The Complicating Sea: The Indian Ocean as Method
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The Complicating Sea: The Indian Ocean as Method
Isabel Hofmeyr
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Volume
32, Number 3, 2012, pp. 584-590 (Article)
Published by Duke University Press
For additional information about this article
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cst/summary/v032/32.3.hofmeyr.html
Access provided by University Of Pennsylvania (13 May 2014 11:12 GMT)The Complicating Sea:
The Indian Ocean as Method
Isabel Hofmeyr
cross a number of domains, the Indian Ocean has moved to the fore. For interna-
tional relations experts and foreign policy commentators, the Indian Ocean world
represents a strategic arena where the forces shaping a post-A merican world intersect
most visibly. These include the rise of India and China as major economic powers and Sino-
Indian competition over oil sea-lanes and African markets and minerals. In a recent book
Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power, security analyst Robert Kaplan
describes the Indian Ocean as a zone “where global power dynamics will be revealed.” 1 It is
the “coming strategic arena of the twenty-first century.”2
Within the academy, as transnational and oceanic forms of analysis become more prom-
inent, the Indian Ocean attracts attention, especially as a domain that offers rich possibilities
for working beyond the templates of the nation-state and area studies. Importantly, the Indian
Ocean makes visible a range of lateral networks that fall within the Third World or Global
South. It is hence of particular relevance to those pursuing post – area studies scholarship and
has much to say to the themes of this special issue on comparative literature across Africa, the
Middle East, and South Asia.
This article seeks to demonstrate the ways in which the idea of the Indian Ocean might
be deployed in pursuing such objectives. It surveys current trends within Indian Ocean schol-
of
d ies arship and suggests how these might be used to illuminate questions of comparative literary
e St u history across Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. The article examines themes of print
ra ti v d
pa an
m ri ca culture across these three regions as well as aspects of anglophone literatures between South
Co , Af
A si a Asia and Africa.
u th st
So Ea
le Indian Ocean Universalisms
M idd
th e In an address delivered to the Arab Writers League Conference in Cairo in March 2008, Ami-
20
12
9
. 3, 15 7 tav Ghosh spoke about his early work in the context of the ideals of the Non-A ligned Move-
,N
o 1 89
32 0 1x- ss ment (NAM).3 He begins by discussing his stint in Egypt doing the fieldwork from which In an
ol. 92 Pre
V 108 ty
/ i
2 15 er s Antique Land emerged.4 His decision to go to Egypt was informed by what he calls xenophilia:
i1 0.1 ni v
o eU “the love of the other, the affinity for strangers.”5
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1. Robert D. Kaplan, Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of 4. See Amitav Ghosh, In an Antique Land: History in the Guise of a
American Power (New York: Random House, 2010), 13. Traveler’s Tale (London: Vintage, 1994).
2. Robert D. Kaplan, “Center Stage for the Twenty-First Century: 5. Ghosh, “Confessions,” 37.
Power Plays in the Indian Ocean,” Foreign Affairs 88 (2009): 16.
3. See Amitav Ghosh, “Confessions of a Xenophile,” Chimurenga 14
584 (2009): 35– 41.Ghosh links this xenophilia back to the brought their states with them. They created 585
spirit of Non-A lignment. In the field of culture, militarized trading-post empires in the Indian
he notes, this spirit “represented an attempt to Ocean, following Venetian and Genoese prec-
restore and recommence the exchanges and edents in the Mediterranean, and were wont
conversations that had been interrupted by to do business at the point of a gun. Hadramis
the long centuries of European imperial domi- and other non-Europeans — such as Gujaratis,
nance.” Such conversations “linked Yemen and Bohras, Chettiars, Buginese, and Malays — did
China, Indonesia and East Africa — and most not. Rather than elbow their way in, they com-
Isabel Hofmeyr
The Complicating Sea:
The Indian Ocean as Method
significant for me, India and the Middle East.”6 ported themselves to local arrangements wher-
Given these interests, Egypt proved especially ever they went.” 8 T. N. Harper puts the point
attractive to Ghosh. succinctly: “The globalization of European im-
In an Antique Land returns to these inter- perialism was an extension of the nation state.
