By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

The Early History Of Gujarat

The world maps in Mughal paintings reveal the aspiration of the Mughal emperors to be rulers of the world or. This is indicated by the names they chose upon their accession to the throne: Salim assumed the title Nur aI-Din Jahangir Badshah Ghazi, meaning Warrior Emperor World Conqueror (who is) the Light of the Faith, while Khurram called himself Shah Jahan, King of the World. Accompanying the trend toward larger-scale polities and institutions in the early modern period, then, was a resurfacing of the ideal of universal empire. In fact after direct sea links were established between Europe, Asia, and the Americas around 1500, a global econ­omy spanning diverse regions of the world gradually emerged.

The Mughal empire was based in the interior of a large land-mass and derived the vast majority of its revenues from agriculture. Because of this, the Mughal emperors are often said to have lacked interest in the coastal territories of the subcontinent and their flourishing maritime trade. Agriculture was certainly the mainstay of the Mughal economy, and the early Mughal court was familiar only with overland or river routes to other regions. Not until the conquest of Gujarat in 1572 did the empire reach the ocean - Akbar, who led the Mughal army in this campaign, is said to have ridden to the Gujarat coast specifically in order to get his first glimpse of a sea. The Mughals never did create a navy, leaving them at a great disadvantage against the Portuguese and later the Dutch and English. And the coastlines of the subcontinent continued to be regarded as a frontier, with all the social diversity and deviance from norms that are associated with the far reaches of empire. But, over time, both the royal family and the high court nobles became involved with the trade that was taking place over the seas, first in Gujarat and later in Bengal.

Despite the presence of Portuguese enclaves along India's west coast ­in Diu, Daman, Goa, and Cochin - Gujarat's maritime trade pros­pered during the sixteenth century. To be sure, fleets of Portuguese ships patrolled the waters off Surat and Cambay, ensuring that all local shipping had been licensed by and paid duties to them. In the long run, however, this meant that local ships going to the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea had superior Portuguese armament to protect them, and so Gujarat's westward trade kept growing. Gujarat merchants had also benefited from the Portuguese attacks on the Malabar coast in the early 1500s; as Mal­abar ports like Calicut declined, trade goods from Southeast Asia were rerouted to Gujarat instead. Over the course of the sixteenth century, Por­tuguese control over shipping lanes weakened, making them even more dependent on Gujarat as a place from which they could purchase not only spices but also goods to ship home to Europe and use for bartering in the Indian Ocean.

A valuable addition to all cargoes headed out from Gujarat were textiles, the most important export item produced in Gujarat. Gujarat had been selling cotton textiles to the Middle East, and most probably Southeast Asia, since at least the thirteenth century. The range of textiles manufactured in Gujarat was very broad: from the extremely expensive silk patola or double ikat fabrics (where the threads of both the warp and woof are tie-dyed prior to weaving, creating a reversible design) to the plainly woven and coarse cotton textiles printed with wood-blocks. While there was much interest in the finer varieties of cloth from Gujaratpatola pieces, for instance, were used only on ceremonial occasions in some areas of island Southeast Asia - the bulk of the demand was for the cheap, coarse varieties of cotton textiles. Soon after their arrival in the Indian Ocean, the Portuguese found themselves buying cloth from Gujarat in order to exchange it for the nutmeg, cloves, and other fine spices of Indonesia that they most wished to obtain, along with Malabar pepper. The practice of using Indian textiles as a medium of exchange was so widespread in Indonesia that the prices of spices were often given in terms of Indian cloth in the trade agreements made by the Portuguese there, rather than in any form of cash.

The initial interest of the Mughals in the Gujarat coast was in providing safe passage to Indian Muslims making the pilgrimage to Mecca by sea. Among the pilgrims who departed from Gujarat on the way to Mecca was the elderly Gulbadan Begum, Humayun's sister and Akbar's aunt, who began what turned out to be a seven-year journey in 1575, accompanied by several other noblewomen from the Mughal court including one of Akbar's wives. Once Gulbadan arrived in Arabia, after having been delayed by the Portuguese at Surat for about a year for lack of proper doc­umentation, she remained in Arabia for another three years, performing the pilgrimage four times. While returning to India, she was shipwrecked and forced to stay for some time in Aden. In spite of the difficulties of sea travel, by the early 1600s several members of the Mughal royal family including Jahangir, his mother, and his wife Nur Jahan owned ships that participated in international trade as well as in the transport of pilgrims. The most active Mughal investor in maritime commerce was Shah Jahan, who had half a dozen large ships built after he became emperor. Due to their size and the pressure exerted by imperial officials on local mer­chants, Shah Jahan's ships carried the bulk of the freight being taken to the Middle Eastern ports of Bandar Abbas and Mokha for several years.

