India between empires: the long 18th century

24:25And then, of course, they're also meeting each other in battle in India. Are those things linked? Are they separate? What's going on? Yeah, so there's the War of Austrian Succession, which is fought in Europe between 1744 and 1747. And then there's the Seven Years' War between 1756 and 1763. That is seven years. It's not a long seven years. It's not. And these conflicts roughly overlap with what are known as the Canardic Wars, which are fought in India between 1746 and 1763. And yeah, there is a sort of spillover of these European rivalries and conflicts into the international arena in this period.

25:10The East India Company is a private company. It has shareholders, but it's also a national interest. And it's closely related to the state. So the East India Company can't avoid getting embroiled in some of these conflicts. And some of these wars that are fought in the south of India are basically proxy wars between the British and the French. There's also another European country that pops up, quite a surprising one. These people, no offence. You've already guessed Belgium, which I thought was a pretty slightly outlandish guess. But do you want to go even more unexpected? The Spanish? I mean, that's too sensible, I guess, arguably.

25:50Oh, it's weirder than that. I think so. What, does Luxembourg turn up for us dust up? Charmingly. No, Denmark.

26:02How does Denmark even get there? I mean, I'd love to know. It's a long old commute, isn't it? Yeah. All the way around. Denmark show up and their plan, Nish, is quite a charming one in some ways. They took advantage of the Anglo-French wars and rivalry. Yeah. And they offered merchants the ability to sail under the neutral flag of Denmark so they wouldn't be attacked by either side. They were basically a maritime VPN service. But the important thing to stress, and I think you want to stress, you're a historian of trade, aren't you? I mean, the Mughal Empire was already plugged into global trade networks.

26:36It's not that European powers showed up and said, oh, let's do trade. Yeah, it's happening before the 18th century and it's happening before the Europeans show up. So India is really plugged into trade networks in every direction. So there's the caravan routes, which I've worked on a bit, between India and Central Asia, Iran, parts of Russia, so towards the north, and then going towards the west, there are all the ports in the Arab Peninsula, the Red Sea region and East Africa. And then, of course, there's Siam and the Spice Islands to the east. And these are just some of the places where you either find Indian goods or you find Indian merchants.

27:13It says in the script here that they were trading with as far away as Bristol. How do we know that? How is Bristol trading with India in the 18th century? Well, by the 18th century, there's definitely trade, I think, between England and India. There's trade between England and India, direct trade, once the East India Company is formed. There are times when goods are not allowed into Britain. So there's this real craze for cotton cloth, cotton textiles from India, calicos. And it's such a there's such a kind of fever for it that it's there's a there's a fear that it's putting British textile manufacturers out of business.

27:53And so goods are smuggled in from the coast. Bristol is an important port. But also Mexico City, right? You know, so there's this idea that there's trade happening between India and Mexico City, which is literally the new world, you know, in 16th and 17th century parlance. Yeah, there's lots of really exciting new research, which has been not just about trade between Asia and Europe, but trade at a more global level. And the Spanish are moving goods between Asia and the New World, sometimes by crossing the Pacific and sometimes by using the route that goes around Africa into Europe and then to the Americas.

28:33And what we're starting to kind of realise is that the reach of some of these goods are really global. So it's not just the rich in England who are decorating their country houses with fine Chinese wallpapers and Indian textiles and so on. It's also the kinds of cloth that are used in the transatlantic slave trade between Africa and the Americas. and Indian cloth is a medium of exchange in the transatlantic slave trade. But there are also fairly ordinary Mexicans who are buying Indian and Chinese goods. Amazing. So it's mainly textiles? Or is it textile, spices, a combination of a bunch of things?

29:14Textiles and spices, definitely. Indigo is a big one, isn't it? Is that going global, indigo? Oh, I've got a good story about indigo. Oh, go on then, yeah, give us your... Well, I don't know if it's a good story. No, you've got to deliver now. Oh, I know. So Indigo, it's called Indigo because it comes from India. You've got to go India to get it. There is an airline in India called Indigo. Yeah, there is Indigo. You want Indigo, you've got to go Indy.

