Counterpoint: Reassessing Ulughkhānī’s Arabic history of Gujarat

2020 ◽  
Vol 74 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-161
Author(s):  
Jyoti Gulati Balachandran
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Red Sea ◽  
Western Indian Ocean ◽  
History Writing ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Intellectual Context

AbstractDespite his familiarity with the well established Indo-Persian history‐writing traditions, ‘Abdullāh Muḥammad al-Makkī al-Āṣafī al-Ulughkhānī ‘Ḥājjī al-Dabīr’ (b. 1540) chose to write his history of the Gujarat Sultanate and of other Indo-Muslim polities in Arabic. Ulughkhānī consulted several Persian chronicles produced in Delhi and Ahmedabad, including Sikandar Manjhū’s Mir’āt-i Sikandarī (composed c. 1611) that has served as the standard history of the Gujarat Sultanate for modern historians. Despite its ‘exceptionalism’, Ulughkhānī’s early seventeenth-century Ẓafar al-wālih bi Muẓaffar wa ālihi has largely been seen as a corroborative text to Persian tawārīkh. This article re-evaluates the importance of Ulughkhānī’s Arabic history of Gujarat by situating the text and its author in the social, political and intellectual context of the sixteenth-century western Indian ocean. Specifically, it demonstrates how the several historical digressions in the text are not dispensable aberrations to his narrative but integral to Ulughkhānī’s expansive social horizons at the time of robust commercial, pilgrimage, diplomatic and scholarly connections between Gujarat and the Red Sea regions.

Gujarat in the History of the Indian Ocean

2019 ◽  
pp. 52-67
Author(s):  
Lakshmi Subramanian
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Western Indian Ocean ◽  
Maritime History ◽  
Historical Knowledge ◽  
History Writing ◽  
New Methods ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Indian Ocean

This chapter takes a stock taking exercise of the history writing on Gujarat and Indian maritime history over the last five decades. It identifies the major shifts and emphases that mark the nature of historical knowledge. What these hold for the discipline of history in general and how these inflect the case study of Gujarat in particular are examined. The intention of such a stock taking exercise is also to consider the importance of recovering and reading new and local archives and of incorporating new methods into standard historical work. The author also explores the most significant shifts that have emerged in the recent historiography of the Indian Ocean and of maritime Gujarat: study of law and piracy and Muslim seafaring and sailing practices in the western Indian Ocean.

Indian Merchants and the Western Indian Ocean: The Early Seventeenth Century

1985 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 481-499 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ashin Das Gupta
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Western Indian Ocean ◽  
Ocean Area ◽  
European Expansion ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Work Done

Researches in Indian economic history have stimulated curiosity about India's connections with the Indian Ocean area. Work done on European expansion in the non-European world has also contributed to the development of this area of enquiry. Recent writings on the Indian Ocean and the Indian maritime merchant have indicated important possibilities of further research. I shall first briefly consider some of these, and then pass on to an examination of a concrete historical problem where Indian economic history meets the history of European expansion and the two themes are held together by the Indian Ocean.

Transoceanic Arabic historiography: sharing the past of the sixteenth-century western Indian Ocean

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-223
Author(s):  
Christopher D. Bahl
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Red Sea ◽  
Western Indian Ocean ◽  
Human Interaction ◽  
Cultural Integration ◽  
Historical Texts ◽  
Shared History ◽  
Ocean Region ◽  
Manuscript Collections

AbstractThe early modern western Indian Ocean constituted a dynamic space of human interaction. While scholarship has mostly concentrated on trade and commerce, recent studies have shifted the focus to social and cultural mobilities. This article argues for the emergence of a transoceanic Arabic historiography during the sixteenth century, which reflected on the cultural integration of regions from Egypt, the Hijaz, and Yemen in the Red Sea region, to Gujarat, the Deccan, and Malabar in the subcontinent. Historians from the Persian cosmopolis further north observed a strong cultural connection between Arabophone communities of the western Indian Ocean region. Manuscript collections in India show that Arabic historical texts from the Red Sea region had a readership in the subcontinent. Most importantly, mobile scholars began to compose Arabic histories while receiving patronage at the western Indian courts. Scholarly mobilities fostered cultural exchanges, which increasingly built on a shared history, written, read, and circulated in Arabic during the sixteenth century

Editorial Introduction

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Editors of the JIOWS
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Western Indian Ocean ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fourth Volume ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Complex Relationships ◽  
Indian Ocean World ◽  
Shed Light