Many other high-ranking Mughal nobles followed in the imperial family's footsteps in either investing in ships or in their cargoes. The interest of the court and nobility in commercial activities persisted throughout the seventeenth century and was a major shift in their orientation from the days of the early Mughals. It may have been due to the influence of the growing Irani faction at court, who had considerable expertise in finance and experience combining trade with statecraft.

The Mughal ships were based mainly at Surat, which had become the most important maritime city of Gujarat as the waters near Cambay grew difficult to navigate. During the seventeenth century, Surat was not only the premier port of the Mughal empire but also the largest coastal city along the entire western Indian Ocean. In 1660 it probably had a population of 100,000 and may have doubled in size by 1700. Surat owed much of its prominence to the fact that it was the terminus of a major overland route from Agra and Delhi. It also had a fertile hinterland from which to secure food and other resources, as well as a wealthy banking community. Situated on the Tapti river, Surat had a mediocre harbor, but its other advantages ensured it the foremost place among Indian port cities on the west coast. When the first Europeans other than the Portuguese sought to establish trading posts in Mughal India, Surat was the site in which they were most interested.

Around 1600, both the Dutch and the English sought entry into the lucrative commerce between Europe and Asia that had provided so much wealth to the Portuguese over the past century. The Dutch and English governments did not get directly involved in efforts to corner a share of the Indian Ocean's vast trade, unlike the Portuguese whose ships and person­nel were under the authority of the Portuguese crown. Instead, the Dutch and English governments each gave a private company - the Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC) in the case of the Dutch and the East India Company (EIC) in the case of the English - the monopoly over trade between their respective nations and Asia. Unlike the Portuguese who were motivated by the desire to spread Christianity and gain an empire, as well as by profits, the Dutch and English intrusion into the Indian Ocean was initially impelled by mercantile objectives. Since the Dutch and English trading companies had the backing of their governments, however, they did increasingly represent their nation's interests in this distant part of the globe.

When the Dutch and English first tried to conduct trade at Surat, they were violently opposed by the Portuguese. The Mughal emperor, who was reluctant to provoke Portuguese anger and thereby jeopardize the safety of Indian ships, at first turned a deaf ear to Dutch and English pleas for trading rights. Several years of conflict on the waters between the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and India's west coast ensued. After the northern Europeans demonstrated that they could inflict substantial damage on 1 Indian and Portuguese vessels, the Mughal court realized it was in its  best interests to welcome these counterweights to Portuguese power.

The first English "factory" (a compound including warehouses and residences) in Surat in 1613 was built with the permission of local authorities, by 1617 they had received official permission from Emperor Jahangir himself to establish factories in several parts of the empire. The Mughals clearly understood the value of maritime commerce and wanted to keep sea routes to and from India open; they consistently tried to maintain freedom of trade along India's coasts to the best of their ability, although hampered by the lack of a navy.

The same time that the Mughal empire was being consolidated in north .a, new states that had arisen from the disintegration of the Bah­li and Vijayanagara kingdoms were flourishing in peninsular India. Tough the successor states to the Bahmani Sultanate were in place by around 1500, they reached their greatest heights only after the defeat of yanagara in the 1565 Battle of Talikota. The best spoils of that victory went to the Adil Shahs of Bijapur, situated immediately north of the yanagara capital, who thus acquired the rich fertile lands and mineral resources of the Raichur doab (the area near the confluence of the Krishna Tungabhadra rivers) that had long been a bone of contention. The other important dynasties to succeed the Bahmanis were the Nizam hs of Ahmadnagar, who controlled much of what is now Maharashtra, the Qutb Shahs of Golkonda, who were based in northern Andhraiesh.

