Thinking About the Indian Ocean and the Mausam Initiative

Abstract

The Mausam Initiative has not met the expectations with which it was announced. As a flagship initiative of the Government of India, its programmatic framework remains unclear and the understanding of the Initiative unifocal. Apart from the effort to transcribe it in the UNESCO’s world heritage list, there is little clarity on how the ancient, mediaeval and premodern histories of the Indian Ocean (IO) may resonate with our times and concerns. There is also little thought put to what this can mean in writing a revisionist history of the Indian Ocean World and what that revisionist writing would mean to India’s relations with its IO neighbours. This article will outline briefly the Mausam Initiative as it stands and what a revisionist history of the IO region could suggest. Many of the discussions around this are already present around the IO intellectual and scholarly circuit, dislocating notions of dominance, sovereignty and statecraft. It remains for policymakers to take note of these to nuance the Mausam Initiative and make it an actually effective arm of policy.

Keywords

Mausam Initiative Indian Ocean World cosmopolitanism soft power

The Mausam Initiative

When the Mausam Initiative was first announced, it resonated with India’s foreign policy of reaching out to near and distant neighbours. It was initiated by the Ministry of Culture which mandated the Archaeological Survey of India to implement it along with a prominent centre for the arts, the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts and the National Museum. At the heart of it was the attempt to have it nominated to UNESCO’s World Heritage list. In fact, the Initiative was launched as Project Mausam in 2014 at UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee Meeting held in Doha, Qatar.

As a consequence, it morphed from the Mausam Initiative to the Mausam Project albeit with the aims listed against a description of the Project on the IGNCA’s website still reflecting its scope as Initiative. Many of the contradictions between a larger visionary Initiative and the more limited scope of the Project have prevented a discussion of what the Initiative could achieve while keeping the objectives of the Project as one important part of its implementation.

Beyond the cultural institutions to which the Initiative was handed over, it was primarily viewed as a soft power addition to strategic policy. Coming as it did soon after China’s announcement of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), it was also interpreted as an alternative to China’s expanding footprint in Asia and especially in the Indian Ocean (IO) even as commentators pointed out the difference between the BRI, as openly strategic, and the Mausam Initiative as primarily cultural (Kumar, 2015; Pillalamarri, 2014; Zhongyi, 2015). The assumption of competitive strategic purpose was misplaced. If anything the Mausam Initiative should have been compared to China’s soft power strategy of collaboration with UNESCO in having a part of the Silk Road from Central China to Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan inscribed in the World Heritage List in 2014, the very year the Project Mausam was launched at Doha.¹ Both as a soft power and a specific strategic component of policy, the plan lacked the people to people and institutional outreach essential to soft power strategies.

It also lacked the element of inclusion essential to persuade audiences of its merits in framing an Indian Ocean World that spoke to the cosmopolitanism of transnational conceptions of space and the complicated reading of its history around the IO littoral. This, despite the objective of the Project to publish research focusing on the common heritage of the Indian Ocean World and its multiple identities. Short-term projects can be directed at the listing of cultural traditions and preserving archaeological artefacts but achieving soft power is always a long-term policy. As one study points out, in relation to the US soft power policies but this would be applicable to all nations who seek a soft power approach, ‘that a much larger and more fluid cultural policy is needed … one that moves beyond current political agendas to support a mosaic of … citizens, working and researching on a global scale in various cultural settings’. Only a longer-term involvement can indicate an interest in cultural relations and creating an environment for an exchange of ideas and concerns (Luke & Kersel, 2012).

Given its nature, support for the Mausam Initiative around the IO littoral has remained limited. The Initiative identified 39 countries as probable partners in a transnational nomination for the IO as a world heritage site with UNESCO, not as partners in the recreation of the cultural space of the Indian Ocean World, a much larger and more political endeavour. There is no evidence that these, or even some of these, have come on board even for the more narrow aim of a UNESCO listing. The Indian missions in these countries were mandated to follow through but to be successful the effort needed to be coordinated between the Ministry of External Affairs and the Ministry of Culture, especially the institutions under the Ministry of Culture mandated with the implementation of the Project. This coordination seems to be missing. Neither is there any evidence for why these and not countries with greater geopolitical value or with greater archaeological and cultural inputs into the Project were listed as partners. Indian ownership of the Project, even if narrowly defined as transcribing transnational heritage, would come up against reservations over the privileged position of Indian contacts and cultural forms in the focus on an ‘Indian’ Ocean World. This is significant in the context of the backlash Beijing faced when it announced the BRI as a unilateral venture, forcing it then to speak in the language of partnerships.

