Indians in Shakespeare's England as "the First-Fruits of India": Colonial Effacement and Postcolonial Reinscription

Abstract

Indians in Shakespeare's England as "the First-Fruits of India":Colonial Effacement and Postcolonial Reinscription Imtiaz Habib (bio) I The triumph of theory in a poststructuralist age might seem to be the prohibition of the real. The threatening specter of essentialism translates factuality into the unknowable, renders ambivalent if not disallows the value of the archive. Yet, theory needs "a local habitation and a name" on which to mark itself, an ontology for the semiology of its performative life, without which its epistemological dividend misses its material effect. This lacuna develops into a compound loss in the otherwise rich aggressiveness of current deconstructions of racial formations in the early modern age in England, in which the topoi of the racial other cannot transcend its constructionist abstraction and remains an ideology only rather than an ideology that includes also, and is mandated by, the possibility of the literal. 1 The resultant scenario can be described as: what is little looked for, and what is therefore non-existent, is also what is/should be unknown because it cannot be known. This in turn reinforces the conventional mis-truth: there were no actual people of color in early modern England, references to them in popular media are metaphoric, and the period is race-innocent. Thus, theory might seem to conspire with the natural fragmentariness and obscurity of the documentary life of the early modern [End Page 1] English episteme to block the real of the racial in the corrective reconstructions of the age. Their truncated, cryptic substance and their theoretically authorized uncertainty of value notwithstanding, there are early modern English documentary records of black people that mark the empirical intimacy of the construction of the racial other, and of the imperial-colonial drive that is its most immediate occasion. These are records of black people that include both Africans (blackamores) as well as Indians (East Indians), both in London and in the country. Whereas both data sets contribute significant, irreversible, and hitherto unavailable materialities to current understanding of racial/colonial formations in sixteenth and seventeenth century England, the latter set breaks relatively newer ground in making analytically visible a subject previously unthinkable and unknown—East Indians in Shakespeare's England. II In 1614 an Indian youth was transported to England, taught English and Latin, and in December 1616, in a busy commercial district of East London, was baptized with the name Peter Pope. The terse record of the incident, which is dated the 22nd of the month, reads: "An East Indian was Christened by the name of Peter." 2 The location is St. Dionis (or Denis as it sometimes spelled) Backchurch, in Jacobean London's terms just across from the intersection of Lombard street and Gracious (or Grace church) street, and north of Eastcheap, and directly north from London bridge. 3 This was a great mercantile concourse, particularly Lombard street which, according to the Elizabethan urban historian John Stow in 1598, was traditionally a gathering place of "merchants, strangers of diverse nations assembling thee twice a day", before the Royal Exchange was built in the adjoining ward of Cornhill in 1568. 4 Even afterwards, respectable city officials and professionals continued to live here, as is clearly evident from the list of important individuals buried in St. Dionis Backchurch that Stow lists. 5 This setting is a clue to the public importance and meaning that this seemingly casually recorded event had for both those who organized it and those who saw it. The ceremony was in fact, a carefully orchestrated, demonstrative public spectacle, put together by the merchant company that had brought the [End Page 2] youth to England. This was the "Company of Merchants of London" that had on December 31 of 1600 been incorporated by Elizabeth with the exclusive charter for "the honour of this Our Realme of England, as for the increase of Our Navigation, and advancement of trade of Merchandise within Our said Realmes," to "adventure, set forth one, or more Voyages . . . by way of traffique and merchandise to the East-Indians, in the country and parts of Asia and Africa, and to as many of the Ilands, and Cities, Townes, and places thereabout", 6 to be otherwise...