Rila Mukherjee

In the remote east of a region once called Harikela lies Chittagong, an upper Bay of Bengal port city at the juncture of the medieval Bengal, Arakan and Tripura kingdoms.

Maps are regarded as affirmative visual documents, permanently fixing places, distances, and itineraries in our minds. Yet we often forget that early modern maps were subjective texts, only approximating places.

When the Dutch, Portuguese, Mughals, and Arakanese fought over a tiny island

In his analysis of the Estado da Índia, which was the official name of the Portuguese Empire, George Winius distinguished between the formal administration by the Estado’s headquarters at Goa over overseas possessions and the ‘informal empire’, which he called the ‘shadow empire’, that the Portuguese established in the Bay of Bengal. The shadow empire was a unique experiment carried out by sailors, merchant adventurers, pirates, and missionaries, with little formal sanction either from Goa or from Portugal.

Chittagong’s neighbour Sandwip is absent from Bay of Bengal history because its nature is hard to define.

Medieval Bengal’s links to the Straits world, a narrow stretch of water connecting to Southeast Asia and beyond, are overlooked. This world saw not only ocean-going vessels, but also coastal and localised traffic which, like riverine transport, has gone largely unrecorded.

Historians usually approach Bengal’s history from Gaur-Pandua in the west (i.e., Ilyas Shahi and Husain Shahi Bengal), but what of early Bengal?