Introducing Dr Mahmood Kooria, lecturer and renowned expert in the History of the Indian Ocean World at Edinburgh. He is the winner of the prestigious Infosys Prize in Humanities and Social Sciences 2024, India’s highly respected awards for academics making an impact. At the awards ceremony on Saturday 11 January 2025 he will receive USD$100,000 towards his research.
Dr Kooria talks about winning the Prize, the challenges of specialising in a niche field and surprise findings in his latest work. And how a chance meeting with a great historian set him on his career path.
A brief encounter with Indian Ocean history expert
On a sunny day in 2011 Dr Kooria was attending the Indian History Congress in Patiala, Punjab. He stepped out for some fresh air and spotted renowned historian Professor Michael Pearson walking alone across a nearby park.
Dr Kooria plucked up the courage, along with his senior Digvijay Kumar Singh, to speak to the respected academic. Much to his surprise, the expert, a keynote speaker at the conference, gave them some of his time.
Their exchange was a turning point for Dr Kooria, then a Masters student at Jawaharlal University. He went on to study a PhD at Leiden University in the Netherlands, and to collaborate with Professor Pearson.
“That brief encounter with one of the great figures of Indian Ocean history left an impression on me,” explains Dr Kooria. “When I decided to do my PhD, he was one of the referees. And while I was doing my PhD, we decided to edit a volume together [Malabar in the Indian Ocean: Cosmopolitanism in a Maritime Historical Region]. This was published by Oxford University Press in 2018.”
Drawn to Edinburgh
After finishing his PhD, Dr Kooria taught in India and carried out research at Leiden University. During this time he saw an advert for a rare lectureship position in pre-1750 Indian Ocean history at Edinburgh.
“I think this is the only position in the entire Europe, including continental Europe and the UK, specifically in Indian Ocean history,” he says. “Edinburgh was at the forefront of creating a position and inviting applications specifically on the Indian Ocean and premodern Indian Ocean. I felt like no matter what, I’m giving it a shot. And I’m very happy that they selected me.”
Since joining the University in 2023, an area of Dr Kooria’s research has focused on the matrilineal and matriarchal Muslim communities of the Indian Ocean between Southeast Africa and Southeast Asia. Within a matrilineal system, women took full ownership of property and the household. Men took to the seas as traders, sailors and itinerants.
“Edinburgh was at the forefront of creating a position and inviting applications specifically on the Indian Ocean and premodern Indian Ocean.
Dr Mahmood Kooria
The system enabled ocean trade to flourish. It also gave women economic stability and greater freedom, and has raised interesting questions around Islamic legal tradition. It continued among the Muslim community from Mozambique and Comoros to Malaysia and Indonesia long after discontinuing among other communities who practised it throughout history.
Exploring the Indian Ocean history’s archives
For Dr Kooria, one particular challenge is that findings focus on the European experience of Indian Ocean history.
“From Southeast Africa to Southeast Asia, this whole region, much of the scholarship is about European expansion, colonisation and so forth,” he says. “Very rarely the pre-European engagements are studied in their own right, and this is something that I love to do, and I have been doing.”
“Europeans are very important and the European archives, for example the Portuguese, Dutch and British archives, are very full shaped,” he continues. “However, equally important are the materials from the region itself. This is challenging because first and foremost, the availability of sources is rather limited compared to the rich European archives.”
Language barriers
Dr Kooria also discovered that material is often written in extinct or illegible languages. To compile a trans-oceanic, trans-regional history, specific linguistic skills are needed.
“Fortunately, I have been very lucky to learn different languages from within the Indian Ocean region before my Masters. During my Masters and PhD I studied additional languages,” he says. “I tried to utilise my linguistic training or trainings in different languages to explore the materials from the region, from East Africa to southern Arabia, to South Asia to Southeast Asia.”
Using his knowledge of languages, Dr Kooria has delved deeper into the history of the region. He has explored how people interacted and migrated across borders between 700AD and the mid 18th century. This research has resulted in two books on Islamic law and the Indian Ocean and a wide range of articles.
A fresh take on the role of women
“Most of the people who travelled as sailors, captains, navigators or traders, were men,” says Dr Kooria. “My current book project is on the matrilineal system and how the property and status, and even family trace their lineage through woman to woman instead of the patrilineal, patriarchal line. And I thought it works very well with the Indian Ocean because most of the men are travelling on the sea while women are staying home. Therefore the property and home, and children, all belong to the mother, passed on down to them. Then I started thinking, didn’t women travel at all in the pre-modern period?”
