15 Nov. Subah Dayal (NYU) and Alexis Dudden (U Conn) 

4:00-5:15 Subah Dayal, Elegies to the Port: Surat and Vengurla in the Persianate imaginary Link to Readings (1) (2)

Subah Dayal is a historian of the Indian Ocean, with a focus on early modern South Asia and the Persianate world. Her current book draws on literary and archival materials in Persian, Urdu, and Dutch to examine how regional household lineages in the Mughal empire’s peripheries transformed institutions and circulation networks in the Indian Ocean. Her research interests are in connected histories, household studies, comparative early modernities, global history, and pre-modern documentary and manuscript cultures. Her publications include “Vernacular Conquest? A Persian patron and his image in the 17th-century Deccan” in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East (Duke, 2017); “Making the ‘Mughal’ Soldier: Ethnicity, Identification, and Documentary Culture in southern India 1600-1700” forthcoming in the Journal of the Social and Economic History of the Orient (Brill, 2020), and “On Heroes and History: Responding to the Shahnama (The Book of Kings) in the Deccan 1500-1800” will appear in the edited volume, Iran and the Deccan: Persianate Art, Culture, and Talent in Circulation (Indiana University Press, 2020). Dayal also developed pedagogical approaches for teaching connected histories in the classroom through an NEH Summer Institute Fellowship in 2017 on ‘Beyond East and West: Exchanges and Interactions across the Early Modern World (1400-1800).’ After receiving her BA from Rutgers University and Masters from the Center for Historical Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, Dayal earned her PhD in History from UCLA, where her research was funded by Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London. Before coming to Gallatin, she was assistant professor of South Asian history at Tulane University and Clemson University.

Abstract: Recent revisions in maritime history have urged shifting our attention from the world of commerce and trade in Indian Ocean port-cities (largely examined through European-language archives) to exploring them as nodes of intellectual exchange (studied through chronicles, treatises, and administrative documents in Persian and Arabic). This paper will turn to a kindred body of Persianate materials, namely in the pan-regional literary idiom of Dakkani Urdu, that memorialized the lifecycle of two port-cities in the seventeenth century – Surat in Mughal Gujarat and Vengurla in the Deccan on the Konkan coast. It will investigate how regional vernacular poet-historians in inland courts, who had never visited the port-city, attempted to make sense of its rise, fall, and destruction.

In doing so, regional literati largely ignored the presence of European actors, so often heralded in scholarship as keepers of these gateways to the seas. Vernacular poets understood port-cities as critical sites where local, regional, and imperial sovereignties were bitterly contested, negotiated, and redefined. Formulating new narratives that connected maritime and agrarian power, seventeenth-century actors plotted contestations between the Deccan sultans, the Mughals, and the Marathas over Surat and Vengurla onto a wider canvas of contentious politics. Entering the story of maritime power from a different textual register – poetic memories of the port-city –  allows us to connect the study of Persianate literary cultures with Indian Ocean social history. Rather than viewing these nodes merely as sites of commercial exchange, we may then unearth what the early modern port-city meant to contemporary non-European observers, who never passed through it, but were deeply aware of its role in transforming the social and economic world of the western Indian Ocean.

5:30-6:45 Alexis Dudden, “Japanese Territorial Disputes and the Legacy of Empire.” (Link to online reading)

Alexis Dudden is professor of history at the University of Connecticut, where she teaches modern Japanese, Korean, and international history. Dudden received her BA from Columbia University in 1991 and her PhD in history from the University of Chicago in 1998. She has lived and studied for extended periods of time in Japan and South Korea, with awards from Fulbright, ACLS, NEH, and SSRC as well as fellowships at Princeton and Harvard. She is the 2015 recipient of the Manhae Peace Prize, and her books include Troubled Apologies Among Japan, Korea, and the United States (Columbia) and Japan’s Colonization of Korea (Hawaii). Currently, Dudden’s research centers on Japan’s territorial contests with regional neighbors, completing a book project tentatively called, The Opening and Closing of Japan, 1850-2020 (with Oxford). She publishes regularly in print and online media, most recently, “America’s Dirty Secret in East Asia” (NYT).