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Amanda Weidman, Brought to Life by the Voice: Playback Singing and Cultural Politics in South India (Oakland: University of California Press, 2021), 270 pp. ISBN 978-0-520-37706-6

This article focuses on the making of the discourse on indigenous banking in colonial India, which was linked to the transformation of the Indian economy and involved the repositioning of indigenous banking and the brokerage business. The rationale underlying indigenous histories of capital and custom was based on the ideas of public good and trust, which could bridge the gap between regulation and law on the one hand and informal practices and custom on the other. This article examines a range of writings and histories composed in both English and vernacular languages by the colonial state and its subjects in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which were concerned with defining and delegitimising or supporting indigenous banking, to revisit the conceptualisation of commerce and banking as a public good and subsequently retell the story of indigenous banking in colonial India.

Kesav Desiraju, Gifted Voice the Life and Art of M. S. Subbulakshmi (Harper Collins, 2021), 499 pages, ₹699. ISBN 9789390327546 (Paperback).

Tejaswini Niranjana, Musicophilia in Mumbai: Performing Subjects and the Metropolitan Unconscious (New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2020), 225 pages, ₹695 (Hardback). ISBN: 978-81-941260-7-2.

I feel singularly privileged to write the introduction for the first of two special JIOWS festschrift editions honouring Michael Pearson's contributions in the field of Indian Ocean studies. My association with Mike goes back to 1979/80 when I met him at the University of Viswabharati, where my mentor Ashin Dasgupta was working with him on an edited volume devoted to the history of India and the Indian Ocean. This was a time when as a young graduate student, I was being exposed to the hotly debated and discussed sub-field of maritime history. Several senior historians questioned the need to study maritime history outside the general frame of Indian economic history, by then an established field of enquiry, driven primarily by the agrarian question, poverty and the drain of wealth paradigm. I recall how, in course of my apprenticeship, I read a range of writings that looked at Asian trade and commercial exchanges that, although written largely out of European archives, dared to tell a very different story to the dominant one of European commercial and military hegemony. This was long before the heady debates of globalization, of Asia before Europe or indeed of the world system thesis that had entered the field; instead, we were chewing over the critiques of the peddler thesis put forward by Van Leur, and of the uncritical endorsement of colonial perspectives on Asian trade embodied in the writings of scholar administrator W.H. Moreland. It was here that Pearson and Dasgupta gave us the vital tools of our trade, to look beyond the official voices in the archive, to search for private adjustments and compromises that had so much more to say about the messy world of commercial and social transactions where to look for Weberian rationality or pure economic determinism was chasing a mirage.

This article responds to Isabel Hofmeyr's Gandhi's Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading, a story of Gandhi's printing experiences, intentions, and experiments in South Africa — a little-known story in India. It reflects on the articulation of Gandhi's meditations on sovereignty, national imaginings, and citizenship both as ideas and practices. Here Subramanian analyzes the act of slow, deliberate reading and thoughtful reflection that Gandhi cultivated and adopted as key conditions toward the realization of truth and self-rule.

The essay revisits ideas of legal pluralism, of subaltern resistance and of alternative geographies that imperial policies and local resistance produced especially in a maritime region such as the northwestern Indian littoral. The essay draws on the more recent and valuable interventions by Lauren Benton and Patricia Risso but in its focus and formulation argues for a politics of resistance, and for the articulation of multiple skeins in the emerging anti-piracy discourse of the colonial state. This was in part due to the blurred and fuzzy boundaries between piracy and privateering in the context of the Atlantic, which had their particular resonance in the Indian Ocean, and in part to the sensibilities and experiences of local officers like Alexander Walker and James McMurdo, whose appreciation of local realities was far removed from the universalizing rhetoric and prescriptions of universal law. On the other hand, the acts of predation too were complex and did not conform to a homogenous standard or prototype—there were instances of men working as maritime mercenaries, as debt collectors and as independent actors taking to the sea and attacking ships as a spontaneous act of will, and not necessarily jostling for legal space or engaging in legal parleys as Benton suggests. This is not to argue that Indian piracy was about cultural resistance and that Indian pirates did not see themselves as privateers unlike their European counterparts, but merely to complicate any easy story-telling, especially given the ambiguities in the European legal discourse on the sea, especially on the Indian Ocean, and the nature of the colonial archive that is being used to recuperate the voice of the marginalized seafarer.

STEVEN E. SIDEBOTHAM, Berenike and the Ancient Maritime Spice Route, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011, pp. 434.