In March 1615, Satomas Roe set out for India. He was to be the East India Company,

ranking James VI and first ambassador to the court of one of the largest and worthiest

empires in the world, that of the Mogal Emperor Jahangir. In the years Roe spent in India,

he kept an almost daily journal of what he found. He wrote letters and reports home. He

described the power, splendour and opulence of Jahangir's court almost despite himself,

for he prided himself on preserving a sense of his own religious and racial superiority.

He went to request a bilateral trade agreement with the Mogals without ever realizing quite

how much it was not in Mogal interests to agree such a thing. He came to learn that

the deck was not stacked in his favour. He was the first English ambassador to India and

it would be a long time before there was another. Roe's embassy complicates the story of the

inexorable rise of the Raj. But while his advice on how to handle trade relations with India

was not heated, his opinion of the character of Indians and how thus to negotiate with them

became embedded in the exoticising narrative that shaped later colonial ventures.

Roe's journey is the subject of a vivid and scholarly new book by Professor Nandini

Das, today's guest. The book is called Caughting India, England, Mogal India and the origins

of empire. Nandini Das is professor of early modern literature and culture in the English

faculty at the University of Oxford and a fellow of extra college at Oxford. A BBC

new generation thinker, she has presented television and radio programmes including Tales of

Tudor Travel, the explorer's handbook on BBC 4 and she edited the Cambridge history

of travel writing. Caughting India is her first book for a general readership and it's

a wonderful debut.

Professor Das, welcome to not just the Tudors, I am absolutely delighted to have a chance

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