The current move towards convergence and broadband was mentioned in the last chapter, while discussing the issue of access and barrier with respect to the internet. These technological trends, which are resulting in the destruction or significant curtailment of the net's open nature, will be discussed in greater detail in this chapter.

But before doing so, we should note that broadband and convergence are two aspects of a single phenomenon. The convergence of broadcast, telecommunications and information technologies is not technically feasible in the absence of transmission channels of large information-carrying capacity, that is, broadband. On the other hand, broadband links may not be economically viable if they are not used to deliver multiple high-value services typical of convergence.

Convergence

Convergence informs all aspects of social life, spanning business, economy, politics, and culture in addition to technology. The following definition provided by the online encyclopedia Webopedia is of interest to us: “The coming together of two or more disparate disciplines or technologies. For example, the so-called fax revolution was produced by a convergence of telecommunications technology, optical scanning technology, and printing technology.”

Another online encyclopedia offers a more common definition: “a term for the combining of personal computers, telecommunication, and television into a user experience that is accessible to everyone.” The ‘converged’ technology has come to be known as ICT, information and communication technologies or, according to the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, “information and computing technology”.

Today, it is difficult to imagine an Indian newsroom without computers, but this was not the case twenty years ago. It was in 1987, when I was a sub-editor with the Calcutta edition of The Economic Times, that I saw a few computers. They were Apple Macintosh desktops, commonly called ‘Macs’ now, and caused a great deal of excitement and bewilderment in our newsroom. Those days, even in places where computers had made an appearance, they were not connected to the internet as India was only taking its first tentative step towards the internet age. Newsroom computers were used mainly for writing and editing copy, and for preparing graphics.

The larger media houses, such as The Hindu, The Times of India, The Indian Express and the Hindustan Times, were the early adopters of this technology, and many smaller organisations went on with their old typewriters and ballpoint pens well into the 1990s. It goes without saying that the Indian media have come a very long way since then, and computers in today's newsrooms are extensively used not only for writing, copy-editing and graphics but also for performing the more complex tasks, which form the core of journalistic work.

These applications can be divided into two broad categories, namely, computers and the net as journalistic tools, and the net as a medium of mass communication. This chapter deals with the former through an account of the methods and consequences of what has come to be known as computer assisted reporting (CAR), and sometimes as computer assisted journalism (CAJ).

Who needs a book on online or electronic journalism in India when millions still do not have basic telephone services in this and other parts of the world? Indeed, who needs online journalism itself, or journalism of any kind, in a country where millions of people are illiterate to this day? I refer here to written forms of journalism, since illiteracy by definition is not a hindrance to accessing broadcast journalism, at least at a certain level.

The answer to these questions is probably obvious to many of us. To those who share the common, somewhat uncritical type of liberal democratic thinking, journalism's raison d'être is to keep citizens informed about important issues, enabling them to make informed decisions about public affairs and exercise control over the powers that be. The traditional Marxist view, on the other hand, is that in class-divided society, journalism's function is to earn profits and shore up the ideological superstructure that favours and naturalises exploitation. A more sophisticated Marxism-influenced view is that the media are a tool of hegemony. Yet another view, which sounds much like the naive democratic one but in fact is more nuanced, is that the mass media are – or should be – an important component of the public sphere. The public sphere, in the words of Habermas, is “a realm of our social life in which something approaching public opinion can be formed”.

The river Ganges is of very unequal breadth, being in some places a League, in others a League and a half wide; so that when the wind is high this River abounds with Waves and Billows, no ways inferior to those of the sea (Glanius, A Relation of An Unfortunate Voyage to the Kingdom of Bengala, 1682, London, Henry Bonwick: 151–2).

States, Religious Networks and Maritime Societies

This book is about Bengal. Bengal is a land of rivers. Its coastal (or littoral) history is marked by centuries old interactions with other lands, peoples and cultures. The history of its coastal commerce and sea trade betrays a continuous negotiation between placid upland rivers coming from the Gangetic plain, swift rivers coming down from the north eastern India, sluggish deltaic zones that house many of Bengal's ports, and the open sea. Such a landscape has rendered Bengal's littoral space unique. The discovery of pre-historic stone figures from eastern India–mainly of snakes, monitor lizards, ducks, birds, toads and frogs–affirm the existence of this distinctive zone from very early times. No work on the commercial history of Bengal can afford to ignore this distinctive waterscape.

Sailing in Bengal is a combination of riverine (upcountry), coastal and sea navigation. Sailing is an integral part of this landscape. Ballads have been composed around boats, poems and novellas have been written about ships at sea, and customs, rituals and festivities have grown around sailing practices and passed into the stuff of legend. Sailing practices have complemented three types of trade: riverine, coastal and long distance.

