Abstract
Maritime History has become a tool in the hands of several Indian historians who are interested in Indo-Portuguese history. The study of maritime history enables these researchers to come closer to the crucial dynamics of historical process. Maritime history embraces many aspects of history, such as international politics, navigation, oceanic currents, maritime transportation, coastal society, development of ports and port-towns, sea-borne trade and commerce, port–hinterland relations and so on.
As far as India and the Indian Ocean regions are concerned, maritime studies have a great relevance in the exchange of culture, establishment of political power, the dynamics of society, trade and commerce and religion of these areas. The Indian Ocean served not only as a conduit for conducting trade and commerce, but also served and still serves, as an important means of communication. The Indians have carried commodities to several Asian and African countries even before the arrival of the Europeans from India. Exchange of goods promoted maritime trade as well as the fusion of different cultures in the Indian Ocean. Art, architecture, culinary habits, music, clothing, language and religion went through a transitional period because of the maritime activities in the Indian Ocean.
There were favourable conditions in the Indian Ocean that helped the Portuguese to build their maritime power on their entry in the Indian Ocean. C.R. Boxer, among other things, mentions the following points as regards Portuguese Sea Trade:
The Emperor of Egypt, Persia and Vijayanagar had no armed shipping in the Indian Ocean.
Wealthy entrepôts of Ormuz and Mallaca did not possess ocean-going vessels.
The Arabs, Gujaratis, and other Muslims who dominated the trade of the Indian Ocean had large ocean-going vessels as well as small coastal ships, but even the largest were not provided with artillery and no iron was used in hull construction.
The Portuguese took control of the strategic points in the spice trade routes. They controlled Goa, Ormuz, Mallaca and these were supplemented by many other fortified coastal settlements and trading posts (feitorias) from Sofola in north-east Africa to Ternate in Moluccas.
The domination of the seaborne trade of the Indian Ocean, first by the Arabs and later to a large extent by Muslims of Indian origin chiefly Gujaratis, was achieved in both cases quite peacefully). Many Asian rulers shared the conviction of Bahadur Shah, the King of Gujarat, that ‘wars by sea are merchants’ affairs, and of no concern to the prestige of Kings’. Thus there were favourable historical conditions that helped the Portuguese to a certain extent to hold a de facto control of a section of the Indian Ocean, that is, mainly the Arabian Sea.
A large contingent of historians working on maritime history and Indian ocean studies have brought in a new historical knowledge that has revolutionised the understanding of the integrated historical processes of Early Modern India. It was the academic endeavours of such leading historians like Ashin Das Gupta, Dietmar Rothermund, M.N. Pearson, Luis Philipe Thomaz, Om Prakash, K.S. Mathew, Teotonio R. De Souza, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Kenneth McPherson, A.R. Disney, R.J. Barendse, B. Arunachalam, K.N. Choudhury that a different set of meanings and added importance began to be accorded to the historical processes of Maritime India. Prof. Malekandathil has been working on this direction for more than a decade and published several volumes on Portuguese India.
The present volume, The Mughals, The Portuguese and The Indian Ocean: Changing Imageries of Maritime India by Pius Malekandathil is a collection of ten research papers, presented as a historical journey through Maritime India analysing its changing imageries and meanings against the background of the Mughal expansion from land to sea and the fluctuating fortunes of the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean. The author dwells upon the mechanisms of the land-centric activities of the Mughals and their relatively formative and feeble strand concentrating on the coastal developments and the trans-oceanic exchanges in the Indian Ocean respectively. The book covers a long span of time from 1500 to 1840 and defies the stereotyped and rigid per iodization of Medieval India to look at the history of Maritime India as a process bringing out patterns of continuity, change and transition.
The focus of analysis in each chapter is changing contours of various regions of Maritime India which is done in the context of larger developments and connectivity. Out of the ten chapters, five deal with a variety of historical process that directly or indirectly help understand the economy and politics of the Mughals while most of the remaining ones dwell on the socio-economic processes of Maritime India.
The author introduces ten different themes of Early Modern Maritime India against the backdrop of definitions and redefinitions given to it by the Portuguese and Mughals in their attempts to bank upon the wealth derived from circuits in the Indian Ocean Regions. He points out that the last quarter of Akbar’s reign was marked by an intense phase of multi-religious discourse in which the dialogue between the Jesuit Missionaries from the Portuguese world and Akbar stands out as a remarkable feat of civilisational encounter in Medieval India. Upon their arrival in India the Portuguese divided the Indian coastal terrains into different hierarchies on the basis of their resourcefulness and strategic locations and the spatial manifestations of deeper societal processes of the cities that emerge from multiple levels of activities connected with production, exchange and power exercise. The author argues that the idea of South India was formulated and reshaped through the channels of commerce particularly through the frequent movements of commodities within the region through the trade circuits resorted to by Portuguese and their mercantile collaborators or by their competitors. There was trade through sea supplemented by the trade through inland routes whose channels interlinked the various economic zones of South India so as to evolve the idea of a distinct region in the south. The Portuguese attempts to monopoly trade in the Indian Ocean received a major setback because of the parallel circulatory processes between India and the Mediterranean in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in differing quantities and degrees. The commercial vibrancy of the coastal Western India depended very much on its relationship with the chain of African markets bordering Indian Ocean which often made them operate as two sides of the same economic world geo-physically distanced but intrinsically connected by the waters and circuits of the Indian Ocean.
He goes on arguing that the period between 1650 and 1720 witnessed the emergence of several maritime power contenders in and around the ports of Northern Kankan and then critically analysed Varthamanapushthakam, which was written in 1785 by Fr Thomas Paremakkel as an account of his travel along with his friend Bishop Mar Joseph Kariyattil to Madras, Africa, Brazil, Portugal and Rome and often held as the first travelogue in an Indian language which has been immensely used as a literary medium by the author to ventilate his dissent and anger against the hegemonic attitudes and the cultural colonial fabric which the European religious missionaries set up for the church in India particularly for the St Thomas Christians of Kerala arguing vehemently that Indians should be ruled by Indians and not by foreigners. He goes on demanding as early as 1785 that Indian Christians should be ruled not by European religious missionaries but by Indians.
Malekandathil discusses the commercially-oriented Portuguese settlers who expanded along the water space of Bay of Bengal, had a different format of operation not only because of their constant refusal to get integrated with the Portuguese power centre on the coastal western India but also because of the regional specificities and exigencies which defined the nature of their behaviour and activities over there. Then he shifts to the period between 1780 and 1840 which is often called the Age of Revolution in the West and the significant change in the Lusitanian space in India due to radical alteration in the politico-economic activities and socio ecclesiastical institutions.
Malekandathil follows an integrated and holistic approach by linking the land-oriented developments with the maritime ones to show the changing meanings that maritime India acquired at different periods following the redefinitions given by the constant coast-hinterland interactions. In fine, this collection focuses on the changing meanings of maritime India.