Southeast Asia as Seen from Mughal India : Tahir Muhammad's 'Immaculate Garden' (ca. 1600) - article ; n°1 ; vol.70, pg 209-237

Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Muzaffar Alam

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Archipel - Année 2005 - Volume 70 - Numéro 1 - Pages 209-237
Muzaffar Alam, University of Chicago & Sanjay Subrahmanyam, University of California
at Los Angeles
Southeast Asia as Seen from Mughal India : Tahir Muhammad's Immaculate Garden (ca.
1600)
On a souvent cru que la xénologie n'existait pas en Inde moghole en tant que champ intellectuel, et que les Moghols ne montraient pas la moindre curiosité envers les autres pays de l'océan Indien. On a aussi voulu parfois contraster cette attitude des Moghols avec le cas ottoman, car, au XVIe siècle, les Ottomans ont manifestement essayé de développer un réseau maritime et politique qui allait jusqu'en Asie du Sud-Est. Cet essai est divisé en trois parties. Dans un premier temps, les auteurs revisitent les lieux communs sur les rapports entre les Ottomans et les pays de l'Asie du Sud-Est, notamment Aceh. La deuxième partie, le véritable cœur de l'essai, est construite autour d'un texte écrit vers 1600 par un intellectuel moghol, le Rauzat ut-Tâhirîn de Tahir Muhammad Sabzwari, œuvre encyclopédique mais contenant aussi une section fort intéressante consacrée aux pays voisins de l'Inde. On trouve dans ce texte des développements sur la situation politique et culturelle en Birmanie à la fin du XVIe siècle, ainsi qu'une vision assez originale du Sultanat d'Aceh juste avant l'époque d'Iskandar Muda (1607-1636). Enfin, les auteurs entreprennent la comparaison de la vision de Tahir Muhammad avec celle d'un texte plus célèbre, le Safîna-i Sulaimânî écrit par un certain Muhammad Rabi', qui faisait partie d'une ambassade saf avide envoyée à la cour du roi siamois Phra Narai, dans les années 1680.
29 pages
Source : Persée ; Ministère de la jeunesse, de l’éducation nationale et de la recherche, Direction de l’enseignement supérieur, Sous-direction des bibliothèques et de la documentation.

