Ramblings on Surat

Maps(i)
Maps often act as a prelude to marvelous encounters. These are disguised as adventurous geographic explorations aspired to encounter unknown territories with secret zeal to conquer and rule. Maps are at times an outcome of such encounters with other geographies and cultures. Navigators travel across the world to bring home the map. Maps are also traveling objects, as a circulating artefact across the globe(ii).Ours is also a story of one such map and its circulatory regimes, a map of Surat city, produced in circa 1730, currently preserved in Maharaja Sawai Man Singh II Museum in Jaipur, copied and translated by a Japanese scholar who also sent a copy to us in the Centre for Social Studies, Surat.(iii)
A fascinating map for its attention to detail and also for its visual appeal, this map is a part of those over two hundred maps existing prior to the nineteenth century mainly of the north western, central and western parts of the subcontinent about which Susan Gole has drawn our attention recently(iv).The pre-colonial characteristics of this map are significant also because what Kapil Raj has argued, ‘maps were not culturally part of the Europian land traveller’s vade mecum until well into the nineteenth century’(v).
The timing of the production of this map then becomes crucial demonstrating one of the most fascinating cartographic illustrations coming from the second quarter of the long eighteenth century.However, before proceeding further on the historical context of this map we need to keep in mind the thinness of the collaborating historical evidences. For Hiromu Nagashima, the map was ‘drawn within the several years around 1730’. The basis of his argument is accounts of certain prominent individuals of this city around this time as mentioned by a legendry historian of this city, Ashin Das Gupta. Refering to Das Gupta, Nagashima writes,
“Mulla Abdul Ghafur, the biggest merchant of Surat in those days died in 1718 and his son also died very soon and the latter’s son, Mulla Muhammad Ali succeeded him. According to Das Gupta, Mulla Muhammad Ali built a mosque at his residence in 1723 and he fortified Mulla Abdul Ghafur’s wharf at Atwa at latest by 1730. The green building at his residence on the map seems to be the mosque(No.79). Mulla Abdul Ghafur’s garden with fortified walls and gates is seen at Atwa on the map (No.21). This fortified garden seems to be the fortified wharf mentioned by Ashin Das Gupta. Mulla Muhammad Ali died in 1734. Therefore, the map must have been drawn at some time between 1723 and 1734”(vi).
The years around 1730 (when this map was drawn) was also a time of whirlwind in the history this city, the subject of this cartographic endeavour. While the beginning of Seventeenth century witnessed high prosperity for Surat and we come to know that 112 ships were listed as using the port in 1701. The value of Surat’s trade, in Das Gupta’s calculation was over Rs.16,000,000 in 1699(vii).In 1946 the total turnover mentioned in an extensive memoir on the trade of Surat by Jan Schreuder, directeurof the Dutch company was Rs. 4,545,606 roughly amounting a quarter of the former figure of 1699(viii).The first half of the eighteenth century witnessed a rapid decline of Surat. The causes of this decline were rooted in a cluster of historical factors—decline of three Asiatic empires ( Mughals, Safavids and the Ottomans leading to the decline of long distance trade networks, Maratha raids disrupting the regional supply routes and in this manner form a Asian story giving way to the rise of British dominance by 1750. The years around 1730 thus come before us forming a middle ground in this story of this city, this region and the Asian story(ix).
Coming from such a crucial historical context, this map of Surat then potentially contains a story that can be told in either manner. It can be a narrative of decline that followed after Indian trade and merchants gave way to Britishers in the second half of the eighteenth century. This can also be about the city of Surat with its Asiatic trade network, about a city that it was at the time of its zenith and also about the romance of wealth that went into the construction of the Surat, its built environment and its city- spaces. However, the question is how we want to interpret this map. It also depends upon how to look at this map from circa 1730, a historical trace, a circulating artifact, another cartographic representation with its own set of rules and grammar or a code to enter into the city of Surat. A historical trace, a code of/from the past, ultimately a code to the city of Surat. The question is also about the historical nature of this trace, this code and about the historical nature of the codified city of Surat itself. Away from the historical, the complicated question is also to ask what does this code coming from one particular time, this trace of the past offer for an understanding of the contemporary city life of Surat. How to meaningfully engage with the traces of the past to understand the experiential understanding of the contemporary city? How to bring the historical and the contemporary close to each other without necessarily allowing analytical hierarchy while dealing with each of them? The map of surat from circa 1730 appears in this respect both as an entry point as well as a site demanding some analytical depth to understand the code, the map and the city. Can we walk in the city following these traces from circa 1730(x)?

