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Relocating East and West in Peter Frankopan's the Silk Roads: a New Relocating East and West in Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Roads: A New History of the World Dr. Mallika Tripathi Assoc. Professor & Head Deptt. of Humanities FGIET, Raebareli & Dr. Ratan Bhattacharjee Assoc. Professor & Chairperson Dum Dum Motijheel College Kolkata India Abstract: Writing history of the world is not an easy task. One needs to pay attention to the minute details. Even missing a minor point makes one stand in the queue of birdbrains but Peter Frankopan not only took this herculean task but also proved his worth by forcing the readers to reassess the history of the world. Thus the present paper unfolds the hidden aspects of the Universe with special reference to The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan. Kewords: Ambition, Religion, Silk, Trade, world In the words of Gerald DeGroot, ‗Many books have been written which claim to be ―A New History of the World‖. This one fully deserves the title….‘. The Silk Roads: A New History of the World is certainly a dazzling piece of historical writing that offers the roadmap of the epic history of the crossroads of the world—the meeting place of East and West and the birthplace of civilization. It was on the Silk Roads that East and West first encountered each other through trade and conquest, leading to the spread of ideas, cultures and religions. From the www.ijellh.com 6 rise and fall of empires to the spread of Buddhism and the advent of Christianity and Islam, right up to the great wars of the twentieth century—this book shows how the fate of the West has always been inextricably linked to the East. Peter Frankopan realigns our understanding of the world, pointing us eastward. Historicism yields a certain predictability and explanatory power; this feature is pronounced in the writings of Hegel and Marx. A historian ―operates within the horizon of his own world view, a certain broad set of assumptions and beliefs‖ ( M.A.R. Habib. P. 760). Hence the dilemma of historical interpretation can easily lead to ― a kind of aesthetic formalism on the one hand , which denies history any constitutive role in the formation of texts and on the other hand to a historical view of texts as culturally and socially determined, a view that reduces emphasis on authorial intention and agency.‖ (Habib P.761). The new historicism which arose in 1980‘s reacted against both the formalist view of the literary text as somehow autonomous and Marxist views which ultimately related texts to the economic infrastructure which constituted the basis of Peter Frankopan‘s book. It is a kind of discourse situated within a complex of cultural discoursed in the discovery of the new geographical balance of the world from a sociological point of view. Peter in charting out the past and re-reading biased history written in modern times, vividly re-creates the emergence of the first cities in Mesopotamia and the birth of empires in Persia, Rome and Constantinople, as well as the depredations by the Mongols, the transmission of the Black Death and the violent struggles over Western imperialism. Throughout the millennia, it was the appetite for foreign goods that brought East and West together, driving economies and the growth of nations. Travelling enriches us with experience and the roads lead us to different destination thus fulfilling the hidden desire of the author where he wishes to know about the hidden truths of World, ‗I wanted to know more about Russia and Central Asia, about Persia and Mesopotamia. I wanted to understand the origins of Christianity when viewed from Asia; and how the crusades looked to those living in the great cities of the Middle Ages- Constantinople, Jerusalem, Baghdad, and Cairo, for example; I wanted to learn about the great empires of the east, about the Mongols and their conquests; and to understand how two world wars looked when viewed not from Flanders or the eastern front, but from Afghanistan and India.‘ In this 25 Chapter book the first one is about the Creation of the Silk Road. the second chapter deals with The Road of Faiths , the third The Road to a Christian East , the fourth ,The Road to Concord, In the sixth there is the Road of Furs , the seventh The Slave Road, the eighth The Road to Heaven , the ninth The Road to Hell , The tenth The Road of www.ijellh.com 7 Death and Destruction , the eleventh The Road of Gold , the twelfth The Road of Silver , the thirteenth the Road to Northern Europe the fourteenth the Road to Empire, the fifteenth The Road to Crisis , The sixteenth The Road to War, the seventeenth The Road of Black Gold, the eighteenth The Road to Compromise , The nineteenth The Wheat Road, the twentieth The Road to Genocide, The twenty first The Road of Cold Warfare, the twenty second The American Silk Road the twenty third The Road of Superpower Rivalry, the twenty fourth The Road to Catastrophe the last one The Road to Tragedy. This shows the gradual changes and evolution of history. As the writer beautifully says in the Preface: ― As a child one of my most prized possessions was a large map of the world.