The Bahmani and Vijayanagara succes­states resembled their predecessors in numerous respects, especially their artistic and linguistic cultures, but the greater movement of people and ­goods, and ideas that was characteristic of the early modern era was to shape these new states in important ways.

The independent Deccan Sultanates were all derived from the Bah­li state and so exhibit some similarities. The most obvious one was the e of Afaqi-Deccani balance within the nobility, a situation inherited from the Bahmanis. The Afaqis were the foreign faction, predominantly Persian-speaking Iranians, though Arabs and even Africans were repre­sented among them. The Deccanis were descendants of Muslims who had migrated from north India, along with indigenous converts. The tension between the two factions went back to the fifteenth century, a period in which there was extensive immigration to the Deccan from outside the subcontinent. A Portuguese estimate from the early 1500s puts the size of the foreign immigrant population in the Deccan at between 10,000 and 12,000 people; among them were military men, scholars, merchants, and Sufis. Immigrants from the Middle East continued to arrive in the Deccan during the sixteenth century, most notably in the period up to 1575. In contrast, the flow of people from Iran and the Arabic-speaking world had sharply declined in north India during the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, only to begin rising again in the last decades of the 1500s. As a result, the impact of Iranians and the Persian culture they brought with them was considerably greater in the Deccan of c. 1600 than in the Mughal north.

An important consequence of the Iranian presence was the spreading of the Shia faith of Iran's Safavid dynasty, which had many more adherents in the Deccan than in contemporary north India. Shia Islam received the unwavering support of the Qutb Shahs of Golkonda, where it was established as the official state religion. The Shia allegiance of the Qutb Shahs is especially evident in their new capital, Hyderabad, founded in 1591 right next to Golkonda city. Hyderabad, replete with palaces and gardens, was a planned city designed with the enormous Char Minar as its centerpiece, essentially a triumphal arch, was situated at the intersection of two major crossroads.

Shortly after the construction of the Char Minar, the royal Ashur Khana was built. It is a large building dedicated to holding huge metal alams used during the commemoration of Ashur, the tenth day of Muharram when Husain was martyred. Husain has special importance for the Shia who accept the Prophet Muhammad's family and their spiritual successors, rather than the historical caliphs of Islam, as spokespeople for Islamic author­ity. Not only were alams intended to be stored in the Ashur Khana, but exquisitely rendered depictions of alams in enameled tile also embellish parts of the interior walls. Small alams rendered in stucco are commonly found in the religious architecture of Hyderabad, thus underscoring a visual connection to Shia Islam.

Traditionally, it is believed that Shia Islam and Sufism are antithetical to one another; however, this was not the case at Bijapur, where Ali Adil Shah not only chose to be buried near Sufi shrines but had also earlier been crowned at one. Ali's tomb demonstrates that in Bijapur the choice between being

Sufi centers had existed in the Deccan since the early fourteenth­ century conquests of the Delhi Sultanate. The first Sufi order to be trans­planted to the peninsula was that of the Chishtis, the most popular group in the north. Members of other Sufi orders migrated to the Deccan from the Middle East or from other areas of the subcontinent slightly later, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. By the seventeenth century, Sufis in Bijapur were varied in affiliation and diverse in their interests, as Richard M. Eaton's work has demonstrated. (See Eaton, The Political and Religious Authority of the Shrine of Baba Farid. In India's Islamic Traditions, 711-1750, ed. R. M. Eaton, pp. 263-84, Oxford University Press, 2003.)

Some Bijapur Sufis worked closely with the court and received land grants in return; this intimate link with Sufis and their ideas is revealed in the painting, poetry, and prose pro­duced by the court elite. Other Bijapur Sufis shunned contact with the courts and instead focused on spreading their ideas through lit­erature. They wrote not only in Persian but also in a form of proto-Urdu known as Dakani. Dakani resembled north Indian languages in grammar and syntax, but incorporated many words from the Arabic and Persian languages and was written in the Perso-Arabic script. Because it combined elements drawn from both the Indic and Islamic traditions, Dakani was a perfect vehicle for the composite culture that flourished in the early modern Deccan Sultanates. As for Urdu in the UK today see note.
And for how this fits in with Pakistan today see.

By the early twentieth century, roughly 10-20 percent of the people in the Deccan identified themselves as Muslims.Compared to north India, however, the Islamic segment of Deccan society was always small. This led to another characteristic feature of the Deccan Sultanates that distinguished them from the Mughal north: the incorporation of numerous indigenous people into the state system.