rupted conversations whose geography is largely The globalism [of diasporas] was not.”9
coterminous with the Indian Ocean. The book Ho also makes the point that the encoun-
dramatizes these themes by contrasting the an- ter between these trading diasporas and Euro-
cient cosmopolitan of the Indian Ocean world pean imperial diasporas cannot be construed as
with the narrowness of the modern nation- an encounter of colonizer and colonized, strong
state. This contrast also serves to underline the and weak, global and local. Rather, both sides
layered and contradictory forms of sovereignty harbored universal ambitions. The group with
and belonging that characterizes many Indian whom Ho is concerned, the Hadramis from
Ocean littoral zones, drawn outward by older Yemen, are sayyids whose grand religious am-
networks of transnational trade and inward by bitions tangle with the hubris of European im-
the demands of the postcolonial nation-state. perial formations.10 This idea has prompted a
Ghosh’s comments provide a useful point rich vein of scholarship on the Indian Ocean
of entry into some of the major concerns of as a zone of universalisms that stretch into the
Indian Ocean scholarship. Shaped by Braude- colonial era. Whether rooted in pan-Islamism,
lian debates on the Mediterranean and world- Hindu reformism, pan-B uddhism, ideas of
systems theories, the heart of this initial work Greater India, or ideals of imperial citizenship,
has been on the early modern Indian Ocean the Indian Ocean offers a rich archive of trans-
trade networks rooted in a grammar of mon- national forms of imagination.11
soons and trade winds, port cities and littorals, This idea of the Indian Ocean as pro-
ships and seafaring, religion and commerce.7 ductive of universalisms has generated much
A point often made is that these networks work relevant to comparative literary scholars.
operated without the backing of a state and with Harper and Mark Ravinder Frost have traced
relatively low levels of violence. Engseng Ho ob- the idea of a series of colonial public sphere/s
serves: “The Portuguese, Dutch, and English in rooted in the port cities of the Indian Ocean,
the Indian Ocean were strange new traders who many of which housed diasporic populations.12
6. Ibid., 37, 38. Cities and Intruders: The Swahili Coast, India, and Por- 10. See Engseng Ho, “Empire through Diasporic Eyes:
tugal in the Early Modern Era (Baltimore, MD: Johns A View from the Other Boat,” Comparative Study of
7. An excellent overview of this scholarship is Markus
Hopkins University Press, 1998). On long-distance Society and History 46 (2004): 210– 46.
P. M. Vink, “Indian Ocean Studies and the ‘New Thalas-
trade, see Gupta, India; and Patricia Risso, Merchants
sology,’” Journal of Global History 2 (2007): 41– 62. For 11. See Sugata Bose, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian
and Faith: Muslim Commerce and Culture in the In-
major overviews of the Indian Ocean, see K. N. Chaud- Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (Cambridge: Har-
dian Ocean (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995). On
huri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An vard University Press, 2005); Harper, “Empire,” 141– 66;
the Portuguese presence, see Sanjay Subrahmanyam,
Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cam- and Mark Ravinder Frost, ‘“Wider Opportunities’: Reli-
The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama (Cambridge:
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Ashin Das gious Revival, Nationalist Awakening, and the Global
Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Gupta, Malabar in Asian Trade, 1740 – 1800 and Mala- Dimension in Colombo, 1870 – 1920,” Modern Asian
bar in Asian Trade, 1740 – 1800, in India and the Indian 8. Engseng Ho, The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Studies 36 (2002): 937– 67.
