Afanasy Nikitin
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Afanasy Nikitin
Famed Russian merchant and autobiographer; exact dates of birth and death unknown.
Afanasy Nikitin was a Russian merchant from Tver who left a diary of his travels to Iran and India during a four-year period between 1466 and 1475. The traveler's own account remains the primary source of information on his personal history and the purpose of his long journey. Under the title The Journey Beyond Three Seas, Afanasy's travel record is a document of great interest, both to historians studying the interactions of medieval Russians with the Muslim East, and in general as one of the first autobiographical accounts in the literature. It has been repeatedly published in the original Russian with annotations and translated into many languages.
Afanasy's notes describe how he left Tver, intending to join a trade expedition headed for the Caucasian principality of Shirvan. On the way, his party was robbed of their goods. He was rescued by the Shah of Shirvan, but, despite the high risk, decided to continue his journey to Derbent, a market familiar to him, and then to Baku, rather than return to Tver empty-handed. He went on to cross the Caspian Sea, continued his travels across Iran, and then crossed the Indian Ocean to the Deccan. After surveying the markets, customs, and courts of the Bahmani and Vijayanagar empires, he made his way back to Russia, crossing the Black Sea. Somewhere in the region of Smolensk, he met an untimely death. Merchants brought his notes to Vasily Mamyrev, secretary to Grand Prince Ivan III of Moscow. The L'vov chronicler reports that he received Afanasy's notes in 1475 and incorporated them into his annalistic record, but was unable to locate any further information on the traveler.
The first historians to study his notes saw Afanasy as a daring explorer and patriot. Looking at the journey in commercial perspective, however, historian Janet Martin concludes that although Afanasy did travel farther than other Russian travelers of his era, and visitied places they did not, his notes reveal him as a cautious, even conservative merchant who made a series of discrete, limited decisions to continue his journey on the basis of information about markets conveyed by merchants that he met. He initially planned to take advantage of a lull in hostilities between Muscovy and the Great Horde to bring furs to the Caucasus and the lower Volga, a venture which had good prospects for high profits. His journey to Iran followed a well-established trade route, with extended stops at towns known for their bazaars. Afanasy indicates that his decision to continue to India was based on information from Muslim merchants whom he met in Iran. His notes on India, a market unfamiliar to Russian merchants, contain the most detailed information on goods and markets, as well as advice on finding shelter and warnings about the high customs fees exacted against Christians and the pressures to convert to Islam. This information would have been of great value to merchants considering such a venture. Only when he concluded that further travel would not bring new opportunities for commerce did he decide to return to Russia.
Long passages in creolized Arabic containing prayers and expression of fears about the traveler's inability to practice Christianity in India have inspired a variety of hypotheses. Nikolai Trubetskoy characterized Afanasy's notes as a lyrical tale of a committed Orthodox Christian who suffered from his religious isolation, but kept the faith of his homeland; the foreign terms and phrases added local color to the narrative, shaping its unique artistic structure, while concealing the traveler's most intimate thoughts from all but a handful of readers. Others questioned Afanasy's faith. Yuri Zavadovsky noted Afanasy's extensive knowledge of Muslim prayers and of the requirements for conversion to Islam. Afanasy's reports of his own behavior suggested to historian Gail Lenhoff that he was a social convert to Islam. This decision to convert appears to have been initially dictated by commercial interests, since Muslims did not have to pay taxes or customs duties and could trade more freely in the Deccan markets. His conversion obligated him to pray in Arabic and to observe Muslim customs in public. The increasing proportion of Arabic prayers in the autobiography and the existence of a final prayer of thanks to Allah for surviving a storm, uttered as he approached Christian soil and duly recorded in his diary, could indicate that by the end of his journey Afanasy had assimilated the Muslim faith.
Bibliography
Lenhoff, Gail and Martin, Janet. (1989). "The Commercial and Cultural Context of Afanasij Nikitin's Journey Beyond Three Seas." Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 37 (3):321 - 344.
Major, Richard H., ed. (1857). "The Travels of Athanasius Nikitin," tr. Mikhail M. Wielhorsky. In India in the Fifteenth Century. Hakluyt Society, ser. 1. volume 22. London: Hakluyt Society.
Martin, Janet. (1985). "Muscovite Travelling Merchants: The Trade with the Muslim East (Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries)." Central Asian Studies 4(3):21 - 38.
Trubetskoy, Nikolay S. (1978). "Afanasij Nikitin's Journey Beyond Three Seas as a Work of Literature." In Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views, ed. Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Slavic Publications.
—GAIL LENHOFF
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Afanasy Nikitin
Afanasy Nikitin (Афана́сий Ники́тин in Russian) (died 1472) was a Russian merchant and one of the first Europeans (after Niccolò de' Conti) to travel to and document his visit to India. He described his trip in a narrative known as The Journey Beyond Three Seas (Khozheniye za tri morya).
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The voyage
In 1466, Nikitin left his hometown of Tver on a commercial trip to India. He travelled down the Volga River, reached Derbent, then Baku and later Persia by crossing the Caspian Sea, where he would live for one year. In the spring of 1469, Nikitin arrived at the city of Ormus and then, crossing the Arabian Sea, reached the sultanate of Bahmani, where he would live for 3 years. On his way back, Nikitin visited Muscat, the Arabian sultanate of Fartak, Somalia and Trabzon, and in 1472 arrived at Feodosiya by crossing the Black Sea. On his way to Tver, Nikitin died not far from Smolensk in the autumn of that year.
