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The City and the Wilderness: Indo-Persian Encounters in Southeast Asia By Arash Khazani. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2020. 244 pp. ISBN: 978050289697 (paper).

2022; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 81; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1017/s0021911822000419

1752-0401

Eric Tagliacozzo,

Asian Geopolitics and Ethnography

The publication of Arash Khazani's new book, The City and the Wilderness: Indo-Persian Encounters in Southeast Asia, is good news for those interested in Southeast Asia's connected histories with other parts of the Indian Ocean world. Khazani is the author of a study of state formation and tribal life on Iran's frontiers, and also a much wider-known book on the history of turquoise, as the stone began to be traded across wide spaces, moving around the globe over the course of centuries. Both of these books evince a concern with liminality, mobility, and travel, in different and wonderful ways. The City and the Wilderness continues this common overarching theme of motion in Khazani's third book. Here, the motion in question mostly concerns Indo-Persian travelers as they made their way to Burma in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This was a world on the eve of turning from one thing into something else. Britain would begin its imperial adventure in earnest toward the end of this period, expanding from a few ports that had been annexed further south in Southeast Asia, and starting to take territory in Burma along the coasts. In a way, then, Khazani's book can be seen as a snapshot of a world that was about to undergo fundamental change, as the fluid travel and easy cross-fertilizations of the past started to give way to more ossified and earnest attempts at local control on the ground. Khazani sketches out this world in vivid fashion.Perhaps the most important thing to say at the outset in connecting these pasts is that Khazani quickly realized the dissonance between the history that interested him and the present, as things stand now: two very different realities. Mrauk U, the kingdom in Rakhine State in western Burma that forms the heart of this book, was once the seat of a local, very cosmopolitan empire, and Khazani found various remnants of that time, though it was not easy to do so. Some of these remnants were texts, which form the spine of his own account. But he also found coins, inscriptions, and other vestiges of a past now under siege, as this part of Burma undergoes violence and repeated attacks against the remaining Muslim inhabitants of this province. Mrauk U is now a Buddhist pilgrimage site with little room in the historiographical ledgers of the present regime to interpret it as anything more syncretic. But Khazani adroitly shows how these stretches of coast and their inner hinterlands were once part and parcel of a much larger maritime world. Through a series of texts of period travelers, he shows us as readers how connectivity actually worked, through diplomats and holy men, as well as through pilgrims and writers. Rakhine State is now one of the most isolated parts of Burma, difficult to enter and almost impossible to study under present conditions. The current Burmese regime has intentionally made this the case. So Khazani's efforts to untangle these pasts stand out as all the more important, in showing how transregional connections have long been a part of Burmese history (including with Muslim visitors), whether this interpretation is currently allowed in-country or not.The wealth of Burma as a country stands out in some of this narrative. It was understood from early on (and not just by the British, who started to take over territory in the 1820s) that Burma was a fecund land. Khazani shows in the narrative of Mir ‘Abd al-Latif Khan, for example, how hardwoods such as teak (used in shipping and for other important construction such as in palaces), as well as precious stones (especially rubies and other gems), were to be found here. Cities, some of them inhabited, some of them now ghostly relics of a gilded past, were also to be witnessed on Burmese soil. Indo-Persian travelers clearly understood that this was a civilization with an antiquity as impressive as their own, and the Muslim/non-Muslim conversations in this part of the Indian Ocean also mirrored confluences that were happening on the Indian subcontinent as well.The texts that form the majority of Khazani's discourses about coastal Burma in this period are not well-known to historians of Southeast Asia. Thus, he provides a valuable lens to look at this kingdom that is at variance from both the Burmese sources (mostly Buddhist) and the Western sources that tell us much of what we know of local cultural history. These Indo-Persian travelers had their own concerns, as well as their own locus of observation, so the untangling of these webs proves to be very useful for thinking about Burmese society as a whole, right as this world was about to dramatically change in the early to middle decades of the nineteenth century. In this, Khazani has provided a real service: altering a way of knowing and, in turn, providing alternative glimpses of what we thought we already knew. It is an exciting and thought-provoking book.