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Networks of Exchange: India, Africa, and a Challenge to “Area Studies”
Organizer and Chair: Pedro A Machado, New York University
Discussant: Edward Alpers, University of California at Los Angeles
The rise of Area Studies as a result largely, if not exclusively, of Cold War concerns has resulted in many, formerly marginalized parts of the world gaining the attention they deserve. Through its provision of effective graduate training, scholars have produced excellent scholarship across wide-ranging areas and languages. However, the Area Studies paradigm/model has also been responsible for producing partial apprehensions and understandings of the past. Working within dominant intellectual discourses that privilege the ‘nation’ as a bounded entity, Area Studies has produced intellectual maps that have elided processes of connection and inter-relation that existed across regional and national boundaries. This is perhaps nowhere more evident than in histories of India and Africa. Regarded and treated as discrete areas of enquiry, ‘African Studies’ and ‘South Asian Studies’ are set in binary opposition that fails to uncover the complexities of interaction and exchange that have mutually constituted these regions. With a focus on East/Southern Africa and India, this panel adopts a ‘transnational’ perspective in foregrounding the webs of connection that brought these parts of the Indian Ocean world into relation with another. As domains of study that are seldom brought into alignment, the papers of the panel explore the complex histories of cultural, intellectual and material exchange that make legible the mutually shaping interaction between India and East/Southern Africa. The papers, in seeing these processes through an Indian Ocean lens, uncover zones of contact that have been overlaid by enduring discourses of the nation and reinforced by the blinkered/limited perspectives of the ‘Area Studies’ model. By so doing, they begin to offer a reading of the past that, in unraveling the thread of traditional approaches, reveals the mutually shaping interactions between India and East/Southern Africa. Isabel Hofmeyr will explore the idea of ‘Africa’ in early twentieth-century discourses in Indian nationalism by focusing on reports on ‘Indians Abroad’ published in the Calcutta periodical, the Modern Review. By rethinking the historical geography of India, Savita Nair will explore how the study of ‘area’ – South Asia or East Africa – requires a remapping of the cultural, religious, economic and regional identities of Gujarat or Punjab to Kampala or Jinja. In his paper, Pedro Machado examines the processes that brought African consumers and Indian producers across the Indian Ocean into relation with one another in particular, complex histories of exchange. The ‘cross-border’ nature of the panel has necessitated the inclusion of two discussants: the first is Claude Markovits, a leading specialist on India whose work has examined transnational diasporic networks; the second is an historian of Africa, Edward Alpers, renowned among other reasons for his innovative cross-cultural work on the African diaspora in the Indian Ocean.
The Idea of “Africa” in Indian Nationalism: The Case of The Modern Review
Isabel Hofmeyr, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa
In a post-Cold War era, the limitations of both a nation-centred and an area studies map are becoming increasingly apparent. In their stead, a range of transnational, transregional, transcontinental and oceanic models of study have started to emerge. One area of emerging focus has been that of the Indian Ocean as an analytical zone. While these developments are most welcome, there is something of an imbalance. Most studies examine movements from India outwards with little sense of what a reverse flow of ideas and people might mean ‘back home’ in India. Studies of indenture for example examine how South Asian migrants take cultural forms and ideas with them and how these change in their new locations. What these new ideas mean for intellectual developments back in India are seldom probed. Recent work by Niranjana and Kelly on the indentured diaspora in Trinidad and Fiji has however started to chart a new course by showing how debates on gender and modernity feed back into nationalist discourses in India. This paper builds on this trend by examining the idea of ‘Africa’ in early twentieth-century discourses in Indian nationalism. The paper focuses on The Modern Review, a periodical started by Ramananda Chatterjee in Calcutta in 1907. The paper carried extensive reporting on ‘Indians Abroad’ and hence provides a useful lens through which to understand how debates about the indentured diaspora in Africa fed into Indian nationalism.
Trajectories of Transnationality: Uganda Indians, Then and Now
Savita P. Nair, Furman University
From a larger project that rethinks South Asia’s historical geography by including Indian overseas families as constituents of Indian history, I focus on Uganda’s Indians whose social, economic, and political worlds traverse lands and seas. Home is extended and connected to sites in India, East Africa, and elsewhere. Distinctive networks and links vary based on the particular period of migration and nature of mobility. Particular features mark the narrative: pre-colonial itinerant trade throughout the northwestern Indian Ocean, the start of indentured labor for construction of the Uganda Railway, continued recruitment for commercial and government initiatives, settlement/citizenship in late-colonial and independent Uganda, expulsion in 1972, and repatriation of former residents and, most significantly, new migrations from India in the early 1990s. My paper is based on recent preliminary research in Uganda as a complement to my existing work on Indians in eastern Africa. The study of “area” - South Asia or East Africa -- requires a remapping of the cultural, religious, economic, and regional identities of Gujarat or Punjab to Kampala or Jinja. Rethinking the historical geography of India makes western India’s overseas constituents central rather than marginal to discussions about Indian history. What are the fault lines between migrants in terms of identity, investment, and interaction with East Africa, with India? How does this “transnational” experience change for colonial and postcolonial Indian migrants to Uganda? The paper draws on newspaper reports, local and colonial documents, and oral historical sources in Mumbai, Porbandar, Ahmedabad, and Kampala.
Spheres of Inter-relation in the Indian Ocean: Gujarat, East Central Africa and South Asia in the 18th and 19th Centuries
Pedro A Machado, New York University
There can be little doubt that Area Studies has resulted in the production of much excellent scholarship on formerly marginalized parts of the world. However, the limitations of this model are becoming increasingly clear, in particular with regard to ‘African Studies’ and ‘South Asian Studies’ which – despite histories of cultural, intellectual and material exchange and interaction – are treated as discrete areas of enquiry. By adopting an Indian Ocean perspective, this paper seeks to trace the chains of connection that brought Africans and Indians across the western Indian Ocean into relation with one another in the 18th and 19th centuries. It will do so by examining a particular circuit of exchange, one that was structured around Indian textiles. The paper will show that the latter bound Africans and Indians together in particular ways that reflected mutually shaping interactions between, on the one hand, sophisticated consumers of textiles in the east central and southeastern Africa, and on the other skilled producers/weavers in Gujarat. Furthermore, it will argue that this process of inter-relation was mediated by Gujarati merchants whose networks of circulation were critical in linking these zones of contact.