The conqueror-statesman Nadir Shah Afshar, otherwise known as Tahmasp Kuli Khan, caused a furore in the eighteenth-century world. If destiny had deemed him protagonist in the political theatre of Asia, the Dutch playwright Frans van Steenwyk in 1745 chose him as the lead character in his play Thamas Koelikan. This literary piece was an example of the European obsession with the conqueror in the 1730s and 1740s. Numerous histories were published about Nadir Shah and new editions of older works rolled off the presses with updates of his latest victories and conquests, and the European public relished it all. Describing the enthusiasm surrounding Nadir Shah, Frederick Bernard notes, “until 1740 … and the galvanic deeds of Frederick (of Prussia), the one man whose exploits seized the attention of Europe and marked him as a ruler worthy of note was Kuli Kan, Shah of Persia.” What is as compelling as the heightened interest in the Persian ruler in the 1730s and 1740s is the association of Nadir Shah from the 1750s onwards with a phenomenon that China too, as we have seen, came to be associated with from the eighteenth century—Oriental Despotism. Visible in an array of European works including those of Byron, Tennyson, and John Stuart Mill, Nadir Shah came to symbolize Oriental Despotism at its worst, and for centuries after this image remained unchanged.

The Plot (The Historical and the Literary)

In 1745, the well-known Amsterdam playwright Frans van Steenwyk published and staged his play, Thamas Koelikan. Unlike his more popular plays such as Ada, Gravin van Holland en Zeeland (1754), Thamas Koelikan was in many ways evasive. The play, we learn, was not popular. The Schouwburg authorities decided to stage the play only three times in 1645 (the year that the play was scripted) and once again in the following decade. Little known in its own time, the play has elicited no scholarly interest apart from customary inclusions in encyclopaedias of Dutch literature.

Thamas Koelikan was based on the story of Nadir Shah's invasion of India six years prior to the scripting of the play. In 1738, having usurped the Persian throne and amassed spectacular politico-military victories in West Asia, Nadir Shah Afshar stood poised to invade Mughal territory.