Views from the Deck of a Ship: Weaving Histories in the Brackish Water Zone of the Coromandel Coast, 1650–1800

Abstract

abstract: During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Coromandel Coast of Southeastern India became a world stage for artistic negotiations between local courts and European East India companies. After all, the region was both the endpoint of long-distance oceanic mobilities for European merchants and a site marking the boundaries of local kingdoms and polities. These two different orientations resulted in divergent perspectives on land and sea—what this article terms the “saltwater perspective” and the “ freshwater perspective.” This article discusses the intertwined nature of these two views in shaping the material culture of the region. While the saltwater perspective framed landscape (and seascape) through the lens of economic utility, favoring oceans and coastlines as corridors for mercantile dominance, the latter imagined inland territories and the freshwater rivers that irrigated them as intertwined entities that nurtured each other. By focusing on the differences between the saltwater and freshwater perspectives, this article is able to argue that this region’s negotiated, “brackish” mode of engaging with landscape underlay contemporary textile-making in Coromandel. This intertwined mode of making and viewing also highlights the agency of the landscape, rather than individual or national actors within it, in shaping artistic negotiations in early colonial India.