The Global Asia Colloquium

 Spring 2019. Fridays, 4:00-6:45. With Wine and Cheese.  (unless otherwise indicated) we meet in 701 KJCC (53 Washington Square South). Come One and Come All !!

1 November.  Subah Dayal (Tulane), “Elegies to the Port: Surat and Vengurla in the Persianate imaginary

Abstract:  Recent revisions in maritime history have urged shifting our attention from the world of commerce and trade in Indian Ocean port-cities (largely examined through European-language archives) to exploring them as nodes of intellectual exchange (studied through chronicles, treatises, and administrative documents in Persian and Arabic). This paper will turn to a kindred body of Persianate materials, namely in the pan-regional literary idiom of Dakkani Urdu, that memorialized the lifecycle of two port-cities in the seventeenth century – Surat in Mughal Gujarat and Vengurla in the Deccan on the Konkan coast. It will investigate how regional vernacular poet-historians in inland courts, who had never visited the port-city, attempted to make sense of its rise, fall, and destruction.

In doing so, regional literati largely ignored the presence of European actors, so often heralded in scholarship as keepers of these gateways to the seas. Vernacular poets understood port-cities as critical sites where local, regional, and imperial sovereignties intersected and were bitterly contested, negotiated, and redefined. Formulating new narratives that connected maritime and agrarian power, seventeenth-century actors plotted contestations between the Deccan sultans, the Mughals, and the Marathas over Surat and Vengurla onto a wider canvas of contentious politics.  Entering the story of maritime power from a different textual register – vernacular poetic memories of the port-city –  allows us to connect the study of Persianate literary cultures with Indian Ocean social history. Rather than viewing these nodes merely as sites of commercial exchange, we may then unearth what the early modern port-city meant to contemporary non-European observers, who never passed through it, but were deeply aware of its role in transforming the social and economic world of the western Indian Ocean.