IISER MOHALI

Abstract: Bengal in the seventeenth century formed a crucial part of early-modern global connections as it witnessed the arrival of the Dutch and English East India Companies and their intervention into the existing social structure. The Portuguese had settled earlier in different parts of this area. But long before any Europeans arrived, Bengal was already a crucial node in the trading networks of the Indian Ocean. Its sprawling markets were accustomed to regular visitors and traders from Pegu to Persia who bought its variety of merchandises, including silk and other commodities. While the Portuguese penetrated these networks and intermingled with the local people and disturbed the balance of power, the Dutch and the English used coercion and aggravated this unevenness of power relations in this region even more. Accounts of India began to be written in a stereotypical fashion, as it came to be represented in different ways by travellers, missionaries, diplomats and merchants who visited the subcontinent from Europe. The seventeenth century was also a time when Europe witnessed a proliferation of printed literature. Amsterdam, Antwerp and London saw expensive productions of geography books from eminent publishers with illustrations in woodblock paintings. Wouter Schouten’s Oost-indische voyagie was one such publication that was produced in Amsterdam in the late seventeenth century. Schouten was a surgeon in the VOC and came to India. Of many other places, he visited Bengal. He witnessed the festivals, festivities and amusements there and wrote about them, accompanied by hand-drawn illustrations within the usual trope of what Benjamin Schmidt called the ‘exotic’. Yet there were moments when he departed from his stereotypes to give the audience a glimpse of scientific temper while describing certain acts. Why did Schouten write about Bengal and publish a volume on his voyages in India? How was Bengal represented in it, in the midst of other publications that swarmed the European literary market of his time? Using Schmidt’s idea of the ‘exotic’ and showing Schouten’s departure from this pattern at times, I show how Europe’s India was variegated and depended on the social and political background of the writer, in this case of Schouten. By doing so, I also try to show how early modernity evolved and how Schouten’s book and his descriptions of Bengal defined the early-modern period in history.

About the Speaker: Byapti is an Assistant Professor of History at the Thapar School of Liberal Arts and Sciences in Punjab. She received her PhD in History from Leiden University in the Netherlands. She specialises in socio-economic and cultural history of the Indian Ocean (1600-1800). In her doctoral dissertation, she examined the networks of informal interactions between the Mughal nobles, the local brokers and the Dutch East India Company officials in Bengal in the seventeenth century. Byapti has taught briefly at the Institute for History at Leiden University. She has also worked as a researcher for the National Archives in the Hague and has worked at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. She was granted the Erasmus Mundus IBIES scholarship for pursuing her doctoral research and COSMOPOLIS scholarship for studying History at Leiden University. She has pursued her M.A. at the Centre for Historical Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Medieval History and her B.A. at Jadavpur University in History.