A HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY OF COASTAL GUJARAT AND KONKAN: REVISITING SPATIAL AND SOCIAL RELATIONS (Part II) (original) (raw)

2005, PhD Thesis, Department of Geography, University of Mumbai, 2005 (Guide: Dr Swapna Banerjee-Guha)

Any part of space, due to its specific potentialities becomes important for a group of users during a specific point of time. Use of such spatial attributes by groups of varied culture makes the place activated leading to a series of changes in society and economy having distinct spatial manifestations. Social processes, thus, can be analysed with a perspective of space-time convergence. It suggests that space is produced, reproduced and structured by different processes over time. The present research has attempted to apply this concept of space-time convergence to investigate the processes through which urban cultural landscape was produced in coastal Gujarat and Konkan and how people in cities of this region produced their own urban spaces. The residents in the cities - merchants, small traders, artisans, local officers and common people - had their own aspirations, motives and needs. The aspirations of the city dwellers were the reflections of the era that was characterised by long distance overland and overseas trade on the one hand and the local networks of production, on the other. These temporal reflections were manifested in the ways in which the city space was organised. The research focuses on the process of making of heterogeneous socio-cultural spaces at specific time scales and attempts to analyse the process of evolution and growth of urban landscape in western India, especially in coastal Gujarat and Konkan (the study area) and examines the underlying spatiality of the growth process of urban centres in the region, especially from 1500 AD to 1800 AD. The study examines the process of growth of coastal Gujarat and Konkan as a heterogeneous cultural space and highlights the formidable forces that controlled the socio-spatial relations of this region, giving rise to a specific cultural landscape from time to time. Accordingly, parameters like economic land use, architecture, house types, language, cuisine, dress types, etc. that characterised the medieval and pre-modern urban landscapes of the region have been included as a part of the analysis, as and when needed. Few selected cities from the period under review have also been discussed in depth. Finally, the study specifically attempts to examine the linkages between spatial forms and social relations with a focus on the contemporary approaches of historical geographical analysis. Researches in historical geography on urban issues have been carried out extensively in other countries. Although, these works have focused only the countries of the North, a large number of themes have been handled by them. In India, however, researches in historical geography are especially scanty and the available works are in the form of papers in various geographical journals or edited books. Substantive works on the theme are almost absent. The existing works are merely descriptive and remain peripheral to the analytical body of contemporary historical geography. Substantive academic research in historical geography establishing a stronger relationship between socio-spatial structures and temporal perspectives is thus the need of the hour. The present study specifically intends to fill this gap. It critically examines the historical socio-spatial processes that shaped the urban cultural landscape of a part of western India at different spatial and temporal scales, with the perspective of space-time convergence.