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Indian Ocean in the Shaping of Late Medieval India

I am extremely grateful to the executive committee of the Indian History Congress for asking me to preside over the Medieval Indian History Section of its seventyfourth annual session. It is a huge and unexpected honour that comes from my fellow-workers. I feel highly elated and humbly thank you for the trust reposed in me. I take this less as recognition of my academic achievements than as a gesture of encouragement from the great national forum of historians in India. In this address, I would like to place before this august assembly a subject on which I have been working for the past several years. As the title suggests, my study looks into the way the Indian Ocean circuits shaped the nature and contours of late Medieval India. The frequent movement of people, commodities and ideas through the oceanic space particularly after 1500 brought in variegated forms of changes that helped to integrate the far-flung and scattered production centres of the hinterland with the various exchange centres of the coastal rim in an intense way. The frequent circulation of goods and wealth of different forms through the maritime exchange centres of India emitted certain type of forces and dynamics that helped to break the relative isolation of the hinterland processes from coastal economy and bridge as well as integrate the vast bulk of production process of terrestrial India with the exchange processes of maritime India by creating subtle channels of connectivity and linkages cutting across various borders of polity, languages and ethnicities.1 The beginnings of these processes were perceptible in a feeble way with the circulatory processes initiated by the Jews linked with Cairo Geniza who established commercial networks from Broach in Gujarat up to coastal southeast