Abstract
I knew of Michael Pearson through his merchants and rulers in Gujarat as a university student in the 1980s, but I only met him at an Indian Ocean conference organized by his colleagues at the University of Technology Sydney in Leiden in 2006. That encounter started a friendship and a collaboration that lasted almost 20 years, and I am honoured to be invited to write a few words about him in the International Journal of Maritime History.
The brief from Professor Cátia Antunes, one of the two editors-in-chief of the journal, was very precise. She did not want a standard obituary; what she wanted to do was celebrate Michael's life and works, and this she envisaged in the form of an imaginary conversation that we, the contributors to this special section, would have with him. But Michael was not a great conversationalist at the best of times, and I really cannot envision an imaginary conversation that would be long enough to feature even as a short piece. So, instead of a conversation, I take this opportunity to talk about some of my interactions with him.
Although a New Zealander by birth, Michael based himself in Australia. He became a member of the Australian Association of Maritime History and contributed to its journal, The Great Circle. Like his predecessor Frank Broeze, Michael defined maritime history as widely as possible. However, when Broeze was writing, the subfield of maritime history was just developing in Australia, the scope of maritime history was yet to be defined, and its practitioners were few and far between. So Michael was a trailblazer of sorts, and his ideas were picked up by a new generation of scholars there. Peter Ridgway, sometime president of the Australian Association of Maritime History, once conceived of an atlas of Indian Ocean history inspired by Michael's work, but I do not know if it was ever published.
Michael’s works are widely known throughout the world; he influenced not just two generations of historians but also human geographers, anthropologists, and scholars of literary and cultural studies. Despite his accomplishments, Michael was a very modest man. He made light of his work; he claimed that he was like a magpie, taking bits and pieces from disciplines to formulate his arguments. He purposely disregarded disciplinary boundaries, although he had started out, very consciously, as a historian of land – to be precise, of Diu in west-coast India's Gujarat. His deliberate use of models from other disciplines not only sharpened his thinking and enhanced his written output, but also imparted a whiff of salt air in his writings. That was his greatest strength – reading widely to understand the sea – and the exercise culminated in his magnum opus of 2003, The Indian Ocean.
Michael made some very significant interventions in the field. His article ‘Littoral Society’ completely changed the way we studied maritime history. 1 It heralded a new wave of history-writing that he called ‘amphibian’ history, containing what cultural studies scholar Isabel Hofmeyr later would call a ‘sodden archive’; what the geographers Philip Steinberg and Kimberley Peters have termed ‘thinking with the sea’ and a ‘wet ontology’; and what historian Alison Bashford calls ‘terraqueous’ histories. 2 Michael called this history ‘oceanic’ as opposed to ‘maritime’ history, which was then mostly about the activities of men and nations at sea. It was a world of monarchs, ministers and map-makers; it was not a world of humble people comprising women as well as men – rope- and sail-makers, pearl divers and small fishermen. This was a world that Michael found more suitable to ‘his’ history. In this oceanic view of history, Michael deliberated on the influence of land on the sea and vice versa, insisting on the historian's need to ‘get wet’ when writing of the sea, and Hofmeyr dedicated her ‘sodden archive’ to Michael in her contribution to his Festschrift in 2020.
Although he wrote about an Indian Ocean world, Michael remained acutely conscious of the dangers of stretching the spatial boundaries of this world. He repeatedly asked: How far inland? How far does the historian need to stretch their oceanic space? Was it possible to write a history of oceans as world history? And what common patterns or themes could we find on land and at sea? He wrote that much of what was purported to be oceanic history was methodologically flawed – most products came from the land, ships were built on land, sailors returned home to their families – and we could not just set sail and ignore the land from which we came. So, Michael felt that although the aquatic part of our globe needed more focus, we could not ignore the land altogether.
I would like to say a few words about our interactions and remember some of the travelling we did together. At the University of Hyderabad in 2011, we had organized a conference on port cities and Michael was invited. When he came, he said that he was happy to be in Hyderabad but he should add that he would not be able to return the invite as he was now retired. This was a surprisingly humble and candid admission for a scholar to make! After the conference, we had a four-day road trip visiting port towns on the eastern peninsular coast of India (known as the Coromandel Coast), and we also travelled to the interior, visiting, among other places, Bijapur, where he had last gone for fieldwork at the time he was working on his PhD thesis on merchants and rulers in Gujarat. The 2011 meeting was significant, for it opened the way to all kinds of collaborations, as well as an enduring friendship with the Pearsons, for his wife Denni accompanied him on that trip (as she did on his subsequent visits to India).
In October 2011, I left Hyderabad to take up a post directing a research institute near Kolkata. My remit was to put the institute on the global map and, to that end, I organized quite a few international meetings during the four years I was there. I invited Michael, in December 2012, to a meeting on waterscapes and, in November 2013, to a meeting on world history, which we held on a boat moored in the creeks of the mangrove forest called the Sundarbans (a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1987) because it was impossible to hire a conference hall and arrange accommodation in Kolkata that winter. Every place in Kolkata was booked solid months in advance. Denni and her sister Barbara accompanied us. Members of the International Journal of Maritime History's extended family were there as well – namely, Amélia Polónia and Radhika Seshan. We stayed on an island; every night, the hosts arranged a concert or a play performed by local artists. We lit bonfires to ward off the damp winter chill. Cocktails were served around the fire. Michael enjoyed the estuarine landscape and kept photographing the mangrove roots going into the water. It was a world of half water, half land – a landscape particularly suited to his littoral fancy. Perhaps the Sundarbans reinforced his interest in water histories, for he was then consciously moving away from the sea into the coastal fringe.
Michael liked coming to Kolkata and, in January 2015, he came for the final time for the Territoriality in Coastal Societies meeting that we had organized there. He flew in with Air Asia only a few days after the fateful Air Asia crash of December 2014. Following the meeting, we spent a few days in an estuarine village on the coast of the Bay of Bengal; Michael went for long walks on the beach and had a head-and-neck massage from the village barber! Then, we flew on to Kerala for the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, and Michael saw his beloved Arabian Sea once again. We met soon afterwards at a conference organized by New York University Abu Dhabi in March that year. And I met him for what was to be the last time at the meeting on Connected Oceans organized by Amélia in Porto that summer. He was not doing very well by then; he had had a series of small strokes, which caused brief memory lapses, and he had a big stroke towards the end of 2015, which incapacitated him for good.
What I remember most about Michael is his infectious enthusiasm. He loved his biryani; he said he came from a farming family in New Zealand, and so he loved his meat and potatoes. We made sure to source him a good lamb biryani wherever we were; I recall that we had a particularly fine one in a Masulipatnam shack in 2011. A quiet man, he was open to new ideas and things. He keenly observed everything around him, absorbed what he considered relevant and disregarded the rest. He had tremendous physical and mental energy, and a great sense of humour. The resort we stayed at in the Sundarbans in 2013 had construction going on in some of the cottages. His sister-in-law Barbara had checked into a cottage whose window panes were not yet installed. When she got up the following morning, she was amazed to see the panes and shutters in place; the evening before, there had been only an opening covered with a mosquito net! On her remarking on this, Michael said: ‘Barbie, this is the mysterious East. Things come up overnight by magic!’ With Michael's passing, the world has lost not just a remarkable scholar, but also a very fine human being. I will miss him.