29:45So the Europeans... For listeners, I'm considered to be an intelligent comedian. So that tells you what the intellectual capacity is for the rest of my profession. Okay, so Indigo, yes. Europeans are buying indigo from India in the 17th century. It's all going great. And then they decide to transplant indigo production to the Americas, so to the Carolinas, to the Caribbean. And there they, quote unquote, improve how the dye is produced. So you have to grow a plant and then you have to turn the plant into a dye. And that, combined with other factors, puts lots of indigo production and indigo producers in India out of business.

30:26There's also like a terrible famine in the 17th century and all kinds of other factors. But that doesn't mean that people who are using indigo dye within Asia stop needing indigo dye. And one of the things that happens in this period is that new places start to produce indigo dye in this period. So in parts of Punjab near Afghanistan, there are relatively new, in fact, probably entirely new indigo fields, fields planted with indigo and dye that's being produced there for the caravan trade to Afghanistan and Iran and Central Asia. And this is also happening in other places where indigo can be produced and where rulers want the revenues that come from the tax on valuable goods like indigo.

31:10Amazing. There's also saltpeter is a big export as well, which is used in gunpowder, right? Yeah, that's why you need it. Yeah, if you want to blow things up, you need saltpeter. Another one would be the growth of the coffeehouse culture. We've done an episode on the history of coffee quite recently. If back in on that. But coffee house culture is an arrival into India in the 18th century? Coffee is one of many new goods that are making their appearance in India in the 17th and 18th centuries. So we know by the 18th century that there are coffee houses in places like Delhi. I want to work on this a bit more, actually.

31:40I want to know more about these coffee houses. Were they like the original coffee houses in the Ottoman world, which gave us the kind of prototype for the coffee house, or were they different? Or was there like Gunther working there? and like everyone hanging out talking about whether Ross and Rachel were on a break. What bits of coffee house culture? Did people have a muffin with their coffee? I mean, those are all the really important questions. Yes. Was Phoebe on guitar? Yeah, was Phoebe playing guitar? That's what we need to know. These are the questions we need to know. And the interesting thing that, I mean, I'm going to have to use the dreaded C word now.

32:15Capitalism. Are we right? The 18th century is the era in which people would often say capitalism is invented. Some would say slightly earlier, but there's the idea that this is the era of like hardcore finance, almost as we think of it, like, you know, where corporations and nation states are using money almost as a weapon somehow. But what does capitalism mean and how is it arriving into India or has it been there all along? Well, we think of capitalism as this uniquely European invention, that it's something that emerges in Europe. You know, these Tuscan bankers are creating banks and that's the kind of master narrative.

32:50But one of the things we've known for quite a while now is that there are similar developments in banking and finance and trade and the market that are happening fairly simultaneously across Europe, but also the Middle East and parts of Asia, including India. And this is not a new development in the 18th century. This is something that has been unfurling for a long time, for at least two centuries by the 18th century. but I think it comes to a kind of crescendo in the 18th century. Two things stand out. One is that the market has really encroached people's lives much more by the 18th century. People's awareness of the value of real estate and their assets, for example, has intensified by this period.

33:37People are really fighting over them and they're getting bits of paper signed and notarised because they know what the market for property is like, for example, and that's just one example. I suppose the second thing that comes to mind is the growing power of merchants and bankers. And they don't form a bourgeoisie like they do in Europe, but they are becoming more important and their relationship to the state is becoming much closer. And that's partly because of what's happening in India in the 18th century. So you have these new rulers and some old rulers too, rulers of these states who are building up their kingdoms.

