ABSTRACT

As the title suggests, this volume looks into the way how the Indian Ocean circuits shaped the nature and contours of early modern India. The frequent movement of people, commodities and ideas through the Oceanic space particularly after 1500 brought in variegated forms of changes that effected some sort of break from the intensely rural societies of medieval period and helped India to march towards a different stage showing some marked progress with specific consciousness and world-views of its own. The recurring circulation of goods and wealth of different forms between the maritime exchange centres of India and the nodal centres of its hinterland during this period helped to reduce the relative isolation of the rural and semi-rural societies and relatively overcome the growth constraints by facilitating the integration of far-flung production centres of the hinterland with the various exchange centres of the coastal rim in an intense way, causing some forces of early modernity to permeate into the subcontinent. Intensified circulatory processes in the Indian Ocean from c. 1500 onwards were followed by equally intense moves from various political players and economic actors to burgeon their realms of power and profit through subtle channels of coast-hinterland connectivity and nuanced linkages that they managed to develop eventually between the two. In this process the narrow borders of regional polity, languages and ethnicities as well as societal isolation started crumbling down carrying India further forward and facilitating the process of knowledge circulation, technological uses and information exchanges in an unprecedented way to a larger portion of its geography.1