Bengal in the Islamic Network and the Rise of the Early Modern States System

Chingiz Khan sent a great number of rareties and offerings with us for presentation to Sultan Muhammad, Khwarazm Shah, and said–“Say ye unto Khwarazm Shah, I am the sovereign of the sunrise and thou the sovereign of the sunset'’, on the occasion of his march from China (Tibet) towards Persia, in Minhaj-ud-Din Abu Umar-I-Usman's Tabakat-I-Nasiri: A General History of the Muhammadan Dynasties of Asia from 810 AD to 1260 AD and the Irruption of the Infidel Mughals into Islam (Tr). Raverty, H.G.I881, Reprint, New Delhi, Oriental Books Corporation, 1970: 966.

If structural changes in the Islamic and Christian worlds signalled the ending of the ancient world by the early medieval period in South Asia the Mongols too paved the way for the ending of the ancient world in Asia in the thirteenth century. Paradoxically this was also the century when Islam formally entered Bengal and the first ever Islamic state was established there.

What was the nature of this new Islamic state? Do we merely designate it as a ‘conquest’ state with a dynamism directed towards events within South Asia or do we seek to integrate the inherent dynamism of this new state within the larger framework of Islamic states that stretched across the civilised world in the thirteenth century? In other words can we establish a typology for this new state form that arose in South Asia and thereby move away from the ‘Islamic’ label?

‘Bengal is an extensive country and fertile, and produces a large revenue. The climate however is very damp, on account of the quantity of rain that falls and its proximity to the salt sea’ (Khwaja Abdul Karim Khan, Baya'n-i-Waki, Elliot and Dowson, V.8: 130).

The Eighteenth Century and Bengal – The Foundations

A major component of the eighteenth century debate is the received idea of Bengal's primacy. This book has questioned the notion of the ‘primacy’ of Bengal in the previous chapters. The story narrated in this book ends in the eighteenth century. The eighteenth century was crucial for Bengal for it experienced all three of the themes that distinguishes the eighteenth century from others: it saw the formal disintegration of Mughal administration in Bengal, it experienced the rise of a regional power (the Murshidabad nizamat), and faced the domination of foreign capital on its shores, rivers, inland markets and manufactures.

Because of these three markers the importance of the eighteenth century continues unabated in South Asian history; but it is important to keep in mind that in Bengal the eighteenth century brought with it yet another dimension. From then on, the economic and political focus was finally concentrated on the west (vanga). The east or samatata became a marginal land.

The eighteenth century–a century of change–is now itself the subject of a debate. It hinges around three themes: the decline of imperial power, the emergence of regional powers, and the rise of European economic and political power. The eighteenth century debate originated from the idea that the fragmentation of the Mughal Empire in the post-Aurangzeb era brought forth an era of decay in the sub-continent.

‘A great empire which marches with the Kingdomes of Delhi, Ceylon, Cathay and Vijayanagar’ (Roger Barlow, A Briefe Summe of Geographie, F.G.R.Taylor ed. Series II, V.69, London, The Hakluyt Society, 1929–32).

The ‘Primacy’ of Bengal?

From the historical accounts to academic works even today Bengal's inarguably large productive potential is taken to be an indicator of its primacy in business within South Asia and beyond. Its productive capacity is confused with the actual management of its resources and its weak commercial system. By commercial system is meant a system of controlling and diversifying production, dictating the quality of commodities and prices, a knowledge of transport networks and markets outside Bengal, and independent access to markets. Bengal's production system was agrarian-based and therefore doubly vulnerable to the vicissitudes of nature and the fluctuations in international trade. One tends to ignore these in favour of arguments highlighting the immense productivity capacity of Bengal in agriculture and crafts.

These accounts ignore the fact that despite its prodigious production, no independent mercantile activity on a large scale is noted for Bengal, after the first half of the seventeenth century. Thereafter, prominent merchants of Bengal functioned as dadni merchants, that is, as intermediaries between buyer and seller within Bengal, and rarely undertook commerce outside Bengal on their own initiative. Bengal merchants did not organise themselves into a trading combine vis-à-vis other ‘national merchants’ as did the Coromandel merchants from the seventeenth century.

Bengala, a most spacious and fruitful province, but more properly to be called a kingdom, which hath two very large powers in it, Purb and Patan, the one lying in the east, the other on the west side of the river Ganges… the chief cities in it are Ragamahat and Dakaka. It hath many havens and ports belonging unto it, which are places of very great trade. (Edward Terry, Voyage to East India, London, T. Wilkes, MDCC LXXVIII: 84–5)

My interest in Bengal's commercial history from the early to the late medieval period is a by product of the doctoral thesis on trade and merchants in eighteenth century Kasimbazar that I did under the supervision of the late Professor Denys Lombard at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris; a work that was made possible through a French Government doctoral grant from 1981–1985. This was published in 2006 as Merchants and Companies in Bengal: Kasimbazar and Jugdia in the Eighteenth Century, New Delhi, Pragati Publications. At the time, notions of ‘Asian Trade’ and ‘successor states’ dominated academic studies on eighteenth century South Asian history. Both notions displayed a deliberate and genuine attempt to understand the pre-colonial period and the nature of transformations in the colonial period. A debate that held centrestage at this time was whether (or not, as the case may be) the seeds of capitalism were present in seventeenth century South Asia.

