Abstract
Inspired by the geo-historical conceptualizations of Fernand Braudel and the Annalistes on the Mediterranean and the modern world-system analysis of Immanuel Wallerstein and the ‘New’ World History, numerous studies have looked at the Indian Ocean Basin and its various components in a worldwide search for ‘parallel Mediterraneans’ and ‘sub-Mediterraneans’ as meaningful units of analysis per se. Elaborating on the classic Braudelian formulation of the unity between land and sea, the ‘New’ Maritime History of the Greater Indian Ocean and its constituent parts is ‘littoral’ (Michael Pearson) or ‘terraqueous’ (Alison Bashford) and deterritorialized recognizing fuzzy and fluctuating boundaries over time.
Cross-cultural Networking in the Indian Ocean Realm is an Indocentric assemblage of interdisciplinary essays at the intersection of recent scholarship and revisionist historiography specifically dedicated to Prof. Noroburu Karashima (1933-2015). This ‘collective’ or ‘joint initiative’ represents long-term, borderless society approaches focusing on the median role of the ‘Wider’ or ‘Extended Bay of Bengal Region’, the ‘central waterscape in cross-cultural networking and consumption in the Eastern Indian Ocean’ acting as a conduit of material and ‘ideational transfers’ between the early historical period and the modern era, c. 100-1800 (pp. xv, 269, 281, 334, 347). Stretching by land and by sea from the Bay of Bengal to the South China Sea with maritime and continental forces jostling for space, the ‘re-territorialization’ and the new spatial links forged by the nineteenth-century ‘colonial moment’ and the European imperial ‘new order’ marked the end of the life-cycle of the eastern Indian Ocean realm in which people, ideas, and objects circulated freely (pp. 1, 341–343, 348).
The book consists of a preface and introduction by Kenneth Hall, 13 individual chapters of varying length and quality organized in rough chronological, geographical, and evidentiary order, plus a conclusive afterword or ‘summative afterview’ by Rila Mukherjee.
The first seven chapter studies (Chapters 1–7) address the eastern South Asia seaboard in the Bay of Bengal, including the pre- and post-Chola coast (Brian Wilson; V. Selvakumar), the Andhra coast (K.P. Rao; Suchandra Ghosh and Sabarni Pramanik Nayak), the Odisha and Bengal coasts (Rajat Sanyal and Suchandra Ghosh), and the early medieval Bengal corridors (Kaushik Gangopadhyay and Sharmistha Chatterjee; Coline Lefrancq). The authors set out to identify ethno-linguistic communities (natios), their probable places of origins and their ethnic and linguistic affiliations to understand the circulation of objects, people and commodities and the use of similar technologies. In the process, they uncover numerous maritime and overland pathways and cultural routes discerning diverse Southeast and East Asia linkages between localities, regions, and transoceanic spaces from the early historical to the medieval period.
The second set of essays (Chapters 8–11) focuses on Island and Maritime Southeast Asia and moves progressively eastward from the Melaka Straits (Rila Mukherjee; Derek Heng) and Vietnam (John Whitmore), the ‘easternmost corner of the extended Eastern Indian Ocean’ (p. 341), back to Mainland Southeast Asia (Kenneth Hall). Mukherjee seeks to locate the cross-cultural networking of Srivijaya (7th–13th centuries) as a ‘world-historical place’ within the wider Indian Ocean (pp. 170, 192). Heng explores the sequential international port of trade centres in the Meleka Straits, most notably Temasik and the Orang laut maritime diaspora, during the post-Srivijaya, pre-Melaka transitional period (late 13th–early 15th centuries) to understand the region’s socio-political dynamics (p. 200). Whitmore traces the cultural accommodation and competition between the Champa and Dai Viet realms along Vietnam’s extended eastern seaboard selectively absorbing and adapting Indic and Sinic civilisational influences from the first to the twenty-first century (p. 224). Based on the case studies of early Myanmar and Angkor, Hall’s revisionist study reevaluates prior depictions of pre-1500 mainland Southeast Asia as a ‘closed’ continental entity in favour of an ‘open’, fluid region including overland, riverine, and oceanic commercial and ideational transfer routes and networks that extended from the Bay of Bengal to the South China Sea (pp. 9, 269, 289).
The third and final set of essays (Chapters 12–13) cover ‘Island’ and ‘Upland Asia’. Similar to Hall, M.N. Rajesh’s revisionist mini-essay seeks to explode the European Orientalist myth of Tibet as landlocked, immobile, inward-looking and shorn of networks of any kind (pp. 296, 297). Using the pre-1500 history of the Andaman Islands as a case study, Aparna Vaidik exposes the ‘island metaphor’, a product of the European epistemic frame and the concomitant ‘historiographical warp’ towards island histories defined by the ‘trope of boundedness, isolation, self-sufficiency and temporal distance’ (p. 312).
An ambitious volume of such vast geotemporal scope is bound to exhibit certain lacunae. While the (pace David Armitage) infra-oceanic, subregional limelight is on the networked eastern Indian seaboard and Bay of Bengal Proper during the pre-1500 early historical and medieval periods, borderlands and border seas, most notably Java and the Java Sea and Eastern Archipelago, and the early modern era remain relatively underexposed. Indeed, though acknowledging extra-oceanic linkages with other lands and seas and cross-cultural networking in the ‘expansive, borderless Indian Ocean world’, such vital topics, amongst others, as ‘ancient’ or ‘archaic globalization’ across Afro-Eurasia, medieval Muslim networking in the Eastern Indian Ocean, and Persianization and mercantilism in the Bay of Bengal and further East before 1700 are given short shrift (pp. 339, 349).
The fuzzy boundaries and numerous external links call into question the relative cohesiveness or unity of the eastern Indian Ocean realm. Mukherjee astutely observes that ‘the region was in effect the sum total of several subregions’ and ‘fluctuating geocultural formulations’ (pp. 333, 335): the Tamil, Andhra, Odisha and Bengal coasts on the eastern seaboard of South Asia; the Thai, Malay, and Cham subregions in maritime Southeast Asia; and the Champa and Dai Viet realms along the eastern littoral of Mainland Southeast Asia. It would have been helpful to identify the Braudelian deep structures or elements of commonality of this internally diverse region (see, for instance, Sunil Amrith, Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013, ch. 2.).
In the end, as an interdisciplinary assemblage of essays drawing on archaeology, ceramics, anthropology, literary studies, and history, Cross-cultural Networking in the Eastern Indian Ocean exhibits, in the words of the editors, ‘considerable variety apart from distinct commonalities’ (p. xv). Using a wide range of mixed media and research methodologies from archaeological recoveries to textual analysis, the resulting bricolage presents and represents an important kaleidoscopic case study of cross-cultural encounters in world history.