Merchants and Mobility across Indian Ocean Gujarat by Ketaki Pant Department of History Duke ...

274 Pages·2015·3.84 MB·English

by  Ketaki Pant

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