Dutch Sources on South Asia : c. 1600-1825 : Vol. IV. Mission to Madurai (Dutch Embassies to the Nayaka Court of Madurai in the Seventeenth Century)

Contents: Foreword. Acknowledgments. Notes on translation and transcription. Introduction: images and ideologies of Dutch-South Asian Contact. 1. Report of Van Rheede’s Mission to Tiruchirappalli, 2 July 1668. 2. Instructions for Bassingh’s Mission to Tiruchirappalli, 4 September 1677. 3. Bassingh’s description of the Nayakas of Madurai, 13 November 1677. 4. Extracts from Bassingh’s Journal and letters from Tiruchirappalli, 25-9 November 1677. 5. Letter of Muttu Alakadri Nayaka to Van Goens the Younger, 13 December 1677. 6. Insttructions for Welter’s Mission to Tiruchirappalli, 14 May 1689. 7. Report of Welter’s Mission to Tiruchirappalli, 9 September 16989. 8. Letter of Ranga Krishna Muttu Virappa Nayaka to Van Vliet, 19 August 1689.

Court journeys represent the most spectaculars sub-genre in western travel literature and the history of cross-cultural interaction. Preceded by an incisive introduction on images and ideologies of Dutch-South Asian contact, these are the hitherto unpublished accounts and related documents of three encounters between representatives of the Dutch East India Company (VOC after its Dutch initials), one of the great Northern European chartered companies of the age of mercantilism, and the state of Madurai, one of the ‘great southern Nayakas’ and successor-states of the Vijayanagara empire, in Southeast India in the second half of the seventeenth century. A shared interest in trade and at times converging political objectives formed the unstable foundations for a complex courtship fraught with tensions between two ill-suited partners, a mixture of conflict and coexistence typical of the age of contained conflict.