34:13And what do they need? They need money. And how are they going to get money? They're going to get money by having a bureaucracy that doesn't leak money and by increasing the amount of production and trade that's happening within their kingdom. So they bring land under cultivation. They try and attract new kinds of cultivation there that maybe didn't happen previously. Try and create new trade routes, maybe have new kinds of manufacturing. And merchants and bankers are financing that. pop quiz what's in your kids lunchbox at whole foods market they've already done the studying over 300 food ingredients are banned from their shelves no hydronated fats in the peanut butter and no high fructose corn syrup in the cookies and for sandwiches there are no synthetic nitrates or nitrites in any of their deli meat so you can pack lunch boxes with peace of mind get back to School ready at Whole Foods Market.

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36:14And they're also sometimes their family members are part of that bureaucracy too. And as well as banking, as well as merchants, as well as insurance firms and so on, that sort of thing, we also get another profession beginning with M, an important profession, a beloved profession. Do you want to guess what that would be, Nish? Mirthmakers. The first comedians emerged. There are lots of those, actually, in the 18th century. Really? Yeah. Fantastic. I don't know if there are more, but they're definitely more prominent. Wow. I said beloved.

36:48No, mercenaries. We get the mercenary class who show up. Nish, have you ever heard of Amir Khan? Amir Khan? Yeah. You mean the incredibly famous actor? Not that one from Lugan. And not the boxer either. Have I heard of Amir Khan? Of course I've heard of Amir Khan. No, this is the third most famous Amir Khan, after the pugilist as well. Jagjit, who was Amir Khan, the Afghan mercenary? He's a big deal, right? Yeah, he began his rise by serving the Marathas, who gave him a royal title, and they gave him some land that he formed into a kind of principality. He then joined the Maharaja of Jodhpur's service, Jodhpur again, but his scheming got him into trouble, which is unsurprising given that he was implicated in poisoning one of the king's favourites.

37:38And so he's expelled from Jodhpur in 1815. But he wasn't unusual. I mean, there are lots of mercenaries. There's what I've called a whole market for violence, which already exists by the 18th century. But in the 18th century, when there is all this competition over land to fashion your own kingdom and make your own state, when so much is at stake, those kinds of actors are becoming more powerful, more important. And it's not uncommon for some of them to be given land in return for their loyal service and to form principalities of their own, making this even more complicated, this whole patchwork of different states.

38:12In the end, it doesn't work out for him, right? I think he sort of just goes to Tonk, which is his principality, and he just retreats and has a nice retirement. Oh, really? OK. Does he really? I don't know, actually. Right, yeah. It's just you don't associate mercenaries with, like, winding down. He doesn't! When you hear mercenary, you don't think, gentle retirement, getting into gardening. And if you do, they're up to something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You sort of feel with mercenaries, it's probably going to end quite badly. So we talked about monarchs, we talked about merchants, we talked about mercenaries, we talked about mirth makers.

38:44Thank you, Nish. Let's discuss how society was structured. Was there a rigid class system? Did it change during the 18th century? What most people think of when they think of India and a rigid class system isn't class, it's probably caste. And this is the subject of quite a lot of debate. So we know that caste is associated with what we today call Hinduism. We know that the Vedic texts talk about a fourfold moral order, which is comprised of Brahmins who are a priestly caste, Kshatriyas who are rulers and warriors, Veshiyas who are involved in commerce, and then Shudras who are various kinds of labouring groups.

39:23That much we know. What's debated is when this system came to dominate Indian society. and how much it dominated Indian society. So at one extreme is the view that it's existed from time immemorial, it's always been really important. At the other end is the view that, at the other extreme, is the view that it's the East India Company, it's the British who completely misunderstand caste and they make it much more of a thing than it ever has been or ever was. But in between that is probably where the consensus is. about caste, that actually it's through the 17th and the 18th centuries that caste is coming to become more important in more places, in more parts of India than it ever was before.

