Abstract
Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Across the Green Sea: Histories from the Western Indian Ocean, 1440-1640 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2024), 274 pp.
Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s latest book is a dense account of the western Indian Ocean between 1440 and 1640. Like other works of Subrahmanyam, Across the Green Sea is a book that can be read on multiple levels. On the one hand, individual chapters present detailed accounts of specific cases, and each chapter can be read independently. The author’s remarkable command of primary and secondary sources in multiple languages written in very diverse contexts makes every chapter a rewarding read. On the other hand, each chapter makes a point in a broader argument that Subrahmanyam pursues in this book: early modern history was not ‘merely connected, but polyphonic’, in which multiple voices sing different songs discordantly and the historian’s task is to listen to them and come up with a symphony as much as possible and, if not possible, just to accept the cacophony (p. 215). I will discuss these two aspects of the book separately.
Let’s start with Chapter One, a long chapter which does not present the characteristic microhistorical approach of the author. It is a broad survey of political and cultural developments in a vast region from Transoxiana to the Deccan and from Madagascar to Hurmuz. I selfishly wish the author made this chapter a separate book in itself. Subrahmanyam demonstrates that the connections in the North–South axis were just as significant as the connections in the East–West axis in the history of western Asia. With a few exceptions, the North–South axis often gets the short shrift in scholarship on western Asia, and I hope that Subrahmanyam’s chapter will encourage more scholars to pay attention to the North–South axis of early modern western Asia and go further than existing scholarship by including the Golden Horde and Muscovite Russia as well as other Northern and Eastern European political and trading organisations, such as the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, the republics of Novgorod and Pskov, the Hanseatic League and the Muscovy Company.
Chapters two to four return to the style that we are accustomed to expect from Sanjay Subrahmanyam. In Chapter Two, his gaze is on a specific text, Nail al-muna by Jarullah b. Fahd al-Makki (d. 954/1547), a voluminous annalistic history of Hijaz. The uninformed readers must be surprised to learn that Muzaffar Shah, the ruler of Gujarat, had a resident representative in Mecca who managed the funds sent from Gujarat to various charities in Hijaz. The funds that the Gujarati ruler sent to Hijaz was enormous; at times it was as high as about one-tenth of the total tax revenues of the Ottoman Empire in Aleppo and Damascus (pp. 116, 231). Chapter Three discusses East Africa’s relationships with India and West Asia. We learn that these relationships were much more complex than the topic of slave trade, although African slaves’ prominent roles, such as that of the influential figure of Malik Ambar (d. 1626) in Ahmadnagar, in the Deccan politics are also discussed in detail. Chapter Four takes us to Surat, which emerged as a cosmopolitan port city in Gujarat. Subrahmanyam here discusses the changes in urban topography and the role that different communities played in the changes of urban landscape in the city.
When I read the book, I felt at home in some chapters, but I was on an entirely new ground in others. As I said earlier, this is the first layer of the book, and I am sure I will return to some chapters for further references and discussions in the future. But Sanjay Subrahmanyam is trying to say something more significant in this book. After giving us the concept of ‘connected history’ about 30 years ago, he is now supplementing it with another concept, ‘polyphonic history’, in order to improve his conceptual toolbox and to respond to his critiques and misinterpretations of the concept. The idea of polyphonic history that he is proposing here is not an entirely new concept, though it is hard to say when exactly the term ‘polyphony’ jumped from musicology to history. It has been with us for sure since at least Peter Burke borrowed it from Mikhail Bakhtin to describe multiple points of view in any given historical moment. Burke defined polyphony (Bakhtin’s dialogism) as the existence of multiple narratives on any given historical moment or event. According to Burke, history has to be polyphonic, it ‘has to contain within itself a variety of tongues and points of view, including those of victors and vanquished, men and women, insiders and outsiders, contemporaries and historians’ (Peter Burke, Varieties of Cultural History, Ithaca, 1997, p. 212. Burke further elaborated on this theme in an introduction to a volume dedicated to him. See Peter Burke, ‘Cultural History as Polyphonic History,’ ARBOR Ciencia, Pensamiento y Cultura 186 (2010): 479–86). Subrahmanyam certainly takes his cue from Burke, but how does the concept of polyphonic history supplement the concept of connected history and how is it a response to his critiques?
Subrahmanyam offered the idea of connected histories as a challenge to the method of ‘comparative history’. It was meant to be a new method through which historians could transcend the methodological and geographical restrictions of their disciplines. However, the reception of the concept was diverse, which Subrahmanyam summarises in the introduction of his book (pp. 14–20). After excluding oversimplifications and misunderstandings, the only serious criticism of the concept came from those who argued that disconnectedness, rather than connectedness, was the norm in the early modern period. Subrahmanyam argues that confusing ‘connection’ with ‘circulation’ is the root cause of this misguided interpretation. He repeats: ‘the crucial question has been one of whether our current geographies are adequate for our research questions or ill fit to deal with them’ (p. 19). First and foremost the concept of ‘polyphonic histories’ is a response to this criticism. The absence of detectable circulation does not mean the absence of connectedness. Therefore, connectedness means not just circulation of goods, people and ideas but also the connectedness of sources and their voices in a regional and inter-regional setting.
This brings us to Subrahmanyam’s detailed, one might even say undue for a synthetic book like this, attention on his sources. In multiple chapters, Subrahmanyam gives us long and meticulous discussions on the authorship and provenance of his sources. I do not think his authorial decision in including these extensive sections is accidental, and his intention crystallises at the very end of the book. Subrahmanyam’s book is in fact a plea for a return to the scholarly style of the great scholars and minds of the past (pp. 212–15), such as V. V. Barthold (1869–1930) and V. Minorsky (1877–1966), but above all, Subrahmanyam’s mentor and friend Jean Aubin (1927–98). These scholars sailed through sources in different languages and genres produced in vastly different contexts, and they did it with grace and humility. I personally believe that every historian of Asian history should put Barthold’s collected works (Sochineniia) published in 10 volumes on a desk and read just the subtitles and table of contents of each volume. To give an extreme example, it is humbling to see that the fourth volume, the slimmest of all, includes 51 articles in 408 pages on archaeology, numismatics, epigraphy and ethnography. As Subrahmanyam argues, the reason why we no longer have scholars like Barthold or Aubin is not because they had a very different lifestyle, as often argued, but because they had a more holistic approach to their sources and questions. Peter Burke also lamented that the polyphonic history was hacked into pieces by the (in)famous cultural turn—and perhaps by other ‘turns’ as well. Across the Green Sea argues that we have wasted enough time in recent decades with provincialising this or that, turning here and there, or decolonising North and South; we need to start respecting our sources and questions again.