How to Know the Indian Ocean

Weihsin Gui

As the wind blows ripples that grow into waves and then swells, well-wrought prose breathes life into small mundane fragments and grand historical forces, vivifying them as memorable figures who journey across watery expanses of the imagination. If we wish to turn to the fiction that brings the histories of the Indian Ocean to life, there already exists what Isabel Hofmeyr calls ‘an informal canon.’[1] This consists of historical novels by Amitav Ghosh and Abdulrazak Gurnah, Joseph Conrad’s novels set in the Malay archipelago, and the works of Mauritian novelist, Lindsay Collen. To this loose constellation of Indian Ocean authors I would add Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, Michelle de Kretser, and Maxine Beneba Clarke. Their prose and poetry trace more recent crossings and connections between various places and peoples of southern and eastern Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Australia. Their writings bring out the various senses of the word ‘port’. Port cities and settlements, of course, but also portals offering alternative entrances and passages into Indian Ocean worlds. Port can be a verb — to carry, bear, or convey goods, bodies, and stories across the waves; also, in our digital age, to translate something for another platform or system, other audiences or readers.

For those other audiences or readers, a simple query about the Indian Ocean in any bookstore will show that much ink has already been spilled on what Alison Bashford calls ‘terraqueous histories.’[2] These are histories that investigate how the watery currents of this ocean do not just convey people across its vast expanse but also intermingle numerous cultures, societies, and places across a broad sweep of time, from 1000 BCE up to the late twentieth century. That is all discussed in at least three academic journals dedicated to the ongoing study of the Indian Ocean across the humanities and social science disciplines: the Journal of the Indian Ocean Region, Journal of Indian Ocean World Studies, Journal of the Indian Ocean Rim Studies. We can also cite some of the books and essay collections about the Indian Ocean. These histories, published mostly in the past two decades, could fill up several, if not all, the shelves of a sturdy bookcase. Curious readers can pick up Michael Pearson’s The Indian Ocean (2003) or Abdul Sheriff and Engseng Ho’s edited volume The Indian Ocean: Oceanic Connections and the Creation of New Societies (2014), both of which draw on earlier work such as K. N. Chaudhuri’s Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean (1985) and Auguste Toussaint’s History of the Indian Ocean (1966). A cursory internet search will also glean a handful of reliable resources with which we can dip into Indian Ocean scholarship, such as the ‘Indian Ocean in World History’ site run by the Sultan Qaboos Cultural Center; Isabel Hofmeyr and Charne Lavery’s essay on ‘Exploring the Indian Ocean as a Rich Archive of History’; and Purvi Sanghvi and Omar H. Ali’s biographical sketches that describe ‘The Indian Ocean World in Five Lives.’ Since last year, the Indian Ocean Working Group from Georgetown University at Qatar has hosted a series of ongoing webinars available for public viewing on YouTube. In this loose canon, in these journals, and in these texts, there are some important ideas and issues motivating Indian Ocean studies, many of which are reflected here in Portside Review.

At first blush it may seem incredible, impossible even, that a body of water should be a metropolis, a city teeming with life and business. But, a metropole is more than a large city and the Indian Ocean can be one too. The word can also refer to the country that lies at the heart of an empire, controlling its numerous colonies from a seat of power often located in a capital city. The Indian Ocean has witnessed the wax and wane of many empires, colonies, and powerful states. The ones that perhaps come readily to mind are European — starting from the sixteenth century, Portugal, the Netherlands, France, and Britain traded with and then invaded and conquered many of the peoples whose lands lie along the Indian Ocean’s rim. If we venture further east and include the islands that comprise what is now Southeast Asia, then Spain and the USA join this colonial gallery. But earlier empires and kingdoms with great influence also found their way to the Indian Ocean through travel and trade at various times: the Persian and Roman empires, the Gupta and Chola empires in India, the Srivijaya and Majapahit empires in the Malay archipelago, and, perhaps most famous of all, China’s Ming dynasty with its seven ocean-spanning voyages led by Admiral Zheng He. The Indian Ocean is seasoned with the salt of tears and sweat shed by violence and conquest; but, the spread of religion along its many trade routes also brought hope and succour to those who looked toward a world beyond our own. From the sixth century BCE, merchants, missionaries, and pilgrims brought Hinduism and Buddhism, Judaism and Christianity, and later, from the seventh century CE, Islam to different parts of the Indian Ocean world. These religions had and still have a hand in shaping many of the languages, cultures, and even some political systems of those who embraced them.

