Knowledges and Environments

The conflict between bounding and unbounding the Indian Ocean in historiographical terms may be read from its environmental history. The monsoon, which the lascars knew well, tugged the sea apart while link­ing its further corners, and this fact explains the difficulty of mounting a total view of the Indian Ocean.

On the sea itself, navigational knowledge focussed on the puzzle of the monsoon. A key early navigational authority from the Arab side was Ahmad ibn Majid of Julfar in Oman, who died around 1504. Ibn Majid’s navigation manuals, in verse and prose were designed for memorisation.

Know, oh reader, that sailing the sea has many principles. Understand them: The first is the knowledge of lunar mansions and rhumbs and routes, distances, bashiyat, latitude measuring, signs (of land), the courses of the sun and moon, the winds and their seasons, and the seasons of the sea, the instruments of the ship... It is also desirable that you should know all the coasts and their landfalls and their various guides such as mud, or grass, animals or fish, sea-snakes and winds. You should consider the tides, and the sea currents and the islands on every route, make sure all the instruments are in order.^[149]

One of the central historiographical debates about nautical knowledge, and by extension other kinds of natural knowledge, is the extent to which Europe changed what was known.

From a more secure scholarly footing, as with nautical knowledge, historians see ship-b uilding generating convergence and divergence between various Indian Ocean cultures. Despite the fact that there were a multitude of different types of vessels built across the Indian Ocean world, one has come to stand for all. This is the dhow. Europeans used ‘dhow’ as a blanket category, typifying this set of vessels as Arab; however, Arabs themselves named their sea-going vessels for the shape of their hull and in turn their size, nominating a range of vessels and dhows could also come from India and the Swahili coast.^[152] In the Arab world and many parts of the Indian Ocean, teak or coconut wood was used for the making of hulls, giving rise to an important trade in teak out of India.

The passage of the winds of the monsoon and its navigation involved the watching of nature’s cycles, even as Ibn Majid’s nautical science touched on everything from fish to stars. If this was so, historiographical debate about European impact has also stretched to accounts of coastal environments. Using archaeobotany, ethnobotany and climatic studies, scholars now hold that the Indian Ocean was a terrain of plural plant and agricultural exchanges from the third millennium onwards, prior to European botany. Coastal sites in Arabia and India served as centres of agricultural experimentation and the diffusion of plants. It is proposed that sorghum, pearl millet, finger millet, cowpea and hyacinth bean moved from Africa to the Indian subcontinent around or after a ‘dry event’ at 2200 BCE, which weakened the monsoon. In another pathway, taro, yams and banana may have constituted another package of transfers from Island Southeast Asia to Africa.^[156] Mastering the monsoon allowed the transportation of specimens to gather pace and focus.

By the time of the Portuguese and the Dutch, the coast of India became a testing ground once more. Two of the major works of European botany undertaken in coastal India were Garcia d’Orta’s Coloquios dos simples e drogas a cousas medicinas da India, published in Goa in 1565 and the mid­shipman turned Dutch commander, Hendrik van Rede tot Drakenstein’s twelve-volumed Hortus Malabaricus which appeared between 1678 and 1693. As Richard Grove argues these two classics were fundamentally ‘indigenous texts’: ‘[f]ar from being inherently European works they are actually compilations of Middle Eastern and Asian ethnobotany, organ­ised largely according to non-European precepts’.^[157] Furthermore, the Indian Ocean’s islands, became experimental sites to collect, improve and pass on the natural finds of Europeans, so much so that Grove contends that it was on Mauritius that ‘the early environmental debate acquired its most comprehensive form’.^[158] For a band of physiocratic and Romantic French and later English naturalists, the limits of the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius, provided the setting for a controlled experiment to docu­ment the impact of deforestation and European colonisation.

These naturalists stood in an intriguing intellectual heritage. In the broader region, the idea of the botanical garden, a central site of expertise for the plantation regime, descended from ‘ancient Iranian, Babylonian, Islamic, Central Asian, Mughal and European traditions’.^[159] On another island testing ground, Sri Lanka, the British botanical gar­den in Peradeniya, founded in 1821 by Alexander Moon, shortly fol­lowing the fall of the interior kingdom of Kandy, was set up on the site of a Buddhist temple garden.^[160] Of particular interest for Indian Ocean histories of botany is the role of the intermediary - a figure who crossed oceanic locales and linked rival regimes of knowledge. In one colour­ful recent telling, which covers the less well-known seventeenth-century world of the English East India Company, Madras served as a hub for botany and medicine: resident surgeons acquired specimens from Company ships and sent instructions to collectors spread across the ocean, keeping up exchanges with Manila, Cape Town and Batavia.

‘Syncretism’ and ‘hybridity’ are alluring words to describe sources such as these; yet, these words have been challenged for displacing the relations of power in the making of modern knowledge. One alternative is to work with contemporary sensibilities so as to evaluate how obser­vers moved between concepts of cooperation and resistance. Another is to sketch the constantly evolving and mutating form of colonial know­ledge - tied to cycles of militarised plunder and warfare, changing notions of statehood connected to corporations and crowns and, changing styles of intermediaries from pandits and munshis to monks and Anglicised elites or the descendants of the Portuguese and the Dutch in the British complex of knowledge across the Indian Ocean. From an oceanic per­spective, the relations of knowledge and colonialism are well tested at the moment of the advent of steam-shipping. Take Stamford Raffles’s scribe, Abdullah Bin Abdul Kadir (1797-1854), who worked as a lan­guage teacher alongside missionaries and other foreigners in Singapore and who is sometimes valorised as one of the earliest Malay writers of the modern age. This is despite Abdullah’s own Indian Ocean heritage as the son of a Tamil from Nagore in South India, who had ancestors from Yemen.^{[162] [163] [164] Abdullah travelled constantly between Singapore and Melaka, to visit his family, and died in Mecca in 1854, while undertaking the hajj. Abdullah visited a steamship in 1841, the Sesostris which was involved in the Opium Wars in China. In writing a Malay text on it, he used what he already knew to comprehend the novel. He wrote for instance that the fire on the steamship does not arise from wood, like that used by Malays for fire: ‘The coal looks like a rock or a stone, shiny, hard, and as if it were removed from the ground or from the mountains.’ The ship itself seemed to have a speed like that pulled by six to seven hundred horses on land.}