The heavy reliance on indigenous warriors and Brahmins was especially evident outside the capital cities, for the Deccan countryside was largely ruled through local leaders who spoke the local Marathi, Kannada, and Telugu languages. These local leaders assimilated many aspects of the Islamicate culture of the Deccan courts, and their languages also adopted numerous words from Persian, most strikingly in the area of administra­tive and fiscal terminology. In turn, the regional languages of the Deccan received considerable patronage from the sultanates. At the Adil Shah court at Bijapur, state documents were often issued in Marathi, one of the local languages. The Qutb Shah rulers of Golkonda issued many of their edicts in a bilingual format, with the same text repeated in Persian and in Telugu, the language of the Andhra region. More so than in any other Deccan Sultanate, the Qutb Shahs were successful in integrating local Brahmins and warriors into their state system. Just as the Bijapur Sufis utilized the composite language of Dakani, so too did their Adil Shah rulers, as well as those of Golkonda, promote Dakani literature at their courts. Persian, the official language ofthe Mughal court, was used in the Deccan for keeping records and writing histories like the famous chronicle Ctarikh) by Firishta, although some of the rulers were actually much less proficient in Persian than in Dakani, Telugu, or Marathi.

The mingling of Indic and Islamicate traditions is exemplified by the “Kitab-i Nauras” that opens with an invocation to the Hindu goddess of learning, Saraswati, followed by praise of the Prophet Muhammad and then the Chishti Sufi saint Gesu Daraz.

Another example is the “Kulliyat“ that as Carla Petievich has pointed out contains poems praising seventeen beautiful women from different castes and religions. (See Petievich "Dakani's Radha-Krishna Imagery and Canon Formation in Urdu." In The Banyan Tree: Essays on Early Literature in New Indo-Aryan Languages, vol. I, ed. Mariola Offredi, pp. 113-28, 2000.)

As the Golkonda state grew, its main port city Masulipatnam achieved a dominant position along India's southeastern or Coromandel coast (roughly equivalent to the coastline of the modern states of Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu). One reason Masulipatnam became much more prosperous than any Nizam Shah or Adil Shah port on the west coast, where the Portuguese had several fortified settlements and a large fleet, was due to the notably smaller official Portuguese presence in the Bay of Bengal. With little opposition from the Portuguese, Masulipatnam became a center not only for international trade but also for the trans­port and redistribution of goods from other coastal areas such as Bengal. The construction of a road from the port to the capital city of Golkonda by Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah contributed to its prosperity, for goods could then be carried overland from Masulipatnam via Golkonda to the bustling commercial center at Surat in Gujarat. By about 1650, Masuli­patnam had grown to a population of 100,000, comparable both to Surat and to the combined cities of Golkonda-Hyderabad.

The initial orientation of Masulipatnam's maritime trade was toward Southeast Asia (modern Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Myanmar), a region where trade goods from the Coromandel coast had been coveted for centuries. Toward the end of the sixteenth century, a break-through occurred when a new sea link was established between Masulipatnam and the Middle East. Previously, the direct sea routes from the Mid­dle East had all been to ports along India's west coast, either in Gujarat or the Malabar coast. Masulipatnam was the first port on India's east coast to link the eastern and western sectors of Indian Ocean travel and trade. Its success in doing so had much to do with the initiative of Golkonda's rulers, who were Shia Muslims and thus sought close relations with Safavid Iran and who also, like the Mughals, wanted to provide direct passage to Mecca for pilgrims. Moreover, much of the capi­tal investment in Masulipatnam's shipbuilding and maritime trade came from Iranians who had immigrated to the Golkonda kingdom. Just as we saw in the case of the Mughal court under Jahangir and Shah Jahan, Iranian immigrants to India often combined skills in statecraft with a keen interest in international commerce. Themselves representatives of the greater mobility of people across national borders in the early modern period, the Iranians in both the Mughal and Golkonda states stimu­lated a further shrinking of the distances between different regions of the world.

