Workshop 20. Faith Journeys: The Early Seventeenth-Century Travels of Teresa Sampsonia Sherley and Begum Mariam Khan from the Islamic Empires of the East to England

Access to electronic file of readings are available upon registration (Google Site)

Organizers: Bernadette Andrea (English), Bindu Malieckal (English)

Abstract: This workshop focuses on representations of seventeenth-century women who traveled across the frontiers between the Islamic world and western Europe, and sometimes back again, often moving through various religious affiliations.   It thereby explores the relationship of “faiths and spiritualities” to competing discourses of empire — primarily the emerging English and the established Ottoman, Mughal, and Safavid — via women’s negotiations of their subject positions as captives, consorts, and servants.

Readings:

A Chronicle of the Carmelites in Persia and the Papal Mission of the XVIIth and XVIIIth Centuries, vol. 1 (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1939).  143-45, 289-93.  (8 pages)

Thomas Herbert, A Relation of Some Yeares Travaile, Begunne Anno 1626. Into Afrique and the greater Asia, especially the Territories of the Persian Monarchie: and some parts of the Orientall Indies, and Iles adiacent (1634).  125.  (1 page)

Anthony Nixon, The Three English Brothers, Sir Thomas Sherley his Trauels, with his three yeares imprisonment in Turkie, his Inlargement by his Maiesties Letters to the great Turke; and lastly, his safe returne into England (1607). sig. K4 (1 page)

William Hawkins, “Captain William Hawkins, his Relations of the Occurrents which happened in the time of his residence in India, in the Country of the Great Mogoll, and of his departure from thence; written to the Company (1613).”  Pilgrimes, ed. Samuel Purchas (1625; New York: AMS, 1965).  15-16, 23-24, 27 (5 pages)

John Dryden, Amboyna, or the Cruelties of the Dutch to the English Merchants (1673).  The Works of John Dryden, vol. 12 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).  19-21, 54-55 (5 pages)

Additional Information:

This workshop focuses on the representations of two seventeenth-century women: Teresa Sherley and Mariam Khan.  Teresa Sherley and Mariam Khan share an outstanding distinction.  They are regarded as the first Persian in England (1611) and the first Indian in England (1614) respectively; therefore, it is through these two women, themselves members of a Christian religious minority in the Islamic empires of their birth—the Safavid in the case of Lady Sherley, a Circassian, and the Mughal for Begum Khan, an Armenian—that the early modern English first encountered Persia and India.  What impression of Persia, India, Islam, eastern empires, orthodox Christianity, “oriental” wealth, exotic trade, and Asian women did the early modern English acquire from Teresa Sherley and Mariam Khan?  What is the significance of the fact that English encounter with the “old worlds” existing beyond the Ottoman familiar is experienced through women?  To address this question, we will read various early modern documents that reference Lady Sherley and Begum Khan.  These include excerpts from the following: A Chronicle of the Carmelites in Persia, which details Lady Sherley’s travels from a Catholic perspective; one of the earliest English accounts, Anthony Nixon’s The Three English Brothers (1607); and one of the latest, Thomas Herbert, A Relation of Some Yeares Travaile (1634); William Hawkins’ narrative about the Mughal court and his marriage (1613), which appeares Samuel Purchas’ Pilgrimes (1625); and John Dryden’s play, Amboyna (1673), which recounts the murder of Mariam Khan’s second husband, Gabriel Towerson, and in which Mariam is “recast” as Ysabinda, an Amboynese (Indonesian) princess.

Biography

Lady Teresa Sampsonia Sherley appears at the center of early seventeenth-century England’s uneasy engagement with the Safavid empire, which was opposed to England’s erstwhile allies in the Islamic world, the Ottomans.  She hailed from a Circassian background, with her aunt ostensibly a member of the Persian shah’s harem.  The Circassians, situated around the Black Sea region, were traditionally Muslim, although Teresa may have been from an Eastern Christian background.  In any case, upon marrying Robert Sherley, long resident in Persia as a result of his brother’s notorious escapades, she aligned herself with the Roman Catholicism of the Carmelite missionaries.  She accompanied Robert on his several embassies to England, becoming part of English culture through a spate of treatises, stage plays, and possibly even the first prose romance by an Englishwoman (Andrea, “Lady Sherley,” 287-91).  She died in Rome as a Catholic, with the Carmelite chronicles recording her resistance to Persian men’s pressure for her to reconvert after her English husband’s death.

