The Muslim and Portuguese Indian Ocean: A Reappraisal of Cosmopolitanism in the Early Modern Era

Abstract

This chapter is an attempt to grapple with some aspects of a complex historical textual legacy in several languages, involving two regions of the Indian Ocean, namely the Western coast of India—especially the Konkan and Kerala or Malabar coasts in the Arabian Sea—and the Straits of Melaka. Moreover, it brings out the many intricate issues associated with a perusal, even of a superficial nature, of the origins and trajectories of some texts within the connected histories of the Indian Ocean. It also tries to point out the pitfalls of traditional ways of looking at such texts and moreover indicates how they might be alternatively understood from perspectives that read them together with texts that are normally seen to belong to other canons. I also propose that calling the texts in question “Creole” might help bring out aspects of their production and the social histories in which they are embedded that are not normally emphasized. My point, as will be seen below, is that least some of these aspects may be useful in inserting the texts—and their authors—in larger Indian Ocean connected histories.

This essay is part of my research on Lusophone South and Southeast Asia carried out under the auspices of the Social and Behavioural Science Cluster, University of Malaya, in 2011–2012. I am also very grateful to Michael N. Pearson for his encouraging comments as well as for invaluable bibliographical suggestions. Finally, I am grateful to Sumit Mandal with Nottingham Malaysia for having made valuable comments related to the authors treated here and for having commented on an earlier version of this paper. Incidentally, I am also grateful to Michael Connors at Nottingham for having offered an honorary research affiliation to me in 2014–2015 that has allowed me to finish my book manuscript. This chapter was originally presented as a conference paper at a conference, “The Dimensions of the Indian Ocean World Past: Sources and Opportunities for Interdisciplinary Work in Indian Ocean World History, 9th–19th Centuries,” organized by Murdoch University and the Western Australia Maritime Museum, in Perth, on November 12–14, 2012. A much shorter version of this chapter will also appear in a volume (Ribeiro 2015). Furthermore, I have previously treated similar themes, albeit in a much more concise manner (Ribeiro 2014).