Exploring Materiality and Connectivity in Anthropology and Beyond, 2020
By the early decades of the sixteenth century, Portuguese colonialist enterprises had arrested co... more By the early decades of the sixteenth century, Portuguese colonialist enterprises had arrested control of almost all maritime trade in the Indian Ocean. This ancient and thriving trade network, transcontinental and multicultural, was now under the centralized control of the Portuguese empire, bringing about a new form of imperial connectivity that linked Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
With ports, ships and trade routes under their command, the Portuguese effectively controlled the dynamic flow of critical material resources. For South Indian and Deccani empires of the time, warhorses imported by sea from the Middle East were their most essential military need. And so the horse, a living and breathing material commodity, was exploited by the Portuguese as a bargaining tool by cleverly pitting the Indian empires of Vijayanagara and Bijapur against each other in an exploitative bidding war.
By revisiting archival materials, including both Indic literary sources and foreign travelogues, and juxtaposing them with material remains from the ruins of Vijayanagara, this paper will explore the movement, sale and deployment of warhorses in the early sixteenth century, and the mechanisms by which new expressions of maritime connectivity interacted with the living materiality of vital imperial resources.
This paper examines five distinct events from seventeenth-century South Asia: a pirate raid, two ... more This paper examines five distinct events from seventeenth-century South Asia: a pirate raid, two battles and two more pirate raids, all of which represent varying acts of defiance committed against the great Mughal imperium. Perpetrated by the Portuguese, the Marathas and the British, on land and by sea, these events seen in sequence shed light on the evolution of geopolitical players and the aqueous shifts in power dynamics related to maritime supremacy in the western Indian Ocean. By taking a broad view of this area over the span of a century, this paper seeks to explore the how notions of piracy, privateering, imperialism and colonialism evolved and changed in correspondence with a diverse, vital and hotly contested seascape.
This article explores the subject of regional folk stories found in various vernacular expression... more This article explores the subject of regional folk stories found in various vernacular expressions of the Mahābhārata. In particular, the non-canonical stories of Śaśirekha and Śakuni as found in several Telugu versions of the Mahābhārata story are taken up as exemplars to investigate the dynamic process by which regional folk stories transitioned from theatre to text, and from text to cinema. The Śaśirekha story for example, moves from Surabhi folk theatre to a multitude of parinaya texts and finally to the Telugu cinematic hit Maya Bazaar of 1957. By tracking these stories as they evolved into various forms of new media, this article elucidates the fluid, circulatory process by which folk elements enter a grand narrative like the Mahābhārata, penetrate the normative text and get recirculated back as new literary forms and performative genres. In this context, I also try to complicate the classical/folk dichotomy and question the permeability and mutually constitutive nature of such hermeneutical categories.
The influential sixteenth-century Sanskrit treatise Svara-mela-kalānidhi describes a novel system... more The influential sixteenth-century Sanskrit treatise Svara-mela-kalānidhi describes a novel system of naming tones, of organizing rāga-s by pitch content, and of reckoning svara-s on 12 fret positions rather than 22 śruti-s. Contrary to its common construal as a sudden rupture in tradition, we highlight the rhetorical means by which the treatise systematically grounds its authority (and that of its ambitious patron, Rāmarāya) in the canon of saṅgīta-śāstra. We also offer a new translation and a new (non-Pythagorean) interpretation of its svayambhu-based tuning system.
Exploring Materiality and Connectivity in Anthropology and Beyond, 2020
By the early decades of the sixteenth century, Portuguese colonialist enterprises had arrested co... more By the early decades of the sixteenth century, Portuguese colonialist enterprises had arrested control of almost all maritime trade in the Indian Ocean. This ancient and thriving trade network, transcontinental and multicultural, was now under the centralized control of the Portuguese empire, bringing about a new form of imperial connectivity that linked Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
With ports, ships and trade routes under their command, the Portuguese effectively controlled the dynamic flow of critical material resources. For South Indian and Deccani empires of the time, warhorses imported by sea from the Middle East were their most essential military need. And so the horse, a living and breathing material commodity, was exploited by the Portuguese as a bargaining tool by cleverly pitting the Indian empires of Vijayanagara and Bijapur against each other in an exploitative bidding war.