While Begum Mariam Khan’s fate is unknown, sources indicate that she was the daughter of Mubarak Khan, a popular Armenian Christian merchant at the court of the Mughal Emperor Jehangir (r. 1605-1627).  “Mariam” could be her actual name or a title, since favored Mughal women, irrespective of religion, were bestowed with the name “Mariam” in honor of emperors’ devotion to Mary, mother of Christ, a devotion not unusual for the tolerant Mughals (Jehangir’s own mother was not a Muslim but a Hindu princess).  At the Mughal capital of Agra, Mariam would have had close ties if not resided with Mughal women in the harem and would have possessed her own property, like other Mughal women, some of whom even owned ships that traded in international waters.  Indeed, Jehangir appears to have taken it upon himself to be Mariam’s foster-father, so when the English adventurer William Hawkins (1565?-1613) informed Jehangir that he would accept a Christian woman to be his wife, Jehangir offered Mariam, whose father had recently died.  It is quite likely that Mariam was not consulted when the match was initiated, but she did have the option to reject Hawkins, an option that she did not exercise.  In fact, Mariam was a supportive wife, choosing to travel abroad with Hawkins in spite of the objections and sabotage of her mother and brother.

Mariam and Hawkins married in 1609 and left for England in 1612.  Hawkins died en route, in 1613, and was buried in Ireland.  Mariam continued to England, where she immediately re-married a fellow-passenger, Gabriel Towerson, a trader and ship captain like Hawkins.  After a number of years residence in London, where she lived comfortably from the money and goods she brought with her from India, Mariam and Towerson returned to Agra in 1617.  Towerson had hoped to gain some advantage at court with Mariam’s connections, but when these influences did not develop as expected, Towerson abandoned Mariam.  He continued to Amboyna, Indonesia, where he was one of the victims of the Dutch in the infamous massacre of 1623.  Towerson is a major figure in John Dryden’s play, Amboyna, or the Cruelties of the Dutch to the English Merchants (1673), in which Mariam is “recast” as an Indonesian princess.  As for Mariam’s fate, she and her family made several appeals to the East India Company (employer of both Hawkins and Towerson) for financial support but to no avail.  Given that the end of Jehangir’s reign (he died in 1627) saw the emergence of Noor Jahan, his favorite wife, as well as a battle for succession between his sons (Shah Jahan, the third son and founder of the Taj Mahal emerging victorious), it is likely that Mariam’s lost her status in Agra and is therefore absent in later records.

Significance

Taken together as symptomatic instances of early modern women’s journeys across regions and religions--sometimes of their own volition but often not--these representations press us to ask questions about female agency in an era of conflicting empires governed by patriarchal imperatives.  They also allow us to ask questions about women’s roles in creating networks across cultures and about their agency in making their faith, even when not natal, a means for personal and political agency.  By focusing on these salient figures for women’s negotiations between East and West, it also seeks to broaden the discussion to other “easts” and other “wests” by expanding this comparative methodology.  To this end, the workshop presenters will begin with a series of exploratory questions based on the required readings, after which they will facilitate discussion about the relationship of women’s movement across empires, especially between the Islamic world and western Europe and their religious affiliations.

Further Reading:

Andrea, Bernadette.  “Lady Sherley: The ‘First’ Persian in England?”  The Muslim World 95 (2005): 279-95.

---.  Women and Islam in Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2007).

Euben, Roxanne L.  Journeys to the Other Shore: Muslim and Western Travelers in Search of Knowledge (Princeton University Press, 2006).

Fisher, Michael.  Counterflows to Colonialism: Indian Travellers and Settlers in Britain, 1600-1857 (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2006).

Malieckal, Bindu.  “Muslims, Matriliny, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream: European Encounters with the Mappilas of Malabar, India.” Muslim World 95 (2005): 297-16.

---.  “Slavery, Sex, and the Seraglio: ‘Turkish’ Women in Early Modern Texts.”  The

Mysterious and The Foreign in Early Modern England.  Eds.  Helen Ostovich, Mary V. Silcox, and Graham Roebuck (Newark: The University of Delaware Press, 2008). 58-73.