In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants by Sunil S. Amrith
  • Christopher V. Hill
Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants. By Sunil S. Amrith (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2013) 353 pp. $29.95

If ever there were a book that epitomizes the historical value of interdisciplinary history, it is Amrith’s Crossing the Bay of Bengal. This volume is a manifest of various fields of history. Among the disciplines covered are religious history, migration, environmental history, the frontier, European history, Asian history, cultural history, labor history, and women’s history. This timely volume has earned a place among the best new books in its field.

Amrith argues that historians need to move away from nationalist histories and maps and to look at history through a different lens. The one with which he primarily focuses is migration. Between 1840 and 1940, 25 million Indians migrated to Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Malaya, and Burma; even more of them ended up in Indonesia and Indochina. As the author notes, “The merchants, workers, slaves, and soldiers who crossed the Bay in the early modern world shaped a maritime sphere around its arc of coasts” (62). Most of these migrants came from South India. Telegu speakers tended to migrate to Burma, while Madrasis ended up in Malaya, and Tamils in Ceylon. To the migrants European frontiers [End Page 109] were meaningless. Connections based on culture and commerce were ties that bound the migrants together regardless of imperial boundaries and states.

A prime example of this phenomenon can be found in the worship of Shahul Hamid of Nagore, India. A Muslim saint of the sixteenth century, Hamid was worshipped throughout the Bay of Bengal at shrines in Penang and Singapore, and supposedly in Burma, Ceylon, Indonesia, and Vietnam. One participant in an annual precession in Penang to honor him noted that the crowd included Muslims, Hindus, Malays, Burmese, Chinese, Bengalis, Japanese, Portuguese, and many others. Amrith lays to rest the old shibboleth that Hindus and Muslims were natural enemies. Within the confines of the Bay of Bengal, crossing the sea was a rite of passage, often leading to a sense of community that transcended ethnicity and religion. Amrith notes that “transformations in the sea are an outcome—unintended and unpredictable—of a history of migration, imperial expansion, and technological change that knit the littorals of the Bay of Bengal together, then pull them apart” (30). The one constant of the Bay of Bengal is change.

The Bay in modern times is different in certain ways and similar in others. Nationalism, arising in the 1920s, tended to emphasize regional identity at the expense of community. The result of post–World War II independence movements is that a bay that was once European is now Asian. Amrith sees two key ways in which the Bay is playing a major role in shaping the future. The first is in the realm of competition, primarily between India and China, over its vast resources. The second concerns “the Bay of Bengal’s littoral [which] stands at the front line of Asia’s experience of climate change: its densely populated coastal zone is home to nearly half a billion people. In this context, the Bay of Bengal’s history can be a source of insight and explanation” (5).

Amrith’s book is both important and engaging; it is is the kind of environmental history of which we need more, transcending boarders and frontiers and offering a more holistic lens through which to view historical causation on a global scale. Books such as Crossing the Bay of Bengal help us to understand the history of South and Southeast Asia without the stifling limitations and elitism of imperial history. For that alone, this monograph is an invaluable addition to the emerging library of environmental histories of Asia. [End Page 110]

Christopher V. Hill
University of Colorado, Colorado Springs
...

pdf

Share