II

The very first thing that strikes any onlooker in this map is two tier walls. These walls that encircle the city on the map, where do they lead us in our engagement? They guide our eyes while looking at this map, how to extend this gaze? How to explore remnants of these walls, if there exists any? Is there any trace left in terms of the experiences of these walls, physical structures, memories, narratives. At the first instance, it appears that the ring road (which has a considerable influence on the spatial experience and organization of this city) follows the outer walls and remnants of both the walls can be found either physically or in memories and narratives (textual or pictorial). One of the tasks then is to follow the walls.
The predominance of the walls in medieval town planning also leads us to the question of (in) security as walls were primarily to guard the city. But there was also a chor darwaja properly delineated on the map. The representation of chor darwaja then also provides as a clue to explore different kinds of spaces that were kept open within the medieval logic of security and town planning. What does this mean to us while thinking on the issue of town planning and security, regimes of legality and practices that make these regimes porous in contemporary urban life?(xi)
Where do these gates and doors lead us in a city like Surat? Old houses, localities and street patterns can be one way to walk through these gates? Another path could be to look at disasters like flood, fire and plagues and ask the question of town planning, security and walls from the vantage point of catastrophy.
On the other hand, these gates also point towards the other, the excluded, the outside of the city and we find ourselves in gardens, graves, burial grounds and cremation grounds. The city had a number of gardens (i.e. Dutch mentioned as baari baldez, French, English, Armenian, baari Hazi salih, baari Allah Baksh’s, Mullah Abdul Ghafur’s garden etc. Gardens or orchards are mentioned in the map as baari) that also find their place in the map under consideration here. Ashin Das Gupta informs that “the garden houses round the city were locations where Europeans and Indians would presumably meet as normal human beings living together in a town. This life was not reported in the official papers”(xii).These gardens were also provided on rent(xiii).We come across (we have specific reference of Dutch factory here) ‘a considerable amount of money’ shown every year in the council's books as having been spent on maintenance’(xiv).Das Gupta’s account indicate gardens as a kind of intermediate space, a non-place revealing heterotopic characteristics, an other space of Michel Foucault(xv).This opens up at least two specific trajectories for further exploration. Firstly, can we actually call these medieval gardens as heterotopic spaces, places that were both part of the city life and yet outside the everyday-ness of urban nature of the city? And if so, then secondly, we need to ask about the contemporary nature of these ‘other spaces’ when the city has expanded and incorporated these gardens at least physically within its fulcrum. In more focused manner we can pose the question, what is Dutch Garden in the memory and life of Surat, a ‘zero mile’ with a Post Office as the sign post? The shift of focus from looking at the gardens as historical sites to treating them as sites of memory and everyday life also allows us to understand the temporal nature of these sites and may further lead to the ways in which spaces loose their functional charm and over the course of time remains no more than fossilized spaces devoid of earlier life spirits. This may be the case with water bodies like tanks (i.e. Gopi Talab) and step wells. One can argue that these water bodies are alter ego of earlier gardens. Earlier gardens were ‘other spaces’ now, these non-functional water bodies are parts of city’s ‘other spaces’.
The frame of heterotopias also allows us to look at spaces and places associated with community of Parsis in fresh perspective. Environments of Parsi Sheri or the small township at Udhwada (located not far from Surat), dastur colony, locked Parsi houses all point to the otherness of these locations. These locations invoke images of different times, an island in the middle of the busy urban centre, a time warp.
Heterotopic nature of these locations may open new ways of looking at these places but it may not offer an adequate framework to understand the multiple functions and multi-tiered imageries of these locations. At this stage one can only hope that these forays can open up inner gates of Surat. Other spaces leading to another city, a hidden city. Thus, by calling hidden city, the idea is to reconstruct the experiences of city life from the perspectives of those communities (like Parsis, Vohras, Sufis), with variable stakes in the city ranging from their memories and histories to communities with relatively recent journeys into the city (marathi speaking migrants from neighbouring regions of Maharastra)(xvi).In this manner, hidden city is a metaphor for a whole range of urban experiences that are either invisible in the dominant discourses and practices in this city or about memories of this city that have lost their charm. In a way, hidden city is about archaeology of experiences leading to a whole gamut of social space and physical terrain that are difficult to locate at any given moment and terrain but are available simultaneously in the past and the present, memory and history, experiences and representations, shared and fractured realities of Surat. A city that was once upon a time multi cultural and cosmopolitan in true sense of the term(xvii).A city that was called as ‘Babul Macca’, the Gateway to Macca.
The biggest challenge for any such exploration is the question of approach, how to approach a subject that is neither explained only from the methods of historical research (the relation between history and memory obviously raise this question) nor can it afford to detach itself from historical enquiries into the past(xviii).The challenge is how to recover and where to locate those experiences that are neither consumed by the history nor been able to sever its past ties. The other question related but hitherto not given due consideration is the domain of the experience itself(xix). How the spaces of Surat are experienced, lived through and enter into the realm of the memory? This experiential city spaces with their narratives (of desires and sufferings and a whole plethora of emotions) would be different from the production of space as the concept has been deployed by Henry Lefebvre in his seminal work, The Production of Space(xv). In the case of Surat, the question would be, does experiential city escape the legacies of the historical city or does it comply with the historical, the remembered and the forgotten pointing us back to the memory and the history? Does the binary of the historical and its other exhaust the possibility of recovering the experiential? There may be many more questions and ways of looking at the experiential but the relevance of asking them here is also to find a way for any engagement with the contemporary city. The difficult challenge is how to locate the contemporary without voiding it but also without inhabiting it completely with the agency of the history. Does this mean that enquiry into the experiential will be located in the liminal and fragile analytical frame at the threshold of an analytical frame itself.

