Courtly Encounters: Translating Courtliness and Violence in Early Modern Eurasia
Sanjay Subrahmanyam
Harvard University Press, 2012
The nation state has become the unlamented victim of the linguistic turn in Historiography. The professional concerns of historians have to a substantial extent revolved around the ideological and political needs and demands of the national state and in parts of the "colonized" world, historical writing became the instrument by which societies inscribed themselves as political entities and therefore worthy of "self-rule" or "independence". Post Independence historiography essentially added in detail to the sketches made during the colonial era and therefore colonial and post colonial historiographies mimic each other in more ways than is apparent to the uninitiated. In the study of the medieval history of Peninsular India in general and of the Vijayanagara Empire in particular the trend nis noticed by most recent historians of whom the late Professor Burton Stein was the most preeminent. The rise of the last imperial polity of Peninsular India is generally regarded as a direct consequence of the establishment of the Islamic-Turkish state in Delhi and its expansion across the Deccan is seen as the sine qua non for Vijayanagara and indeed its reason for existence Added to this is the imposition of the Hindu and Muslim communities as politically charges and self conscious societies to the medieval past, an anachronistic reading as pointed out by several recent historians. Against this background a new reading of Vijayanagara history is always welcome and Professor Sanjay .Subrahmanyam has discussed the "encounter" between Vijayanagara and the expanding Portuguese empire in India in the book under review.
The present work divided into 3 substantial chapters with an Introduction and Conclusion is based on the Mary Flexner Lectures delivered at Bryn Mawr College in 2009. In the course of the lectures Subrahmanyam analyses the historical events which form the important narrative strands in Vijayanagara history from two quite distinct perspectives. Following the trend of much of post colonial historiography, there is an attempt at problematizing language in an effort to grasp the shape of events and personalities. In most of the histories written on Vijayanagara and its successor states, the pride of place is given to inscriptions which are taken as the very embodiment of empirical reality. Other kinds of materials are usually brought is as supportive documents with the inscriptions forming the mainstay of the documentation.One might agree with Julian Barnes when he says in the Booker winning novel, The Sense of an Ending, "history is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation". Sanjay Subrahmanyam gets past this methodological problem by locating the events is a dense description from a variety of written sources of which he uses the Portuguese chronicles and texts with aplomb.
There has been an earlier work which traverses the same terrain: Jean-Pau Rubies', Travel and Ethnology in Renaissance South India. While Rubies is concerned with the mental images and categories of thought through which the late medieval travelers interpreted what they saw or "encountered" in South India. Subrahmanyam is more concerned about the political and diplomatic language in which the polities of late medieval South India apprehended the changing military and economic equation with the Iberian world. And he is interested in a larger question: Are there similarities to this in other parts of Eurasia particularly Malacca and Ache where the "native"polities /courts encountered a similar situation. The cumulative result of the written and artistic representations of the encounter made possible the circulation of ideas about the "Orient" that subsequently shaped Western polcy and politics toward India and parts of the non-White world.
The book is an interesting addition to the ever increasing number of important studies on Vijayangara and like Zupanov's Missionary Tropics will find an important place in the historiography of Peninsular India.
Sanjay Subrahmanyam
Harvard University Press, 2012
The present work divided into 3 substantial chapters with an Introduction and Conclusion is based on the Mary Flexner Lectures delivered at Bryn Mawr College in 2009. In the course of the lectures Subrahmanyam analyses the historical events which form the important narrative strands in Vijayanagara history from two quite distinct perspectives. Following the trend of much of post colonial historiography, there is an attempt at problematizing language in an effort to grasp the shape of events and personalities. In most of the histories written on Vijayanagara and its successor states, the pride of place is given to inscriptions which are taken as the very embodiment of empirical reality. Other kinds of materials are usually brought is as supportive documents with the inscriptions forming the mainstay of the documentation.One might agree with Julian Barnes when he says in the Booker winning novel, The Sense of an Ending, "history is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation". Sanjay Subrahmanyam gets past this methodological problem by locating the events is a dense description from a variety of written sources of which he uses the Portuguese chronicles and texts with aplomb.
There has been an earlier work which traverses the same terrain: Jean-Pau Rubies', Travel and Ethnology in Renaissance South India. While Rubies is concerned with the mental images and categories of thought through which the late medieval travelers interpreted what they saw or "encountered" in South India. Subrahmanyam is more concerned about the political and diplomatic language in which the polities of late medieval South India apprehended the changing military and economic equation with the Iberian world. And he is interested in a larger question: Are there similarities to this in other parts of Eurasia particularly Malacca and Ache where the "native"polities /courts encountered a similar situation. The cumulative result of the written and artistic representations of the encounter made possible the circulation of ideas about the "Orient" that subsequently shaped Western polcy and politics toward India and parts of the non-White world.
The book is an interesting addition to the ever increasing number of important studies on Vijayangara and like Zupanov's Missionary Tropics will find an important place in the historiography of Peninsular India.