‘Early modern history was shaped by a long since operational world economy and not just by the expansion of a European world system’ (A.G.Frank, 1998, Re Orient: Global Economy in an Asian Age, University of California Press and Sage/Vistaar: 327)

We have spoken this far of the ‘world empires’ of the Mings (1368), Ottomans (1453), the Mughals (1526) and the Safavids (1600) who participated in the politics and trade of this world. Let us now speak of ‘world economies’. World empires can exist as sub-sets within a single world economy and the world economy ultimately creates a world system with a hierarchical ordering of spatial units articulated to the structure of the state that is central to it. We saw that the Indian Ocean was a world system motored by a world economy that was constituted by the world empires that participated in its economic life.

So what denotes a world economy? It denotes, firstly, a spatial physical territory centred around an intital process of state formation and its outward projections over space and time. The two main markers of a world economy are its durability over time and its capacity to govern economic activities from its peripheries to the advantage of its core area. Secondly, a world economy, when it has retained its hegemony over surrounding regions for a long enough time, transforms itself into a world system where the dominant positions of power may not always be expressed through economic relationships.

Various Bengals and their Coalescence into Subah Bangla in the Eighteenth Century

‘Les Khorasan I'appellent Douzakhast…ce qui signifie en arabe un enfer rempli des biens’

(The Khorasans call it [Bengal] in Arabic ‘a hell full of abundance’)

Ibn Batuta, Voyages, Tome III, (Tr). Defremery, E.C., Sanguinetty, B.R., 1982, Paris, Maspero. (My translation).

The idea of Bengal, as a hell full of good things, took root from the fourteenth century. The statement above, attributed to Ibn Batuta the famous Maghrebian voyager who visted Bengal in the first half of the fourteenth century, has also been attributed to other travellers who have left behind accounts of Bengal; most notably Francois Bernier and Robert Challes, both of whom visisted Bengal in the seventeenth century. This was echoed as late as in the eighteenth century when the Riyas-us-Salatin stated this same sentiment unambiguously.

The flag of dissidence was frequently raised from Bengal. In 1579 Abu'l-Fazl called Bengal bulghak-khana or a ‘house of turbulence’. In Mughal times a posting to Bengal was deemed a demotion away from the corridors of power at Delhi, Agra or Lahore; yet it was emphasised that fortunes awaited those subahdars who braved this unsavoury posting. In travel accounts Bengal is portrayed as a frontier land, a place unknown, yet a country where fortunes could be made.

Bengal's frontier culture was unfamiliar to the north. A fish-eating land, its culture was perceived as alien by the Mughal ashrafi culture of north India. Bengalis were dismissed as ‘bands of fishermen’–a culture that the Mughals despised.

‘Let traders and karwans on both sides come and go, and let the precious products and ordinary commodities which may be in my territory be conveyed by them into thine, and those of thine, in the same manner, let them bring into mine’, Chingiz Khan to Sultan Muhammad Khwarazm Shah, on the occasion of his march towards Persia (Khwarizim) through Afghanistan, in Minhaj-ud-Din Abu Umar-I-Usman's Tabakat-I-Nasiri: A General History of the Muhammadan Dynasties of Asia from 810 AD to 1260 AD and the Irruption of the Infidel Mughals into Islam (Tr). Raverty, H.G. 1881, Reprint, New Delhi, Oriental Books Corporation, 1970: 966.

There was, we know, another ‘Asian Trade’ in existence in South Asia: an Asian trade of caravans, mules and nomadic tribesmen who traversed mighty passes, steep ravines and inhospitable terrain in a vast trade route spanning the cities of Asia, Arabia, Mongolia and China. This ‘Asian (overland) Trade’ was very different from Asian trade in Asian waters; nevertheless due to accessibility of sources it has always been this latter (sea) trade that has been treated under the idiom of ‘Asian Trade’ for the purposes of historical research.

We have seen that in the eighties the frontiers of this new subject–Asian Sea Trade–were pushed ahead by the provocative works of Ashin Das Gupta on the Malabar and Surat, by Om Prakash–and to a certain degree by Sushil Chaudhuri–for Bengal, by Aniruddha Ray on Cambay, by Sinappah Arasaratnam for the Coromandel and by K.N. Chaudhuri for the whole of the Indian Ocean World.