Another contradiction that holds the Initiative back is that while the state funds it, its success depends on people outside government who will be asked to. They will lend their scholarship and efforts to rethink the connections and the understanding of the maritime region and draw the lineament of the cultural spaces of the Indian Ocean World (all objectives of the Mausam Initiative as outlined by the Ministry of Culture). This a much larger task that speaks to the vision of the Initiative but is severely constrained by the timeline and direction of the Project implemented by the state. For a vision that is intended to bring the IO littoral states into its ambit the funding for the Project was confined to a small group of institutions, those that were mandated to focus on Indian arts. The Initiative, curiously, seems also to have been defined as time bound and not as an exercise that would be part of a long-term strategy of binding with and winning over neighbours. The Ministry of Culture stated that activities listed under the initiative were to be completed by 2017, although they have now been extended through to 2020 (Press Information Bureau, 2018). Unlike China’s BRI which has a ‘whole of the country’ approach and no stated timeline given what is at stake, the Mausam Initiative has found little resonance across likely constituencies in India (Ranjan, 2017). The list of activities on behalf of the Mausam research project, intended to add substance to the Initiative, remains woefully limited and at a far distance from the dynamic cosmopolitan debates around creating stake holders in the IO community.²

The dominant view of the IO in India today is that it is a strategic concern which has been ignored since independence (Tanham, 1992, p. vii). Of late, the IO and the Indian Ocean World has become important as India’s strategic interests have been redrawn. Major government documents like India’s maritime strategy documents draw from this understanding as do the discussions on the blue economy spearheaded by the IO Rim Association and the National Maritime Institute (Ministry of Defence, 2015a, 2015b, 2015c).

Taking from geopolitical perspectives—such as K. M. Panikkar’s (1945) argument for the significance of the IO to India’s security and Alfred Thayer Mahan’s (1890) thesis on the control of the seas as essential to sustaining power—a common view is that the IO is a locus of military and economic strength. This is further underscored by a nationalist rendering of history. The dominance of initiatives around strategic concerns in the Western IO marks the re-emergence of India in its near and distant neighbourhoods and is a complement to the Look East policy of the early 1990s and its more recent action-orientated offspring, the Act East policy. It also captures some of the confidence of Afro-Asian solidarities of the first decade after independence.

This view of the IO has rarely been questioned as the creation of a specific historical moment when making policy, even when post-colonial readings of the IO and its history argue for significantly different epistemological approaches to this maritime domain. The pre-colonial condition of the IO as an arena of an open flow of scientific and philosophical ideas, institutional forms and monetary traditions that created the multilayered culture of this world by the sixteenth century would be a useful template to draw upon to widen and deepen the meaning and potential of an initiative such as the Mausam (Mahan, 1890; Panikkar et al., 2012; Sakhuja, 2012; Sakhuja & Narula, 2016).

While the implementation of the Initiative as Project may lack focus and its many possibilities be disregarded the Initiative itself has the potential to create new engagement in the IO, perhaps in deeper and more lasting ways. There has been significant work on the Indian Ocean World from the perspective of world systems which examines IO exchanges before colonialism and since. Other and newer work moves away from the generalising tendency of world systems to look at the complexity of this contact, the many institutional processes that supported it and the cosmopolitanism that sustained it (Abu-Lughod, 1991; Bose, 2009; Braudel, 1979; Chaudhuri, 1990; Habib, 1200–1750; Pearson, 2003).

Whose Indian Ocean?

