Cosmopolitanism and Imagination in Nayaka South India

2020 ◽  
Vol 70 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jos Gommans
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
State Formation ◽  
South India ◽  
Cotton Textile ◽  
Royal Court ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Johan Huizinga ◽  
Indian Ocean World

Abstract Questions arising from the so-called Brooklyn kalamkari, a seven-panel, hand-painted cotton textile, have confronted art historians for decades: what do we see, who produced it for whom, what does it mean? With royal court scenes from all over the Indian Ocean world, the Brooklyn kalamkari represents a uniquely cosmopolitan worldview from early-seventeenth-century South India. In this essay I discuss the makings of this particular worldview in the context of early modern processes of globalization and state-formation. By engaging with the work of Indologists Johan Huizinga, Jan Heesterman, and David Shulman on Indian kingship and theater, I then attempt to decode the local and the global, as well as the seen and unseen, meaning of this textile.

Intersections: Peoples, ports and trade in seventeenth-century Surat and Madras

2017 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 111-122
Author(s):  
Radhika Seshan
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
North India ◽  
Trade Networks ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Indian Ocean World

The article discusses the ways in which, in the seventeenth century, as India drew the attention of more Europeans, both as private traders and as part of larger east India companies, networks of contacts were established. Two ports in particular, Surat and Madras (now Chennai), became points of intersection of Europeans and Asians, through the multi-pronged trade networks that linked these two ports to other ports in the Indian Ocean world, through traders from across regions. Focus is on the English in particular, as their main port of trade for Mughal North India was Surat, and Madras, their first fortified establishment on the coast of India.

Sufi Cosmopolitanism in the Seventeenth-century Indian Ocean: Sharīʿa, Lineage and Royal Power in Southeast Asia and the Maldives

2018 ◽  
pp. 53-80
Author(s):  
A. C. S. Peacock
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
Political Influence ◽  
State Building ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Royal Power ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
The Right ◽  
Indian Ocean World

Peacock’s chapter examines the circulation of Seventeenth-century Sufi scholars to the ‘contested peripheries’ of the Indian Ocean. He argues that notable Muslim Sufi shaykhs did not travel to maritime kingdoms such as Banten, Aceh, and the Maldives to learn from locals, but rather to propagate ‘shariʿa-minded piety’ focused on ‘commanding the right and forbidding the wrong’. Peacock describes how the ambitions of religious scholars like the Syrian Qādirī preacher Muḥammad Shams al-Dīn intersected with early modern state-building in the Indian Ocean world. This chapter chronicles how Shams al-Dīn not only gained great political influence in Aceh, but was even made the actual ruler of the Maldives after his followers overthrew the sultan there. Peacock concludes that the cosmopolitanism of Sufi itinerants relied less on the fusion of pre-Islamic and Islamic practices than on universalist agendas of social transformation founded upon prophetic Sunna and enacted through the mechanisms of political coercion.

scholarly journals Africa, the Indian Ocean World, and the ‘Early Modern’: Historiographical Conventions and Problems

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 24
Author(s):  
Gwyn Campbell
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
World Economy ◽  
Eastern Africa ◽  
African History ◽  
Conventional View ◽  
The People ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
European Colonialism ◽  
Indian Ocean World

European-inspired scholarship underscores conventional academic consensus that African commercial entrepeneurship disappeared with the European voyages of discovery, and subsequent implantation of the Potuguese, Dutch, English, and French commercial empires. Thus the people of eastern Africa are portrayed largely as technologically backward and isolated from the main currents of global history from about 1500 until the onset of modern European colonialism from the close of the nineteenth century. This article argues that the conventional view needs to be challenged, and that Eastern African history in the period 1500-1800 needs to be revised in the context of an Indian Ocean world economy.

Iranians Abroad: Intra-Asian Elite Migration and Early Modern State Formation

1992 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 340-363 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sanjay Subrahmanyam
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
State Formation ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Host Society ◽  
Class Stratification ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Asian Context

The idea of trader communities spread across the shores of the Indian Ocean, or along the caravan routes of the Asian heartland, is a familiar one. Once designated as the ubiquitous “pedlars” of the “traditional trade of Asia,” these traders have more recently been described using the term “diaspora”—a term not restricted in its application, needless to add, to the Asian context. In the hands of Philip D. Curtin, the idea of traders in a diaspora has become a simple but powerful tool to analyze the phenomenon of what he terms “cross-cultural trade.” What, then, is a diaspora? To Curtin, a diaspora is “a nation of socially interdependent, but spatially dispersed communities,” that are, moreover, separated from their “host societies” in each locus in which they are situated (Curtin 1984:5). He continues: “The traders were specialists in a single kind of economic enterprise, whereas the host society was awholesociety, with many occupations, class stratification and political divisions between the rulers and the ruled” (Curtin 1984:5).

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