Abstract
The mission lead by John Surman in 1714 to the court of the then Mughal Emperor Farrukh Sīyār (1683–1719) has been described as “the most important step taken by the English in Bengal from the foundation of Calcutta … to the conquest of Bengal by Clive.”1 Surman, a bureaucrat in the fledgling East India Company, headed a trade mission to obtain a royal seal in order to allow exclusivity of trade in Bengal. Similar to the monopoly trading rights of Elizabethan England, the cherished imperial farmān was the ticket to instant fortune. Drawing on over a hundred years of trading knowledge in India, the embassy’s role was to flatter, ingratiate, and bribe their way through to the emperor and buy his favor for the much-needed imperial signature.
Madras Diary and Consultation Book, 1715–1719, 87 Range 239.
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Notes
C.R. Wilson, The Early Annals of the English in Bengal (London: 1895), vol. 2, part 2, chapter l.i.
Mirzā Muhammad Harisi, Ibrāt Nāmā, 52b–53a, quoted in Ganda Singh, Life of Bandā Singh Bahadur (Patiala: Punjabi University, 1999), 148.
John Keay, India: A History (London: Harper Collins, 2000), 374.
Robert Orme, A History of the Military Transactions of the British Nation in Indostan (London: 1778), vol. 2, book 4, 19.
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© 2004 Amandeep Singh Madra and Parmjit Singh
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Singh Madra, A., Singh, P. (2004). Execution of Bandā Singh Bahādur in Delhi, 1716. In: Madra, A.S., Singh, P. (eds) “Sicques, Tigers, or Thieves”: Eyewitness Accounts of the Sikhs (1606–1809). Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-11998-8_4
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