By revisiting archival materials, including both Indic literary sources and foreign travelogues, and juxtaposing them with material remains from the ruins of Vijayanagara, this paper will explore the movement, sale and deployment of warhorses in the early sixteenth century, and the mechanisms by which new expressions of maritime connectivity interacted with the living materiality of vital imperial resources.
This paper examines five distinct events from seventeenth-century South Asia: a pirate raid, two ... more This paper examines five distinct events from seventeenth-century South Asia: a pirate raid, two battles and two more pirate raids, all of which represent varying acts of defiance committed against the great Mughal imperium. Perpetrated by the Portuguese, the Marathas and the British, on land and by sea, these events seen in sequence shed light on the evolution of geopolitical players and the aqueous shifts in power dynamics related to maritime supremacy in the western Indian Ocean. By taking a broad view of this area over the span of a century, this paper seeks to explore the how notions of piracy, privateering, imperialism and colonialism evolved and changed in correspondence with a diverse, vital and hotly contested seascape.
This article explores the subject of regional folk stories found in various vernacular expression... more This article explores the subject of regional folk stories found in various vernacular expressions of the Mahābhārata. In particular, the non-canonical stories of Śaśirekha and Śakuni as found in several Telugu versions of the Mahābhārata story are taken up as exemplars to investigate the dynamic process by which regional folk stories transitioned from theatre to text, and from text to cinema. The Śaśirekha story for example, moves from Surabhi folk theatre to a multitude of parinaya texts and finally to the Telugu cinematic hit Maya Bazaar of 1957. By tracking these stories as they evolved into various forms of new media, this article elucidates the fluid, circulatory process by which folk elements enter a grand narrative like the Mahābhārata, penetrate the normative text and get recirculated back as new literary forms and performative genres. In this context, I also try to complicate the classical/folk dichotomy and question the permeability and mutually constitutive nature of such hermeneutical categories.
The influential sixteenth-century Sanskrit treatise Svara-mela-kalānidhi describes a novel system... more The influential sixteenth-century Sanskrit treatise Svara-mela-kalānidhi describes a novel system of naming tones, of organizing rāga-s by pitch content, and of reckoning svara-s on 12 fret positions rather than 22 śruti-s. Contrary to its common construal as a sudden rupture in tradition, we highlight the rhetorical means by which the treatise systematically grounds its authority (and that of its ambitious patron, Rāmarāya) in the canon of saṅgīta-śāstra. We also offer a new translation and a new (non-Pythagorean) interpretation of its svayambhu-based tuning system.
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With ports, ships and trade routes under their command, the Portuguese effectively controlled the dynamic flow of critical material resources. For South Indian and Deccani empires of the time, warhorses imported by sea from the Middle East were their most essential military need. And so the horse, a living and breathing material commodity, was exploited by the Portuguese as a bargaining tool by cleverly pitting the Indian empires of Vijayanagara and Bijapur against each other in an exploitative bidding war.
By revisiting archival materials, including both Indic literary sources and foreign travelogues, and juxtaposing them with material remains from the ruins of Vijayanagara, this paper will explore the movement, sale and deployment of warhorses in the early sixteenth century, and the mechanisms by which new expressions of maritime connectivity interacted with the living materiality of vital imperial resources.
With ports, ships and trade routes under their command, the Portuguese effectively controlled the dynamic flow of critical material resources. For South Indian and Deccani empires of the time, warhorses imported by sea from the Middle East were their most essential military need. And so the horse, a living and breathing material commodity, was exploited by the Portuguese as a bargaining tool by cleverly pitting the Indian empires of Vijayanagara and Bijapur against each other in an exploitative bidding war.
By revisiting archival materials, including both Indic literary sources and foreign travelogues, and juxtaposing them with material remains from the ruins of Vijayanagara, this paper will explore the movement, sale and deployment of warhorses in the early sixteenth century, and the mechanisms by which new expressions of maritime connectivity interacted with the living materiality of vital imperial resources.