The editors are proud to present the first issue of the fourth volume of the Journal of Indian Ocean World Studies. This issue contains three articles, by James Francis Warren (Murdoch University), Kelsey McFaul (University of California, Santa Cruz), and Marek Pawelczak (University of Warsaw), respectively. Warren’s and McFaul’s articles take different approaches to the growing body of work that discusses pirates in the Indian Ocean World, past and present. Warren’s article is historical, exploring the life and times of Julano Taupan in the nineteenth-century Philippines. He invites us to question the meaning of the word ‘pirate’ and the several ways in which Taupan’s life has been interpreted by different European colonists and by anti-colonial movements from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. McFaul’s article, meanwhile, takes a literary approach to discuss the much more recent phenomenon of Somali Piracy, which reached its apex in the last decade. Its contribution is to analyse the works of authors based in the region, challenging paradigms that have mostly been developed from analysis of works written in the West. Finally, Pawelczak’s article is a legal history of British jurisdiction in mid-late nineteenth-century Zanzibar. It examines one of the facets that underpinned European influence in the western Indian Ocean World before the establishment of colonial rule. In sum, this issue uses two key threads to shed light on the complex relationships between European and other Western powers and the Indian Ocean World.

Hymnody and Liturgy

2019 ◽  
pp. 491-506
Author(s):  
Jonathan Hehn
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
North American ◽  
John Calvin ◽  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
Metrical Psalmody ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Church

This chapter outlines the history of Presbyterian worship practice from the sixteenth century to the present, with a focus on North American Presbyterians. Tracing both their hymnody and their liturgy ultimately to John Calvin, Presbyterian communions have a distinct heritage of worship inherited from the Church of Scotland via seventeenth-century Puritans. Long marked by metrical psalmody and guided by the Westminster Directory, Presbyterian worship underwent substantial changes in the nineteenth century. Evangelical and liturgical movements led Presbyterians away from a Puritan visual aesthetic, into the use of nonscriptural hymnody, and toward a recovery of liturgical books. Mainline North American and Scottish Presbyterians solidified these trends in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; however, conservative North American denominations and some other denominations globally continue to rely heavily on the use of a worship directory and metrical psalmody.

Las Yslas de Esperar en Dios: The Jesuit Mission in Moro 1546–1571

1988 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 593-606
Author(s):  
John Villiers
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Society Of Jesus ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Political Conditions ◽  
Jesuit Missionaries ◽  
Mission Field

The numerous and voluminous reports and letters which the Jesuits wrote on the Moro mission, as on all their missions in Asia, are perhaps of less interest to us now for what they reveal of the methods adopted by the Society of Jesus in this remote corner of their mission field or the details they contain about the successes and failures of individual missionaries, than for the wealth of information they provide on the islands where the Jesuits lived and the indigenous societies with which they came into contact through their work of evangelization. In other words, it is not theprimary purpose of this essay to analyse the Jesuit documents with a view to reconstructing the history of the Moro mission in narrative form but rather to glean from them some of the informationthey contain about the social and political conditions in Moro during the forty years or so in the sixteenth century when both the Jesuit missionaries and the Portuguese were active in the regio Because the Jesuits were often in close touch with local rulers and notables, whether or not they succeeded in converting them to Christianity, and because they lived among their subjects for long periods, depending upon them for the necessities of life and sharing their hardships, their letters and reports often show a deeper understanding of the social, economic and political conditions of the indigenous societies and, one suspects, give a more accurate and measured account of events and personalities than do the official chroniclers and historians of the time, most of whom never ventured further east than Malacca and who in any case were chiefly concerned to glorify the deeds of the Portuguese and justify their actions to the world.

A View from Mecca: Notes on Gujarat, the Red Sea, and the Ottomans, 1517–39/923–946 H.

2017 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 268-318 ◽  
Author(s):  
MUZAFFAR ALAM ◽  
SANJAY SUBRAHMANYAM
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Red Sea ◽  
Rich Source ◽  
Main Interest ◽  
History Of ◽  
Indian Ocean World

AbstractThis article examines the history of Gujarat-Red Sea relations in the first quarter of a century after the Ottoman conquest of the Hijaz, in the light of Arabic narrative sources that have hitherto been largely neglected. While earlier historians have made use of both Ottoman and Portuguese archives in this context, we return here to the chronicles of Mecca itself, which prove to be an unexpectedly interesting and rich source on the matter. Our main interest is in the figure of Jarullah ibn Fahd and his extensive annalistic work, Nayl al-munā. A good part of our analysis will focus on the events of the 1530s, and the dealings of Sultan Bahadur Shah Gujarati's delegation to the Ottomans, headed by ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Asaf Khan. But we shall also look at the longer history of contacts, and conclude with brief remarks on the relevance of the career of the celebrated Gujarati-Hijazi intellectual, Qutb al-Din Muhammad Nahrawali. We thus hope to add another important, concrete dimension to our understanding of India's location in the early modern Indian Ocean world, as a tribute to the career and contribution of David Washbrook, our friend and colleague.

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