Indian Shipping/An Introductory Note
AN INTRODUCTORY NOTE
(By Principal Brajendranath Seal, M.A., Ph.D.)
Prof. Mookerji's monograph on Indian shipping and maritime activity, from the earliest times to the end of the Moghul period, gives a connected and comprehensive survey of a most fascinating topic of Indian history. The character of the work as a learned and up-to-date compilation from the most authoritative sources, indigenous and foreign, must not be allowed to throw into the background the originality and comprehensiveness of the conception. Here, for the first time, fragmentary and scattered records and evidences are collated and compared in a systematic survey of the entire field; and one broad historical generalization stands out clearly and convincingly, of which all histories of world culture will do well to take note, viz. the central position of India in the Orient world, for well-nigh two thousand years, not merely in a social, a moral, a spiritual, or an artistic reference, but also and equally in respect of colonizing and maritime activity, and of commercial and manufacturing interests. A multitude of facts of special significance also come out vividly, and, in several cases, for the first time, in the author's presentation, e.g. the teeming ports and harbours of India, the harbour and other maritime regulations of the Mauryan epoch, the indigenous shipbuilding craft, the Indian classification of vessels and their build, the paramount part played by indigenous Indian shipping in the expansion of Indian commerce and colonization from the shores of Africa and Madagascar to the farthest reaches of Malaysia and the Eastern Archipelago; the auxiliary character of the foreign intermediaries, whether Greek, Arabian, or Chinese; the sources of India's manufacturing supremacy for a thousand years in her advances in applied chemistry, etc. In establishing these positions, the author, besides availing himself of the archaeological (including architectural and numismatic) as well as other historical evidence, has drawn upon hitherto unpublished manuscripts and other obscure sources. But the signal merit of the survey is that these facts of history are throughout accompanied by their political, social, or economic interpretation, so that the monograph is not a mere chronicle of facts, but a chapter of unwritten culture-history, conceived and executed in a philosophical spirit. The author's style combines lucidity with terseness, compresses a large mass of facts into a small compass, and is equal alike to the enumeration of details and the march and sweep of a rapid historical survey.
One characteristic cannot escape the most casual reader of this volume: Prof. Mookerji takes his materials as he finds them, and does not clip and pare them down, in the name of historical criticism, or handle them after the accredited methods of speculative chronology. By confining himself to settled landmarks, and traversing his ground by rapid strides, proceeding from epoch to epoch, he is able to avoid the quicksands of Indian chronology. As for the critical methods of sifting evidence, there is a great deal of misconception in the air, and it is best to point out that the methods which are imperative in testing an alleged fact or event are highly unsuitable in a review of the formative forces, agencies, movements, of a nation's history as preserved in the storehouse of national tradition. To take an example from the so-called Higher Criticism, to explode the Mosaic authorship is not to explode Moses in culture-history. In fact, whether in Semitic, Chinese, or Indian philology, the destructive (and explosive) criticism of the seventies and eighties of the last century is now itself exploded, and has been followed by a finer and more accurate sense of historic origins and national evolutions. For the rest, it must be recognized that, while accuracy and scientific criticism, in the measure in which they are attainable in the social sciences, must always be essential to a right historical method, a first sketch or mapping of an entire province, the work of scouts, pioneers and conquerors, cannot usefully employ the methods of a trigonometrical or a cadastral survey.
Brajendranath Seal.