A collection of stories and accounts of the lesser known 'firangis' or foreigners who chose India as home, culturally and linguistically, makes up Jonathan Gil Harris's 'The First Firangi'.
An Aleph publication, the book revisits the lives of those who migrated who settled down in India from backgrounds less affluent than the country's then colonial rulers.
The author cites in the book that some of these foreigners came as slaves, servants, or those perhaps looking for better economic opportunities to escape poverty and persecution.
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"I was not interested in the colonists, I was not interested in the architects of the Raj or in explaining how we got from the earliest European travelers to colonialism.
"I was interested in telling stories which were different, which might interrupt presumption of what being a foreigner in India means. I was looking for people who often came from humble backgrounds and who often did unexpected things here," says Harris, who is an academic at Asoka University.
Some of the characters in the book are servants of European masters who came to work for Indian masters as a consequence of circumstantial events; there are convicts, criminals who for survival sake got absorbed into the armies of Indian rulers.
There is mention of those who changed their religion to Hinduism or Islam in order to adapt better.
The author has sought to explore the bodily changes which these foreigners experienced in order to habituate to life in India - adapting to the weather, learning craft which required specific bodily movements or learning styles of painting in India.
In the introduction Harris has chosen to begin the book, with a note on 'Becoming Another'; about his own physicality in the midst of northern Indian weather.
Given the fairly commoner nature of most of these characters, the author, who has been living in India permanently for the past four years says he had to work hard to build stories around these characters with mere hints, which distances the book from typical historical accounts.
"This is not a traditional book of history book because I could not sit down in an archive and amass an entire life's worth of information in a way that conventional biographers would do.
"I really had to work with hints. I say in the in the book, what I was dealing with - it was the archival alternative of a vapour trail, hints. The main archive I was using in many ways was my own body, my own experiences," says Harris.