Ocean World: Trade and Politics (New Delhi: Oxford Mobility across the Indian Ocean (Berkeley: University
12. See Harper, “Empire”; Frost, ‘“Wider Opportuni-
University Press, 2004); and Michael Pearson, The In- of California Press, 2006), xxi.
ties’ ”; Mark Ravinder Frost, “Asia’s Maritime Net-
dian Ocean (London: Routledge, 2003). On port cities
9. T. N. Harper, “Empire, Diaspora, and the Languages works and the Colonial Public Sphere, 1840 – 1920,”
and littorals, see Michael N. Pearson, “Littoral Society:
of Globalism, 1850 – 1914,” in Globalization in World New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 6 (2004): 63 –
The Concept and the Problems,” Journal of World His-
History, ed. A. G. Hopkins (London: Pimlico, 2002), 158. 94; and Mark Ravinder Frost, “In Search of Cosmopol-
tory 17 (2006): 353 – 73; and Michael N. Pearson, Port
itan Discourse: A Historical Journey across the Indian586 As Frost notes: “Entrepots like Bombay, Madras, print capitalism.20 Greater attention to print
Calcutta, Rangoon and Singapore witnessed culture trajectories in the Indian Ocean will il-
the emergence of a non-European, western luminate new global histories of print.
educated professional class that serviced the The publications emerging from these
requirements of expanding international com- networks constitute experimental transnational
mercial interests and the simultaneous growth textual forms that seek to bring new kinds of
of the imperial state.”13 These groups shared audiences into being.21 This experimental work
e similar projects of social, political, and religious becomes especially visible in the newspapers
ra ti v
m pa reforms and exchanged ideas, personnel, pub- that emerge from the port cities and seek to ad-
Co lications, and equipment. Positioned as “nodal dress an Indian Ocean public. The most famous
f
ie so
tu d
points in an imperial network of steamer routes, of these is Gandhi’s Indian Opinion, initially
S
ia , telegraph lines and railways,” these “informa- published in four languages (Gujarati, Hindi,
As
u th
So he tion ports” 14 functioned as relay stations for Tamil, and English) but then reverting to Guja-
n dt
aa ideas, texts, commodities, and people.15 rati and English.
ric
Af st This view of the Indian Ocean public As the title implies, the newspaper sought
Ea
le
M idd sphere/s has proved fertile in terms of under- to create a transoceanic public through which
standing different aspects of print culture.16 an experimental idea of India as a transnational
Tracing the circulation of print technology and entity could take shape. Toward this end, the
culture in the Indian Ocean world presents a paper deploys a range of different genres that
complex picture that suggests different trajec- can accustom readers to transnational modes
tories for global histories of print. These routes of thinking and reading. Some, like the letter,
include Sufi networks, madrassas, pilgrims, the clipping, or quotation excerpted from news-
students, and middlemen 17 working at the in- papers around the Indian Ocean Rim, enact
terstices of different “imperial assemblages,” as notions of circulation that embody an idea of
Seema Alavi terms it.18 Greater India. The Indian Ocean travelogue,
Other print networks involve diasporic which reports on the port-to-port journeys of
routes across the Indian Ocean that produce notables like Gopal Krishna Gokhale, who vis-
novel printing endeavors drawing on Indian, ited South Africa in 1912, habituates readers
African, and Christian-mission printing exper- to an oceanic geography. In other instances,
tise.19 While these networks span South Asia, genres straddle different languages in the
the Middle East, Africa, Central Asia, and Eu- newspaper. Readers of the Gujarati column are
rope, many are centered on the Indian Ocean. referred to parts of the English section of the
Invariably such printing ventures are invested paper and vice versa. Given that many Gujarati-
in ideals of social reform and religious philan- speaking readers couldn’t read English, nor
thropy and do not conform to the model of English-speaking readers Gujarati, such cross-
Ocean from Singapore to South Africa, 1870– 1920,” in 17. See Anne K. Bang, “Authority and Piety, Writing 20. See Isabel Hofmeyr, “Gandhi’s Printing Press:
Eyes across the Water: Navigating the Indian Ocean, and Print: A Preliminary Study of the Circulation of Is- Print Cultures of the Indian Ocean,” in Cosmopolitan
ed. Pamila Gupta, Isabel Hofmeyr, and Michael Pear- lamic Texts in Late Nineteenth-and Early Twentieth- Thought Zones: South Asia and the Global Circulation
son (Pretoria: University of South Africa Press, 2010), Century Zanzibar,” Africa: The Journal of the Interna- of Ideas, ed. Sugata Bose and Kris Manjapra (London:
75– 108. tional African Institute 81 (2011): 89 – 107; and Preben Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 112 – 30.