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• Publié par: ARCHIPEL0
• Publié le: 01 janvier 2005
• Nombre de lectures: 51
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Muzaffar Alam
Sanjay Subrahmanyam
Southeast Asia as Seen from Mughal India : Tahir Muhammad's
'Immaculate Garden' (ca. 1600)
In: Archipel. Volume 70, 2005. pp. 209-237.
Résumé
Muzaffar Alam, University of Chicago & Sanjay Subrahmanyam, University of California
at Los Angeles
Southeast Asia as Seen from Mughal India : Tahir Muhammad's "Immaculate Garden " (ca.
1600)
On a souvent cru que la xénologie n'existait pas en Inde moghole en tant que champ intellectuel, et que les Moghols ne
montraient pas la moindre curiosité envers les autres pays de l'océan Indien. On a aussi voulu parfois contraster cette attitude
des Moghols avec le cas ottoman, car, au XVIe siècle, les Ottomans ont manifestement essayé de développer un réseau
maritime et politique qui allait jusqu'en Asie du Sud-Est. Cet essai est divisé en trois parties. Dans un premier temps, les auteurs
revisitent les lieux communs sur les rapports entre les Ottomans et les pays de l'Asie du Sud-Est, notamment Aceh. La deuxième
partie, le véritable cœur de l'essai, est construite autour d'un texte écrit vers 1600 par un intellectuel moghol, le Rauzat ut-Tâhirîn
de Tahir Muhammad Sabzwari, œuvre encyclopédique mais contenant aussi une section fort intéressante consacrée aux pays
voisins de l'Inde. On trouve dans ce texte des développements sur la situation politique et culturelle en Birmanie à la fin du XVIe
siècle, ainsi qu'une vision assez originale du Sultanat d'Aceh juste avant l'époque d'Iskandar Muda (1607-1636). Enfin, les
auteurs entreprennent la comparaison de la vision de Tahir Muhammad avec celle d'un texte plus célèbre, le Safîna-i Sulaimânî
écrit par un certain Muhammad Rabi', qui faisait partie d'une ambassade saf avide envoyée à la cour du roi siamois Phra Narai,
dans les années 1680.
Citer ce document / Cite this document :
Alam Muzaffar, Subrahmanyam Sanjay. Southeast Asia as Seen from Mughal India : Tahir Muhammad's 'Immaculate Garden'
(ca. 1600). In: Archipel. Volume 70, 2005. pp. 209-237.
doi : 10.3406/arch.2005.3979
http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/arch_0044-8613_2005_num_70_1_3979Muzaffar Alam & Sanjay Subrahmanyam
Southeast Asia as Seen from Mughal India :
Tahir Muhammad's 'Immaculate Garden' (ca. 1600)
ocean, "Hindustan accounted and Melaka but within Sri is (Malâgha), described Lanka its extent". (Sarândïp), as and enclosed a considerable Aceh on (Âchïn), the east, number the west Moluccas and of south islands (Malûk) by the are
Shaikh Abu'l Fazl, A "in-i Akbari. (D
The Indian Ocean conjuncture
The existence of very extensive commercial and other relations between
the India of the Mughals and the kingdoms of Southeast Asia is perfectly
well-known, but still surprisingly difficult to delineate in fact with any great
clarity. (2) These relations must obviously have passed above all through two
principal corridors in the late sixteenth century, after the great Mughal
expansionary wave of the 1560s and 1570s : relations between the ports of
Gujarat (and most particularly Surat) and the havens of island Southeast
Asia, the Malay Peninsula and the Mergui-Tenasserim complex; and those
between Bengal and other ports of the Bay of Bengal littoral. Later, as the
Mughals advanced southwards down the Indian peninsula, we may equally
* An earlier version of this text was presented in the seminar of Claude Guillot at the EHESS
(Paris) on 13 May 2004, and we are grateful to a number of participants for comments and
suggestions.
1. Shaikh Abu'l Fazl ibn Mubarak, A 'in-i Akbari, trans. H.S. Jarrett, revised Jadunath Sarkar
(Calcutta, 1948), Vol. Ill, p. 7.
2. We thus return here to themes studied briefly in Sanjay Subrahmanyam, "Persianisation
and Mercantilism : Two Themes in Bay of Bengal History, 1400-1700", in Denys Lombard
and Om Prakash, eds., Commerce and Culture in the Bay of Bengal, 1500-1800 (New Delhi,
1999), pp. 47-85, as indeed in the rest of that conference volume by other authors.
Archipel 70, Paris, 2005 pp. 209-237 210 Muzaffar Alam & Sanjay Subrahmanyam
imagine that these relations would have grown more complex in their geo
graphical spread. Thus, in about 1700, ambassadors from the Restored
Toungoo dynasty in Burma to the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, arrived in the
port of Mylapur, which had only recently fallen under Mughal control, and
were received by the governor Da'ud Khan Panni. In the same years, we are
aware that ports like Pipli and Balasore maintained relations with a number
of Southeast Asian courts, ports and polities.
Inevitably, it is the commercial aspects of these relations that are the easi
est to seize. Historians of trade have been able to set out, and even quantify
in a limited way, the numbers of ships and the volume and value of goods
that moved between the ports of Mughal India and those of Southeast Asia.
We know that textiles formed a staple of Indian exports, and that Southeast
Asian spices, some metals and minerals, woods, and even elephants were
carried in the other direction. We are able to identify some of the great mer
chants who plied these routes, whether the Iranian magnates of
Masulipatnam, or the traders of Aceh, Mergui and Johor, or even some of the
more obscure merchants of Surat who traded in Aceh in about 1610. (3) What
we are able to reconstruct is, however, very largely a function of European
sources, a fact noted with irony and regret several decades ago by Ashin Das
Gupta. (4)
The history of mutual perceptions and cultural interactions is at any rate a
far harder nut to crack, because European sources are only of limited utility
in this respect. Still, in his important study published in 1967 of the Sultanate
of Aceh in the period of Iskandar Muda (1607-36), Denys Lombard called
attention at several points to the significance of the cultural link between
India and Sumatra from a Southeast Asian viewpoint. Drawing on the earlier
works of G.P. Rouffaer and Teuku Iskandar, Lombard commented regarding
the ruler Iskandar Muda that "on est en droit d'admettre que ce fut bien ce
grand Sultan d'Atjéh qui voulut (...) s'inspirer du grand Mogol".(5)
Rouffaer, it may be recalled, had studied with particular interest the nine-cir
cle seal of the Aceh Sultans, where one finds "around a central circle, con
taining the name of the reigning monarch, eight other circles with each one
containing the name of one of his great predecessors". The Dutch scholar
3. Shireen Moosvi, "Travails of a Mercantile Community : Aspects of Social Life at the Port
of Surat (Earlier Half of the Seventeenth Century) ", Proceedings of the Indian History
Congress, 52nd Session (New Delhi, 1992), pp. 400-409; Farhat Hasan, State and Locality in
Mughal India : Power Relations in Western India, c. 1572-1730 (Cambridge, 2004), p. 90.
4. See, for instance, Ashin Das Gupta, " Indian Merchants and Trade in the Indian Ocean ", in
Tapan Raychaudhuri and Man Habib, eds., The Cambridge Economic History of India, vol.
1 : c. 1200-1750 (Cambridge, 1982), p. 407.
5. Denys Lombard, Le Sultanat d'Atjéh au temps d'Iskandar Muda, 1607-1636 (Paris, 1967),
p. 79.
Archipel 70, Paris, 2005 Southeast Asia as Seen from Mughal India 211
had then noted the anterior mention and description in the Akbar Ndma of
Shaikh Abu'l Fazl of such a seal and concluded that the Acehnese usage had
a "Hindustani origin ".(6) Teuku Iskandar for his part had argued that the
anonymous text, Hikdyat Aceh, drew inspiration from the Akbar Nâma, and
that it was commissioned at the court of Iskandar Muda with the purpose
once more of following the Mughal model. (?) However, to cite Lombard more, while the structural and even anecdotal similarities are striking,
"s'il y a inspiration, il ne peut être question d'imitation". This discussion
thus suggests that by about 1600, there was a sufficient circulation of texts,
and perhaps even of savants, between Mughal India and the Sultanate of
Aceh, to permit such passages and transformations. To cite Lombard once
more : "Dans certaines façons de gouverner ou de penser, dans le vocabul
aire comme dans la littérature, dans la vie profane comme dans la vie
religieuse, on retrouve [à Aceh] l'Inde et surtout l'Inde islamisée des
Mogols ". (8) Certainly, there are a few mentions in the writings of Shaikh
Abu'l Fazl himself that make it clear that Aceh formed a part of his geo
graphical horizons, however indifferent he may have been to, say, the world
of the Europeans.
The temptation remains to imagine that the primary line of circulation
would have passed through Gujarat. This is for several reasons. First,
arguably the most celebrated Indian figure in the history of the Sultanate of
Aceh is Nur-ud-Din al-Raniri, author of the Bustân us-Salâtïn (" Garden of
the Sultans"), who originally came from Rander in Gujarat, and then moved
to Aceh in 1637. (9) In