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Recentering the Bay of Bengal Connected Spaces in an Inter-Asian Bordersea

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Recentering the Bay of Bengal Connected Spaces in an Inter-Asian Bordersea The Newsletter No. 85 Spring 2020 29 The Focus Recentering the Bay of Bengal Connected spaces in an inter-Asian bordersea Jayati Bhattacharya and Carola Erika Lorea The interconnected world history of the Bay of Bengal is re-enacted in people’s memories, habits and everyday practices. The word for ‘star anise’ in Central India is Singapoor ke phool [Singapore flower], a colloquial echo of a pre-modern network of maritime trade. The Bengali word for window [janala] is directly borrowed from Portuguese, a reminder that language witnessed the syncretic impact of early European settlements around the Bay. Epic stories from the Ramayana, originating in ancient India, are re-enacted daily in Javanese traditional theatre. These are just a few of the examples that can serve as metaphorical mappings of the past and present of a network of interdependent livelihoods, a busy seascape, and a web of littoral hubs, which constitute the life of the Bay of Bengal. Above: Sadarghat harbour in Dhaka. Right: A monsoon day in southern Bangladesh, June 2011. Photos by Carola Lorea, 2019. he Bay of Bengal, a web of maritime waterscape has been characterized by an and ideas across the region. The hegemonic deeply embedded in academic, political, highways as well as a chessboard of absence of any major territorial conflicts (British) colonial domination over the seascape and public discourses. It is only recently Trelationships and mobilities, is a vital or claims; perhaps one of the reasons for and adjoining hinterlands and littorals was that increasing globalization and inter-state region for several countries; both littoral traditionally receiving less attention – in the often achieved through destruction and interactions have facilitated looking beyond (India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Thailand, larger realm of Indian Ocean studies – than violence. Yet, administrative subjugation the conventional categories sanctioned Sri Lanka, Thailand) and landlocked (Nepal, the western Indian Ocean region. Yet, the also generated a sense of unity in the Bay. by the history of Area Studies. The Bay of Bhutan, China, Northeast India, Nepal). eastern Indian Ocean has been one of the This complex area has thus witnessed Bengal thus emerges as an incredibly fertile Often disregarded as the periphery and the busiest seascapes, with overlapping circuits multiple and mutual borrowings across the field of inquiry as an in-between space of liquid borderland between South Asia and of interaction between the regional nodes seas, littorals and borderlands, with strong borrowings, contacts and interactions that Southeast Asia – two macro areas that came of exchanges and the global economic legacies of circulations in culture, economy, shape the vision of the past, the present to define much of the modern scholarship order. The ‘monsoon winds’ established life-style and languages. and the future of a considerable part of the about this region – the Bay of Bengal can and connected the dominant trade routes However, porous borders and circular global population. Moreover, the increasing be seen as the nodal crossroad and the and shaped migratory trends till the onset migrations slowly turned into isolationism importance of borders, borderlands and cultural hub for a network of exchanges of colonial intervention and consequent and rigidly monitored frontiers in post-colonial trans-border studies in academic discussions1 and contacts of diverse kinds. introduction of steamship navigation. Asia, with the emergence of decolonized has often laid more emphasis on mainland In the new millennium, the Bay has emerged European trading settlements, experiments geopolitical territories, the dominance of ‘barbed-wire borders’ rather than on maritime as a significant subject of debate in popular and ambitions, left a trace of Portuguese, nation-centric visions and inward-looking borders, shared maritime heritages, and the as well as academic discourses, particularly Dutch, Danish, French, British and other policies for most of the states around the hydroscapes of bordering regions, pointing with rising sea levels, and attention to maritime presences. A successive period of colonial rim of the Bay. Borderlands and borderseas to another lacuna that our focus on the Bay trajectories in policy approaches of different intrusion and governance both separated and were divided into South and Southeast Asian of Bengal region aims to fill.2 Asian states in and around the region. This united communities, commodities, cultures states, a binary conception that became Continued overleaf 30 Recentering the Bay of Bengal The Focus Connected spaces in an inter-Asian bordersea Continued from