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Domnic Fernandes continues (Part III) his reminiscence of
Mapusa of the 1950s
http://www.goanet.org/index.php?name=News&file=article&sidB6
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A different historical trajectory
The Hindu
Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Apr 11, 2006
R. CHAMPAKALAKSHMI
This concluding part of the review focusses on Sanjay Subrahmanyam's
main contributions to a better understanding of the complex historical
processes
EXPLORATIONS IN CONNECTED HISTORY - Mughals and Franks: Sanjay
Subrahmanyam; Oxford University Press, YMCA Library Building, Jai Singh
Road, New Delhi-110001. Rs. 575.
The historiographical importance of the two collections of Sanjay
Subrahmanyam's essays lies in his main contributions to a better
understanding of the complex historical processes, which marked the
interaction between the European world and the Asian polities in the
early modern period. One may start with his discussion on the
millenarianism of the 16th century, providing one of the most powerful
of the ideologies associated with European expansion i.e., Portuguese
expeditions in the Indian Ocean occurring at a millenarian conjuncture
that operated over a good part of the old world in the 16th century and
coinciding with economic networks and political imperialism of the
Ottomans, Mughals (Akbar's messianic pretensions) and Safavids (Iran).
The complex history of the 16th century millenarianism operated on a far
wider and perhaps even global scale, the globe being encompassed by
discoveries. Apart from empires and larger political entities, the
importance of assigning historical agency to individuals, be it a
private trader or Flemish jeweller-cum-traveller or a governor of the
Portuguese Estado da India or an Anand Ram Mukhlis in Mughal Delhi, is
emphasised. Their ability to make observations and their perceptions of
events within a given context are most useful as against the
structuralist and relativist or even nationalist approaches.
Events are of equal significance as historical agency. To cite an
example, the "assassination" of Bahadur Shah of Gujarat (1537), in which
Portuguese complicity is strongly suspected, is an event to be located
in the context of the factional/political interests of the times as also
the larger political and ideological issues. Yet other examples are the
Portuguese involvement in the fratricidal conflicts during the disturbed
periods of Mughal succession, when pretenders and impostors proliferated
and the legend of Bulaqi, another Mughal prince and his wanderings,
which also point to individuals as important sources of historical
agency.
Acculturation
The period is particularly important for the process of acculturation in
the newly discovered regions, i.e. through Christianity (Spanish
America-Mexico), while Persianisation of the Asian countries, which is
not necessarily Islamisation, was more cultural. Influences from Mughal
Delhi and Deccani sultanates over Vijayanagara were as a part of it. In
Deccan, the direct participation of Golconda and Bijapur in commerce as
that of the Bengal sultanate was as significant as that of the other Bay
of Bengal states like Arakan and Melaka. Acculturation also in the form
of Persianisation and spread of Mercantalist ideology in the Bay of
Bengal was brought about through the spread of Iranian and Persian
elites and traders from 1400-1700 in Thailand and the partial
Persianisation of comportments and of conceptions of statecraft in
Arakan (the Maghs with dreams of world conquest) and in the Aceh
sultanate, which point to the fact that Persianisation was the yardstick
of civilisation.
Crossroads of culture
Second is the recognition of South Asia's role as the crossroads of
different cultures from the Mediterranean to East Asia (Japan), China,
Manila and Melaka with a series of trade centres and a vast series of
commercial routes such as the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea, and also the
newly discovered route around the Cape of Good Hope (Africa).
Portuguese settlements on the west and east coasts of South India
(Masulipatnam, Hughli, Santhome, Mylapore) with Goa and Melaka as the
two main official centres apart from Manila in the Far East became part
of a Portuguese commercial network that survived in later centuries with
other European groups. Fray Gabriel's text (A Dominican voyage through
the India c.1600) forms the centre of questions relating to trading
links from Manila and Melaka to Mylapore.