A starting point for an inclusive outreach policy on the IO would appropriately be to ask the question: whose IO? This question has, in fact, been inverted by strategic rivals like China who have warned that it ‘would be a mistake for New Delhi to consider the (Indian) ocean’s international waters as “its backyard”’ (Krishnan, 2015; Scott, 2015). Even more benign partners like the ASEAN have viewed the Mausam Project as a foreign policy construct with India at the centre of it and have suggested that it take on board the many ASEAN members who are key stakeholders in the IO. Thus,

In this light, the development of Project Mausam, or at least some strategic elements of it, can be seen as India’s attempt to address the imbalance and pre-emptively reassert its dominance over a region that it sees as its natural sphere of influence. It would be reasonable to expect that any roll out of Project Mausam will take into consideration the strategic importance of ASEAN. Several of its members—Myanmar, Indonesia and Thailand—share borders with the eastern IO while Malaysia and Singapore are key stakeholders. (Daniel, 2015)

Ownership of the IO has been complicated throughout recorded history. The naming of the Ocean was unstable and changed over time depending on who was writing its history (Agius, 2020). The unnamed author of the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea (60 ce) went by the conventions of the ancient Greeks and Romans and called it the Erythraean Sea, establishing one aspect of the historiography of IO Trade. At the height of Persian power, Persians were wont to call it the Sea of Fars (Persia). One map of the mid-tenth-century cartographer and geographer Abu Ishaq Ibrahim ibn Muhammad al-Farisi al-Istakhri names it the Sea of China with India and China being shown as one land mass (Al-Istakhri, 1193). In India as well, as Rila Mukherjee (2020) points out in her paper in this issue, the conceptions of sea, ocean and river remained fluid until very late.

Naming became a way of establishing the reach of kingdoms, reflected the vantage point of commercial centres and was an iteration of cosmological belief systems. This last was certainly true of Islamic scholars. Ibn al-Istakhri’s maps, for example, show the world’s oceans as a fluid and amorphous body of water encircling the land mass of the world and the ‘Islamic cartographic imagination reaffirms that cosmogony establishes a timeless space that transcends history and geography’ (Pinto, 2019).

Given that India was one of the three trading centres (Mesopotamia, India and China) and stood in the middle, it retained a position of primacy. But other port cities were central to the traffic in the IO as well. A network approach to trade indicates that while the most networked port was Barygaza in Northwest India and an important centre of one regional cluster, the Egyptian ports of Myos, Hormos and Berenike were important in terms of long-term trade, as were the ports of Adulis in Eritrea and Muza in Yemen which were the gateways interconnecting wider regional and IO networks. Thus, trade was rarely dominated by one port or region in the IO (Seland, 2016).

If geography and history were fluid, the movement of people along the coast of the IO, even before the intense movement in the region since the coming of Islam, converted IO ports from Gujarat to the Malabar and Coromandel coasts and those along the Persian and Omani coast into cosmopolitan spaces (Seland, 2013). Here, people from across the IO littoral and further, as with Jewish and Armenian traders, came to stay for longer or shorter periods. The Periplus provides reference to a mix of communities of traders and sailors as far back as the first century ce (Breasted, 1912). The dependence of the ships on the monsoon winds ensured that sailors and traders stayed for at least 3 months at any port until the winds turned to take ships back. Accounts by ship captains and travellers indicate that Cambay and the ports on the coast of Gujarat were home to Parsi communities, Omani sailors, Yemeni merchants and traders from South East Asia on their way to the ports of Siraf and Suhar in the Gulf (Agius, 2020). Clearly, even though India was a prominent centre for trade, commerce and other activities were rarely seen as a national enterprise. As Ibn Battuta’s account of his travels in India indicates the city of Cambay was home to many foreign merchants who chose to settle in the city, and many of those who stayed for longer periods intermarried. On his way to China as emissary of Mohammad Bin Tuglak, Battuta arrives at Cambay and notes that,

We next arrived at the city of Kambaya, which is situated at a mouth of the sea which resembles a valley, and into which the ships ride: here also the flux and reflux of the tide is felt. The greatest part of its inhabitants are foreign merchants. (Battuta, 1325–1354)

