopaedias was widely accepted as accurate. Encyclopae- dias transformed information into socially accepted truth. For contem- poraries the story about a female guard was credible and represented the strange and oriental character of the Mughal court. But where does this story, about a female guard, which we nowadays would con- sider incredible, come from? A similar description can be found in Erasmus Francisci ’s Lust- und Statsgarten, an earlier type of encyclopae- dia published in 1668. Shah Jahan , as we read there, had no men in his palace, but only female bodyguards. Women were on guard inside the palace, armed with ‘male’ weapons.2 Erasmus Francisci culled this information from travellers and their reports. Travel accounts were an important source of new information from non-European countries.

1 Krünitz J.G., Ökonomisch-technologische Encyklopädie oder allgemeines System der Staats-, Stadt-, Haus- und Land-Wirthschaft, und der Kunst-Geschichte, in alphabetischer Ordnung, vol. 92 (Berlin: 1803) 601–602. My special thanks to Andreas Pietsch for discussing this paper. 2 ‘Inwendig hielten die Frauen Wache/und dienten ihm/mit ihrem männlichen Waffen/für Leib-Trabanten; strafften auch einander selbst ab/wenn sie mißgehan- delt’, in: Francisci E., Ost- und West-Indischer wie auch Sinesischer Lust- und Statsgarten [. . .]; in drey Haupt-Theile unterschieden. [. . .] Aus den fürnembsten/alten und neuen/Indiani- schen Geschich-Land- und Reisebeschreibungen/mit Fleiß zusammengezogen/und auf annehmliche Unterredungs-Art eingerichtet (Nürnberg, Endter: 1668) 1444. 338 antje flüchter

From our current perspective Portuguese and later English travel accounts would be the most likely sources for this kind of information. However, in German speaking territories and during the Early Modern period the Dutch VOC was more important for ﬁrsthand knowledge about India and Asia in general, a fact almost forgotten nowadays in the German cultural memory. For a long time, the VOC was not only the most important European power in the European- Asian encounters,3 but also gave many Germans an opportunity to visit Asia.4 Particularly during the seventeenth century, a huge migra- tion from German speaking territories took place to the Netherlands and beyond. Cord Eberspächter estimates that two thirds of the VOC- employees were of German origin, numbering between 200,000 to 300,000 men.5 Many of these people not only travelled to Asia with the VOC, but wrote travelogues afterwards. In this way, the VOC provided ﬁrst-hand information about the East Indies and that knowledge thus gained formed the basis for a broader knowledge system about Asia in Germany. The female bodyguard is also mentioned in travel accounts, but, and this is important for the process of producing and saving knowledge, in a different location. The female guard was mostly not located at the Mughal’s court in India, but at the court of the king of Mataram, who was the hegemonic power of Java for a long time. Johann Jacob Ebert mentioned the king’s female bodyguard in his book about Batavia, at the end of the eighteenth century as a ‘Merckwürdigkeit’,6 a curious or strange thing. In the seventeenth century several German VOC-employees, who published their memoirs, mentioned this guard in Mataram. Jürgen Andersen from Schleswig-Holstein wrote that the king of Mataram did not have a typical bodyguard, but one consisting of 1200 women; every night 400 of them were on guard.7 Another German travel account reports an

3 Gaastra F.S., The Dutch East India Company: Expansion and Decline (Zutphen: 2003). 4 Gelder R. van, Het Oost-Indisch avontuur. Duitsers in dienst van de VOC (1600–1800) (Nijmegen: 1997). 5 Eberspächter C., “Abenteurer oder Gastarbeiter? Deutsche Bedienstete in den niederländischen Überseekompanien im 17. und 18. Jh.”, in Boer D.E.H. de – Gleba G. – Holbach R. (eds.), ‘. . . in guete freuntlichen nachbarlichen verwantnus und hantierung . . . ’ Wanderung von Personen, Verbreitung von Ideen, Austausch von Waren in den niederländischen und deutschen Küstenregionen vom 13.-18. Jahrhundert (Oldenburg: 2001) 425–441, esp. 428. 6 Ebert J.J., Beschreibung und Geschichte der Hauptstadt in dem Holländischen Ostindien Bata- via. Nebst geographischen, politischen und physikalischen Nachrichten von der Insel Java. Aus dem Holländischen übersetzt, vol. I (Leipzig, Weidmann Erben und Reich: 1785) 88. 7 Andersen J. – Iversen V., Orientalische Reise-Beschreibungen. In der Bearbeitung von Adam Olearius , (Schleswig: 1669), newly published by Dieter Lohmeier (Tübingen: 1980) 12.