Mission to Madura by Markus Vink, a Review

Mission to Madurai: Dutch Embassies to the Nayaka Court of Madurai in the Seventeenth Century
Markus Winlk
New Delhi: Manohar Publishers and Distributors, 2013

The transition  to the rule of the European Companies in the seventeenth century over parts of South India is a complex problem in the historiography. On the one hand the nature of the source material changes with documents in Dutch, Portuguese, Latin and of course English and French and on the other, we have continuity in political and economic forms which add to the over all complexity of the historiographical questions. Few Indian historians with the sole exception of Sanjay Subrahmanyam have ventured to research this span of time and the reasons are not hard to determine: the linguistic resources required is extremely challenging and in our Universities here in India, teaching foreign languages as part of the Ph D programme is just absent. So there is little that has been published on the relations between the Nayaka kingdoms of Southern India and the representatives of the European companies. The Dutch were particularly active in the region after the conquest of Sri Lanka and the acquisition of Cochin and Negapattinam along the Kerala and Coromandel coast respectively. Markus Wink has published eight Reports written by ambassadors of the Dutch sent to the Nayaka court at Madurai.

There have been a few studies in recent years relating to the political and economic history of the southern part of the Tamil region. David Ludden's Peasant History in South India .   was based on English language sources available in the Archives of Tamil Nadu and the celebrated monograph of Nicholas Dirks, The Hollow Crown: The Ethno history of a South Indian Little Kingdom was based on archival records as well as a dense "thick description" of social and political relations emanating from the statecraft of caste and its hierarchical variations in the Kallar territories. To these we may add M SS Pandian's work on the Nanchil Nadu and its social and agrarian history during the rule of the Travancore rulers, the last of the little kings of the deep South. The arrival of the Christian Missionaries, first the Catholics and later the evangelists of the London Missionary Society added another layer of complexity to the tangled history of the area. Afterall Robert Cauldwell celebrated "Dravidian" theory is still a hot subject of debate, polemic and of course the starting point of the identity politics   that still grips the region. Hence any new addition of source material will be welcome.

The Dutch interacted with the Court of the Nayakas using a host of local intermediaries making the embassies sent to Madurai "courtly encounters" in which the Asian and the European engaged with each other using categories of thought and concepts of politics and culture derived from their own historical experience and perspectives. We get the distinct impression that the Dutch were able to see through the charade that passed off as Court or Darbar   under the nayakas. Their agents were well informed about court factions and the shifting sands of dynastic politics Above all they were aware of the hollwness of the political and military pretensions of the nayaks.

This is a valuable compilation of documents that sheds light on one of the more complex areas of historical inquiries and we must thank the author for making these documents available to historians interested in the early history of colonial rule in the area. 

A Cartographic Profile of the Deccan: A review

A Cartographic Profile of the Deccan
by Salma Ahmed Farooqui and A Subash
A K Sherwani Centre for Deccan Studies
Hyderabad: Maulana Azad National Urdu University


The history of map making, cartography and two dimensional representations of space is still in its infancy in India. Except for a few maps made in the Mughal court and the maps of military campaigns made by the Maharata chieftains in the eighteenth century we hardly have any indigenous examples of maps.  The last great medieval empire of South India, the VIjyanagara empire seems to have made absolutely no attempt at either mastering the art of artillery casting or map making and in the changing military scenario of the sixteenth century had little, if any chance of succeeding against a better equipped and disciplined army, the Deccan army of the Sultanates. The book under review is an attempt at bringing together both the printed and the manuscript maps in different repositories around the world which illustrate the Deccan and is a laudable attempt at documenting a neglected aspect of Indian history.

Indian historiography has a long way to go before it can analyze the contribution of Indian traders and explorers to the development of western knowledge about the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal.We know that a sailor Majid had provided assistance to Vasco da Gama on his maiden attempt to sail across the Arabian Sea. The nautical tradition behind his venture has not yet been studies. Similarly the sailors of the Cholas who effortlessly sailed from Nagapattinam to Guangzhou have not left traces of their craft behind. It would be well worth our while to investigate the nautical and navigational knowledge behind such sea borne ventures. B Arunachalam began his research which culminated in a monograph published by the Bombay Maritime History Society, but this line of inquiry has not been pursued. In the light of the context outlined above, the book discussed in this essay makes a valuable beginning. Of course Susan Gole published her monumental work in the 1970s and there has been little since. The Atlas of the Mughal Empire and more recently the Atlas of Ancient India are valuable contributions to Historical Geography.

J B Harley in his monumental work History of Cartography which was published in five volumes by the University of Chicago Press has exactly 2 chapters on Indian cartography even though India and Ireland were the earliest countries to be surveyed using the Trigonometrical techniques. Mathew Edney has an extremely interesting book on this. Harley has frequently drawn attention to the political and ideological use of cartographic representations. The maps in this book contain a wealth of details which  reveal the intellectual and cultural presumptions on which the mappe mundi  were constructed. The authors have documented maps belonging to all the important powers which controlled parts of the Indian coastline from the early seventeenth century. By carefully studying the maps illustrated in this book we get a fairly accurate idea of the evolution of Indian geography. The dominant powers controlling the cost are carefully marked and the capital city depiction on the maps. We also get some idea of the fortification walls from the maps, like the example of Ginjee located near Pondicherry.  The coastline of the Deccan received particular attention as the Portuguese were interested in acquiring ports and facilities for their ecclesiastical and trading pursuits.

The book contains nearly   150 maps from different parts of the world. The section on Arabic maps and Chinese maps are particularly interesting. This book makes interesting reading and is a valuable contribution to the thin self of serious books on the history of cartography.

 

Penukonda Fort:History, Art and Culture

Penugonda Fort: A defence (sic) Capital of Vijayanagara Empire, History Art and Culture
R Vasantha
New Delhi: Sharada Publishing House, 2000

Vijayanagara History has emerged as one of the most interesting and intensively researches areas in the history of medieval India. Yet, alarmingly it is still possible  to produce doctoral theses which skirt the intellectual and historiographical issues and reduce the quest for understanding the past to a mere catalogue of inscriptions and in this case of monuments.  It is well known that Penukonda, Chandragiri and Vellore were all associated at different phases of its history with the Vijayanagara Empire. In the book under review one does not get any appreciation of the larger historical context of the Empire and its Architecture. In fact the author has completely ignored the recent works on the art, history and architecture of Vijayanagara. George Michell excellent book on the Architecture of Vijayanagara and its successor states in not even listed in the bibliography. Apart from sloppy research, this lacunae suggest that writing Vijayanagara history has turned into a mere ritual.

The book is divided into four chapters and each of them stands independent of the next making the book appear without any focus or theme.. The author has used the Mackenzie Manuscript as a source but has not said anything about the context in which the documents were collected. There is no discussion about the role of the Nayakas in the revenue system or tax farming system that existed in the dry region of Anantapur. The investment in tank irrigation undertaken by nayakas which was essestial to make this region productive is seen only as traditional charity. The early Company rule associated with Sir Thomas Munro is sketched against the background of the litany of folksy legends that has sprung up in the region. Surprisingly Burton Stein's Thomas Munro: Man and Vision of Empire  is not even mentioned in the discussion on Munro.

The book contains some good photographs and apart from the pictures there is hardly anything reddeming about this mis adventure into Vijayanagara History.