The Governor's Residence in Tranquebar: The house and the daily life of its people, 1770–1845 ed. by Esther Fihl (review)

Between 2004 and 2016, the National Museum of Denmark organized a large scale Tranquebar Initiative project led by the Copenhagen University anthropologist Esther Fihl. This was a collaborative endeavor involving Danish and Indian scholars and heritage specialists, who together reexamined the over two-hundred-year-long history of Danish colonial presence in southern India and its material legacies. One of the focal points of this research and restoration efforts was a house, which in the period 1775–1845 served as the residence of Danish governors. The book summarizes this multifaceted scholarship making the house a prism through which the complex history of Danish engagements in and with India is scrutinized. The house is examined in terms of its architectural features, layout and furnishing but it also serves as a physical setting for understanding the everyday life of its residents—the governors' families and their Indian staff. It is a framework for disentangling complex interactions between Danish and Tamil inhabitants of the residence and the town. The house is also used as a backdrop of social and political events, and diplomatic negotiations that shaped balance of power in the town and the southern Coromandel Coast.

The book is beautifully and richly illustrated; it contains a wealth of historical detail resulting from expansive archival and architectural investigations and presents rich and multilayered narratives that are contextualized against the history of European presence and rule in India and against local sociopolitical and cultural settings. As such, it not only contributes to the better understanding of Danish involvement in India but it also adds to the scholarship on European colonial presence on the subcontinent and cross-cultural interactions between Europeans and the local population. Positioned between academic and popular science writing, it successfully straddles these two different genres.

The book consists of an introduction, eight thematic chapters and a series of vignettes presenting biographies of some of the individuals connected with Tranquebar, events that shaped life in the town and extensive excerpts from archival records. Chapters by Simon Rastén, Niels Erik Jensen and Martin Krieger focus on the history of the house, its architecture and furnishing. Drawing on the still standing structures, archival material and archaeological excavations, the authors review the architectural development of the house and its gardens, explore its distinctive colonial style with its blend of Indo-European solutions employed in the exterior and interior design of the house, and pay attention to the symbolism of the house. They demonstrate how the residence's grandeur, its central position in the townscape and its luxurious furnishings were not just a matter of comfort and practicality for the governors and their families. They reflected the taste and cultural capital of the governors, and were meant to impress the European and Indian visitors and project the power and sovereignty of Danish presence in India. This contextualized research on the history, architectural styles and the uses of the house was utilized in the reconstruction efforts—a process which is described in the chapter by Atin Kumar Das, Renate Hach, Niels Erik Jensen and Ajit Koujalgi.

For other authors, the house is a conduit for engaging stories about Danish colonial presence in southern India, which dates back to 1620, when King Raghunatha Nayak approved establishment of a Danish trading station in Tranquebar administered from Fort Dansborg. Esther Fihl's introductory chapters draw attention to the intricate sociopolitical settings in seventeenth-to-nineteenth-century southern India: power dynamics and struggles for control between local rulers, expansion of the European colonial powers, dominance of the British East India Company and Danish maneuvering in this complex landscape. She describes the rituals of governmentality spanning the annual tributes to the Nayaks and later the Marathas, gift exchanges, collections of revenue from the allotted villages, administration of justice and navigation of complex and fluid caste system and sociocultural customs, which the Danish governors had to learn and perform in order...