Book Reviews

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social history is conceptually an exclusive cultural case history of Aryanisation of a

non-Aryan territory.
With the primacy of the source, Narayanan’s method is analytical positivism away
from social theory and fully at the empirically given, allowing incompatibilities like
viewing historical process as introduction from above (for example, viewing the ‘bot-
tom up’ historical formation of the kingdom as the ‘top down’ division of the kingdom
into provinces) and conceiving the simultaneity of the irreconcilable (for example,
monarchy and oligarchy or monarchy and provincial autonomy or monarchy and ritual
monarchy). However, to me it is a mine of new knowledge, enabling other studies. For
example, my own study on the Kerala temple is a small flint flaked from this big rock.
A lucid narrative of new knowledge accompanied by an extremely useful index to the
Cera inscriptions (which itself is a major contribution to knowledge), it is an eminently
educative book that contributes substantially to the understanding of a crucial period
in the history of Kerala.

Rajan Gurukkal
Visiting Professor, Centre for Contemporary Studies,
Indian Institute of Science,
Bangalore, Karnataka, India

Pius Malekandathil, The Mughals, the Portuguese and the Indian Ocean:
Changing Imageries of Maritime India. New Delhi: Primus Books, 2013,
ISBN: 978-93-80607-33-7, pp. viii + 234, `850.
DOI: 10.1177/0376983614521619

Maritime History has become a tool in the hands of several Indian historians who are
interested in Indo-Portuguese history. The study of maritime history enables these
researchers to come closer to the crucial dynamics of historical process. Maritime history
embraces many aspects of history, such as international politics, navigation, oceanic cur-
rents, maritime transportation, coastal society, development of ports and port-towns, sea-
borne trade and commerce, port–hinterland relations and so on.
As far as India and the Indian Ocean regions are concerned, maritime studies have a
great relevance in the exchange of culture, establishment of political power, the dynam-
ics of society, trade and commerce and religion of these areas. The Indian Ocean served
not only as a conduit for conducting trade and commerce, but also served and still
serves, as an important means of communication. The Indians have carried commodi-
ties to several Asian and African countries even before the arrival of the Europeans
from India. Exchange of goods promoted maritime trade as well as the fusion of dif-
ferent cultures in the Indian Ocean. Art, architecture, culinary habits, music, cloth-
ing, language and religion went through a transitional period because of the maritime
activities in the Indian Ocean.

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There were favourable conditions in the Indian Ocean that helped the Portuguese to
build their maritime power on their entry in the Indian Ocean. C.R. Boxer, among other
things, mentions the following points as regards Portuguese Sea Trade:

1. The Emperor of Egypt, Persia and Vijayanagar had no armed shipping in the
Indian Ocean.
2. Wealthy entrepôts of Ormuz and Mallaca did not possess ocean-going vessels.
3. The Arabs, Gujaratis, and other Muslims who dominated the trade of the
Indian Ocean had large ocean-going vessels as well as small coastal ships, but
even the largest were not provided with artillery and no iron was used in hull
construction.
4. The Portuguese took control of the strategic points in the spice trade routes. They
controlled Goa, Ormuz, Mallaca and these were supplemented by many other
fortified coastal settlements and trading posts ( feitorias) from Sofola in north-
east Africa to Ternate in Moluccas.
5. The domination of the seaborne trade of the Indian Ocean, first by the Arabs
and later to a large extent by Muslims of Indian origin chiefly Gujaratis, was
achieved in both cases quite peacefully). Many Asian rulers shared the convic-
tion of Bahadur Shah, the King of Gujarat, that ‘wars by sea are merchants’
affairs, and of no concern to the prestige of Kings’. Thus there were favourable
historical conditions that helped the Portuguese to a certain extent to hold a de
facto control of a section of the Indian Ocean, that is, mainly the Arabian Sea.

A large contingent of historians working on maritime history and Indian ocean stud-
ies have brought in a new historical knowledge that has revolutionised the understand-
ing of the integrated historical processes of Early Modern India. It was the academic
endeavours of such leading historians like Ashin Das Gupta, Dietmar Rothermund,
M.N. Pearson, Luis Philipe Thomaz, Om Prakash, K.S. Mathew, Teotonio R. De
Souza, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Kenneth McPherson, A.R. Disney, R.J. Barendse,
B. Arunachalam, K.N. Choudhury that a different set of meanings and added importance
began to be accorded to the historical processes of Maritime India. Prof. Malekandathil
has been working on this direction for more than a decade and published several vol-
umes on Portuguese India.
The present volume, The Mughals, The Portuguese and The Indian Ocean:
Changing Imageries of Maritime India by Pius Malekandathil is a collection of ten
research papers, presented as a historical journey through Maritime India analysing
its changing imageries and meanings against the background of the Mughal expansion
from land to sea and the fluctuating fortunes of the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean. The
author dwells upon the mechanisms of the land-centric activities of the Mughals and
their relatively formative and feeble strand concentrating on the coastal developments
and the trans-oceanic exchanges in the Indian Ocean respectively. The book covers a
long span of time from 1500 to 1840 and defies the stereotyped and rigid per iodization
of Medieval India to look at the history of Maritime India as a process bringing out
patterns of continuity, change and transition.