40:10And Shivaji's coronation is a good example of this, right? Because he's from fairly humble stock, but he wants to be a Kshatriya because Kshatriyas are the warrior caste. The Rajputs are all Kshatriyas. So if he wants to be recognised as a kind of prestigious king, he has to be a Kshatriya. Who does he get to invest him as a Kshatriya? Brahmins, who are the priestly caste? So this whole coronation sort of reifies and consolidates caste and caste, the caste order. Can we talk quickly about gender relations and, you know, the idea of perhaps masculinity, femininity? Do we see any changes or evolutions in how relationships between men and women might be expressed?

40:47There's some really great new work which suggests that there's not only a relationship between rulers of states, kings, kashatryas sometimes, and merchants, but also between them and Brahmins. And that what's happening in this period is that caste society is being made and the kind of caste order that's coming into being is much more patriarchal. That women are seen as a kind of property, and that their bodies, their bodily freedoms are becoming much more regulated as a result. But the evidence comes from Rajasthan. And I think whether we can generalise that picture across all of India. Well, we have to wait and see.

41:22What we do know about other parts of India is that, you know, like in much of the pre-modern world, like, you know, today, women are really vulnerable if they don't have independent means. And so we see women in this period, increasingly as we get through the period, trying to build up their personal wealth. Royal women, gentry women, occasionally some ordinary women too. So they are investing in property or in trade and so on in order to, in cultivation, in order to amass a fortune of their own. The political and economic dynamism of this era was reflected in the arts. In what way? Well, there are lots of different arts.

42:03The one that we know most about is painting, probably, because it survives in a way that more ephemeral art forms like music maybe don't survive. Comedy, yes. Well, when it's written down, people write about it sometimes. Terrible, two stars. Yeah, exactly. The lasting memory is a one and a half star review I got from the Herald Sun in Australia in 2014. And in painting, we see in this period a real growth of regional styles. One of the things that's happening in the early part of the century is that lots of imperial artists who are working in the imperial workshops, they basically need a new job because things aren't so great in the centre.

42:42And so they look for patronage opportunities further afield. In fact, this process is starting maybe in the late 17th century before Orangzeb's death. And those painters, they end up in regional courts, they train others and so on. And what you start to see is a blending of the imperial style, which lots of rulers really like. They have seen it at the imperial court. They associate it with imperial majesty with regional traditions or local traditions of painting. And so you get this kind of hybrid styles that are very unique to different particular places. you also get a sort of proliferation of the kinds of things that our people are painting what kind of stuff are we painting um what kinds of nudes actually there are nudes gotta be nudes artists are turning out pictures of famous people so the ruler his clansmen um other notables in society um this is a very something that you know they pick up from mughal tradition there are hunting scenes.

43:42Lots of the Rajput rulers paint lots of hunting scenes. There are paintings of important manuscripts, that's where you, you know, things like the Kama Sutra, but also other manuscripts. Paintings of, like, the Indian ragas, and also paintings of the kingdom itself. Right, so sort of nature imagery, something like that. Yep. And at Udhapar, there's Amar Singh II. He's well known for patronising architectural paintings. He's kind of interested in buildings. and whatnot? Yeah, he localises lots of those other kinds of compositional forms to his kingdom. So you'll see the landscape of his kingdom in the hunting scenes or in some of these important texts that are illuminated and illustrated.

44:27But also he just has pictures of his palaces, his lakes, the dam in the state and all kinds of things painted as well. And fine taste. That's too cheap. Have you seen my dam? It's an incredibly boring conversation piece. Look at this painting of a dam. Oh my God, he's going on about the dam again. Oh God. Dam, not the dam again. There's also a poetry scene, Nish, but it's a battling poetry scene. It's a competitive poet. What, like rap battling? Rap battles. Oh, that's exciting. Yeah. That's very exciting. It's basically eight mile, but It's probably slightly fancier, I guess. Yeah, everyone's in a court.