Kaarsholm, “Transnational Islam and Public Sphere
13. Frost, “‘Wider Opportunities,’” 937. 21. See Isabel Hofmeyr, “Indian Ocean Lives and Let-
Dynamics in KwaZulu-Natal: Rethinking South Af-
ters,” English in Africa: Book History in Africa 35 (2008):
14. Juan R. I. Cole, “Printing and Urban Islam in the rica’s Place in the Indian Ocean World,” Africa: The
11 – 25; Thembisa Waetjen and Goolam Vahed, “The
Mediterranean World, 1890 – 1920,” in Modernity and Journal of the International African Institute 81 (2011):
Diaspora at Home: Indian Views and the Making of
Culture: From the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, 103 – 31.
Zuleikha Mayat’s Public Voice”; James R. Brennan,
ed. Leila Tarazi Fawaz and C. A. Bayly (New York: Co-
18. See Seema Alavi, “‘Fugitive Mullahs and Outlawed “Politics and Business in Indian Newspapers in Colo-
lumbia University Press, 2002), 344.
Fanatics’: Indian Muslims in Nineteenth Century nial Tanganika”; and Bodil Folke Frederiksen, “Print,
15. See Frost, “‘Wider Opportunities,’” 937– 39. Trans-Asiatic Imperial Rivalries,” Modern Asian Stud- Newspapers, and Audiences in Colonial Kenya: African
ies 45 (2011): 1337– 82. and Indian Improvement, Protest, and Connections,”
16. See Isabel Hofmeyr, Preben Kaarsholm, and Bodil
Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 81
Folke Frederiksen, “Introduction: Print Cultures, Na- 19. See Hofmeyr et al., “Introduction.”
(2011): 23– 41; 42– 67; 155– 72.
tionalisms and Publics in the Indian Ocean,” in Africa:
The Journal of the International African Institute 81
(2011): 1– 22.reference becomes a symbolic activity where indentured peripheries as discrete: the scholar- 587
one participates in the idea of another language ship traces the transfer of Indian cultural forms
even if one can’t actually read it.22 outward and looks at how these are or aren’t
The textual fields established in and be- changed in their new locations. This position is,
tween these periodicals will enable us to un- however, starting to change with work on inden-
derstand the trajectories of Indian nationalism tured labor as a key issue in shaping Indian na-
in new ways. Take Gandhi’s seminal work Hind tionalism on the subcontinent demonstrates.27
Swaraj, produced in 1909 as he returned from This trend toward integration has been
Isabel Hofmeyr
The Complicating Sea:
The Indian Ocean as Method
London to Johannesburg.23 Written in Gujarati strengthened by a growing body of work focus-
and then translated into English, the book is ing on British India as a subempire. This has
a key statement of Gandhi’s political philoso- opened the way for ideas of imperial revision-
phy and his thinking on industrialization and ism to be applied to British India and its inden-
violence. The standard interpretations of the tured peripheries in order to grasp them intel-
text regard its major addressees as the Indian lectually as one integrated space.28
“revolutionaries,” whose methods Gandhi ab- The question of crosscutting diasporas
horred as a mirror image of colonial violence.24 is also important in complicating our ideas of
However, if one examines the early editions of colonial and postcolonial histories, which tend
the text, it becomes apparent that he also had to be turned into binary stories of colonizer
another group of addressees in mind, namely versus colonized, white versus black. As Jon So-
readers of Indian Opinion.25 This perspective ske’s important work on Africans and Indians
from the periodical press reminds us of the oft- in Natal indicates, most communities under
