Maritime History and Traditional Knowledge
Dr. Radhika Seshan
Retired as Professor and Head of the Department of History, Savitribai Phule Pune University
Key Highlights
- The paper is broadly divided into three parts, covering historiography, sources, and knowledge systems.
- The sea was ‘open to all’ but was nevertheless peripheral to the lives of most Indians— one manifestation of this attitude was the greater importance of land revenue, as opposed to that from trade by sea.
How do we study maritime history? An equally important question would be, why should we study maritime history? Yet another question, which links both these, is what do we learn by studying and understanding maritime history? There are many answers to these questions, some of which are given below. The paper is broadly divided into three parts, covering historiography, sources, and knowledge systems.
Historiography and its focus are perhaps the starting point, and to my mind, the answer to the first question of how to study maritime history. Here, a crucial factor has always been the many ways in which, during and since colonial rule, India’s engagement with the sea has been at best side-lined, and at worst ignored. Colonial historiography has, unfortunately, handed to us two myths that are constantly reiterated – so much so, that they are now accepted as ‘fact’. The first is that Indians feared the loss of caste that necessarily followed the crossing of the seas, and the second, a corollary to this, is that Indians therefore had nothing to do with the sea. To this, is added the second ‘fact’ – that the caste system and its rigidity meant that, while trade existed, traders were generally ignored by the upper castes and the rulers, and so, lived in a separate world.
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Dr. Radhika Seshan
Retired as Professor and Head of the Department of History, Savitribai Phule Pune University
Dr. Radhika Seshan retired as Professor and Head of the Department of History, Savitribai Phule Pune University, in August 2019. She is now Visiting Faculty at the Symbiosis School of Liberal Arts, Pune. Her area of specialisation is Medieval Indian History, within which she has concentrated on economic history, especially maritime and urban history. She is the author of three books, Trade and Politics on the Coromandel Coast (Primus Books, 2012), Ideas and Institutions in Medieval India, 8th to 18th centuries (Orient Black Swan, 2013), and The Constructions of the East in Western Travel Narratives, 1300-1800 (Routledge, 2020). In addition, she is the editor /joint editor of 11 books, including Indian Ocean Histories: The Many Worlds of Michael Naylor Pearson, jointly edited with Rila Mukherjee(Routledge, 2019/20), Wage Earners in India 1500-1900: Regional Approaches in an International Context, jointly edited with Jan Lucassen, Sage (Sage Series on Politics and Society in India and the Global South), 2021, and most recently, Connecting the Indian Ocean World – Across Sea and Land, jointly edited with Ryuto Shimada (Routledge, 2023). She has numerous research papers to her credit in national and international journals.