45:12It's not quite as scuzzy as a Detroit basement. Well, it's the arts. We've also got the patronising of science and scholarship as well. I mean, Jai Singh II is renowned for the patronage of thinkers and people who study things. Yeah, Jai Singh builds these impressive observatories. They don't really look like observatories as we would sort of imagine an observatory, like one building with a telescope. They're often made of a collection of different buildings, a couple of stories high, that are used to calculate the movement of the celestial bodies. And that's why they're called Jantramantras, which literally means calculation instruments.

45:53And he builds them. There's one in Jaipur, there's another in Delhi, but he also builds others across Mughal, North India. So to make all the calculations that he needs, Jair Singh employs scholars expert in knowledge found in Sanskrit, in Persian, in Arabic treatises on astronomy and mathematics. And they use their data to prepare a text that Jair Singh dedicates to the Mughal emperor. But it's used widely across North India and other parts of the Islamic world. What's in the text? It's a series of data tables. Oh, wow. That's kind of disappointing. if you spend quite a lot of money and then they're really important though i know but like you're like come on it's a spreadsheet mate come on i was hoping for a picture of a dam i dedicate this spreadsheet to the emperor shout out to my main man if you look at column b12 it's actually a really interesting day to them um so we have rough audio book to listen to as well really rough audio book so we've got scholarship we have multilingual manuscripts.

46:56We have Persian, Arabic, English? English, German, French, Latin, Bengali, Hindi. Okay, so it's a really multicultural, multi-faith, multi-sort of traditional world we're talking about here. India is all sorts of things happening simultaneously. Well, Jessing, definitely. Oh, really? This is just at his court. Well, there are other observatories and other kinds of learned astronomers doing important things in other parts of India. It's just that we know much more about Jessing because he makes these massive observatories and he writes this much more interesting book than we're giving him credit for.

47:30He's also into city planning, Jessing. He's big on kind of the ideal city. Nish, what would be your ideal city? If you could start from scratch and Bish, Nish, if you could build Nishtropolis. Nishtropolis. I think when you go through the grid systems in American cities, you think, well, that does make a lot of sense. If you can plan that out, it does mean that you're never fully lost. But then you do lose something of the charm of... The thing that I think is interesting about London is it's never been planned. And actually, I would say Mumbai has the same energy. There's no one has planned these cities.

48:10Like, these were cities that sort of just grew sort of organically. And it looks like a kind of wild tree stump. When you actually look at it from above, Whereas North American cities were sort of, you know, they operate on a grid system and I can see the logic of that. But I do sort of like I like I enjoy the charm of a city that's that sort of like a wild bush, essentially. There's just like grown outwards from a river. Like I so if I'm honest, whilst on paper, I can see the grid system would really help me. I would I quite like the wildness of streets that just curve around. If you're in the middle of London and you follow a street that you think is parallel, you get lost so quickly.

48:52Because when you look at it from above, you realise some, let's face it, probably drunk guy, just drew a sort of line that loops off into the middle of, like, it just sort of curves neatly off. So, yeah, I would definitely say green space, I think, is essential, especially if you want a lot of housing. And the easiest way to build a lot of housing is to build sort of apartment blocks. and so if you're doing that you absolutely need to have public green space you've got to have a cinema but i suspect i suspect that's obviously we're we're we're a hundred years off for anyone having that conversation so uh i i can understand that that might not have made the cut you've got to have a cinema you've got to have parks you've got to have a theater uh preferably around 800 to 900 seats depending on your population size for me to do tour shows in and you've also got to have some kind of transportation system that isn't rail.

49:43All very sensible. All I heard really, though, was you wanted your wiry bush. That's all I heard. As soon as you said that, my brain just went, Nish is wiry bush. And that's what we're calling the city. So I'm really sorry, Nish. That was a lovely answer. Jake Cheat, actually, Jai Singh's city was a grid system. It was a grid, yeah. Was it really? What you didn't say was a grid where every bit of the, every quadrant relates to one of the planetary bodies in Vedic scientific treatises. And where the intention is to produce and cultivate particular affects and particular, you know, something in the inhabitants of those quadrants.