‖ He was uneasy of about the relentlessly narrow geographic focus of his classes at school during his teenage, because this map concentrated solely on Western Europe and the United States and left most of the rest of the world untouched. It was his boyhood dream that he would enlighten the world about the huge regions that had been passed over in silence. A book by Eric Wolf was an anthropological study that lazily accepted the lazy history of civilization where Ancient Greece begat Rome, and Rome begat Christian Europe , Christian Europe begat the Renaissance and the Renaissance the Enlightenment , the Enlightenment political democracy and the industrial revolution .The mantra of the political , cultural and moral triumph of the West prevailed and this historical account was flawed. An alternative way of looking at history was a necessity. He rightly realised that the regions that are not being accommodated in the historical study either got lost or suffocated by the insistent story of the rise of Europe. Again there were the biased views. The Christians located Jerusalem as its focus and midpoint while the Arab geographers put the Caspian Sea at its centre. Again an important Turkish map in Istanbul had at its heart a city called Balasaghun which was once considered the centre of the world. The Silk Road or Silk Route is an ancient network of trade and cultural transmission routes that were central to cultural interaction through regions of the Asian continent connecting the West and East by merchants, pilgrims, monks, soldiers, nomads, and urban dwellers from China and India to the Mediterranean Sea during various periods of time. Extending 10,000 kilometres (6,400 miles), the Silk Road derives its name from the lucrative trade in Chinese silk carried out along its length, beginning during the Han dynasty (207 BCE – 220 CE). The Central Asian sections of the trade routes were expanded around 114 BCE by the Han dynasty, largely through the missions and explorations of Chinese imperial envoy, Zhang Qian. The Chinese took great interest in the safety of their trade products and www.ijellh.com 8 extended the Great Wall of China to ensure the protection of the trade route. Trade on the Silk Road was a significant factor in the development of the civilizations of China, the Indian subcontinent, Persia, Europe, the Horn of Africa and Arabia, opening long-distance, political and economic relations between the civilizations. Though silk was certainly the major trade item from China, many other goods were traded, and religions, syncretic philosophies, and various technologies, as well as diseases, also travelled along the Silk Routes. In addition to economic trade, the Silk Road served as a means of carrying out cultural trade among the civilizations along its network. But this Silk Road seems to have got a new dimension in the new interpretation offered by Peter Frankopan in his book. It shows the eagerness of the author to make the world know more about the Silk Road as the crossroads of civilisation in the past. Anthony Sattin in an article in The Guardian (Sept 15) wrote : ―This ―new history of the world‖ is a strangely myopic one for it starts by ignoring thousands of years of documented human achievement to look at the rise of the Persian empire. But Frankopan is quick to make a point of this apparently arbitrary opening: he wants to recalibrate our view of history, to challenge assumptions about where we come from and what has shaped us.‖ Russia and Central Asia about Persia and Mesopotamia, the book clarifies the confused understanding about the origins of Christianity when viewed from Asia or how the Crusades looked to those living in the great cities of the Middle Ages – Constantinople, Jerusalem , Baghdad and Cairo. We get ideas about the great empires of the East, about the Mongols, and to understand how two world wars looked when viewed from the Flanders or the eastern front but from Afghanistan and India. The author‘s knowledge encompasses a vast area of linguistic diversity from the Russian to Arabic and it helped him to unlock a world waiting to be discovered. The book offers a vantage point to view the world‘s past and its present. In fact for millennia , it was the region lying between east and west , , linking Europe with the Pacific Ocean , that was the axis on which the globe spun , not as the biased study of history presented it .
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