Woven Webs: Trading Textiles around the Indian Ocean

Throughout its long history, the changing networks of the Indian Ocean textile trade have served as circuits of material communication, transmitting cultural values embodied in cloth, defining and redefining identities and relationships. This paper explores some of the cultural ramifications of this venerable trade. From ancient times, India was a major exporter of textiles, sitting at the centre of a complex regional network of exchanges which inserted Indian cottons and silks as prestige items into the textile regimes of societies all around the Indian Ocean. The balance between indigenous production marking local identity and Indian imports marking elite status and trans-local identity was disrupted by the spread of the competing globalisations of Islam and Christianity. Colonialism expanded networks and forged new connections, redirecting a significant portion of production through metropolitan centres towards a global market and facilitating a dynamic process of cultural exchange. By the late 20th century India was no longer the dominant player in a regional system, but one of several players in a global system. Nevertheless, within this new system particular networks continue to connect the disparate communities of the Indian Ocean and to play a complex role in negotiating identification with and resistance to competing globalisations

Review: Global Indian Diasporas

Book Revie

Indian Ocean Traffic: Introduction

Like the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean has been a privileged site of cross-cultural contact since ancient times. In this special issue, our contributors track disparate movements of people and ideas around the Indian Ocean region and explore the cultural implications of these contacts and their role in processes that we would come to call transnationalization and globalisation. The nation is a relatively recent phenomenon anywhere on the globe, and in many countries around the Indian Ocean it was a product of colonisation and independence. So the processes of exchange, migration and cultural influence going on there for many centuries were mostly based on the economics of goods and trade routes, rather than on national identity and state policy

'Ocean of Stories': an introduction

Editors' introduction to the volume

Boundaries and Crossings: Religious Fluidity in Twenty-first Century India

Following Partition, newly independent India adopted a constitution based on secularism and rights for minorities. In recent years, under the Bharatiya Janata Paty government, this model of society has been steadily eroded and supplanted by one favouring Hindu nationalism. This shift has changed the ways in which various religious communities relate to each other as well as their relationship with the state. In this special issue, we examine how these social and political shifts have impacted on the willingness of individuals to engage across religious boundaries and highlight instances of continuing religious cosmopolitanism. &nbsp

Dreams, History and the Hero in the Chansons de Geste

The predictive dreams and divine revelations in which epics and histories abound contrast with the dreams of personal desire to be found in the romances. For the twelfth century epic poetry was a form of history. Like history it was permeated with a religious world-view. Whereas the romance dream tends to express the fundamental theme of the romance, namely the alienation of the individual from the social group, epic and historical dreams function to situate the individual in a social and religious context. The chansons were written in vernacular poetry and the histories in Latin prose and verse but they shared a common subject matter in the exploits of famous kings and warriors, and they were subject to the same influences and examples. Following the classical view of history as rhetoric, medieval historians sought to glorify nations and their rulers, while hopefully entertaining their readers5. Dreams served to demonstrate the exceptional nature of the protagonists, their providential mission and moral status, and like digressions in general, to provide a relief from an accumulation of details which historians feared would prove tedious. Epic poetry formed part of this approach to history. Virgil's Aeneid provided the model by which the rising barbarian nations could be endowed, like Rome, with a noble Trojan descent. Geoffrey of Monmouth was to be the twelfth-century's most notable practitioner of this technique which Suger applied to the Capetians and Ekkehard to Henry V

Aeneid VI and Medieval Views of Dreaming

Virgil's Aeneid was the most popular classical text preserved by the Middle Ages'· Like many classical works, it abounds in dreams and so it is not surprising that it should have influenced medieval thought concerning them. Perhaps even more importantly, the Aeneid was seen by medieval scholars as resembling a dream, in that it was a falsehood that concealed a truth, and in this respect it was representative of all pagan and indeed fictional literature. Virgil's contribution to medieval dream theory derives preeminently from Aeneid VI, which both provides a model of an otherworld journey and makes metaphoric statements about the nature of dreams. Virgilian imagery figures in Gregory the Great's account of Stephen's vision, in the popular Visio San Pauli, in Gregory of Tours account of Sunniulfs vision, in the visions of Prudentius and W etti, in the twelfth-century visions of Tundale and St.Patrick's Purgatory, and, of course, in Dante's Divine Comedy where Virgil guides Dante through HeiJ2. Aeneas' descent to the otherworld through a cave with an ecstatic priestess as guide suggests incubation such as medieval Christians practised at St.Patrick's Purgatory. Virgil's account was inspired by Plato's vision of Er, itself a literary version of a shamanistic soul journey3 Aeneid VI begins with Daedalus, whose flight Neoplatonic commentators saw as symbolic of that of the soul, and ends with Aeneas and the Sybil emerging, curiously enough, from the Gate of False Dreams. Between these two points Virgil not only makes several references to dreams but also presents a Platonic myth of the eternal cycle of the soul's incorporation, purification and release. The nature of this allegory, and the meaning of the Gate of Ivory and the fa/sa insomnia which pass through it, excited the interest of medieval commentators as they continue to puzzle modems.

Visions of Disaster in the Central Middle Ages

Whereas modern Western scientific thought has tended to draw a sharp distinction between nature and society, for the early middle ages they were united as part of God's creation (cf. Davidson 1989). For a medieval cleric, a disaster was not a 'natural' event calling forth a 'social' response. Rather, the medieval imagination both defined disaster and gave it meaning, by placing it in a wider intellectual, moral and symbolic context. In a sense this is true of all societies. A disaster may start as a natural event, but in becoming a disaster it becomes a social experience, that is an experience defined and interpreted according to social beliefs. Not even natural disasters can remain purely 'natural'. A close examination will reveal their social dimension-who they affect and why. At first glance some events appear unequivocally disastrous. Earthquakes and plagues seem to afflict indiscriminately everyone who has the misfortune to be in their vicinity. Yet some people are more vulnerable to their assaults than others -the poor more than the rich, or urban dwellers more than those who live in the country. And while few people would dispute that such events are disastrous, people nevertheless differ on what such disasters may mean. Religious fundamentalists were swift to see the 1989 San Francisco earthquake and the Aids epidemic as divine punishments for a godless and unnatural lifestyle. This approach is a commonplace of religious disaster interpretation. Medieval writers were equally willing to see unpleasant events as divine retribution for sins. We are never as good as we should be, or as the moralists would like us to be

Woven Webs: Trading Textiles around the Indian Ocean

Throughout its long history, the changing networks of the Indian Ocean textile trade have served as circuits of material communication, transmitting cultural values embodied in cloth, defining and redefining identities and relationships. This paper explores some of the cultural ramifications of this venerable trade. From ancient times, India was a major exporter of textiles, sitting at the centre of a complex regional network of exchanges which inserted Indian cottons and silks as prestige items into the textile regimes of societies all around the Indian Ocean. The balance between indigenous production marking local identity and Indian imports marking elite status and trans-local identity was disrupted by the spread of the competing globalisations of Islam and Christianity. Colonialism expanded networks and forged new connections, redirecting a significant portion of production through metropolitan centres towards a global market and facilitating a dynamic process of cultural exchange. By the late 20th century India was no longer the dominant player in a regional system, but one of several players in a global system. Nevertheless, within this new system particular networks continue to connect the disparate communities of the Indian Ocean and to play a complex role in negotiating identification with and resistance to competing globalisations