1st Edition
Narratives, Routes and Intersections in Pre-Modern Asia
This book traces connections in pre-modern Asia by looking at different worlds across geography, history and society. It examines how regions were connected by people, families, trade and politics as well as how they were maintained and remembered. The volume analyses these intersections of memory and narrative, of people and places and the routes that took people to these places, using a variety of sources. It also studies whether these intersections remain in later and present times, and their larger impact on our understanding of history.
The narratives cover several journeys drawn from archaeology, texts and cultural imagination: trade routes, marts, fairs, forts, religious pilgrimages, inscriptions, calligraphy and coinages spanning diverse regions, including India–Tibet–British forays, India–Malay intersections, corporate enterprise in the Indian Ocean, impacts of slave trade in Southeast Asia shaped by the Dutch East India company, movements and migrations around Indo-Iranian borderlands and those in western and southern India.
The book will greatly interest scholars and researchers of history and archaeology, cultural studies and literature.
Introduction: Intersections: Narratives, Routes and Marts in the pre-modern Asian world 1. Imagination, Memory and History: Narrating India-Malay Intersections in the Early Modern Period 2: Routes into the Present 3. Movements and Migrations around the porous Indo-Iranian Borderlands: The View from Archaeology and Texts (c. 3rd century BCE to 3rd century CE) 4. Minor Trade between India and Tibet and new routs after the British intervention 5. Slavery and the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in Seventeenth Century Island Southeast Asia 6. Goa at Intersection of World Trade Routes in the Pre-Modern Age: Strangers at home and at home with strangers 7. The Indian fort as a site of intersections 8. English corporate enterprise and private trade in the Indian Ocean: A common meeting ground 9. Inscriptions and Calligraphy on the Mughal and Safavid Coinages: A Comparative Study 10. Looking around the institution of tirtha-yatra in the context of Maratha expansion 11. Fairs and Pilgrimages as Points of Intersections: The Case of Medieval Western Maharashtra 12. Continuing Routes, Changed Intersections: A Study of Fort St. George (Madras) in the 17th Century
Biography
Radhika Seshan is Associate Professor at the Department of History, Savitribai Phule Pune University, Maharashtra, India. Her area of specialisation is medieval Indian history, with a focus on economic history, especially maritime and urban history. In recent years, she has also been working on travel accounts and the constructions of the East therein. She recently organised a panel at the World Economic History Congress in Japan. Apart from publishing many papers in national and international journals and editing five books, she has authored Trade and Politics on the Coromandel Coast: Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries (2012) and Ideas and Institutions in Medieval India: Eighth to Eighteenth Centuries (2013). She is joint editor (with Professor Rila Mukherjee) of the series ‘Issues in History’, in which she edited the book Convergence: Rethinking India’s Past (2014).