He has since unearthed fragmented evidence of interesting cases of women travelling in medieval times. While some were slaves or concubines, others were scholars, traders and diplomats. This was at a time before the introduction of steamships or planes, which would make travel more accessible to women.
Female travellers of the Indian Ocean
“If you look at 16th– and 17th-century British writings, or even Japanese, there are a lot of negative notions against women travelling,” says Dr Kooria. “For example, that you can’t take a woman seriously if she’s travelling. Also, there are a few quotations, where travelling women are counted among the mad, that you can’t take their testimonies seriously in a court as a witness account, and decrees that if a woman wants to travel, a husband can divorce her. This somewhat continued to the 19th century, where we see this idea that women cannot travel, and did not travel.”
Dr Kooria is finding more cases of female mobility during the period that tell a different story. “Through this research, I would like to challenge that to see across the globe in the mediaeval world how women travelled,” he says. “Some of them were pirates, some were scholars, some disguised as men because it was predominantly a masculine space. But still they undertook these long journeys across the world. So that challenges this myth in terms of women travelling in the medieval world.”
An unexpected award
Dr Kooria’s research is highly regarded by specialists in Islamic law in the history of the Indian Ocean world. However, his findings have recently started to attract the attention of a wider audience.
In November 2024 Dr Kooria was invited to a Zoom call by Akeel Bilgrami, an eminent professor of philosophy at Columbia University, to discuss his book: “I was happy and honoured that such a great philosopher like him had read my book and wanted to discuss it. So, I prepared myself by rereading some of his works.”
To his surprise, a large team greeted him on the call. Here Professor Bilgrami told him he had won the Infosys Prize in the Humanities and Social Sciences category. As it turns out, Professor Bilgrami was the chair of a six-member jury.
The prize comprises a medal, citation certificate and USD$100,000, awarded by the Infosys Science Foundation. The foundation is a not-for-profit trust, set up in 2009 by Infosys. Researchers connected to India are awarded for their work across six categories.
Gaining recognition
“I didn’t have any clue when they selected me. I hardly thought that they would select someone like me who was very junior as they have always selected very senior scholars in the field. I’m still processing it,” says Dr Kooria.
He continues: “I think what it means to me in terms of my research is a huge recognition for the field of the history of the Indian Ocean. It’s a very niche field, especially in Europe and also in Asia. Even though many scholars explore this now, I don’t think there is any specific Indian Ocean academic position, for example, in India. It is a great vindication of the decision that the School of History, Classics and Archaeology particularly, but also the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, have taken in terms of creating a position. Edinburgh being at the forefront of this is wonderful and I feel honoured to be in that position.”
Dr Kooria is optimistic that the award could generate more interest in his field of research in the future. “I feel that it is a huge recognition for the field broadly and specifically for the study of Islam in the Indian Ocean, and it would encourage more people to explore some of these areas in their own terms,” he explains. “So again, that especially materials from Asia and Africa are taken more seriously and explored more in detail, along with the European sources, so it’s not one or the other, rather a complementary approach. That’s something that I would like to do, and I hope the award also encourages more people to come to explore similar dimensions.”
“I feel that it is a huge recognition for the field broadly and specifically for the study of Islam in the Indian Ocean, and it would encourage more people to explore some of these areas in their own terms.”
Dr Mahmood Kooria
A supportive environment
For Dr Kooria access to support has been an invaluable part of the process towards his recent award success.
“There is huge support here in Edinburgh for research, especially in my School,” he says. The Research Office is very proactive and gives all sorts of different support. I would like to emphasise the effort that they put in and also that in turn gives us more encouragement to continue what we do.”
It’s clear that Dr Kooria finds the research side of his role at the University rewarding. He has also found the experience of teaching history of the Indian Ocean courses at Edinburgh a positive one.
“In terms of teaching I have taught the same course in the Netherlands and in India and what amazes me each time is the quality of the students here in Edinburgh,” he explains.
“I have scaled up the requirements in my courses,” Dr Kooria continues. “I taught the same course last summer here and then I realised that the students are really wonderful here. One example is that earlier, the requirement wasn’t to do any primary source-based essay for the final assessment. Now I have made it mandatory. And it is so impressive how students here managed to find the sources from the Indian Ocean region and come up with so many things that I even didn’t know before. So that is a really rewarding experience. In terms of research, the position and teaching, I find Edinburgh, and the School of History, Classics and Archaeology, an amazing place.”
Image credits: Main image of Dr Kooria standing at lectern, Ajeeb Komachi; Dr Kooria listening in an audience, Ajeeb Komachi; Dr Kooria sitting in an armchair, Anoop Dharmaraj; Dr Kooria standing with arms folded, Arish Azmat
