000 01570nam a22001577a 4500
999 _c515787
_d515787
008 210208b ||||| |||| 00| 0 eng d
100 _aAgius, Dionisius. A.
_924121
245 _aWhere facts and history meet myth and legend: groups or communities in the marvels of India
260 _aIndia Quarterly
300 _a76(3), Sep, 2020: p.392-410
520 _aThe cAja-’ib al-Hind (Marvels of India) is a collection of sea stories allegedly compiled by Captain Buzurg Ibn Shahriya-r (d. 399/1009) which belongs to an Arabo-Islamic literary genre called the caja-’ib, containing themes of entertainment—things that are marvellous and strange. But these stories are not merely entertaining, they are an additional resource for the modern researcher because they also reflect the realities of daily life in seafaring communities of the Indian Ocean in the ninth and tenth centuries. Among the tales of the fantastic and the marvel, we find the simple humanity of the seafarers, something lacking in the purely factual, medieval, geographical and historical texts. A complementary model to the understanding of the maritime landscape of a group or community is proposed in this article. The stories model in this article demonstrates the relationship of an occupational group with other seafarers in a trans-regional Indian Ocean trade. – Reproduced
650 _aStories model, Marvels of India, Maritime landscapes, Community or group identity, Nautical data, Fact and fiction
_921711
773 _aIndia Quarterly
906 _aINDIAN OCEAN
942 _cAR