made point that Gandhi’s Indian nationalism imperial rule find themselves living alongside
was shaped as much in South Africa and the In- other colonized groups, what Soske calls “the
dian Ocean as in India itself.26 also-colonized other.” Any substantial histori-
ography requires a simultaneous grasp of all
Crosscutting Diasporas groups involved avoiding the patterns of the
One important theme in Indian Ocean scholar- past that produced “African” or “Indian” his-
ship has been a revision of older ways of think- tory in South Africa as two discrete domains.29
ing about diaspora that tend to single out only Such desegregating approaches help us
one group for analysis. Not only does this repro- think about crosscutting transnational interac-
duce older racial categories of empire (Indian, tions in more productive ways. Thinking about
African, Chinese), it privileges movement out- Africa and India in relation to Gandhi helps us
ward — from India to Africa, Fiji, or the Carib- appreciate the ways in which he deploys the fig-
bean. What the reverse flows might be, or what ure of the African as a boundary for his imagi-
such outward flows mean for politics back on nation of India. Like all Congress moderates,
the mainland, are themes that have only re- Gandhi initially envisaged India as being a do-
cently started to attract attention. The older minion within empire. In this schema, India
diasporic scholarship sees the center and its and empire share a boundary that is marked
22. See Hofmeyr, “Gandhi’s Printing Press.” 27. See John Kelly, A Politics of Virtue: Hinduism, Sexu- link between transoceanic trade and cosmopolitan-
ality, and Countercolonial Discourse in Fiji (Chicago: ism. Edward Simpson notes: “Human movement in
23. See Isabel Hofmeyr, “Violent Texts, Vulnerable
University of Chicago Press, 1991); and Tejaswini Ni- the Indian Ocean fragments space and divides peo-
Readers: Hind Swaraj and Its South African Audi-
ranjana, “Alter/Native Modernities — ‘ Left to the ple” (Edward Simpson, “Sailors that do not Sail: Hin-
ences,” Public Culture 23 (2011): 285– 97.
Imagination’: Indian Nationalism and Female Sexu- duism, Anthropology, and Parochialism in the West-
24. See Anthony J. Parel, introduction to Mahatma ality in Trinidad,” Public Culture 11 (1999): 223 – 43. ern Indian Ocean,” in Journeys and Dwellings: Indian
Gandhi, “Hind Swaraj” and Other Writings, ed. An- Ocean Themes in South Asia, ed. Helen Basu [Hyder-
28. See Bose, Hundred Horizons; and Thomas R. Met-
thony J. Parel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, abad: Orient Longman, 2008], 92). Kai Kresse and
calf, Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean
2009), xiii– lxii. Edward Simpson argue that “movement and migra-
Arena, 1860 – 1920 (Berkeley: University of California
tion . . . tended to create new or modified divisions in
25. See Hofmeyr, “Violent Texts.” Press, 2007).
the population both at home and away rather than
26. See Claude Markovits, The Un-Gandhian Gandhi: 29. See Jon Soske, “ ‘Wash Me Black Again’: Afri- creating a unified oceanic society” (Kai Kresse and Ed-
The Life and Afterlife of the Mahatma (Delhi: Perma- can Nationalism, the Indian Diaspora, and KwaZulu ward Simpson, eds., Struggling with History: Islam and
nent Black, 2003), 78– 84. Natal, 1944 – 1960” (PhD diss., University of Toronto, Cosmopolitanism in the Western Indian Ocean [New
2009). This work resonates with another strand of In- York: Columbia University Press, 2008], 13).
