Download PDF | Sanjay Subrahmanyam - Across the Green Sea_ Histories from the Western Indian Ocean, 1440-1640 (Connected Histories of the Middle East and the Global South)-University of Texas Press (2024).
297 Pages
Preface
Maritime history has been a central focus of my work from the very beginning of my publishing career as a historian in the mid-1980s. This was the same period when I had my first proper exposure to the maritime dimension of India, which until that point had largely been restricted to periodic summer visits as a child to Chennai (Madras) and strolls at sunset on Marina Beach by Gandhi’s statue, accompanied at times with a strong smell of drying fish. While doing the archival research for my doctoral dissertation I returned several times to Mumbai (Bombay), staying on the splendid campus of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research thanks to dear friend Kapil Paranjape, and to Goa, staying in Panaji’s Altinho district.
The significant difference between the life of a maritime urban center and one in the interior, which I had grasped earlier as a mere bookish idea, became far clearer to me as an existential proposition. Since that time, I have come back periodically to the Indian west coast, especially for some memorable visits to Kerala in the company of historians rooted in that region, as well as to diverse sites on the Bay of Bengal, on the east coast, ranging from Puri to Tarangambadi. It has also been my privilege to have seen the western Indian Ocean from a very different viewpoint while visiting the island of Réunion for lectures and seminars in September 2008.
When Houri Berberian and Afshin Marashi invited me to submit a book for their new series “Connected Histories of the Middle East and the Global South,” from the University of Texas Press, there was an obvious temptation to turn to the western Indian Ocean as a subject. I had been exploring different aspects of the maritime region in the past two decades in a variety of ways in my research, whether it was Gujarat turned to these subjects, my thoughts were drawn to a group of French scholars who had played an important role in my early career in the late 1980s and 1990s.
The youngest of them, Denys Lombard, had not really worked on the western Indian Ocean but was instead a scholar of maritime Southeast Asia. In that capacity, he helped found an important journal, Archipel, and wrote significant monographic works on Aceh and Java, besides editing some crucial texts such as the travel account of Augustin de Beaulieu. A second figure was Geneviève Bouchon, who wrote on both Kerala and coastal Sri Lanka at the beginning of the sixteenth century and went on to publish several significant documents from the early years of the Portuguese presence in the Indian Ocean. But the most formidable personality in the group was Jean Aubin, who began his career as a historian of medieval Central Asia and Iran but was then progressively drawn into studying the Indian Ocean of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Aubin was never attracted to the monograph as a form, and he much preferred the essay; he also edited several intriguing texts in both Persian and Portuguese.
I knew him well in the last decade of his life before his untimely death in January 1998 (a mere two weeks after that of Lombard), and I treasure our conversations and the advice and comments he gave me on my drafts, usually written in his minute and meticulous hand. In the last years, aware of his unreliable health, he sometimes spoke of drawing his scattered works together and eventually published the first volume of what became a trilogy, Le Latin et l’astrolabe, of which the last two volumes were published posthumously. It was my privilege, albeit an increasingly sad one, to be the discussant for the release of each of these volumes in Paris at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.
Over the years, Aubin’s influence on Indian Ocean studies has grown in some circles through the Portuguese historian Luís Filipe Thomaz, Aubin’s close associate, and Thomaz’s students in Lisbon. On the other hand, one has the impression that with the passage of time Aubin’s work has been progressively neglected in the world of Anglophone scholarship, something Aubin feared might in fact be the case. A good part of this book was written in Covid times, during which the companionship of Caroline Ford was indispensable for me. These years have been a rough ride, with both our neighborly and our professional milieu having deteriorated, a tendency notably exacerbated by the growing hold of unfortunate forms of identity politics and social media in our times.
It will probably be diplomatic to pass in silence over the attitude of my home department leadership and the university administration in this context. On the other hand, I have had reason to appreciate those colleagues and friends who have held on to their sanity and sense of humor, even when they have been my interlocutors at a distance. In no particular order other than an alphabetical one, my thanks go to Ned Alpers, Francisco Apellániz, Jyoti Gulati Balachandran, Evrim Binbaş, Guy Burak, Subah Dayal, Malika Dekkiche, Indravati Félicité, Jorge Flores, Naveen Kanalu, Arash Khazeni, Mike Laffan, the late Pier Larson, Giuseppe Marcocci, Roxani Margariti, Claude Markovits, Søren Mentz, Hiromu Nagashima, Mike O’Sullivan, Keelan Overton, Kaya Şahin, and Tunç Şen. A special word of recognition for the late Cornell Fleischer and Cemal Kafadar, friends and colleagues of very long standing, who were my coauthors in relation to the #Selimgate affair in Ottoman and global history in 2020, when so many of our fellow historians simply failed to rise to the occasion.
To these names I will add three elder statesmen: Saul Friedländer, Carlo Ginzburg, and Velcheru Narayana Rao, whose intellectual company has ever been a delight. As usual, Muzaffar Alam collaborated generously with me on several projects, the results of which have been regularly employed in this work, and I thank him profoundly for his help and intellectual companionship. I am also grateful to Bill Nelson, who prepared the maps with his customary efficiency. It remains difficult to come to terms with the loss of my close friend and long-term intellectual conversation partner Sunil Kumar, who left us in January 2021.
He loved the craft of history as he loved walking through and savoring the sights of his difficult city (and to a lesser extent mine) of Delhi in the company of friends and students. I still feel his warm hand on my shoulder and believe he would have enjoyed this book, which reflects so many discussions, both serious and frivolous, we had over the years.
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