Homes of Capital: Merchants and Mobility Across Indian Ocean Gujarat
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Homes of Capital: Merchants and Mobility across Indian Ocean Gujarat by Ketaki Pant Department of History Duke University Date: _________________ Approved: ___________________________ Engseng Ho, Supervisor ___________________________ Sumathi Ramaswamy __________________________ Janet Ewald __________________________ Philip J. Stern __________________________ Ajantha Subramanian Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of History in the Graduate School of Duke University 2015 ABSTRACT Homes of Capital: Merchants and Mobility across Indian Ocean Gujarat by Ketaki Pant Department of History Duke University Date: _________________ Approved: ___________________________ Engseng Ho, Supervisor ___________________________ Sumathi Ramaswamy __________________________ Janet Ewald __________________________ Philip J. Stern __________________________ Ajantha Subramanian An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of History in the Graduate School of Duke University 2015 Copyright by Ketaki Pant 2015 ABSTRACT HOMES OF CAPITAL: MERCHANTS AND MOBILITY ACROSS INDIAN OCEAN GUJARAT Chair: Engseng Ho My dissertation project is an ethnographic history of “homes of capital,” merchant homes located in port-cities of Gujarat in various states of splendor and decrepitude, which continue to mark a long history of Indian Ocean cross-cultural trade and exchange. Located in western South Asia, Gujarat is a terraqueous borderland, connecting the western and eastern arenas of the Indian Ocean at the same time as it connects territorial South Asia to maritime markets. Gujarat’s dynamic port-cities, including Rander, Surat and Bombay, were and continue to be home to itinerant merchants, many with origins and investments around the littoral from Arabia to Southeast Asia. I argue that rather than a point of origin or return, Gujarat's merchants—many of whom are themselves itinerants from Arabia, Persia and Northwest India—produce and produced Gujarat as a place of arrival and departure: as a crucible of mobility. Gujarat's merchant homes offer a model of transregional engagement produced through the itineraries of merchants who continue to see the regions bordering the Indian Ocean as an extension of their homes. While historians have generally studied these merchants through the bureaucratic archival records of imperial trade-companies, my project examines the yet-unexplored archives that collect around historic merchant homes. Curated by a current generation of merchant families who continue to ply old routes at the same time as they forge new ones, merchant homes offer a way to study oceanic connections from the inside-out and capital in cultural terms. Drawing on a rich array of collective and personal ethnographic and historical materials within homes, including architectural form; material objects; private journals, iv datebooks and travelogues; visual media; and merchant memory, my project brings into view a mercantile space-time on ocean's edge. Though emerging from concrete ethnographic and historical materials that cast powerful light on Gujarati merchant mobility in the British Empire over the course of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, my account of “homes of capital” pursues mercantile imaginings across long tranches of time routed through the political economic transformations of the period stretching between the tenth and twelfth centuries. I argue that these non-linear imaginings structured by oceanic mobility exist in the interstices of imperial, colonial and post-colonial state space. Placing merchant imaginings at the center of my analysis, my dissertation argues that the Indian Ocean was and continues to be a key spatial and temporal motivator of mercantile life. My project makes explicit the terms of this intimacy through a “chronotopic” study of merchant homes across Gujarat. Homes of capital in its broadest sense also include mercantile buildings like bridges, libraries, funerary sites, mosques and community centers, which, when linked together, created shaded pathways across the region in the face of an emergent colonial state centered on Bombay. In doing so I also reveal a more capacious mercantile subject, showing how new kinds of nineteenth-century circulations of Gujarati- language texts across merchant libraries, reading rooms and homes were embedded in and shaped a longue durée oceanic topography. My project documents the range of visual, material, textual and affective modes from within this topography through which merchants gave and give form to such a terraqueous region. v For my parents, Rajesh and Anupama Pant. vi Our lives are not our own…we are bound to each other. Past and present. ~ David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract iv List of Illustrations x Note on Maps xii Note on Transliteration xiii Acknowledgements xiv 1. Introduction: Homes of Capital Makata Lane 1 Terraqueous Gujarat 5 Itinerant Subjects 12 Oceanic Chronotopes 17 Chapter Outline 21 The Home in a Time of Violence 25 PART ONE: Dimensions 2. A Poet’s Ocean Introduction 33 Oceanic Patrimonies 37 Book of Wonders 41 An Ocean of Homes 54 Three Studies of Home 63 Conclusion: Poetic Returns 86 3. Charred City Introduction 88 Itinerant Origins 91 Historiographical Erasures 95 Time Travel (Writing) 100 Renovating the Longue Durée 111 Conclusion: Time and Space in Indian Ocean Gujarat 123 4. Building Life and Death Introduction: Paper Trails of Capital 125 viii Topographies of Reading 134 A Public of Paper 141 Bringing the Dead back to Life 152 Figurative Reburials, Posthumous Inhabitations 161 Conclusion 169 PART TWO: Inhabitations 5. Merchant Fortress Introduction 173 Echoes 177 Bharuch circa 1700 178 The Interiors of Capital 184 Restorations: Love in a Port City 198 Conclusion 207 6. Twilight in Surat Introduction: Abandoned Homes of Capital 208 Caste Arguments: Khattris in History 210 Kharwar Street: Heirlooms of Caste 219 The Singapore Connection 228 Conclusion 232 7. Conclusion: Chronotopic History 234 Bibliography 244 Biography 258 ix LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Figure 1. Havelis on Makata Lane 3 Figure 2. Map, Indian Ocean Gujarat 30 Figure 3. Map, Gujarat in the Indian Ocean 31 Figure 4. Map, Randeris across the Indian Ocean 53 Figure 5. Rander Homes 54 Figure 6. Patail Mansion, Rander 57 Figure 7. Butler Manzil, Rander 57 Figure 8. Nayatwada Ni Masjid, Rander 58 Figure 9. Ketaki Pant, Study in Pencil of the Entryway of Nayat Wada Ni Masjid, Rander, 2011 58 Figure 10. Porcelain Plate, Hathia Mansion, Rander, Made in Rangoon, Burma 68 Figure 11. Porcelain Plate, Hathia Mansion, Rander, Made in Maastricht, Holland 69 Figure 12. Porcelain Plate, Hathia Mansion, Rander, Made in Maastricht, Holland 69 Figure 13. Ahmed Manzil, Rander 70 Figure 14. Blue-White “Porcelain” (Ceramics), Ahmed Manzil 71 Figure 15. Madha Mansion, Rander 84 Figure 16. Madha Mansion Interior, Rander 85 Figure 17. Nayatwada Ni Masjid, Rander 119 Figure 18. Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy, Memorandum, Navsari 143 Figure 19. Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy, Undated Petition, Navsari 144 Figure 20. Begumwadi, Bharuch 173 Figure 21. Pierre Sonnerat, “Tisseran” (Weaver) 215 Figure 22. Land Deed of Kharwar Street 227 x Figure 23. Marble Bust of Sheth Sri Keshavram Singapuri 230 xi NOTE ON MAPS Maps of the Indian Ocean and Gujarat were created by Akshay Dhavle using R statistical software and libraries (http://www.r-project.org/), which are available under the GNU General Public License. Vector and raster map data was obtained from Natural Earth (http://www.naturalearthdata.com/). Natural Earth is a public domain map dataset, a collaboration involving many volunteer cartographers around the globe and originally created by Nathaniel Vaughn Kelso, Chief Cartographer at The Washington Post, and Tom Patterson, Chief Cartographer at the U.S. National Park Service. Data at 1:50m scale (1cm = 500km) was used for Indian Ocean centric maps, and data at 1:10m (1cm = 100km) was used for maps roughly centered around Gujarat. Natural Earth data was visualized in map form using the ggplot2 package for R developed by Hadley Wickham, with liberal help from online documentation and tutorials. Edwin Chen's tutorial was immeasurably helpful in accelerating the learning process. Official site for R: http://www.r-project.org/ Natural Earth: http://www.naturalearthdata.com/ Complete list of Natural Earth contributors: http://www.naturalearthdata.com/about/contributors/ ggplot2 documentation: http://docs.ggplot2.org/current/ Edwin Chen's ggplot2 tutorial: http://blog.echen.me/2012/01/17/quick-introduction-to- ggplot2/ xii NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION My transliteration of Gujarati words follows the Library of Congress standard scheme of Romanized transliteration (2011). I have used this as a guide and made slight changes for readability, including dropping the underdot marking retroflex letters. I also have used the most anglicized versions of names of individuals and places, which commonly appear in English-language texts. xiii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS A project such as this, based on research within merchant homes, rests on the hospitality of many people and institutions. I’d like to start by acknowledging the generous support of the Wenner-Gren Foundation; Harvard South Asia Initiative; Harvard University Asia Center; Department of Anthropology, Harvard University; Department of History, Duke University and Friedl Women’s Studies, Duke