When you hear the phrase ‘Asia on the Move’, the last thing that would come to your mind is musical instruments. At a time when New Delhi’s conference circuit is brimming over with foreign policy talks, to hear scholars talk about the contribution of preachers, musicians, nomads and painters in building India’s ties with Central Asia was refreshing.
The ties went beyond silk and trade routes. At the heart of this exchange were ideas that travelled.
The two-day international conference, ‘Asia on The Move’, at the India International Centre (IIC) explored the impact of this movement of musicians, merchants, travellers and artists across the continent. Scholars from the United States, Hungary, Russia, Uzbekistan and India among other countries sought to understand the overarching idea of Asia itself—Asianism.
“The goal was to bring to light the tremendous mobility and interactions of Asians in the long history of Asia,” said Gitanjali Surendran, professor at O.P. Jindal University and the convener for this conference.
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Economic ties
Trade, of course, played a pivotal role in fostering connections, giving rise to port cities from Maleka, a Portuguese settlement that can be traced to modern day Malacca in Malaysia, to Kochi in India. The diversity in these cities are early examples of cosmopolitanism, said Professor Sanjay Subhramanyam of the University of California, Los Angeles in a session titled ‘Port Cities and Mobility in Early Modern Asia’.
“It is and should be taken for granted that port cities are multi-ethnic,” he said. “There is no port city which just has one community living there.” But that didn’t mean there wasn’t segregation or attempts to enforce homogeneity. He gave the example of Kochi, when the city was partitioned between the Portuguese and the ‘natives’, with the Jews taking refuge on both, and of forceful implementation of a single ethnicity in Maleka when the Chinese asked the Muslims to leave the port in the 1400s.
The port city of Surat is another example of a city that survived one crisis after another from attacks to invaders destroying its architecture. But it not just survived, it thrived and was home to the Ethiopians, the baniyas, Jains and Europeans including Armenians.
The session left the audience wanting more.
“It was a galactic presentation. But why was there no mention of river ports?” asked one woman while emphasising the significance of river ports like Allahabad (now Prayagraj), Hooghly and Calcutta (now Kolkata).
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India’s connection to Egypt and Rome
When it comes to ancient trade routes in India, the Silk Route is almost always a talking point. But William Dalrymple turned his gaze on to the Golden Road–the cultural and economic network linking India to Egypt and Rome, where India enjoyed primacy for more than a thousand years between 250 BC and 1,200 CE. It’s the subject of Dalrymple’s yet to be published book, The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed The World.
It could explain how a statue of Buddha dating back to the Roman era was found last year at a dig in what was once the ancient Egyptian seaport of Berenice on the Red Sea. Similarly, Roman coins have been found in parts of present-day India and Pakistan, but not in China.
The scale of trade between India and Rome was monumental — over one billion, leading to a fivefold increase in shipping to India, said Dalrymple. While describing the challenges in navigating trade routes on the Red Sea and the Indus River, he spoke of the incessant desire of Rome to access India’s wealth, including gold, the spices of Southern India and cotton.
A conducive maritime highway then led to the opening of Roman embassies in the region. The revenue generated from these ancient trade routes have shaped the economic, cultural and artistic tapestry of the region.
The evidence of such a connection between Egypt (and subsequently Rome) and India can also be found in literature and art. Dalrymple drew connections between the Gandhara Buddha and Augustus’ statues and the presence of Libation trays and Harpocrates in Taxila.
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Music, a tool for diplomacy and politics
At the heart of this exchange were ideas that travelled. Music played a huge role too in cultural confluences.
“Musical instruments are [among the] various archaeological artefacts discovered in India, modern Pakistan, China, Afghanistan, and Central Asia. [They] are the only sources to assist with information about history of music and ancient and early mediaeval times, and interrelations between Indian and Central Asia,” said musicologist and music critic Dr. Dilorom Karomat.
Thriving trade made its impact on music in Central Asia and India–music was exported and consumed as a tool for diplomacy and politics. According to Karomat, these cultural exchanges go back to the time before Islam’s entry into India and continued right up to the 20th century.
In one of her papers, she wrote about a song-text collection in Delhi from 1669. “This text collection was a copy of an earlier anthology and it was the last extant record of the general Eastern repertoire,” she wrote.
Indian court music was patronised by the Central Asians in the 18th and 19th Centuries. According to Karomat, it was more popular in Afghanistan before it spread to Central Asia and Persia. Indian musicians were brought to Kabul by Amir Shaer Ali Khan in the 1860s, and along with their descendants, they made Kabul a centre for Hindustani music.
Navina Najat Haidar, historian and chief curator of Islamic art at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art explored how ideas travelled — through art, specifically the work of 16th century Persian painter, Farrukh Beg.
He’s produced mesmerising miniature paintings under the patronage of five known rulers in West and South Asia: Ibrahim Mirza of Safavid Mashhad, Mirza Muhammad Hakim of Kabul, Mughal emperors Akbar and Jahangir, and Ibrahim Adil Shah II of the Sultanate of Bijapur. He worked on the Baburnama and the Akbarnama, both commissioned by Akbar as historical documentation of Babur and Akbar’s reign.
Mughal emperor singled him out for praise, and he appears in Jahangir’s memoirs as “one of the peerless of his age. He also served in the court of Ibrahim ‘Adil Shah II in Bijapur. Many of his paintings bled Timurid and Mughal styles into what Haidar calls, a “new vision of startling sophistication”.
His paintings are as important as written records as a source of information of that period.
“Some small things and details we can only find through the paintings itself because these things are not often mentioned in historical texts. With small details one can see Beg’s connection to nature and especially trees,” says Haider. A painting in the Baburnama shows the emperor on horseback with servants on foot following him behind, carrying a lantern and a wine bottle. In fact, Babur recalled the incident in his memoirs,
But he left the patronage of the powerful Mughals to paint for the Sultan of Bijapur. One vivid painting shows Ibrahim Adil Shah II Khan on a white hawk and a red-legged horse. It’s fantastic and surreal—an insight into the painter’s mind and times.
At the end of the two-day session, politician, philosopher and scholar Karan Singh spoke about the idea of Asian identity.
“I’ve never heard someone say, ‘I’m proud to be an Asian’,” he said. People express pride in being Indian, Pakistani or Japanese. But pride in the Asian identity as a whole is rare. Conferences like Asia on the Move are a good starting point.
(Edited by Anurag Chaubey)