As he goes down the coast, he finds that the city of ‘Manjarun, which is situated upon a large estuary of the sea … [has] some of the greatest merchants of Persia and Yemen’ (Battuta, 1325–1354, p. 36). On the ship by which Battuta travelled to Malabar after his brief stay at Cambay, as Ross E. Dunn points out, there were a hundred soldiers many of them descended from African fighters (Dunn, 1989, p. 218). At the Island of Mohl, (the Maldives island), Ibn Battuta notes the presence of an army of foreigners, a thousand strong, in the service of the female ruler of the island (Battuta, 1325–1354, p. 42). But diasporic communities did not just move from north to south as generally in the West Indian Coast but also south to north. Ibn al-Mujawir’s Tarikh al-Mustabsir, ‘History of the Observer’ (624–627/1226–1230 ad), for example, describes the occupation of Aden by people from Madagascar. A significant community of Siddis has resided in Janjira Island off the coast of Gujarat since the late fifteenth century (Ogot, 1992). Older South Asian contacts within the Indian Ocean World are also borne out by archaeological sites at Dilmun (third millennium bc) in Bahrain and in Kuwait and with accounts of Indian communities in Basra among other places in the Arabian peninsula (Nizami, 1994).

While slavery was an aspect of diaspora along the IO littoral, and there are many references to slaves in domestic service and as a gift to valued guests, the notion of an enslaved diaspora was complicated in the colonial period when large-scale movement of peoples occurred under slavery, indenture and settlement policies. The history of this diaspora has opened up new questions about belonging and community in the Indian Ocean World, questions that now form a part of the literature emerging from diasporic vantage points (Hawley, 2008; Hofmeyr, 2007, 2012).

Commerce and trade were not the only templates for communities in the IO littoral. As one study points out, the find of a bronze figure of a lion in the Swahili town of Shanga on Kenya’s north coast indicates the existence of communities of Indian artisans in Africa on the Swahili coast. This reveals the probable existence of religious networks, the transmission of aesthetic forms and a market for valuable items beyond the commodities ordinarily traded (Hawkes & Stephanie, 2015). Documents in the Geniza archive also reveal the habit of sending gifts with commodities, an Indian custom which Jewish traders adopted (Goitein & Friedman, 2008). In a study of objects, many objects also indicated not just religious, ethnic or linguistic identity but connections through ‘possession, consumption and display’. Here circulation occurred not only through trade but also looting and gifting.

By the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century trade on the Swahili coast was part of the IO network. As early as the tenth century, however, there were reports of exports of luxury items such as ambergris and resins, leopard skins, tortoise-shell, and ivory from East Africa to India and China. Some Swahili oral traditions indicate early connections with South Asia, most particularly with Sindh. Swahili oral histories, especially the waDebuli or waDiba stories are associated with the port of Daybul at the mouth of the Indus. This ‘might not refer to a literal origin point for immigrants so much as a “direction of cultural contact”’. Other studies indicate the multiplicity of contacts between East Africa and India. Similar symbols in coins, a common aesthetic in beads and the similarity of ceramics over time indicate wider social connections (Hawkes & Stephanie, 2015; LaViolette, 2008). This reorientates us from the dominance of Indo-Arab trade to other locations around the IO (Gregoratti, 2019).

IO cosmopolitanism arose in many ways from what Philip D. Curtin called the transregional ‘intercommunicating’ zones that were part of the Afro-Asian ecumene during this period (Curtin, 1984). The knowledge produced about the IO was translated and transmitted across communities with reliance on earlier knowledge about the IO The familiarity with the IO was not just a material familiarity for those who travelled it but was also the basis for an IO episteme. This is best illustrated by the overlay of texts in geographical and astronomical calculations on which ship captains and sailors depended as they navigated the IO. Thus, Claudius Ptolemy’s Geography (c. 90–168 ad) was translated by both Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khorezmi (c. ah 232/846–847 ad) and al-Battani the noted astronomer (c. ah 244–317/858–929). The former used translations of Ptolemy’s Geography to locate port cities on the African coast, measure the Sea of India and understand the monsoon. The latter to improve on Ptolemy’s astronomical calculations by coming the closest to calculating the length of a year. Muhammad al Idrisi’s (ah 493–560/1100–1165 ad) geography was produced in Sicily using Arabic and European texts, generally following Ptolemy’s organisation based on the description of the Seven Climates of the world. The author of the Periplus ascribes the Arab knowledge of navigation to the Greek navigator Hippalus (first century bc; Tolmacheva, 2015). Travel accounts like The Marvels of India (Aja’ib al-Hind, c. 953 ad), skirted the line between the familiar and the strange drawing their audience into new worlds (Agius, 2020). First-hand accounts as in the case of those by Ibn Battuta, Al-Biruni and the historian al-Mas’udi (d. ah 345–346/965 ad) charted the region and the world, adding to the sense of the seamlessness of geographies from Arabia to India and China and ‘marking their presence’ in these maritime regions. The use of Persian and other languages in nautical and commercial vocabulary became part of the Lingua Franca in these ports and the frequent use of scribes and translators allowed a level communication not generally seen outside of the Western IO.

