Image by courtesy of Gulam Mohammed Sheikh, 'Ark', from 'Kaavad - Home' (2011).
After the highly successful Indian Ocean and Beyond webinar series in 2022-2023, jointly hosted by the Centre for Inter-Asian Research (CIAR), Ahmedabad University and the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa, University of Witwatersrand, we are delighted to launch its second edition during the academic year 2023-2024.
Continuing with the earlier approach, the talks in this edition will cover wider-ranging research themes pivoted around the Indian Ocean and its littoral. These talks will bring the current state of art research and new ideas drawn from different disciplinary vantage points. Scholars working in the fields of history, anthropology, food studies, environment change, species migration, and so on, with different registers of temporal and spatial focus will discuss their ongoing research. In performing disciplinary boundary crossings, these talks also straddle spatial configurations of regions, nation-states, and land and water binaries.
CIAR invites you to be part of these talks and participate in the ongoing conversations to reconceptualise our histories, environment, cultural mores, identity, and culinary traditions.
The second edition of the Indian Ocean and Beyond webinar series is coordinated by Murari Jha and Safwan Amir, Faculty Fellows, CIAR.
Looking at the oceans as continuous allows us to think beyond the idea of the discrete spaces of Asia, Africa, and Europe. What might it mean to move beyond histories of the nation-state spatially and temporally and beyond the limited chronologies of colonialism, nationalism, and modernity? As social scientists, we tend to work with a terrestrial imagination, leaving the ocean on the margins of our research. We need a notion of spacetime dictated by movements across the ocean, as Braudel foundationally proposed, and historians like Sanjay Subrahmanyam and Engseng Ho have emphasised more recently.
Adopting a maritime vision would require us to engage with the persistent movement of people, goods, and ideas across the ocean which has always exceeded the remit of states and empires. We would need to think of the oceans as connecting territories and people rather than dividing them. Looking outwards from Gujarat into the oceans from the early modern period onwards, we can see a concatenation of geographies that stretch to Africa and even as far as the South American continent. While locating Gujarat empirically on a map is not difficult, its fluid location intersecting with multiple networks of religion, trade, and intellectual and cultural exchange across the oceans, allows us to think the idea of the region in more contingent and expansive ways.
Drawing on the exciting new work by historians, anthropologists, art historians, legal scholars and social theorists, we propose a webinar series that will cover topics such as the relationship between law, subjecthood, and the ocean; sea trade and politics in the age of empire; Sufism, historical memory, and regional identity; shipbuilding, migration, and religious affiliation; sea piracy and regimes of protection; language, culture and trade routes.
Coordinated by Tejaswini Niranjana, Ahmedabad University, and Dilip Menon, University of Witwatersrand. Hosted by the Centre for Inter-Asian Research, Ahmedabad University, and the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa, University of Witwatersrand