50:21Right, okay. Which is because the city is a sort of microcosm for the kind of moral and cosmic order. Right, okay. Why didn't you say that? So you would have said, so New York would be a lot more chill if they built it on those cosmic models. Very little relating to the moral and cosmic order in New York. Very little of that. Yeah, I'm walking here. Yeah, yeah, very little of that is related. Unless there's a bit of the Vedic text that I've not come across that involves someone openly urinating on a rat's house. I don't know which bit of the Vedic text, that's it. But there's very little moral and cosmic things going on in that city.

50:55Amazing. The Nuance Window!

51:02Well, it's time now for The Nuance Window. This is the part of the show where Nish and I pull out our paintbrushes and poetry books for two minutes. while Dr. Jagjit takes centre stage to tell us something we need to know about India in the 18th century. My stopwatch is ready. So take it away, Dr. Jagjit. Well, I think what has become clear by now is that the 18th century was a really exciting, really dynamic time. It's full of lots of opportunities, some hazards too. But this isn't how we've always seen the 18th century. And to grasp just how much our understanding has changed, I think it pays to go back to the period itself.

51:38From the point of view of Mughal writers, anyone who rocked the boat was tarred as a rebel and often seen as being a ruffian from outside the Mughal order. Another important set of source materials we have on the 18th century are those histories that are written by men working for the East India Company after the colonial conquest had begun. And these writers had a vested interest in helping the company legitimate its new spoils. And so they portrayed the company as the font of order and peace and prosperity. That conquest would help Indians out of the chaos that supposedly reigned supreme. So these two very different groups of writers, some writing in Persian in and around the Mughal court, those writing in English on behalf of the company, gave us a very similar and very negative picture of the century.

52:24And that picture more or less persisted until around about the late 1970s, when historians started to turn their attention to all these new regional courts that we've been to do that, including those with their poor paintings, in fact. Now, the first part of this work was really about state building, it's about revenue management, and so on. And it showed that these new rulers and their collaborators, like merchants and bankers, were creating a political order and islands of economic prosperity at a very regional level. More recent work, in the wake of the cultural turn, has focused on court culture, art, poetry, music, intellectual life, and it's showing us just how vibrant these regional centres were.

53:06What's maybe been missed in some of this is detail about the lives of fairly ordinary people and how that was changing. That kind of social history is something I've been fascinated by ever since I wrote my first book, and I'm sure the archives can tell us much more. Wonderful. Two minutes on the dot. Well done. Wow. That was bang on. Yeah. Give a lot of lectures. Two minute ones. nish final thoughts on 18th century india have you this has been great like this is a you know yeah this is really filling in like a total gap in my historical knowledge and really like reframing the way i think about the sort of east india company and even what i was saying i think one of the things i think is interesting about this idea of this independent sort of capitalism springing up is that even in kind of what you would identify as politically progressive history of the region we still talk about it as we still have this like victim narrative around it that western capitalism in cohorts with western governments took over these countries and we only focus on them as conquered lands essentially even when we're trying to write positive histories about them and actually it really benefits to understand that there was a whole independent culture and country that was evolving and to look at it through a non-European lens, even when the European lens is trying to be progressive and post-colonial and anti-capitalist.

54:39So what do you know now?

54:46So it's time now for the So What Do You Know Now? This is our quickfire quiz for Nish to see how much he has remembered and learned. Oh boy. Nish, are you feeling confident? You have taken extensive notes. How many pages are we talking here? We're talking 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13. 13 pages. Impressive, aren't you? You have eclipsed Sally Phillips. I was literally like, I've got no idea what's going on. I've got to write everything. Sally Phillips, I think, did 12 pages. You've gone 13. Suck it, Phillips. You've written your own doctorate over here, this thesis. Amazing. OK, we've got 10 questions for you.