Arakan, also at the crossroads, emerged under the Mrauk U dynasty, from
its marginality in the perspective of Indo-Persian writers, to be drawn
into the international sea borne trade and Aceh by the last quarter of
the 16th century. After 1630s Melaka fell into Dutch hands, from when
Dutch sources become important for the politico-economic history of
Arakan society under Mrauk U.
Departure
Third, his analysis of the inter-relationships between the European and
the Asian powers as an Age of Contained Conflict and not as an Age of
Partnership, especially between the Mughals and Europeans, be it the
Portuguese, French or English, is a significant departure from
conventional notions.
With the Portuguese arrival in the Indian Ocean in the 15th century in
the process of empire building, a political interpretation of the events
in the maritime space seems to be more appropriate in the author's
analysis, as shown in the case of Gujarat's slow decline, a period of
curious vacuum in the political history of maritime Gujarat, Portuguese
defence of Diu and capture of Daman, a recrudescence of rival routes
after 1530s, the rise of Surat, its importance even before the Mughals
captured it and its resistance to Portuguese control.
The potential of the ports of the west coast from Kerala to Gujarat,
including Bhatkal and Albuquerque re-conquering the domination of the
Indian Ocean trade, the Red Sea and other old and new routes,
interception of ships, issue of cartazes by Portuguese to the Indian
ships e.g., cartazes to the Adil Shahi ships to Red Sea, till the Aceh
sultan and Marikkar took over as bogeymen, show the geo-political
concerns of the Portuguese. Issue of cartazes to the Mughal vessels to
the Red Sea carrying Hajjis adds a religious dimension. The dynamics of
maritime trade were determined by a number of factors and not by
Portuguese alone. The change of regime in the Iberian world (Portugal
and Spain under the Habsburgs) and its impact on Mughal-Portuguese
relations, the Deccan Sultanates accepting the ritual sovereignty of
Safavid Iran and the Mughal shadow in the Deccan, seen as a new threat,
are given an event oriented and purely political interpretation by
exploring the interaction between dominant political and ideological
shifts in several polities and the wider system of political alliances
with the focus on the Portuguese and the Mughals. An unsuspected and
malevolent Portuguese hand is seen in the events of the epoch, e.g.,
Gujarat's fragmentation (before the coming of the Dutch and English in
India). Vijayanagara decline was detrimental to the Portuguese at Goa.
Mughal decline
A perverse Eurocentrism is recognised in the observations of the Mughal
Court and its rituals by the two British ambassadors Sir Thomas Roe and
William Norris (in the times of Jahangir and Aurangazeb), less subtle
than that of the Portuguese and Spanish Jesuits at the court.
The English Company even from its very inception was not merely a
commercial but a political actor in both Europe and Asia. Oriental
despotism, invented by the Portuguese was reiterated, both a rhetoric
and a political ethnography of the court as a theatre, and Mughal rule
as an epitome of despotism and tyranny. In a speculative exercise
proposing a 'counterfactual scenario', i.e. some trajectory other than
British colonial domination, Sanjay Subrahmanyam attributes Mughal
decline and establishment of British colonial rule to a military event,
i.e. Quli Nadir Shah's invasion, and the Mughal defeat at Karnal, as
against different explanations, especially the Marxist, an economic one,
as caused by an agrarian crisis, i.e., primary contradictions such as
the conflicting interests of the peasants and the elite, making Mughal
decline inevitable and permitting the later rise of capitalism. For, it
was on seeing Nadir Shah's taking Delhi in 1739 that the English
Company's own dream of an empire took concrete form. The alternative
scenario envisages the consolidation of a large territory under Nadir
Shah, with a large political structure and a powerful standing army on
the Iranian model, underpinned by a fiscal bureaucratic structure,
drawing upon the centuries of Mughal expertise, which would have led to
a re-Persianisation of North Indian elite culture.
However, there are "limits to which historical imagination can be
stretched." Yet, by no stretch of imagination can the historiographical
importance of the two volumes of Sanjay Subrahmanyam's essays be denied.
http://www.hindu.com/br/2006/04/11/stories/2006041101371700.htm
~(^^)~
Avelino
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