The focus of the book is the wide stretch of water- and sea-ways connecting the coasts of Bengal and Sri Lanka to the coast of Vietnam. The authors address three broad issues through an interdisciplinary perspective. The first relates to boat-building traditions and the communities who traversed these waters. The challenge is to use the ethnographic present and mobility of the fishing and sailing groups for an understanding of the history of the sea and the extent to which knowledge of the waters was vital to the construction of identity of a maritime society. Linked to this movement across the waters, are the narratives of trans-locality inherent in memories of groups in the region. Long-distance pilgrimage and devotional networks have been consistent features of the cultural life of South and Southeast Asia. A third issue relates to European intervention, starting with the Portuguese and the Dutch. The engagement of the English East India Company with the countries of the Bay of Bengal was of a different order from that of its predecessors, as the Company sought to establish a maritime empire. The eighteenth century thus, raised a different set of issues with the colonisation of large parts of South and Southeast Asia. How did notions of a maritime empire impact the study of the regions past? It is these themes that we address in the volume thereby shifting the focus from chronological markers and national histories to communities who crossed the waters and the changes that these underwent in time.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Himanshu Prabha Ray
Himanshu Prabha Ray is associate Professor at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, where she has taught since 1980. Her publications include Monastery and Guild: Commerce under the Satavahanas, Oxford University Press, 1986; The Winds Change: Buddhism and the Maritime Links of Early south Asia, Oxford University Press, 1994 (reissued as Oxford India Paperbacks, 1998); The Archaeology off Seafariing in Ancient South Asia, Cambridge University Press, 2003. In 1996, she jointly edited with Jean-Ffrancois Salles a volume titled, Tradition and Archaeology: Early Maritime Contacts in the Indian Ocean, Manohar, 1996. another volume Archaeology of Seafaring: The Indian Ocean in the ancient Period, was published in the Indian Council of Historical Research Monograph Series I, New Delhi, 1999.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Satish Chandra
Satish Chandra (b. 1922) is among a select band of historians who helped to give a new shape to Indian history after independence. He was Professor of History, Jawaharlal Nehru University and Vice Chairman and Chairman, University Grants Commission (1972-81). He taught at the Universities of Allahabad, Aligarh Muslim, Delhi and Rajasthan. He was Smuts' Visiting Professor, Cambridge University (1971) and Associated with many national and international agencies. He was secretary and later President, Indian History Congress (1973), Council Member, United Nations University, Tokyo (1980-86), Associate Director of Research, Maison des Sciences de I'Homme, Paris; Member, Executive Board, International Congress of Historical Sciences, Paris, etc. He was also Chairman of the Committee to review Civil Services Examination in Delhi. He had written and edited many books on Medieval Indian History, and the Indian Ocean History and published a large number of research articles in national and international journals. Some of these have been brought together and published in three monographs. Presently, he is Executive Chairman, Maulana Azad Institute of Asian Studies, Calcutta and Secretary-cum-Treasurer, Society for Indian Ocean Studies. He is also the Secretary of the twelve volumes comprising History of India scheme prepared by the Indian History Congress.
There are no reviews yet.