Notes

i. A large part of this essay began with a conversation with Prof. Biswaroop Das and around a map of Surat (c.1730). We talked on a number of issues in the evening of 6th February 2008 at CSS. We started this conversation in quite a random manner with an objective of seeking a way to engage meaningfully with this map.

ii. See Kapil Raj, “Circulation and the Emergence of Modern Mapping: Great Britain and Early Colonial India 1764-1820”, Claude Markovits, Jacques Pouchpedass and Sanjay Subrahmanyam (eds.), Society and Circulation: Mobile People and Itinerant Cultures in South Asia 1750-1950, Permanent Black, Delhi, 2003, pp:23-54. He has highlighted “the ways in which the circulation of competencies and objects, and the attempts to control this circulation, contributed to the emergence of modern-day map literacy and culture. By providing an alternate account of the cultural and political history of the construction of geographical knowledge and practices based on historical evidence”, he has shown “the untenability of the claims of recent social historical scholarship that European and Indian scientific practices were radically different at the time of colonization, that ‘western’ science was introduced into India by the British as part of the ‘civilising mission’. Indeed, the case of the geographical exploration of British India in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries provides a good illustration of the way in which British and Indian practitioners and skills met around specific projects, how they were reshaped and the modern map and its uses co-emerged in Idnia and Britain through the colonial encounter”. Kapil Raj, Ibid, pp:26-27.
iii. See Hiromu Nagashima, “On a Map of Surat ( a Mughal Port Town) Drawn in the Former Half of the 18th Century”, Nagasaki Perfectural University Journal, vol.40, no.2, September 2006.
iv. See Susan Gole, Indian Maps and Plans from Earliest Times to the Advent of European Surveys, Manohar, Delhi, 1989; cited by Kapil Raj and Hiromu Nagashima.
v. Kapil Raj, Ibid, p.29.
vi. Hiromu Nagashima, ibid, pp:1-2. In the absence of any external collaborating evidence about the map, this internal semiotic reference will be difficult to defend for the authenticity of the production years of this map. But, here, the authenticity about historical chronology is not the objective of engagement hence, we can safely rely on Nagashima’s analogy.
vii. Ashin Das Gupta, Indian Merchants and the Decline of Surat C.1700-1750, in Ashin Das Gupta, India and the Indian Ocean World: Trade and Politics, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2004 ( 1979), p.326 and p.19.
viii. Ashin Das Gupta, p.19.
ix. Also see P.J. marshall, “Introduction” to Ashin Das Gupta, Ashin Das Gupta, India and the Indian Ocean World: Trade and Politics, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2004, pp:vii-xx.
x. Following de Certeau, ‘walking’ as a metaphor has been quite a power one in the study of the city in the last couple of decades. See Michel deCerteau, “Walking in the City”, Practice of Everyday Life, University of California Press, Berkley, 1984, pp: 91-110.
xi. An English traveler who officiated as Chaplain of the English Factory at Surat from around the middle of September 1691(?) to 1693 writes that “The entrance into the city is by six or seven gates, where are centinels fixt continually, requiring an Account, upon the least Suspicion, of all that enter in, or pass out of the city”. J.Ovington, A Voyage to Surat in the Year 1689, edited by H.G. Rawlinson, Oxford University Press, London, 1929, p.130. This travelogue describes the life of Surat quite vividly hence a great source of information about this city during its heydays.
xii. See Ashin Das Gupta, “Pieter Phoonsen of Surat, c. 1730-1740”, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 22, no. 3, Special Issue: Asian Studies in Honour of Professor Charles Boxer. (1988), pp. 551-560, here p. 559.
xiii.Das Gupta, Pieter Phoonsen, p. 556.
xiv. Das Gupta, Pieter Phoonsen, p.560
xv. See Michel Foucault, "Of Other Spaces," Diacritics , vol. 16, Spring 1986, 22-27.
xvi.Unlike other communities mentioned here those affiliated with different Sufi orders do not form a coherent social unit. In fact, they are mentioned here because of their distinct association with some of the city spaces and also for a possible line of enquiry on the ways in which religious practices and city spaces negotiate and shape each other. See Peter Van Der Veer, “Playing or Praying: A Sufi Saint's Day in Surat”, The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 51, no. 3, August, 1992, pp. 545-564.
xvii.By multi cultural pasts hovering over to the present city, the particular work in my mind is Ashis Nandy, “Time Travel to a Possible Self: Cranganore, Cochin, Jews, Zamorins”, Time Warps, Rutgers University Press, Delhi, 2002, 157-209.
xviii.On history and memory see Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Leiux de Memoire”, Representations, no.26, Special Issue: Memory and Counter Memory, spring, 1989, pp: 7-24.
xix. See Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History: Essays on the Destruction of Experience, Translated by Liz Heron, Verso, London and New York,1993, particularly pp: 11-64.
xv. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith, Blackwell, MA, 2007 (1974).