Carmarthen Classical Association
Title of paper: “The Tusk Breaks, the Ocean Gives, the Diver Disappears: South Indian Pearl Trade in the Age of Indo-Mediterranean Trade.”
Speaker: Priyasakhi Chiara Barchi
Time, date and location: 18:00 BST (13:00 EDT) on Thursday 25th June (online via MS Teams).
Abstract: Pearls have been regarded as elusive luxury commodities from antiquity to contemporary scholarship. Their affective and visual properties imbue them with an otherworldly essence, often leading them to be perceived as more than mere oceanic materialities. This is especially true in Classical Tamil texts, where pearls exist in both the maritime and terrestrial realms, as products of the animal, plant, and mineral worlds.
This paper explores the fluid and often contradictory narratives of pearl origins in such texts, with pearls variously described as being cast ashore by waves (Ainkurunūru 105; Akanānūru 130) and coming from shattered elephant tusks (Naṟṟiṇai 282), to growing in paddy fields (Manimekalai, 8.8). What is strikingly absent in Early Historic South Indian poetic imaginary is any direct account of pearl diving. This elision of labor and human agency underlying the harvesting of pearls, culminating in disembodied imagery of waves yielding pearls to the shore, finds stark contrast in Greco-Roman sources, which display an empirical interest in the extraction of natural products. Human labor is central to the accounts of Pliny the Elder and the Periplus Maris Erythraei 59, which describes the Pandyan king’s use of convicts as divers at the port of Korkai. What does the absence of pearl diving in Sangam poetry thus reveal about local ideologies of labor and natural products? Who were the likely divers fueling the South Indian pearl trade in the early first millennium CE?
By comparing Tamil with Mediterranean textual traditions and incorporating epigraphic evidence, this paper aims to uncover the historiographical tensions surrounding pearls as both trade commodities and oceanic materialities, situating the analysis within broader theoretical discussions on poetics of origin and extraction practices.
All are welcome. To request to attend, please email either R.Parkes@uwtsd.ac.uk or m.cobb@uwtsd.ac.uk
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