KCHR Webinar
Narrating the Coast, (Re)imagining the Region: Indian Ocean and Malabar
by
Dr. Digvijay Singh
Date and Time: September 12, 2024 | Thursday | 3 pm
Abstract: This talk is an exploratory exercise aimed to integrate the knowledge about Malabar’s maritime identity into the larger frameworks of situating its pre-modern past. In the process, it also seeks to pose some methodological questions regarding the possibility of using oceans as a category of historical analysis particularly in the case of societies with distinct maritime orientation; and the consequences of such an endeavour for characterising the historical evolution of Kerala as a region. Drawing on the accounts of Arab geographers and trade letters of the Jewish merchants (the Geniza Letters) among other sources, the speaker tries to argue that Malabar had a distinct perception in the eyes of contemporary observers primarily due to the phenomenon of the simultaneous existence of many port towns and exchange centres, each participating in the thriving networks of Indian Ocean world, not essentially at the cost of others. This intensity and dynamism of coastal processes induced significant changes in the economy, society and political structures that ask us to look at the relationship of the ocean, coast and hinterland more closely than so far done in the standard historiographical writings on the early mediaeval Malabar.
About the speaker: Dr. Digvijay Kumar Singh teaches at the Department of History, Cotton University, Guwahati. He finished his Ph.D on the Maritime History of early Mediaeval Malabar from the Centre for Historical Studies, JNU. His interests lie in the economic history of premodern South and South-East Asia, with a particular focus on the circulation of commodities, and networks and methods of transactions across the Indian Ocean. He has published articles on the history of the Indian Ocean and Malabar, and has also co-edited a volume, Social Worlds of Pre-Modern Transactions: Perspectives from Indian Epigraphy and History, New Delhi, 2020.