Modern Formations
If historians of knowledge and religion debate long-term continuity versus modernisation and mixing versus differentiation, cosmopolitanism is a key route for social historians wishing to engage with the modern Indian Ocean.
Port cities are cast as ‘the quintessential sites of Asian cosmopolitanism’.[171] One way of defining cosmopolitanism is to sketch ‘boundary crossing’ or local or transnational attempts of conceiving a whole beyond ethnicity, denomination, nationality and social diversity.[172] In Indian Ocean port cities, it is said that a globalised public sphere came to its height before the impact of the First World War, while newer work pushes this story into the interwar period.[173] Southeast Asianists claim that such public spheres depended on the co-option of local elites into governing bodies, the spread of the press, the relay of news and a fetish for translation. They were evident in reforming and voluntary societies and campaigns for instance related to opium, indenture or the status of women. They stretched to encompass Chinese opera, Hindi drama and jazz. The result was ‘universal neighbourliness’ and the lineaments of civil society which arose out of the waters.[174]On the Arabian and East African coast three ports may illustrate maritime cosmopolitanism: Zanzibar, Mombasa and Aden. In each case, the port became a thickening link between the hinterland and the ocean. As a servicing point for plantations and trades such as ivory, copal, hides and labour, through the moment it was taken as a British protectorate in 1890, with uncontrolled immigration into the First World War, Zanzibar attracted to itself Omani Arab settlers and political elites; Indian moneylenders and traders; fishermen and traders, from Hadhramaut, the Comoros and Madagascar; various slaves and ex-slaves from East Africa and elsewhere, and a European and American merchant class.[175] In 1890 it boasted fifty mosques ranging in theology from Sunni-Shafi'i to Ibadi and Shi'a.[176] Aden's story is as eclectic: Janet Ewald sketches dizzying ‘crossers of the sea', originally from South Asia, East Africa or the Arab highlands, who crossed the boundaries of free and unfree, ship and dock, and social rank, and at times travelled the world, through Aden.[177] Meanwhile, Mombasa was transformed from a hinge between caravan porters and Indian Ocean craft to the terminus of the Kenya-Uganda railway by the start of the twentieth century, with numbers of steamers arriving in it doubling between 1903 and 1913.
It drew to itself from the collapsing agricultural sector of the hinterland, labourers who served on the docks, and new arrivals gave rise to the repeated redefinition of self and other in Islamic communities into the late twentieth century.[178] Yet in the midst of these transformations is a story that present-day scholars cannot celebrate, the continued legacy of racial understandings, reasserted in colonial bureaucratic structures and public ceremonies. In Zanzibar, longstanding Arabocentricism continued to be potent, authorised by British indirect rule through Omani elites, leading to ethnic tensions which reverberated through the 1964 revolution, when Zanzibar lost, as a result of death or flight, a quarter or more of its Arab population as its African majority rose against the sultan.[179]At the heart of the Indian Ocean is the port of Colombo, another site at the rim of the waters that witnessed an explosion of ethnic tension, for instance in the 1983 riot which is taken to mark the start of the island's civil war. The early twentieth-century port is a telling lens from which to view this later history. At one level it was cosmopolitan.[180] Colombo’s intelligentsia combined Western modes and customs with religious revivalism, temperance and an interest in the vernacular. This kept narrower communal nationalism at bay.[181] Yet when such a social history is approached from the infrastructure of the port, the first decades of the twentieth century look rather different.[182] The growth of the port led to a reorganisation of the capital: a significant segment of the fort and the area north of Colombo became unbearable to its middleclass and Burgher residents. They moved their pretty mansions south to escape the coal, the noise and the shops that sprung up to cater to the traffic through the port. In their place arose the slums or ‘tenement gardens’. Thus developed a differentiated city: on one hand, the richer and greener south and its prized district of Cinnamon Gardens (today’s wealthy Colombo 7), and on the other, the poorer north.
Port workers were central agents to the working-class strikes that began to occur by the 1920s: in 1919 the workers of the Harbour Engineers’ Department petitioned for an eight-hour day, and the next year 5,000 coal ‘coolies’ struck. In 1927, 13,000 harbour workers followed suit, 5,000 of them coalers.[183] The divided history of the port becomes here a mirror to the history of the segregated city and the history of class and identity more generally.Indian Ocean social formations moved therefore between alternative presentations: peaceable and neighbourly and violent and segregated. Cosmopolitanism did not stand alone. The combination of these slightly different historiographical impulses falls in line with recent breakthroughs in Indian Ocean intellectual histories. In one now-familiar story, Mahatma Gandhi’s thinking in South Africa grew out of a commitment to imperial ‘citizenship’, tied to the plight of Indian merchants whom he represented as a lawyer, and who wished to keep their status in the local hierarchy. In place of ‘citizenship’, came the template of the Indian ‘nation’ outside empire, encompassing overseas Indians within a ‘Greater India’.[184] In other words, Gandhi calibrated a conception of Indianness and Indian sovereignty with respect to Africa (and the status of African ‘natives’ specifically, who he excluded) and events on the ground in South Africa, such as satyagraha protest between 1906 and 1914, imprisonment, the ‘Boer’ war which led to his mobilisation of ambulance brigades in support of the British, and his social relations with other communities, such as the Chinese. It is important not to fixate on Gandhi - for this type of oceanic and diasporic thinking was evident among other Indians on the African coast. Yet, there were limits to such intellectual prospecting. According to one recent argument, cosmopolitan thought zones need to be brought back to particular ‘religious, philosophical, and ethical traditions’, without being read from today’s liberal universalism, arising out of Europe.