The most valuable item Golkonda exported was diamonds, for it had the largest alluvial diamond mines in the world at this time. Golkonda's high-caliber iron and steel were also in great demand. But the item most closely associated with Masulipatnam port's maritime trade was cotton textiles. Although the Golkonda region produced muslin (a thin fabric with open weave and finely spun yarn), it, and the rest of the Coromandel coast, was best known for its chintz. Chintz is a general term for cotton fabrics whose designs are produced after the cloth is already woven; these designs could be block printed but often were hand applied with pen and brush or a combination of both techniques. The artist's creativity was better reflected in hand-painted Coromandel chintzes than in the block­printed designs that were typical of textiles from Gujarat. Multiple stages were involved in the application of color to a Coromandel chintz, generally including the use of both mordants (substances that bind dyes to cotton, which is not naturally color absorbent) and of resists (wax or other items that prevent color from adhering to cloth). India was technically centuries ahead of the rest of the world both in the vividness of its dyes and in their permanence. The Golkonda region was especially fortunate because a bright red dye-producing plant grew in the Krishna river delta, not far from supplies of excellent indigo (which yielded a deep blue color) as well as raw cotton.

Golkonda's textiles were so highly regarded that they were favored by the Mughal elite of the seventeenth century. The French traveler Francois Bernier reported in 1665 that the main tents where Aurangzeb held court while traveling from Delhi to Lahore were lined inside "with beautiful hand-painted chintz, manufactured for the purpose at Masli­patam." Aurangzeb's private tents, Bernier tells us, were surrounded by tall screens and some of these were "lined with Maslipatam chintz, painted over with flowers of a hundred kinds." (Travels in the Mogul Empire, AD 1656-1668, trans. A. Constable, 2nd edn, 1992, pp. 361-62.)

At least five large chintz textiles from Golkonda were acquired by Rajput princes of the Kachh­waha house, possibly while on campaign in the Deccan, and placed in the storehouse of their Amber palace between 1639 and 1685. Among these is a double-arched panel that most probably served as part of the decorative lining for an elaborate tent. One panel of this vibrant hanging, painted largely in shades of red, depicts a double-headed mythic bird carrying a small elephant in each of its mouths and reflects south Indian or Sri Lankan taste, indicating it was probably made for one of these markets.

The unique cultures of the Bijapur and Golkonda Sultanates, blending both Indic and Islamicate traditions with a strong Iranian overlay, con­tinued to flourish throughout much of the seventeenth century. Their fellow Bahmani successor states farther to the north fared less well, under pressure from the Mughals. By the mid 1630s, the Mughals had annexed northern Maharashtra and forced the Adil Shahs and Qutb Shahs to sign a treaty acknowledging their overlordship. For the most part, however, these two Deccan Sultanates were left undisturbed and, with their northern borders now secure against Mughal attack, they went on the offensive against territories to their south. Bijapur acquired southern Karnataka and the fortress of Senji (also spelled Gingee) on the Tamil coast, thereby terminating several Nayaka states that had arisen in the aftermath of the Vijayanagara empire's collapse. Golkonda, for its part, annexed all of southern Andhra and put an end to the last dynasty of Vijayanagara rulers. Eventually both Bijapur and Golkonda were defeated and incorporated within the Mughal empire in the 1680s.

Soon after the fateful battle in 1565 when the Vijayanagara army was defeated by the combined forces of the Deccan Sultanates, the capital was shifted from Hampi, which was close to the Vijayanagara kingdom's former northern border, to a more distant location in southern Andhra.
The first site chosen came under attack more than once, and the capital was moved again, to Chandragiri, even farther away from Bijapur and Golkonda cities. Chandragiri was a small town, situated in the linguistic and cultural border zone between the Tamil country and the Telugu­speaking Andhra region. It had the advantage of being close to the great temple town ofTirupati, whose wealth was so widely known that a plun­dering expedition from Portuguese Goa had been planned in the 1540s, though abandoned in the end. Travelers to Chandragiri often toured Tirupati town as well, as we see in the case of Jacques de Coutre, a Euro­pean gem trader who visited in 1611:

We left for the city of Chandreguiri, where the emperor had his court after the rebellion [1565]. We arrived at this place, which was very lovely and walled just like Belur [Vellore]. It had a castle atop a very high hill, and at its foot was the palace of the emperor; it was a large and sumptuous edifice. And the city had great suburbs, and it was teeming with people. I was there for five days; and I went alone from there to the diamond mine in a palanquin  I left the walls of the city and made my way more than two leagues through its suburbs till Tripiti, the city of the pagode [temple] which is so called, and it seemed that it was all one city.( Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Penumbral Visions: Making Polities in Early Modern South India, Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 47.)