dian Ocean scholarship that questions any automatic588 by the “native,” the figure who stands beyond ized and there was some mobility between the
the pale of civilization. Gandhi’s South Afri- states of being slave and free.32
can writings seek out situations in which this This stress on unfree labor forms an im-
arrangement can be dramatized. His prison portant theme in Indian Ocean history. As work
writings especially use the figure of the African by scholars like Clare Anderson, Kerry Ward,
prisoner as a way to underline the unity of In- and Nigel Worden indicates, the Indian Ocean
dian prisoners both political and criminal (al- witnessed extensive movements of slaves, politi-
e though the latter are always in danger of being cal exiles, prisoners of war, indentured laborers,
ra ti v
m pa seduced by the African prisoners who offer soldiers, and prisoners.33 The Indian Ocean be-
Co them tobacco and marijuana). Together this came a zone of penal experiment with a range
f
ie so
tu d
band of Indian prisoners offers an image of a of colonial powers trying out different forms
S
ia , miniature nation-in-formation.30 and types of penal settlement. Indeed, the In-
As
u th
So he A further advantage of a desegregated ap- dian Ocean constitutes a necklace of island
n dt
aa proach is the way it can deracialize and hence prisons stretching from Robben Island in the
ric
Af st extend our understanding of categories like Atlantic to the Andamans.
Ea
le
M idd slave, indentured laborer, and settler. In the This focus on islands also constitutes an
popular imagination (and in some academic important node in the scholarship on the In-
writings), the slave is imagined as African, the dian Ocean, including work on Islam, slavery,
indentured laborer as Indian, and the settler as indenture, and trade, and compressed histories
white. There were, however, Indian slaves just of creolization in the Indian Ocean. Islands also
as there were African indentured laborers. The play a significant conceptual role in oceanic his-
category of settler was likewise one claimed by tory, constituting an anticontinental geography
Indians in parts of Africa who often presented that relativizes the territorial obsession of much
themselves as better and more hardworking nation-state focused history.34
than their white counterparts. Indeed, Gandhi
often said that Indians in East Africa made bet- Bandung Revisionism
ter settlers than the whites as they did not have Another important strand of work on lateral
the Bible and did not drink.31 transnationalisms within the Indian Ocean is
The Indian Ocean is also important in what I would term Bandung revisionism. On one
complicating our views of slavery, which are the- level, this work seeks to revisit Bandung and
orized on the basis of the Atlantic experience. non-a lignment and produce new histories of
While plantation slavery was evident in parts these moments.35 On a second and, for us, more
of the Indian Ocean world (especially the Mas- pertinent level, this work reengages with older
carenes), other forms of slavery were evident in ideas of non-alignment and Afro-A sian solidar-
the Indian Ocean arena. In the Atlantic world, ity not to reintroduce them as working political
slavery was starkly racialized and the boundary concepts but as a way of posing revisionist ques-
between slave and free unequivocally drawn. In tions to the present-day realities of the Global
the Indian Ocean world, slavery was not racial- South.
30. See Isabel Hofmeyr, “The Idea of ‘Africa’ in Indian 33. See Gwyn Campbell, “The East African Slave 35. See Antoinette Burton, “Cold War Cosmopolitan-
Nationalism: Reporting the Diaspora in The Modern Trade, 1861 – 1895: The ‘Southern’ Complex,” Interna- ism: The Education of Santha Rama Rau in the Age
Review, 1907 – 1929,” South African Historical Journal tional Journal of African Historical Studies 22 (1989): of Bandung, 1945 – 1954,” Radical History Review 95
57 (2007): 60 – 81. 1 – 2 ; Clare Anderson, Convicts in the Indian Ocean: (2006): 149 – 7 2; Antoinette Burton, Augusto Espir-
Transportation from South Asia to Mauritius, 1815 – 53 itu, and Fanon Che Wilkins, “Introduction: The Fate
31. See Isabel Hofmeyr, “The Black Atlantic Meets the
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000); Kerry Ward, of Nationalisms in the Age of Bandung,” Radical His-
Indian Ocean: Forging New Paradigms of Transnation-
Networks of Empire: Forced Migration in the Dutch tory Review 95 (2006): 145 – 48; Christopher J. Lee, ed.,
alism for the Global South— Literary and Cultural Per-
East India Company (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni- Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment
spectives,” Social Dynamics 33 (2007): 3– 32.