This specific critique rests on the career of Abul Kalam Azad (1888-1958), the scholar, journalist and Khilafat activist, who had studied both Islamic law and Western philosophy and mastered many languages. On the one hand, he was committed to the India National Congress’s vision of Indian democracy and anti-colonial politics across Eurasia; on the other hand, he supported Sa’udi conquest of the Hijaz in 1925.[185]Attention to governance and the law is vital in understanding the malleability of self, sovereignty and the social, between the cosmopolitan and more rooted and territorial forms. As early modern historians have demonstrated, the Indian Ocean was a contested space for the law, given clashes between land-based polities and maritime European empires.[186] Recent work on piracy reveals this tussle in rich detail. In the nineteenthcentury Indian Ocean, violence directed towards ‘pirates’ through steam and firepower, emerged from and authorised liberal commitments to the law, free trade and mercantile and civil port society.[187] Militarised regimes of law-keeping were particularly evident in island locations in this sea and ‘islanding’ was a scheme of government, connected to repatriation, exile or confinement. One string of islands which demonstrates this story, now in compelling inter-disciplinary hues, is the Andamans. The colonial phase began with a characterisation of these islands as inhabited by cannibals or as a place where piracy was rife. Into the 1850s, the East India Company saw piracy orchestrated from the islands as a threat to its sovereignty. Malays and Chinese operating in the Bay of Bengal, possibly in search of birds’ nests as a culinary delicacy, were classed as ‘perfidious’.[188]
The Andamans’ alignment with cannibalism and piracy made this the perfect location for a penal colony. After the Indian Rebellion, in 1858, 200 convicted mutineers and rebels arrived; some 80,000 criminal convicts were transported to the islands up to the 1930s and 1,000 political prisoners.[189] The notorious Cellular Jail in Port Blair can easily open up Foucauldian approaches to imprisonment, yet the recent literature has instead drawn attention to the variety of communities on these islands.
Beyond the convicts, the indigenous community was decimated; and non-convict settlers arrived as agriculturalists and labourers. The story becomes more complex by the Second World War, when the Andamans were occupied by the Japanese and visited by Subhas Chandra Bose in 1943. ‘The Andaman Islands, then, have a complex and entangled history, they constitute and remain a place at the centre of networks of governance, coercion and mobility.’ In other words, migration and linkage is important, but it doesn’t capture the whole, for forms of classification, settlement and differentiation continue to play a role in the islands to the present as arrivals from elsewhere encroach on the lands of indigenous peoples. When Bose visited, he exulted in standing in ‘Free India’ and seeing the tricolour Indian flag. Yet the question of whether he was aware of the violence committed by the Japanese against islanders, including torture and rape, continues to be debated. These charged histories, which are directed across various axes, island-mainland, colonised-coloniser, settler-indigenous, are ever present, neither totally Foucauldian nor cosmopolitan.In closing this section on modern formations - stretching over society, ideas, law and government - the Andamans is the perfect site at which to observe another set of sources. Indian Ocean locales are proving excellent places to debate the grammar of the visual and to write ‘object biographies’, utilising material culture as a means of getting to histories which are absent in textual remains. This is because they served as hunting grounds for collectors in the modern era, including tourists, and also photographers, scientists and anthropologists motivated by commitments to cultural salvage and the utility of islands as laboratories. On the Andamans, between 1906 and 1908, A. R. Radcliffe-Browne,
the social anthropologist and supposed originator of structural functionalism, conducted his doctoral work and collected objects. Expert collecting sat together with the production of curios for sale by various Andamanese in colonial ‘homes’ formed for civilisation.[190] In this context, focusing on material culture has also allowed reflection on gender and sexuality. Take the large corpus of homoeroticised photographs of the Andamanese, mostly taken between 1890 and 1895, by colonial administrator and former officer of the Indian Marine, Maurice Vidal Portman. For Portman, ‘the colonizer’s assertions of control and delinquent fantasies of losing control came together in the aesthetics and measurements of the eroticised aboriginal body’.[191] Debating cosmopolitanism and its limits should include the intersection between sexuality and modes of self formation too.