Ahmad ibn Majid, the author of the Kitab al-Fawa’id (The Book of Useful Information about the Seas and Principles of Navigation), saw himself as a teacher of naval arts and wrote prolifically on nautical instructions. But he is also known to have used Greek sources and some concepts used in Egyptian geography as well as earlier astronomical works (Agius, 2020). The fact that many later Arab writers were able to draw upon and use the knowledge of many centuries past attests to the circulation of texts and the experience that sailors and ship captains, travellers and other groups of professionals passed on by word of mouth and of their large-scale acceptance among communities around the littoral. Over several centuries, then, literature about the IO created a vocabulary and ways of thinking about the IO that lasted into the premodern period.

The Significance of Great Centres of Learning

A proper history of the IO also reveals that there was no-one ownership of scientific and philosophical knowledge. There is no clear line between when Arab scholars were translating Greek texts and when these were being translated back as the Byzantine empire weakened. This imprecision aside, the fact is that among the many other forms of exchange which took place in the IOR, the dialogue between communities of scholars, officials and itinerant intellectuals was significant. As we know, Arab learning in geography and nautical science leant heavily on Greek and Egyptian sources. Translation projects across the Arab world focused on translating texts from the Greek, Chinese and Sanskrit (Kaviani et al., 2012; Kooria, 2017).

The exchange of ideas and beliefs led to the establishment of centres of learning along the IO littoral which served to create syncretic forms of religious and secular knowledge in the region. Since the ancient period, states and societies have viewed the establishment and nurture of learning as central to sacred and secular agendas. Schools and libraries, madrassas and gurukuls and the great imperial centres of learning across Asia had a vested interest in upholding and expanding religious/philosophical precepts, in expanding the frontiers of science and applying knowledge to practical aspects of life. The cross current of ideas tested local beliefs and learning and provided an impetus to include secular disciplines such as medicine, law and aesthetics within their intellectual domains while expanding dialogues on religious dogma. Most importantly, they created specific ways of knowing and interacting within the Indian Ocean World.

The growth and linkages between centres of learning in the region reveal the nature and strength of the otherwise diverse communities which inhabited the IOR littorals. Evidence indicates that intellectual advances in many fields because of cross-pollination of ideas linked different communities, the interchange of ideas across societies and regions created the dynamism necessary for the emergence and sustenance of extensive civilisations and the movement of scholars and students across institutions sustained an early cosmopolitan urge (Bsoul, 2019; Gutas, 2012; Lyons, 2010; Needham, 1970). These great knowledge centres of the Afro-Asian world broke down the narrow parochialisms of region, state, creed and race as no other institutions did during the periods in which they were extant. Yet they also created unique and specific knowledge systems that defined their worlds as separate and different. The intellectual dialogue between different traditions created space for the empathy and contest which was often manifested in the cross-cultural and cross-intellectual strains found across the Afro-Asian world. In their institutional forms, in their classifications of knowledge, the translation of texts from the Hellenic to the Indian and Chinese world and the control through academic titles over the knowledge that they imparted and produced, the great centres of learning in Afro-Asia become the precursors of the modern university system.

Existing evidence, both archaeological and textual, indicates the breadth of the intellectual discourse which ran through the Indian Ocean World. It indicates also the location of many of the more influential centres of learning, the extensive libraries which formed the backbone of these endeavours and the scholars who through the centuries took this dialogue forward. The House of Wisdom in Baghdād and Al. Azhar in Cairo stand out in the Arab world for the direction they gave to religious teaching as well as jurisprudence, medicine and astronomy. There is somewhat fainter evidence of connections between thriving cosmopolitan centres such as Sofala and Gondar on the east African littoral and the larger intellectual community of the time. But we do know that from the third-century ad onwards state funded, publicly sponsored and endowed institutions existed from China to Cairo.³

