Cosmopolitan Cultures and Oceanic Thought

✍ Scribed by Dilip M Menon (editor), Nishat Zaidi (editor)

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2023
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 281
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This book imagines the ocean as central to understanding the world and its connections in history, literature and the social sciences. Introducing the central conceptual category of ocean as method, it analyzes the histories of movement and traversing across connected spaces of water and land sedimented in literary texts, folklore, local histories, autobiographies, music and performance. It explores the constant flow of people, material and ideologies across the waters and how they make their presence felt in a cosmopolitan thinking of the connections of the world. Going beyond violent histories of slavery and indenture that generate global connections, it tracks the movements of sailors, boatmen, religious teachers, merchants, and adventurers.

The essays in this volume summon up this miscegenated history in which land and water are ever linked. A significant rethinking of world history, this volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of history, especially connected history and maritime history, literature, and Global South studies.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of figures
List of contributors
Introduction: Oceanic Imagination and Cosmopolitan Cultures:
Thinking Through History Across the Waters
PART I: The Poetics of Fluvial Cosmopolitanism
1. Going Below the Waterline: Hydrocolonial Methods, Creolised Water
2. Fellowship and aversion in the South: The challenges of South–South collaboration
3. Found in Prison: The Poetics of Oceanic Histories
4. Remembering the Bengal Delta ca. 1450–1850
5.
“The wind sketches landscapes of words”: Reading the wind in the Horn of Africa
PART II: Oceanic Narratives
6. Padmabati of the Oceans: Unfreedom and belonging in Syed Alaol’s Padmabati
7.
Pat.appa-t.t.us in the Indian Ocean: Connected Literary Sensibilities and the Circulation of Texts and Sounds across Arabic, Persian, and Sanskrit Cosmopolises
PART III:
Constructing Space
8. Of Those on Shore: The Dhow Trade and Mobility in the Indian Ocean
9. Towards an Architecture of the Indian Ocean: Mapping the Syncretic Grammar of Coastal Cities and Architecture through Ibn Battuta’s Water Journeys (1342–47)
10. Through the Eyes of the Boat People: Redefining Oceans in the twenty-first century
PART IV: Religion, Knowledge and Law Across the Oceans
11. Literate Illiterates: Arabi-Malayalam and Parallel Process of Knowledge Production among Muslims in Kerala
12. ʿUlama-ʾ Networks across the Seas: Understanding the Trajectory of Islam in Medieval Malabar
13. Encountering the ‘Other’: Pilgrims at Sea and Accounts of Journeys to Hejaz in the Age of Oceanic Mobility
14. Christianity, Conversion and Caste: Reflecting on Identity in Dalit Christian Malayalam Writings in Post-Colonial India
15. Rainbow Waters: Towards a Queer Coalition between India and Botswana
Index