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  • Dryden's Transformation of Bernier's Travels
  • Peter Craft

Although critics such as Achsah Guibbory and Derek Hughes have revealed bits of advice for Charles II embedded within Dryden's plays, there has been little study of collaborative composition between these two men.1 Dryden's Aureng-Zebe (1675), which depicts one of the English king's trading partners, could present such a "collaboration" because the dedication of the play to Mulgrave states that Charles II read it before "the last hand was added to it" and modified "the most considerable event of it" (10). Early drafts of Aureng-Zebe have not survived, so the full extent of Charles II's input is unknown. Most scholars agree with Ros Ballaster's claim that "Dryden plays fast and loose with the historical facts" of its source, François Bernier's Travels in the Mogul Empire (first English edition 1671) (279). The critical consensus is far less overwhelming, as Mita Choudhury points out, when it comes to the question of how scholars should interpret Dryden's distortions (136). I will argue that the play could have functioned as a collaborative public relations' spectacle that presents a sanitized version of Aurangzeb to English theatergoers, and possibly even to the emperor himself, in order to avoid injuring England's lucrative trade with the Mughal Empire.

The Missing Link: Fazelkan

Unlike the previous historical figures upon which Dryden's characters were based, Aurangzeb was no long-dead leader (ruled 1658-1707). Picking up on the contemporaneity of the play and its subject a century later, Samuel Johnson wrote that if Aurangzeb "had known and disliked his own character, our [England's] trade was not in those times secure from his resentment." While Johnson claims that the possibility of Dryden's play coming to Aurangzeb's attention [End Page 47] was unlikely because "[h]is country is at such a distance," another look at that possibility is merited (qtd. in Bernier x-xi). In the first English edition of Bernier's Travels in the Mogul Empire, the main source for Dryden's Aureng-Zebe, a letter precedes the narrative from "M. de Monceaux the younger" to "Henry Ouldinburgh," the translator, which clearly states that Fazelkan, an important counselor to Aurangzeb himself, procured and read "European Books." The letter reveals that Bernier taught Fazelkan "the principal languages of Europe," and because Bernier spent time at Surat, Agra, Ahmedabad, Moka, Kásimbázár, and Masulipatam, all of which contained East India Company factories at the time, it is probable that English was one of those languages (xxvi-xxvii, xvi-xvii). The English playwright could not have missed Bernier's references to Fazelkan since one of the "Indian lord" or "Omrah" characters in Aureng-Zebe is named "Fazel Chan," and "Chan" was a variant spelling of "Khan," which meant noble (16). There were also Mughal merchants who spoke English, and translators were common at court. As a play written by the Poet Laureate and Historiographer Royal and modified by the English king, Dryden's work may have been considered important enough to influence Aurangzeb's attitude toward England, which was crucial for the East India Company's trade network.

East India Company Factories in Mughal Territory

Because almost half of the East India Company's factories were in the reigning emperor's jurisdiction in the late seventeenth century, the maintenance of his continued goodwill was essential to England's economic prosperity. In order to show the extent to which the East India Company depended upon Aurangzeb's favor, I have compiled the most comprehensive list to date of the company's factories from 1600 to 1674, both within and outside of Mughal territory. For some of these factories, at least five variant spellings exist since English was not standardized yet and the names came from or passed between Hindi, Persian, Portuguese, Dutch, Italian, and French. A few of these names, such as "Petapoli" (a.k.a. "Nizampatnam"), are not even remotely similar phonetically. I have cross-referenced at least a dozen sources to ensure that none of these factory names refer to the same place.

Before the initial performance of Aureng-Zebe in 1675, the East India Company...

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