Muzaffar Alam & Sanjay Subrahmanyam
Southeast Asia as Seen from Mughal India :
Tahir Muhammad's 'Immaculate Garden' (ca. 1600)
"Hindustan is described as enclosed on the east, west and south by the ocean, but Sri Lanka (Sarândïp), Aceh (Âchïn), the Moluccas (Malûk) and Melaka (Malâgha), and a considerable number of islands are accounted within its extent".
Shaikh Abu'l Fazl, A "in-i Akbari. (D
The Indian Ocean conjuncture
The existence of very extensive commercial and other relations between the India of the Mughals and the kingdoms of Southeast Asia is perfectly well-known, but still surprisingly difficult to delineate in fact with any great clarity. (2) These relations must obviously have passed above all through two principal corridors in the late sixteenth century, after the great Mughal expansionary wave of the 1560s and 1570s : relations between the ports of Gujarat (and most particularly Surat) and the havens of island Southeast Asia, the Malay Peninsula and the Mergui-Tenasserim complex; and those between Bengal and other ports of the Bay of Bengal littoral. Later, as the Mughals advanced southwards down the Indian peninsula, we may equally
* An earlier version of this text was presented in the seminar of Claude Guillot at the EHESS (Paris) on 13 May 2004, and we are grateful to a number of participants for comments and suggestions.
1. Shaikh Abu'l Fazl ibn Mubarak, A 'in-i Akbari, trans. H.S. Jarrett, revised Jadunath Sarkar (Calcutta, 1948), Vol. Ill, p. 7.
2. We thus return here to themes studied briefly in Sanjay Subrahmanyam, "Persianisation and Mercantilism : Two Themes in Bay of Bengal History, 1400-1700", in Denys Lombard and Om Prakash, eds., Commerce and Culture in the Bay of Bengal, 1500-1800 (New Delhi, 1999), pp. 47-85, as indeed in the rest of that conference volume by other authors.
Archipel 70, Paris, 2005 pp. 209-237