versity Press, 2009); and Nigel Worden, “New Ap- and Its Political Afterlives (Athens: Ohio University
32. See Gwyn Campbell, “Introduction: Slavery and proaches to VOC History in South Africa,” South Af- Press, 2010); and See Seng Tan and Amitav Acharya,
Other Forms of Unfree Labour in the Indian Ocean rican Historical Journal 59 (2007): 3 – 18. eds., Bandung Revisited: The Legacy of the 1955 Asian-
World,” in The Structure of Slavery in Indian Ocean Af- African Conference for International Order (Singapore:
34. See Pamila Gupta, “Island-n ess in the Indian
rica and Asia, ed. Gwyn Campbell (London: Frank Cass, National University of Singapore Press, 2008).
Ocean,” in Eyes across the Water: Navigating the Indian
2004), vii-x xxii.
Ocean, ed. Pamila Gupta, Isabel Hofmeyr, and Michael
Pearson (Pretoria: University of South Africa Press,
2010).In his analysis of the Bandung moment, Much contemporary work on transna- 589
Christopher Lee directs our attention to the tionalism operates on North-S outh axes and
hitherto unrecognized diversity of forms of invokes older categories of empire and nation,
transnational political community that emerge of the dominating global and the resistant local.
within the purview of the Bandung nations These categories — domination and resistance,
(largely the Indian Ocean arena). These in- colonizer and colonized — arise from postinde-
volve the constellations of political community pendence revisions of colonial history. The In-
(and non-community) that have “cut across the dian Ocean requires us to take a much longer
Isabel Hofmeyr
The Complicating Sea:
The Indian Ocean as Method
Asian-A frican divide for the twentieth and early perspective, which necessarily complicates any
twenty-f irst century” and that transcend the simple binaries.
political geographies and the imagination of This complicating orientation is apparent
the nation-state. While Lee’s focus is the latter in two iconic Indian Ocean writers.
half of the twentieth century, these ideas can Ghosh’s In an Antique Land provides a
be pushed backward with a view to examining layered archive of the different forms of sov-
the “variety, complexity and wide ranging geog- ereignty that accumulate around the Indian
raphies of Afro-A sian relations during the last Ocean littoral. His recent novel Sea of Poppies
century” and their “multiple histories of con- likewise explores a world of oceanic belongings
nection” and contradiction.36 as lascars, indentured workers, slaves, and run-
This stress on contradiction is important aways encounter each other.39
and takes us away from the pitfalls of both an- Abdulrazak Gurnah’s work on Zanzibar
ticolonial and colonial approaches, the former similarly charts a series of overlapping transna-
producing romantic accounts with too much tional vectors: old trading diasporas, Muslim
African-Indian solidarity, the latter too little.37 networks, slavery, waning British imperialism,
Instead, we need to examine relations of both Zanzibari independence and the African-A rab
conflict and cooperation as ongoing themes in violence that followed it, Cold War politics, and
colonial and postcolonial histories. Also key is international regulation of refugees.40 In keep-
a grasp of the inequalities between Africa and ing with Indian Ocean themes, these trans-
India. Antoinette Burton has termed this a national systems are compacted in one island
“semi-imperialism” relationship.38 These fault space.
lines are likely to become more significant as These novels all turn to the past to high-
the new world order takes shape. light the ambiguities of belonging that the
Indian Ocean sustains. A new wave of literary
Some Literary Implications of the forms looks to the future to track the bizarre
Indian Ocean Scholarship and unexpected cultural forms that emerge
Analytically the Indian Ocean obliges us to ex- as a new post-A merican world takes shape in
tend our axes of investigation and hence has the Indian Ocean. What might these “semi-
implications for literary scholars. Not only does imperialisms” and new inequalities in this arena
it present an ideal vantage point for pursuing mean in cultural terms? One recent experiment
productive postnational and post – area studies, was a special issue of the South African literary
it also offers rich ways to conceptualize lateral magazine Chimurenga on African Asian conver-
transnationalisms within a previously Third sations. The parodic and satirical intentions of
World space. It is hence an ideal arena from the editors, Ntone Edjabe and Achal Prabhala,
which to discuss transnationalisms within the emerge from the call for papers that presaged
Global South. the special issue.
