Vernacular Capitalism and Intellectual History in a Gujarati Account of China, 1860–68

Abstract

This article examines one of the earliest Gujarati travelogues concerning China, written by Damodar Ishwardas—a Hindu resident of Bombay and a clerk for a Sunni Khoja commercial firm—and published in Bombay in 1868. Based on a three-year trip to the port cities of southern China, Ishwardas's text runs close to 400 pages and was patronized by a prominent stratum of Bombay's Gujarati-speaking commercial and bureaucratic elite. The primary intervention in this article is to analyze Ishwardas's account as a neglected relic of vernacular capitalism and vernacular intellectual history. Furthermore, the text presents an opportunity to reexamine the history of the Indian intellectual and mercantile engagement with late Qing China, especially before anticolonial nationalism and pan-Asianism supplied new paradigms for Indian writing on East Asia beginning around 1900. It further points to the many unstudied Indian materials that have yet to be integrated into the study of modern capitalism in the regions from the South China Sea to the western Indian Ocean.

The languages of Indian Ocean studies: Models, methods and sources

“…In more recent years, though, increasing attention has been paid to Arabic, Armenian, Persian, Ottoman Turkish, and Malay materials, in some cases drawing attention to interactions between these overlapping literary spheres (Alam & Subrahmanyam, 2007; Aslanian, 2011; Azra, 2004; Baig, 2020; Bang, 2003; Bishara, 2014; Blecher, 2018; Bradley, 2016; Casale, 2010; Feener et al., 2011; Green, 2019; Khazeni, 2020; Marashi, 2013; McDow, 2018; Peacock & Gallop, 2015; Reese, 2017; Ricci, 2011). A nascent body of work has explored the movement of Bengali, Gujarati, Malayalam, Urdu, Tamil, and Gujarati texts around the Indian Ocean (Akhtar, 2016; Alavi, 2015; Basu, 2015; Bose, 2006; Green, 2012b; Kooriadathodi, 2018; Muneer, 2016; O’Sullivan, 2021; Pant, 2021; Tschacher, 2010). But, aside from Arabic, the maritime dimensions of African written languages have largely been restricted to Swahili (Biersteker & Plane, 1989; Geider, 1992; Harries, 1965; Kresse, 2018; Versteegh, 2001; Vierke, 2016, 2017), though, as noted above, renewed attention to “Cape Malay” and Arabic‐Afrikaans ( Lisan‐e‐Afrikaans ) will hopefully improve our understanding of Africa's place in Indian Ocean exchanges (Effendi, 1979; Laffan, 2017; Stell, 2007; Stell et al., 2008).…”

Imagining Region in Late Colonial India: Jhaverchand Meghani and the Construction of Saurashtra (1921–47)

“… 13 On Bengali middle-class travelers and their writings, see K. Chatterjee (1995). O'Sullivan (2021) has recently written about a Gujarati travelogue on China.…”