The palaces at Chandragiri were built by Venkatapati II (r. 1586-1614), the greatest ruler of Vijayanagara's last royal dynasty, the Aravidus. The Aravidu kings continued the early practice of building secular palace structures in a style that fused traditional Indic with Islamicate forms. The large edifice at Chandragiri mentioned by de Coutre was probably the Raja Mahal, or King's Palace, a rectangular three-storied structure with Islamicate arched openings. The center of the building's facade has a large projecting portal, bearing Indic tiered, stacked superstructures resembling temple spires.

Although the Aravidu kings attempted to replicate the greatness of their imperial predecessors and may have succeeded in the eyes of people like de Coutre, their kingdom was but a mere shadow of what Vijayana­gara had once been. After 1565, the Nayaka lords of many localities, especially in the Karnataka area, asserted their independence. The bor­derlands between Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu remained under the Aravidu dynasty's overall rule. But most of the Tamil country was in the hands of three Telugu-speaking Nayaka warrior families, all of whom had entrenched themselves in the far south around 1530, during the heyday of Vijayanagara's imperium. The largest and wealthiest of the three Nayaka kingdoms was based at Madurai, an ancient city on the Vaigai river.

 A second, more compact, Nayaka state controlled the fertile Kaveri river delta from Tanjavur, another Tamil city with a long history. The third, and most tenuous, of the Vijayanagara successor states was founded at Senji (Gingee), not far from the Aravidu base in Chandragiri - a geo­political reality that hampered Senji's expansion. For the most part, the Nayaka kings continued to pay homage to the Vijayanagara throne, even under the Aravidu dynasty, and they also generally remitted a portion of their revenues to Chandragiri until the 1630s. The authority of the Aravidu and Nayaka kings was often contested by numerous small war­rior chieftains, who built fortified strongholds in the countryside. The former Vijayanagara empire was thus, by 1600, highly fragmented.

Already in the early sixteenth-century heyday of Vijayanagara, the peninsula had experienced the early modern trend of increased elite migration. Telugu-speaking warriors, in particular, had moved into upland sections of the Tamil country in a form of internal colonization. A multi-linguistic milieu had been created at court by the fact that the empire encompassed several linguistic regions. This trend culminated in the post-1565 era, when the remnants of Vi jay an agar a power were con­centrated in the Tamil south, outside the core area of the original empire. Even more than before, we witness the transposition ofthe culture ofthe southern Deccan onto that of the Tamil area and the resulting emergence of a common south Indian high culture. The urbane court of the Tanjavur Nayakas was especially active in its promotion of Sanskrit and regional literatures, most notably in the genre of dance drama known as yaksha­gana. One yakshagana composed by a Tanjavur prince about his father, Raghunatha Nayaka (r. 1612-34), includes a scene where accountants speaking in different languages - Tamil, Telugu, and Kannada - bicker amongst themselves, perhaps reflecting some tension between the diverse constituents of the kingdom.

The Nayaka kings are best known as patrons of literature, but they also made efforts to emulate their Vijayanagara predecessors by con­structing buildings in the imperial idiom. The Nayaka palace in Madu­rai is an outstanding example of a seventeenth-century monument that combines Islamicate with Indic traditions. Its great arched audience hall, embellished with stucco sculptures of attendant figures and mythic beasts, clearly indicates awareness of the palaces at Chandragiri, yet surpasses them in terms of lavish extravagant forms. However, the most signifi­cant architectural accomplishment ofthe Nayakas was the renovation and expansion of the Minakshi temple in the heart of Madurai city, under­taken by the famous king Tirumala Nayaka (r. 1623-59).

