6 - Piracy in India’s Western Littoral: Reality and Representation

Summary

Abstract

The chapter sets out to counter Eurocentric bias in depictions of maritime power and violence along India's western littoral during the period of British expansion in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The author adapts analyses of legal pluralism in maritime spaces to explore the role of piracy in Indian conceptions of power and jurisdiction at sea. Piracy was a matter of contention among Indian and British governing authorities that drew both of them into efforts to understand the phenomenon as part of local histories and traditions. Despite the efforts of some to understand piracy in this context, the British ultimately portrayed maritime predation as an ethnographic marker of a “savagery” over which their sovereignty could be asserted.

Keywords: East India Company, South Asia, legal pluralism, Eurocentrism, sovereignty

The present chapter is an attempt to respond to recent attempts at questioning the Eurocentric bias in depictions of maritime power and violence in a period of European expansion. It takes its cue from new and significant work done on the idea of legal pluralism in maritime spaces, on non-European conceptions of power and jurisdiction at sea, and on the value of using piracy as a lens for understanding the articulation of sovereignty. As the title indicates, the chapter focuses on both the materiality of maritime violence and predation as well as of its representation in Asian and European sources to arrive at a more nuanced understanding of the phenomenon in the context of India's western littoral, conventionally understood as the “pirate coast” par excellence. It was a dubious and inglorious reputation for sure and not necessarily the sole construction of the British colonial state, although the latter's intervention as the policeman of the seas to protect free trade lent additional semantic and political overtones to the bundle of activities that came to be designated as piracy.

In keeping with the underlying rationale of the present volume, namely, to look at non-European understandings of maritime violence, this chapter will draw attention to three important sub-themes that constituted the phenomenon of predation and raiding, as it was pursued actively by littoral society, as it was described by the early colonial state and, subsequently, by imperialist and nationalist historiography.