previous page Besides migrations and connections, the history of the Bay of Bengal is also a history of natural calamities and catastrophes, of A new phase of Bay of unkind weather conditions and of tragic disruptions that mark the social and political Bengal studies: economic history of maritime borderlands and islands. and cultural contexts beyond The 2004 tsunami, for example, acts as a geopolitical strategy watershed in the history of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in terms of conservation This Focus section of The Newsletter has policies, development of mass tourism, threats been inspired by the need to emphasize the to vulnerable ecologies, and to the coastal spaces and trajectories between the two livelihoods of fishermen and informal settlers. macro areas of South and Southeast Asia, The contributions in this Focus remind strongly embedded in popular imagination us that the northern Bay, spreading from and academic discourses. Transcending the unique ecological reality of the Bengal methodological nationalism, it focuses on Delta seamlessly into the Indian Ocean, is transnational and transregional movements, a space that challenges established notions practices and institutions that connect people, of water, land, soil and sea. Whereas histories and knowledge across the Bay. disciplines at the service of the Empire, For example, present-day impermeable such as cartography and oceanography, borders and nationalist rhetoric in countries like have striven to separate navigable sea from Burma and Bangladesh are better understood taxable land, the Bengal Delta defies these if compared to a long history of exchanges binary notions through its tidal landscape, and colonial connections between the historical its ubiquitous ponds, swamps and wetlands, province of united Bengal and British Burma. its métissage of salt and fresh waters, and its Above: The Conflagration Contrary to the dominant discourse in of Dalla, on the Rangoon cyclical reshaping of sandbars, flooded soil, contemporary Myanmar, which strives to River. From Series 1 of temporarily emerged land, and submerged identify members of the Rohingya community ‘Views taken at or near coastlines. Studying the nature and the Rangoon, and Combined as 'Bengalis' or foreign infiltrators, making way operations in the Birman human course around the Bay of Bengal, with for a tragic humanitarian crisis, nineteenth and Empire’, by Lieutenant its fluid and moving relation between water early-twentieth century histories of the Bay Joseph Moore. and land, can help us to shift conventional Description: Plate 17: of Bengal demonstrate that the two regions moonlit river view, with paradigms surrounding land-water visions, were linked through common movements of smoke rising from fire on a starting point to secure the future of resistance, intellectually constructed pan-Asian the right horizon, near coastal cities in a world of rising waters. sentiments, but also mutually influenced by pagodas, seen from the The backwaters of the Bengal Delta, with river in the foreground anti-colonial political activists. where ships and boats their forbidding wilderness, thick forests, Whereas mainstream popular discourses are mooring or rowing, merciless salinity and natural impediments, depict the Bay of Bengal as a strategic some figures on them discouraging settlement and cultivation, spotting the fire. Year: area both at the convergence of two geo- 1826. Hand-coloured opened up to the markets and routes of the Bay political blocks (ASEAN and SAARC) and at aquatint with etching. of Bengal and the greater Indian Ocean long the confluence of two competing maritime before the coming of European sea voyagers. Left: Ganges Delta. powers (India and China), this special Focus JPL space images. This pre-European cosmopolitanism of trade considers not only the high politics but also This image was taken across the Bay was not only made of traffic the everyday lives of the Bay of Bengal from the Space Shuttle and exchanges between Malacca, Sumatra, on January 13, 1997. by gathering perspectives from historical, Image credit: NASA/JPL Borneo, the Persian Gulf, Bengal and the anthropological, sociological, literary and /UCSD/JSC Coromandel Coast, Sri Lanka and Malabar; multidisciplinary research. but also of raids of pirates and fortune-hunters. The nine contributions by scholars from This inter-littoral world of trade, of spices and different disciplines and areas of expertise fabrics, sugar and silk, sandalwood and muslin, are based on the discussions held at a preceded the advent of the big European day-long intensive roundtable session at prominent outcome of which was the big boost Cosmopolitan connections, overseas trading corporations. It is from this the 11th International Convention of Asia to the organization of the Indian Navy and liquid borders, and time period that our contributors retrace
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