Tirumala of Madurai, perhaps more than any other Nayaka ruler, attempted to live up to the example of righteous kingship set by Vijayanagara emperors such as Krishnadeva Raya, which stressed the patronage of temples as a central royal activity. Tirumala Nayaka also set great store on the displaying of royal greatness to the public. The Jesuit Baltazar da Costa provides some details on Tirumala Nayaka's public rituals in the 1640s:

Almost every day he appears on the terrace surrounded by his courtiers, while in front of them his elephants are drawn up in two rows, the space between them occupied by three or four hundred Turks, who form his bodyguard. When he comes out of the fortress to visit some pagodes [temples], as he is wont to do on days of festival, he is surrounded with great pomp. Sometimes he rides in a palanquin, at other times he mounts an enormous elephant. Next come the elephants in a long file, mounted by his nobles and chief captains, preceded by the arms and insignia of the Nayaka. Then the cavalry and the rest of the troops follow. (V. Narayana Rao, D. Shulrnan, and S. Subrahrnanyarn, Symbols of Substance: Court and State in Nayaka Period Tamilnadu, Oxford University Press, 1992, p. 87.)

Yet, in spite of the superficial similarities with the Vijayanagara past, the elite culture of the Nayaka kingdoms had significantly changed in its ori­entation. It had a far less militaristic ethos, for one thing, so that the kings are depicted in literature not so much as warrior-heroes or even as moral exemplars but rather as semi-divine and highly erotic individuals ­the essence of kingship was now a heroism not of the battlefield but of the bedroom. The literary focus on sexual pleasure was but one aspect of a larger emphasis in Nayaka culture on bhoga, a term that is best expressed as consumption from the root "to eat" and by extension "to enjoy".( V. Narayana Rao, D. Shulrnan, and S. Subrahrnanyarn, Symbols of Substance: Court and State in Nayaka Period Tamilnadu , Oxford University Press, 1992, p. 87.)

In keeping with this transformation in Nayaka values was a corresponding shift in the forms of royal religious patronage. Instead of making grants of land or valuables to a deity enshrined in a temple, Nayaka kings preferred to engage in the lavish, and public, feeding of Brahmins and other worthy people within temple compounds. That is, the ephemeral act of feasting a host of individuals now took precedence over the making of permanent endowments to religious institutions.

The more hedonistic tone of the Nayaka courts may explain the explicit sensuality in sculptural images ofthese kings and their courtiers. There is no shortage of these images rendered on calicos, in ivory, and on stucco adorning local temples. A Nayaka courtier, for instance, is shown in an ivory statue embracing a voluptuous woman. This and sim­ilar images, found on everything from combs to bedsteads to temples, reflect the widespread dissemination of the new Nayaka concept of plea­surable consumption not only in literary but also in visual terms. While loving couples have long featured in Indian art and are often said to rep­resent the soul's yearning for union with god, this particular ivory, and other objects like it, parallel the explicit erotic literature of the Nayaka period.

The new premium placed on consumption reflects the altered real­ity of the Nayaka world both economically and sociologically. Public consumption - whether by the provision of feasts on the part of the king or by the display of royal splendor - was a sign of command over liquid resources in an environment that was rapidly becoming monetized. The Nayaka economy was expanding quickly, partly because agriculture was being extended into the dryer zones of the Tamil countryside, but primarily because of the growing networks of trade, which brought in large quantities of cash. The social groups that had accompanied the Nayaka rulers in their rise to power, moreover, came not from the old landed aristocracy, but instead represented a class of upwardly mobile entrepreneurs who combined martial skills with commercial ones. By taking the risks of moving to a different region and engaging in new activ­ities, the warrior-merchants who backed the Nayakas of Tamil Nadu had forged a new and better life for themselves. Theirs was a more individ­ualistic and less class-conscious ethos than that of the hereditary upper castes. They operated on a more modest scale than did the high-ranking Iranian entrepreneurs of Golkonda, who have been described as "port­folio capitalists" on account ofthe diversification of their investments and their straddling of the spheres of commerce and politics. Nonetheless, the warrior-merchants of the Nayaka south contributed to the growing commercialization of its political economy.