The Indian Ocean also extends our sense of who we are beyond the modern nation-state, inclining us towards a broader geo-graphy, literally writing about the earth. Given the history of colonialism mentioned above, most of the countries in the Indian Ocean world sprang up in the mid-twentieth century after European colonial powers withdrew in the aftermath of World War II, with varying degrees of haste and goodwill. But centuries of trade, travel, and migration from southern and eastern Africa, the Arab world, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Australia have created islands, coastal settlements, and cities that sometimes do not match the existing or assumed ethnic and cultural homogeneity in the countries of which they are a nominal part. As Isabel Hofmeyr remarks in a 2012 essay titled ‘The Complicating Sea,’[3] many studies and stories about the Indian Ocean raise questions about how well the nation-state can be the central organising principle in the lives of individuals and communities. Evidence of cosmopolitan sentiments and transregional bonds, of forced or voluntary migration and dispersal, and interminglings of blood and language often emerge in examinations of Indian Ocean networks past and present. While nation-states are by no means obsolete, their rhetoric of patriotism and rootedness need to be balanced by peregrinations and connective routes that can still be traced upon the waves. These oceanic connections, Hofmeyr points out, trouble our pre-conceived notions of who is a slave, an indentured labourer, a settler, or a migrant. The ethnic and racial identities commonly associated with these different categories in popular culture most likely come from the world of the Atlantic Ocean, which has its own distinctive history of movements, conflicts, and conquests. In certain parts of the Indian Ocean, for example, some Africans were indentured workers and some Indians were slaves and settlers; migrants in the diaspora could play significant roles in the struggle for their emerging countries even though they were not standing on the soil they hoped one day would be sovereign.

And so, what would the world look like if we set aside the struggles between superpowers, between geographical blocs of countries bound by competing treaties of security and trade? This is where ‘Bandung revisionism’ is one key aspect of Indian Ocean studies concerned with the recent past and the present moment. ‘Bandung’ here refers to the 1955 Afro-Asian Conference that took place in Bandung, Indonesia. It helped create a worldwide and still-existing Non-Aligned Movement as an alternative to the First World spearheaded by the USA and the Second World with the Soviet Union at the helm. The struggle between First and Second Worlds, commonly understood as the Cold War, nominally ended in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Looking at the Indian Ocean during the formative years of the Cold War offers a new conception of this period as also one of African and Asian (both South and Southeast) geopolitical cooperation and solidarity. As the twenty-first century Indian Ocean becomes another maritime arena, this time with the key contestants being India and China, the legacy of the Bandung conference may serve as a way of comprehending the alliances and animosities that crisscross this part of the globe.

But to re-read the Indian Ocean is to re-learn what home is, and from there to find new ways of conceiving and looking at the world as a whole. In her 2012 study of Amitav Ghosh’s novel The Hungry Tide,[4] Meg Samuelson proposes that the novel shows how its characters develop attachments that are neither national nor patriotic. These bonds are instead ecological, literally grounded in a shared commitment to an environmental location — specifically the Sundarbans, those marshy borderlands spanning the state boundary between India and Bangladesh. Home is not where the heart lies; it is where tides rise and fall. In a broader essay about ‘Coastal Form’ and Indian Ocean fiction published in 2017,[5] Samuelson describes the novels of Abdulrazak Gurnah and Mia Couto as having an ‘amphibian’ aesthetic or style, one that pays attention to maritime and coastal experiences while simultaneously possessing an inland orientation. An amphibian style avoids sharp divisions between sea and soil, coast and hinterland, outside and inside. Instead, it shows how such separations may be porous, permeable. It uses multiple, overlapping, even nested stories spoken by numerous narrators whose lives intersect and diverge, in books whose chapters may be interwoven or interleaved, without necessarily synthesizing all the different parts into a satisfying whole. A style like this marks not only a new conception of the world but also the inception of a literary perspective that can help us understand Indian Ocean worlds, past and present. That might be how we come to know the Indian Ocean itself, which has always been there but presents a new vision to us with every wave that laps on every shore no matter which way the water flows.

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[1] Isabel Hofmeyr. “Styling Multilateralism: Indian Ocean Cultural Futures.” Journal of the Indian Ocean Region, vol. 11, no. 1, 2015, pp. 98-109.

[2] Alison Bashford. “Terraqueous Histories.” The Historical Journal, vol. 60, no. 2, 2017, pp. 253-272.

[3] Isabel Hofmeyr. “The Complicating Sea: The Indian Ocean as Method.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, vol. 32, no. 3, 2012,  pp. 584-590.

[4] Meg Samuelson. “Crossing the Indian Ocean and Wading through the Littoral: Cosmopolitan Visions in Amitav Ghosh’s ‘antique land’ and ‘tide country.” Cultural Dynamics, vol. 24, nos. 2-3, pp. 189-205.

[5] Meg Samuelson. “Coastal Form: Amphibian Positions, Wider Worlds, and Planetary Horizons on the African Indian Ocean Littoral.” Comparative Literature, vol. 69, no. 1, 2017, pp. 16-24.