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Book Reviews 107

The focus of analysis in each chapter is changing contours of various regions of

Maritime India which is done in the context of larger developments and connectivity.
Out of the ten chapters, five deal with a variety of historical process that directly or
indirectly help understand the economy and politics of the Mughals while most of the
remaining ones dwell on the socio-economic processes of Maritime India.
The author introduces ten different themes of Early Modern Maritime India against
the backdrop of definitions and redefinitions given to it by the Portuguese and Mughals
in their attempts to bank upon the wealth derived from circuits in the Indian Ocean
Regions. He points out that the last quarter of Akbar’s reign was marked by an intense
phase of multi-religious discourse in which the dialogue between the Jesuit Missionaries
from the Portuguese world and Akbar stands out as a remarkable feat of civilisational
encounter in Medieval India. Upon their arrival in India the Portuguese divided the
Indian coastal terrains into different hierarchies on the basis of their resourcefulness
and strategic locations and the spatial manifestations of deeper societal processes of
the cities that emerge from multiple levels of activities connected with production,
exchange and power exercise. The author argues that the idea of South India was for-
mulated and reshaped through the channels of commerce particularly through the fre-
quent movements of commodities within the region through the trade circuits resorted
to by Portuguese and their mercantile collaborators or by their competitors. There
was trade through sea supplemented by the trade through inland routes whose chan-
nels interlinked the various economic zones of South India so as to evolve the idea
of a distinct region in the south. The Portuguese attempts to monopoly trade in the
Indian Ocean received a major setback because of the parallel circulatory processes
between India and the Mediterranean in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in dif-
fering quantities and degrees. The commercial vibrancy of the coastal Western India
depended very much on its relationship with the chain of African markets bordering
Indian Ocean which often made them operate as two sides of the same economic world
geo-physically distanced but intrinsically connected by the waters and circuits of the
Indian Ocean.
He goes on arguing that the period between 1650 and 1720 witnessed the emergence
of several maritime power contenders in and around the ports of Northern Kankan
and then critically analysed Varthamanapushthakam, which was written in 1785 by
Fr Thomas Paremakkel as an account of his travel along with his friend Bishop Mar
Joseph Kariyattil to Madras, Africa, Brazil, Portugal and Rome and often held as the
first travelogue in an Indian language which has been immensely used as a literary
medium by the author to ventilate his dissent and anger against the hegemonic attitudes
and the cultural colonial fabric which the European religious missionaries set up for the
church in India particularly for the St Thomas Christians of Kerala arguing vehemently
that Indians should be ruled by Indians and not by foreigners. He goes on demanding
as early as 1785 that Indian Christians should be ruled not by European religious mis-
sionaries but by Indians.
Malekandathil discusses the commercially-oriented Portuguese settlers who
expanded along the water space of Bay of Bengal, had a different format of operation
not only because of their constant refusal to get integrated with the Portuguese power

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centre on the coastal western India but also because of the regional specificities and exi-
gencies which defined the nature of their behaviour and activities over there. Then he
shifts to the period between 1780 and 1840 which is often called the Age of Revolution
in the West and the significant change in the Lusitanian space in India due to radical
alteration in the politico-economic activities and socio ecclesiastical institutions.
Malekandathil follows an integrated and holistic approach by linking the land-
oriented developments with the maritime ones to show the changing meanings that
maritime India acquired at different periods following the redefinitions given by the
constant coast-hinterland interactions. In fine, this collection focuses on the changing
meanings of maritime India.

K.S. Mathew
Director, Institute for Research in Social Sciences and Humanities,
Nirmalagiri, Kannur University, Kerala, India

Agnieszka Kuczkiewiez–Fras (ed.), Islamicate Traditions in South Asia: Themes

from Culture and History. New Delhi: Manohar, 2013, pp. 414, `995.
DOI: 10.1177/0376983614521622

The editor of this neatly produced volume is known for her translations of Hindi and
Urdu texts into Polish and also for her study of linguistic structures of Hindi–Urdu or
Hindustani. She characterises traditions flowing from the cohabitation of Hindus and
Muslims in India for centuries as a unique phenomenon, which resulted in creating the
Islamicate (as distinct from Islamic) culture of South Asia.
Ashok Vajpeyi’s introductory essay arguing that Ghalib’s, ‘modernity’ was essen-
tially a product of interaction of Indian and Persian literary traditions, seems to under-
line this characterisation.
Articles contributed by experts in different fields are grouped in this volume under
four sub-heads: ‘Places and Images’, ‘People’, ‘Ideas and Notions’ and ‘History and
Language’. Those grouped under subhead ‘People’ seem to represent the more impor-
tant part of the volume. These are important for novelty of subjects discussed as well
as variety of source material put together. Christina Oesterheld’s piece on novels of
Nasim Hijazi, for instance, is noteworthy for providing insights on popular sentiment
among sections of Urdu reading public during agitation for partition and subsequently
in the newly created Islamic state of Pakistan. The author very correctly refers to these
novels as jihadi literature. According to her, these may not be compared with Abdul
Halim Sharar’s late nineteenth century novels glorifying Islamic history where element
of jihad is not always central to basic narrative. She however concedes that literary
histories of Urdu do not take notice of authors of Nasim Hijazi’s ilk and if at all they
are referred to as an example of literature which constructs a past that entirely belongs
to conquerors and invaders. One may, however, note that Nasim Hijazi’s jihadist fury is
mainly directed towards Christian regimes in West Asia and Europe overrun by Arabs.

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