36. Lee, Making a World, 27. 39. See Amitov Ghosh, Sea of Poppies (New York: Far-
rar, Straus and Giroux, 2008).
37. See Vijay Gupta, ed., Dhanyavaad India: A Tribute
to the Heroes and Heroines of India Who Supported the 40. These include Abdulrazak Gurnah, By the Sea (Lon-
Liberation Struggle of South Africa (New Delhi: High don: Bloomsbury, 2005); and Abdulrazak Gurnah, Par-
Commission of the Republic of South Africa in India, adise (New York: New Press, 1994).
1997).
38. Burton, “Cold War,” 151.590 India is the world’s favourite market: 50 million
engineers to a backdrop of an ancient culture.
phenomenon? South-South slapstick, after all,
seems a contradiction in terms, and there seems
Africa is the world’s favourite cause: 50 million little place for Leon Schuster in the morally el-
problems, and such fascinating Wildlife. Put
evated discourses of the South.
them together and we should have an opera of
By seizing the challenge and contradiction
cinematic proportions. Instead, what we see is
inherent in relations across the Indian Ocean,
mere stock footage; what we hear, the dull drone
of conventional foolishnesses volleyed across the the Chimurenga special issue opens new analyti-
e cal pathways. These enable us to think beyond
ti v
Indian Ocean.
ra
m pa the tired pieties of older ideologies that have
Co Could it be true that the Mandrax currently
lost much of their purchase while also captur-
f
so hobbling pre-teen South Africa is entirely man-
di e ing new cultural forms as they are taking shape
St u ufactured in India? Why does the Hausa film
ia , in a rapidly changing world order. These new
As look like a low-budget Hindi potboiler? How
u th
So he is it that so many Nigerian footballers play for directions demonstrate that the Indian Ocean
n dt
aa Bangladesh? Who decided that the lost tribes of is indeed a complicating sea.
ric
Af st Shiva built the foundations of Great Zimbabwe?
Ea
le
idd
And were they on Mandrax?
M
Today, there are all kinds of lines criss-crossing
the Indian Ocean and they’re just as likely to be
drawn by governments and tourists as pirates
and preachers. . . . The lines we are interested in
are any and none of these and more: all we want
is a new conversation.41
The collection makes a concerted attempt to
unseat older romantic discourses on Afro-A sian
solidarity through the solvent of parody and sat-
ire. As I have discussed in detail elsewhere, sev-
eral stories cluster around and revisit themes of
non-a lignment, Afro-A sian solidarity, and the
Cold War through nostalgia or satire.42
This stress on satire and parody as a way
of unsettling the old and making the new visible
is important. As the size and shape of African/
Asian interactions changes, the resultant cul-
tural forms can be startling. Take, for example,
a South African film, Mr. Bones, which has been
circulating in India. The film comes from Leon
Schuster, the king of South African slapstick.
The film tells a story of a “white” boy who falls
from an airplane and grows up in a “tribe” and
becomes a witch doctor. Translated into a range
of Indian languages, this primitivist slapstick
has been a runaway success in cinemas and on
TV. On the face of it, this success may seem un-
remarkable: slapstick stereotypes travel easily.
Yet how would one begin to make sense of this
41. Chimurenga, call for papers, special issue on Af- 42. See Isabel Hofmeyr, “Indian Ocean Genres,” in
rican Asian conversations, 27 October 2008,www Literature, Geography, Translation: Studies in World
.myspace.com/whonoknowgoknow/blog/444129691. Writing, ed. David Watson, Stefan Helgesson, and
Cecilia Alvstad (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Pub-
lishing, 2011).You can also read
