Scholar Voices: Bose

Indian Ocean: Cradle of Globalization
Scholar Voices
Sugata Bose

Although best known as an economic historian of South Asia, in "Introducing An Interregional Arena through the Eyes of a Poet: Rabindranath Tagore's Discovery of the Indian Ocean," Sugata Bose suggests that there is a much more interesting story to be told when engaging students in thinking about the Indian Ocean world. Two key points guide Bose's current work:

the assumption that the organic unity of the Indian Ocean world was ripped apart by the arrival of the Europeans is innacurate.

traditional ties of economic and cultural relationships remain and can help us reconceptionalize the Indian Ocean world as an inter-regional arena.

Bose contends that Rabindranath Tagore's travels in the early years of the twentieth century to find Indians overseas and collect source materials for his work was also a search for greater India. Tagore, the Bengali poet who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, made many journeys around and beyond the Indian Ocean. In the process he became an acute observer of history. He did not treat 'India' as a monolith, but recognized the diversity of India. Tagore's intellectual journey made him a universalist and led him to promote an alternative to anti-colonial positions and the model of the European nation state. In a 1932 poem-panting Tagore wrote:

The night has ended.
Put out the light of the lamp
of thine own narrow corner
smudged with smoke.
The great morning which is for all
appears in the East.
Let its light reveal us
to each other
who walk on
the same
path of pilgrimage.

Bose makes the case that the study of Tagore's life and work offers a poetic, a different way to think about the blurred spatial boundaries of the Indian Ocean world.

Bose's new work, The Indian Ocean Rim: An Inter-Regional Arena in the Age of Global Empire, to be published by Harvard University Press, will cross area studies and disciplinary frontiers and bridge the domains of political economy and culture.

CAK

Publications:

Bose, Sugata, Agrarian Bengal: Economy, Social Structure and Politics (1986)
_____ , South Asia and World Capitalism (1990)
_____ , Peasant Labour and Colonial Capital in The New Cambridge History of India series (1993)
_____ , Credit, Markets and the Agrarian Economy of Colonial India (1994)
_____, with Ayesha Jalal, Nationalism, Democracy and Development (1997)
_____, with Ayesha Jalal, Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy (1998)

____ , "Space and time on the Indian Ocean Rim: Theory and History," in Modernity and Culture (New York 2002)

Links:
Rabindranath Tagore

Sugata Bose

Gardiner Professor of Oceanic History and Affairs ~ South Asia

Harvard University

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