Trading diasporas rested on cultural, ethnic and economic ties rather than on political support (Seland, 2013). The institutional mechanisms that supported trade lay to a large part outside the state, especially at times when the state itself was fractured and smaller kingdoms gained more from the revenues from trade than from restrictions on trade. In fact, it was not until the Portuguese and the arrival of armed flotillas that restrictions on trade begin to appear in the India Ocean (Prakasch, 1998). This mix of cultures and the settlements of foreigners in the port cities around the IO littoral testified to the fairly lax (from our contemporary experience of visas and passports) regulations by rulers on movement between countries and thereby also to the consciousness of an accessible space for travel, commerce and study. Ibn Battuta points out that political interference with incoming ships or those that passed by the coast of various rulers amounted to a ‘present to the Sultan’ in the absence of which ‘they then board (the ship) out of contempt, and impose a double tine upon the cargo, just in proportion to the advantage they usually gain from merchants entering their country’ (Battuta, 1325–1354, p. 36). Enseng Ho notes that ‘The Portuguese, Dutch, and English in the IO were strange new traders who brought their states with them. They created militarised trading-post empires in the IO, following Venetian and Genoese precedents in the Mediterranean’ (Ho, 2006; Hofmeyr, 2012). While institutional support existed this lay mainly in the networks outside the state. Even monetary exchanges, now central to notions of state power and control of economies, were carried out by intermediaries and money changers in the Indian bania community by hundis or by means of the commenda familiar in the Geniza Chronicles of Jewish trade.

What Does This Mean for the Mausam Initiative?

If the Mausam Initiative is to take off, its protagonists must be clear about what direction the Initiative should take. As a soft power strategy linked to India’s interests abroad, it must choose its partners carefully from countries who are likely to have a stake in the history and culture of the Indian Ocean World. The list of 39 identified countries should be re-examined to see why there has been little response so far. The government must have also a clear strategy for making long-lasting cultural contacts in the IO littoral. Here India’s representatives in foreign capitals should be able to weigh in by connecting with institutions and communities with whom engagement would be meaningful. But all of this needs to be done while keeping the substantive aspects of the Initiative in mind.

The history of cosmopolitanism in the Indian Ocean World should resonate with contemporary concerns about the region. It is a conception worth reviving by keeping its core strengths in mind. While it is axiomatic that the career of the modern nation-state does not permit the levels of autonomy from the state that historically traders, itinerants and scholars enjoyed, it would still be useful to allow freer movement of people in the region for trade, intellectual debate and discussions on the overriding concerns of livelihood and sustainability of the region. Flexible communities are the basis for social and intellectual networks that underlie innovation and creativity. Cosmopolitan communities also escape the hierarchies of power established through economic dominance and racial difference and find ways to communicate in more equitable ways. The social world of the Indian Ocean World did so to a large extent.

The Indian Ocean World, a world that contributed to the rise of India’s economy, which provided a rich textual grounding for an IO episteme, was many centuries in the making. To think of the Mausam Initiative as a limited and time-bound project that aims at recognising and preserving this history sells the Initiative short. While it is not necessary to think in terms of centuries given the technologies at our command, the objectives of the Initiative would be considerably enabled by a longer-term investment in time and resources, both human and material. Indian diplomacy must take a ‘whole of the nation’ view of its task to revive and build on the goodwill of historical memory.

Cultural and intellectual communication and exchange, in particular, should be the focus of this revival. Most policy missteps occur when common historical pasts are misread and misinterpreted and contemporary research informs us that many accepted categories of understanding our worlds are being rethought in the countries to which India will be directing its Initiative.

In all phases of globalisation, states and societies which controlled knowledge were economic frontrunners holding out the promise of a better life for their citizens. An understanding of the importance of learning and knowledge and its institutionalisation in societies in Africa and Asia would provide insights for a revival of knowledge societies across this region. We have only a cursory understanding yet of the knowledge networks between the societies of the Indian Ocean World even though we know where the institutions of learning were located. The Mausam Initiative could support an understanding of this network as a first step in establishing a strong web of connections across the IO littoral. The habits of communication between us which have lapsed, as Amitav Ghosh (1992) points out in In an Antique Land, need to be re-established before we can seek cooperation and reciprocity and trust in our foreign relations.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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