Aakhil Perumugham

The global historical studies after the 1950s, especially in fields such as maritime history, cross-cultural history, cliometrics, and global history, have challenged the traditional boundaries of area studies, the teleologies of European expansion, and the constraints of nationalist historiography, and shifted from a collection of isolated regional histories toward a more unified, transregional framework. One of the most significant methodologies to emerge after the 2000s was the concept of Connected Histories proposed by the Indian historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam in 1997. Central to this shift was his work Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia from 1997, countering the Southeast Asian and Eurasian historian Victor Lieberman’s Strange Parallels from 2003. By integrating multilingual archives, including Persian, Portuguese, Dutch, and other indigenous sources in Asian languages, and capturing the polyphonic nature of early modern interactions, the academic corpus provides a sophisticated re-evaluation of the political economy, social networks, and intellectual encounters that defined the maritime world between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. It also contributed to the emergence of a distinct field of Indian Ocean Studies, which depends on the coming together of historical scholarship in a post-colonial world and the development of World History as a discipline. This framework often offered a moral counterweight to both Western exceptionalism and modern nationalism.

The coastal forest dense of Irikkur a locality within Kannur has been lit up all the nights, for having the spiritual moonlight glow. Everything that appeared there had something pious pierced within it. As I paved the way through, even the green leaves near the shrine chanted with reverence.