Sales taxes from the market towns that were springing up through­out the territories of the far south, as domestic trade grew, benefited the Nayaka and Aravidu states. So too did the customs duties levied on exports from the numerous ports along the Coromandel coast. Imports, on the other hand, were charged only very light duties, indicating that the southern rulers wanted to encourage the flow of international trade into their realms. They, like the Vijayanagara emperors of earlier times, sought horses from overseas in order to strengthen their armies. Precious metals were another import that was eagerly desired. Substantial quantities of gold entered south India in the seventeenth century, providing the supplies for its ample gold-based currency. This was a contrast to the Mughal north, where silver coins were the primary unit of the monetary system. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there were massive flows of bullion (i.e., gold, silver, and copper) into the subcontinent from other parts of the world. Much of the bullion came originally from the huge quantities of silver mined by the Spanish in Latin America, which circulated through European markets before coming to India via the Middle East or the direct sea routes from Europe. African and Japanese gold also entered the subcontinent, all in response to the enormous overseas demand for Indian products. Without these supplies of precious metals from abroad, the monetization of the early modern Indian economy would undoubtedly have proceeded at a much slower pace.

While indigenous merchants participated in the booming international trade of seventeenth-century south India, an increasing share went into the hands of Europeans. The Coromandel coast was studded with Euro­pean enclaves: the Portuguese were at Nagapattinam in Tanjavur territory and at Silo Tome-Mylapore in the Chandragiri realm by the early 1500s; the Danes were in the Tanjavur port ofTranquebar as well as Golkonda's Masulipatnam by the 1620s; and in 1640 the English finally settled in Madras (Chennai), within the Chandragiri kingdom, after first trying several other sites. By far the most dominant group among the European traders were the Dutch, who arrived on the Coromandel coast during the first decade of the seventeenth century. They soon came to an agreeable arrangement with the Qutb Shahs of Golkonda, but their trading post at Masulipatnam ranked second to their primary settlement at Pulicat, on the central Coromandel coast near Chandragiri. The Coromandel coast was the source of the overwhelming bulk of the items acquired in India by the Dutch trading company (VOC) for its intra-Asian or country trade during the entire 1600s, an era when the Dutch were in the ascendance in Indian Ocean waters.

It was the Dutch who mounted the first serious challenge to Portuguese naval supremacy in the Indian Ocean, because they were better financed and equipped than the English. Like the Portuguese, the Dutch wanted to corner the European market in fine spices. Their strategy was quite different from that of the Portuguese, who had based themselves in south­western India and tried to monopolize the spice trade through control­ling the ships that carried spices for sale. The Dutch decided instead to monopolize spices at their sources, the places where they were actually produced. This meant that their main area of interest was Indonesia rather than India. From their base at Batavia (modern Jakarta) on the island of Java, the Dutch systematically attacked all competing interests. The official Portuguese presence in Southeast Asia was wellnigh eliminated when in 1641 the Dutch captured Malacca, the renowned entrepot that had been in Portuguese hands for a century. The Dutch then started to deprive the Portuguese of their possessions in South Asia, taking Sri Lanka in 1658 and ports on the Malabar coast in the 1660s.

Even before the 1640s, when the Dutch became the foremost of the European traders, they encountered the same problem the Portuguese had faced earlier. The islanders who grew spices were not interested in exchanging them for European goods or even necessarily for precious metals. The main item they sought in return for the sale of their spices was Indian cloth, and so the Dutch had no alternative but to set up trading posts in the subcontinent. One reason for choosing the Coromandel coast initially was its proximity to Southeast Asia. But it also appears that Southeast Asians of the seventeenth century preferred textiles from the Coromandel coast to those from Gujarat or Bengal. A wide variety of colors and designs were produced in the south, tailored specifically for different segments of the Southeast Asian markets. The Thais, for example, liked textiles painted with a fine thin finial motif in their borders which were quite different from distinctive tastes in other regions of Southeast Asia. Designs and tastes were probably transmitted from buyer to producer through the circulation of books containing textile patterns, like those that survive from nineteenth-century Java.

While the northern Coromandel region in Golkonda territory was known for its high-end cloth, central and southern Coromandel specialized in cheaper textiles that were sold in the largest quantities. The influx of Indian textiles into Southeast Asia was enormous: as many as 400,000 pieces were imported into the Spice Islands of Indonesia alone in a single year during the early 1600s, according to one estimate. They had a profound and lasting impact on textile preferences and production within Southeast Asia. Not only was the art of batik (patterning cloth with the use of wax as a resist medium) introduced to Indonesia via Indian textiles along with the patola or double ikat technique of weaving, so too were many of the designs used in indigenous textiles for centuries thereafter.

 

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