Thanjavur, a polity taken over by the Marathas in 1674, became a contentious kingdom for the Dutch East India Company (VOC). The Marathas in Thanjavur controlled some land around Nagapattinam, the administrative centre of Dutch Coromandel, making Dutch trade and the provision of essential goods in southeastern India dependent on Thanjavur. One of the lubricants that could smoothen the relation between the Dutch and the Thanjavur Maratha court was elephant diplomacy, the practice of gifting elephants from the Dutch to Thanjavur’s kings. This activity can be traced back to an earlier period where the Nayak dynasty still ruled Thanjavur, before the arrival of the Marathas. However, under the Maratha rule, the Dutch-Thanjavur elephant diplomacy accelerated, largely due to a treaty signed by both parties in 1676. This treaty required the Dutch to send a specified number of elephants annually as a token of recognition to Thanjavur’s Maratha kings. Beyond sending elephants to Thanjavur, its court also played a very proactive role in the elephant diplomacy by sending royal court elephant specialists to select elephants on spot in Jaffnapatnam, in northern Ceylon, where the Dutch had access to the island’s elephant population. Through episodes of this Dutch-Thanjavur elephant diplomacy, this seminar aims to preliminarily revisit received notions of bilateral diplomacy and treaties in early modern southern Asia.

Pichayapat ‘Toh’ Naisupap is a PhD candidate at Leiden University’s Institute for History. He earned his MA from the same institution, where he conducted historical research on Dutch-Asian elephant diplomacy in the seventeenth century. His current PhD project explores the entangled history of the Dutch Empire and various elephant traditions across the Indian Ocean world, focusing on elephant knowledge, management, trade, and diplomacy. His broad specialism and interests include cultural, intellectual, and environmental history, particularly in the context of Eurasian interactions between and within Europe and southern Asia.