The Sovereign and the Pirate: Ordering Maritime Subjects in India’s Western Littoral, by Lakshmi Subramanian

Abstract

Lakshmi Subramanian’s book provides us with an interesting new study on the mechanics and dynamics of piracy in the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries. Situated in the waters of western India, it roams freely between colonial documentation and subaltern analysis, looking to tie together the two strands into a combined study of what maritime predation might have looked like two hundred years ago, on a remote stretch of coastline. This area—roughly bounded by the Gulf of Cambay on the east and the deserts of Sindh on the west—takes in parts of Gujurat, Kathiawad and Cutch, a long, baking coastline joining northwest India’s littoral to the Arabian Sea. This was prime territory for piracy at the end of the eighteenth century and beginning of the nineteenth precisely because it was a liminal sphere, once rather important (in the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries, and also in Antiquity) but now relegated to something of a backwater by the rise of Bombay and other cities more centrally aligned to the larger colonial economy. It is in a space such as this that Lakshmi Subramanian sees ripe terrain for scrutinising ‘piracy’—a term which certainly has a slippery definition. She sees it as nomenclature used by states to describe the very non-state-sanctioned activities of coastal populations, who saw little reason to adhere to the evolving geo-political order when it offered them precious little in return. She also sees regional piracy here as declarative of a subaltern viewpoint, a kind of economic, and occasionally even a political, challenge to rule by those from afar. The collision of both of these viewpoints makes for interesting and instructive reading in her study.