Arts of the Indian Ocean Full Program, April & May 2024

The book presents papers by archaeologists, anthropologists, historians and heritage specialists and highlights the multi-layered meaning of maritime cultural landscapes. The authors shift the emphasis from understanding heritage in its local context to discussing it across the waters of the Arabian Sea. The relationship between the sea and the land underlines the centrality of the coast; the communities who inhabited the space between the ocean and the hinterland; their histories and attempts at constructing their cultural environment. An important component of this cultural landscape is monumental architecture and archaeological sites, as also their inter-linkage with travelling groups who moved both across the sea, as well as on routes into the interior. A common concern that all papers share is with definitions of maritime heritage; different articulations of social and political power; and regional and local nautical traditions. One of the objectives of this volume is to underscore the important role of World Heritage, especially sites and monuments located along the coasts that have already been identified as national treasures by individual Nation States. The objective is to bring these coastal monuments and structures into dialogue with those located across the Ocean for a holistic understanding of maritime cultural heritage of the western Indian Ocean. It is suggested that this dialogue across the seas, would help in the protection and preservation of a maritime heritage known for its ‘outstanding universal value’.

This course is designed to introduce the Indian Ocean as a region linking the Middle East, East Africa, South and Southeast Asia. With a focus on both continuities and rupture, we study select cultures and societies brought into contact through interregional migration and travel across the Indian Ocean over a broad arc of history. Different types of people-nobles, merchants, soldiers, statesmen, sailors, laborers, scholars, slaves-experienced mobility in different ways. How did different groups of people represent such mobilities? What kinds of cooperation, accommodation, or conflict did different Indian Ocean encounters engender? Using an array of different primary sources, we look at particular case studies and their broader social and cultural contexts. At the heart of the course is attention to the ways in which primary sources provide access to the historical meanings of their contexts of production. We read humanities and social science scholarship, as well as primary sources ranging from manuscript illustrations, sailor's stories, merchant letters, travelogues, pilgrimage accounts, colonial documents, memoirs, and diplomatic accounts.

The book presents papers by archaeologists, anthropologists, historians and heritage specialists and highlights the multi-layered meaning of maritime cultural landscapes. The authors shift the emphasis from understanding heritage in its local context to discussing it across the waters of the Arabian Sea. The relationship between the sea and the land underlines the centrality of the coast; the communities who inhabited the space between the ocean and the hinterland; their histories and attempts at constructing their cultural environment. An important component of this cultural landscape is monumental architecture and archaeological sites, as also their inter-linkage with travelling groups who moved both across the sea, as well as on routes into the interior. A common concern that all papers share is with definitions of maritime heritage; different articulations of social and political power; and regional and local nautical traditions. One of the objectives of this volume is to underscore the important role of World Heritage, especially sites and monuments located along the coasts that have already been identified as national treasures by individual Nation States. The objective is to bring these coastal monuments and structures into dialogue with those located across the Ocean for a holistic understanding of maritime cultural heritage of the western Indian Ocean. It is suggested that this dialogue across the seas, would help in the protection and preservation of a maritime heritage known for its ‘outstanding universal value’.

India Quarterly, 2020

The article argues that UNESCO's 1972 World Heritage Convention provides a global platform for projecting not only India's maritime cultural heritage but also building bridges and collaborative networks with other Indian Ocean littoral countries for the promotion of shared cultural practices and traditional knowledge systems of the Indian Ocean. Unfortunately, this collaborative research aspect of the World Heritage Convention has yet to be tapped for nominating and inscribing transnational heritage or cultural routes across the Ocean. This is despite the fact that India was the founder member of the intergovernmental organisation, Indian Ocean Rim Association, one of whose thrust areas relates to promoting cultural heritage on the UNESCO platform. Given India's rich maritime past, there is an urgent need to implement measures to establish academic networks with littoral countries for not only creating awareness of the maritime cultural heritage of the Indian Ocean but also harnessing linkages between maritime communities for building a culturally diverse but harmonious future.

Postcolonial Text, 2019

This essay is the Introduction to an edited collection as a two-set Special Issue, published in Postcolonial Text in December 2019, titled "Maritime Transmodernities: Literary and Cultural Representations of the Indian Ocean World." In it, I pose the question: "[W]hat is it about the ocean that makes it as an analytical category or critical paradigm distinct from land?" The edited collection examines the Indian Ocean World and its literatures as providing an important archive of interconnected knowledge and world-views. The collection shows that the Indian Ocean World challenges the many givens of Postcolonial Studies, moving the unit of analysis from terrestrial to oceanic spaces, from the nation-state as an organizing category to the littoral.

Les Cahiers d'Afrique de lEst, 2016

Transforming Cultures eJournal

This paper aims to open up a cultural studies conversation on the Indian Ocean. Knowledge of the Indian Ocean should be born of the problems encountered in situ, rather than viewed and assessed from afar in erstwhile colonial centres. Networks and institutional links have to be created to sustain an interdisciplinary conversation leading to this decolonisation of knowledge. In investigating the interplay of commerce and culture, this paper abandons the critical separation of the two in favour of a critical engagement with forces of globalisation. As a precolonial global economy, the Indian Ocean offers considerable historical depth to the current ranking of economic powers. But within a general problematic of the theory of value, there is no doubt that cultural forms (narratives, myths religious beliefs, artefacts) are fundamental to the organising forces of trade, and not just ‘adding value’ in market transactions.