55:20So, question one. Which famed Indian empire was founded by Babur in the early 1500s? The Mughal Empire. Very good, straight in. Question two. Which surprising European country had Indian trading outposts and let merchants borrow its flag? Denmark. It was Denmark, I love that story. That's a wild piece of knowledge, man. That's a really wild piece of information. Question three. Name two commonly exported Indian goods in the 18th century. Textiles and spices. Very good. You could add indigo and saltpizza as well. Question four. What profession did Amir Khan, the third most famous Amir Khan, belong to?

55:56Mercenary. He was. He loved it all day long. Question five. Which northern empire made by uniting 12 missels was formed by Maharaja Ranjit Singh in 1799? The Sikh Empire. Very good. Question six. What kind of paintings were popular at the Udapur court? Let me have a little look at my notes. It was actually, it was just mentioned, wasn't it? TikTok, TikTok. Paintings of landscapes. It was, landscapes, buildings and dams, of course. Oh, yeah, the dams. Yeah, question seven. Which Rajput ruler was known for his patronage of art, astronomy and learning? That was my main man, J.S. Singh. It was the second, very good.

56:36Question eight. What was the name of the 17th century Malata leader who had himself crowned king? That would be Shivaji. Very good. I mean, the note system is working very well. The note system is really playing off. Question nine. What was distinctive about Jai Singh's plan for the city of Jaipur? It was divided into the four Vedic quadrants. Nine, yeah, nine divisions. I will give you that. I mean, this is a perfect 10 out of 10, and I've even got a bonus question for you. Question 10. In which Rajput capital was the 1983 James Bond film, Octopussy film? It was in Udaipur. It was. 10 out of 10.

57:11Can he get 11? For a bonus point, which Indian tennis player starred in the movie? Vijay Amrath Raj. 11 out of 10, he's done it. What I will say is this has been, it's showed me in some ways my intellectual capacity has not moved on from when I was a student because this is basically what I was like as a student. Knew nothing, knew absolutely nothing and then was able to retain quite a lot of information in quite a short term period and then did really well on exams. I fear that if we met tomorrow and you asked me those same questions I would only get the one about octopus secret that's the beauty it's recorded yeah exactly you can listen to it again and again every day you can just play it to people and say I know this stuff because that's me on the recording but that whole episode in microcosm is what I was like as a student like it absolutely knew nothing and then right at the end would just quickly retain a lot of information regurgitate it and then move on You are not the only comedian to have said that.

58:14Well, thank you so much, Nish. Thank you so much, Jagjit. And listener, if you want more Indian history, check out our episodes on the Mughal Empire or on the history of Bollywood cinema. That was a fun one. And if you want a different perspective on the 18th century, why not listen to our episode on black people in Georgian England? But I'd just like to say a huge thank you to our guests in History Corner. We have the incredible Dr. Jagjit Lally from UCL. Thank you, Jagjit. Thanks, Greg. It's been an absolute hoot. And in Comedy Corner, we have the fantastic Nish Kumar. Thank you, Nish. Thank you very much for having me.

58:41It was very educational. I hope to remember some of it. Octopussy. And to you, lovely listener, join me next time as we shine new light on historical periods. But for now, I'm off to go and make my fortune by investing in indigo. Hopefully I'm not hundreds of years too late. Bye.

58:59Your Dead to Me is a BBC Studios audio production for BBC Radio 4.

59:12Screenshot. It gave me as an actress just what I was craving. They were both very mature as filmmakers. This was a film that spoke to a red state, blue state divide. I'm Mark Kermode. And I'm Eleni Jones and we'll direct you through the intertwined worlds of film, television and streaming. In the new series, we'll look at Studio Ghibli and summer blockbusters and start with cinema's fascination with doppelgangers. Helped by the one and only Richard Ayoade. I'd quite like to meet more Norwegian Nigerians. In fact, if there's a meeting, I'll happily attend. Screenshot from BBC Radio 4. Listen now on BBC Sounds.