In the sixth chapter of the book, Bose argues that Islam, specifically the hajj’s ritual was a key element to the Indian Ocean’s overarching in the early modern times. When I read the hajjis accounts in opposition to colonial archive, I have learned how the author documented the pilgrims’ continuous flow in the colonial period, despite diseases, deprivation and scams. For people of South Asia mourning both the world of Islam’s and India’s loss of chronological freedom in Western Imperialism’s face, we learned that the act of hajj performance was an important anti colonial activity because it was also a figurative reminder of divine sovereignty of Allah. I agree how Bose wrote this chapter as I can see it as a reminder for us saying that it’s specifically an alternative sort of Pan-Islamic autonomy, which gives the momentum for 1919s Khalifat Movement that eventually became the first nationalist movement than spread all over India.
In the seventh chapter of this book, Bose wrote the piece by following different type of pilgrimage through Rabindranath Tagore’s oceanic journeys. The author argued that Tagore, a Nobel Prize winner for Literature, imagined that interregional arena of Indian Ocean is an ordinary location that holds the unique unity of culture and poetry. Bose documents Tagore’s travels as logical expedition, which was considered Greater India’s cultural contours. He also wrote that Tagore chased several Southeast Asian adaptations like the Mahabarata and Ramayana while he was on his expedition. So as I have read the chapter, it taught me that with all of his quests, it was Tagore’s pilgrimage to Iran that has the greatest significance. I have Tagore’s journeys in Indian Ocean was used by the author, Bose, to precisely create a sense of religious and cultural continuities and affinities reconnecting the early modern, premodern, and colonial periods, proved that, despite whether or not the political and economic Indian Ocean unity was distressed by intervention of Europeans and globalization forces. I agree with the author’s argument that the modernity of the Europeans was not able to monopolize the universal aspirations or globalization terms because Europeans also wished to contribute and participate to cultural exchange’s larger arenas.
Reference
Bose, S. (2006). A hundred horizons: The Indian Ocean in the age of global empire. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