During his trip, Nikitin studied the population of India, its social system, government, military (he witnessed war-games featuring war elephants), its economy, religion, lifestyles, and natural resources. The abundance and trustworthiness of Nikitin's factual material provide a valuable source of information about India at that time.
Nikitin, Christianity, and Islam
After studying Nikitin's account, and especially his references to Islam (at the time much of India was ruled by Muslim sultans and there were considerable numbers of Muslim merchants living along the coast), particularly the prayers he transliterates from Arabic and Turkic into Cyrillic letters, Gail Lenhoff and Janet Martin concluded that Nikitin probably converted to Islam while in India.[1]
His loss of contact with Christianity and his life among Muslims (and apparent lapse from Christianity and conversion to Islam) bothered him and he mentions this several times in his account. Indeed, he begins his account calling it his "sinful voyage beyond three seas." He went on to explain that, while he continued to date events by Christian religious holidays and invoked the Mother of God and the saints("the Holy Fathers"), he could not remember when Christian holidays were, so he could not celebrate Easter and other movable feast days or keep the Christian fasts (Lent, the St. Peters' Fast, the fast during Advent, etc.). Thus, he kept the fasts of the Muslims and broke fast when they did. He also wrote that at Bindar in the third year of his journey he "shed many tears for the Christian faith." Very near the end of his account, he wrote of his wish to return home and to the Christian faith: "I, Afanasy, a damned servant of Almighty God, Maker of heaven and earth, pondered over the Christian faith, the Baptism of Christ, the fasts established by the Holy Fathers, and the apostolic commandments, and I longed to go [back] to Rus!" [2]
Yakov Lurye, an editor of Nikitin's Journey, sees his conversion as doubtful, pointing out that a circumcised convert should be persecuted or even put to death in Rus', so if Nikitin had indeed become a Muslim, he would have avoided returning to his country, while in fact he died on his way back in Lithuania not far from the Muscovite border.
Nikitin in modern memory
In 1955, the local authorities of Tver erected a bronze monument to Afanasy Nikitin on the bank of the Volga River. The sculptor was Sergei Orlov. There is a folk legend, that this statue was raised because Nikita Khrushchev upon visiting India, told Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru that there was a statue of Nikitin in Russia when in fact there was not (Nehru had asked if the Russians had honored the first Russian to visit India). So as not to be proven a liar, Khrushchev phoned back to Russia demanding that a statue of Nikitin be built immediately, before Nehru's state visit to Russia. The statue was featured on a Russian postage stamp in 2005 commemorating the 75th Anniversary of the establishment of the Tver region (oblast).[3] Nikitin was also featured on a coin commemorating the 525th anniversary of his journey.
In 1958, Mosfilm produced a film entitled The Journey Beyond Three Seas with Oleg Strizhenov cast as Afanasy Nikitin.
In 2000, a black obelisk was erected in Nikitin's honor at Revdanda, 120 km south of Mumbai, the probable location where he first set foot in India.
In 2006, the Indian organization "Adventures & Explorers," with the support of the Embassy of India in Moscow and the Tver Regional Administration sponsored the "Nikitin Expedition", in which 14 travellers set out from Tver to retrace Nikitin's journey through Russia, the Middle East, and Central Asia to India.[4] The expedition lasted from 12 November 2006 to 16 January 2007. The Indian national newspaper, The Hindu, filed several reports of the expedition's progress.[5] After reaching India, two members of the "Nikitin Expedition" set out in March 2007 from Mumbai (formerly known as Bombay) in SUVs to retrace Nikitin's travels around India itself. The Calcutta Telegraph filed a report on its progress in one of its March editions.[6]
Rock band Aquarium composed a song "Afanasy Nikitin Boogie". Power metal band Epidemia composed a song "Хождение за три моря" about Nikitin's writings. A mark of Tver beer "Afanasy" is named after Afanasy Nikitin.[7]
See also
- Daniel Kievsky
- Chronology of European exploration of Asia
- Niccolò de' Conti (1385–1469) - another European who traveled to India a few decades before Nikitin
- some marginal notes on india:sergei d serebriany
References
- ^ Gail Lenhoffand Janet Martin "The Commercial and Cultural Context of Afanasij Nikitin's Journey Beyond Three Seas." Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 37, No. 3 (1989):321 - 344; See also Janet Martin, "Muscovite Travelling Merchants: The Trade with the Muslim East (Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries)." Central Asian Studies 4, No. 3 (1985):21 - 38.
- ^ For a translation of Nikitin's account, see Richard H. Major, ed. "The Travels of Athanasius Nikitin," tr. Mikhail M. Wielhorsky. In India in the Fifteenth Century. Hakluyt Society, ser. 1. volume 22. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1857). See also the online English translation at: http://www.russian-centre-mumbai.org/history.htm
- ^ See Stamp News International at: http://www.stampnews.com/stamps/stamps_2005/stamp_1173967252_581033.html
- ^ See the online press report from the Embassy of India in Moscow at: http://www.indianembassy.ru/en/en_05_04_t0311_2006.html
- ^ See the online versions of the articles at: http://www.hindu.com/2006/12/10/stories/2006121000542000.htm and http://www.hindu.com/2006/11/26/stories/2006112602291000.htm
- ^ See the online version of the article at: http://www.telegraphindia.com/1070322/asp/nation/story_7550104.asp
- ^ Торговая марка пива "Афанасий"
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