He noted that its cannon balls were as big as his head. In perhaps the ultimate indicator of how he placed new machines in the light of extant ways of thought, he described the Sesotris as ‘a gift bestowed by Allah upon man for his thought and enterprise’.⁷¹

The power of new technologies changed the speed and intensity of globalisation across the Indian Ocean, and yet these technologies were appropriated by maritime peoples on the rim of this sea for their own purposes and within their own mental universes. This is not an argu­ment for full European impact or for syncretism and hybridity but for analysis that shows how historical actors appreciated the differences between intellectual traditions and even the materiality of different ships. They understood the acceleration of the modern and evinced the ability to move between alternatives, while stitching together cohesive natural knowledge.

If there was a seaborne knowledge which was accelerated as a result of steam it was Islam. The arrival of Islam in Southeast Asia is difficult to date, but there was an Islamic presence from the mid-seventh century. Arab envoys visited the Sumatran court of Srivijaya between the tenth and twelfth centuries, and Melaka became an Islamic trading state, with the conversion of its ruler Paramesvara, from the fifteenth century until its fall to the Portuguese.⁷² Further to the east, Islam reached China during the Tang dynasty. Its spread in coastal South Asia came out of settlements of Muslim traders, who were sometimes also ship-owners, who made alliances with ruling authorities, such as the Caulukya dynasty of Gujarat (941-1297). Yet the arrival of modern steam accelerated this old template, most notably the hajj. Abdullah was amongst hundreds of thousands of Southeast Asians who made the journey in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. If Portuguese and Dutch botanical texts could be ‘indigenous’, it is curious that the hajj became ‘colonial’ on one read­ing, state-sponsored and regulated by the British, the Dutch and oth­ers, for the fear of anti-colonialism and cholera in turn, while European shipping companies controlled the main pilgrim routes as a business, by deploying fleets of ships, and enabled a wider class of people to make the pilgrimage at lower cost till the arrival of air travel.^{[165] [166] [167] Yet as with the his­tory of botany, the individual pilgrim, in hajj memoirs, a key source for historians of pilgrimage, emerges with the ability to straddle concepts, to articulate their own narrative of self-fashioning and to move beyond the panopticon control of the colonial state.}

If religious knowledge, like natural knowledge, was made modern by the recasting of the old in the context of new technologies, some of the best scholarship on early modern and modern Islam in the Indian Ocean approaches it as text, language and print, seeking to trace the emer­gence of an ecumene. Islamic literary networks are said to include sto­ries, poems, genealogies, histories and treaties, together with the patrons, authors and audiences who supported such activity, linking the oral to the printed, the textual to the performative and allowing Arabic to be translated into a series of vernaculars and vice versa. Borrowing from Sheldon Pollock’s ‘Sanskrit cosmopolis’, Ronit Ricci has recently located an ‘Arabic cosmopolis’ by tracking the Book of One Thousand. Questions, which narrates the conversion of Abdullah Ibnu Salam from Judaism to Islam, and which was multiply translated from the tenth century into Persian, Urdu, Tamil, Malay, Javanese, Sudanese and Buginese.^[168] In a later period, Nile Green locates Islam in the marketplace of the burgeon­ing late nineteenth-century port of Bombay, arguing that Bombay was to steam travel what Dubai is to today’s air travel, ‘its iron printing-presses produced books in Persian and Arabic, English and Urdu, Malay and Swahili... its sheer size allowed Muslims to alternatively discover the collective unity of the umma or to learn instead that they were above all “Indian” ’.^[169] Yet intriguingly, the salient lesson is that steam produced myriad competing forms of reformist and customary Islam in Bombay rather than a standard, and these faiths were part of a religious economy fed by a bewildering range of family firms, entrepreneurs and writers, generating individual re-enchantment as a commodity rather than tech­nological disenchantment on a global scale. From a totally different geo­graphical vantage point, what is called the ‘ocean of letters’ appears to view in how Malagasy encountered Christianity, in the creation of a sphere of vernacular literacy among converts between Madagascar, Mauritius and Bourbon, and also the Comoros archipelago and the Cape.^[170] Critically, this linguistic space was not simply ‘creole’; creolisation existed side by side with the continued nourishment of practices from the homeland, the Big Island of Madagascar.

Knowledges and environments were interlaced in the Indian Ocean, by the winds and waves, by technological changes that contorted their relationship, and by the speeding up of encounter, the rapid serialisation of what was known across the waters. Yet the old did not disappear, nor did the new not hold power. There were unexpected contradictions in the relatedness of nativeness and coloniality; not all was mixed up into the syncretic, hybrid or the creole, but woven knowledge could encom­pass alternative strands and formats in a tense and competitive embrace.