No Single Line Across the Ocean

As a closing vista of the effect of the waters of the Indian Ocean, I turn to the island of Mauritius, which was unpopulated before the arrival of colonists and labourers. Yet the Grand Bassin crater lake is now taken to be a sacred site, to which hundreds of thousands of Hindus throng.

In a tradition which began in the 1890s, they hold that the lake is connected - across the ocean - with the River Ganges in India and call it ‘Ganga Talao’, the lake of the Ganges. In popular telling, Shiva, the Hindu deity and his wife Parvati, when flying around the world in a ship, stopped in Mauritius. Shiva was carrying the River Ganges and accidently spilt some holy water into the crater giving rise to Grand Bassin. In 1972, water from the Ganges was poured into the lake. Grand Bassin illustrates the continuing work that goes into making the Indian Ocean: through imagination, religion and knowledge, through the dispersal of labour and trade and through the constitution of diasporic communities, such as those who have descended from indentured South Asians on Mauritius. Grand Bassin links the timeless past with the rapid changes of modernity. Today, large statues, pilgrims and tourists jostle with each other on the banks of the lake.^[192]

In the spirit of the elements that make up the pilgrimage to Grand Bassin, this chapter has surveyed the historiography of the Indian Ocean under three broad headings: trades and labourers; environments and knowledges; and, modern social, intellectual and material formations. In each case the Indian Ocean appears to view in the tussle between systematisation and plurality; foreign invaders and long-term legacies; cosmopolitan strivings and commitments to place, self, race and identity; and control and the lack of it. It is the longevity of consciousness about the Indian Ocean which is noteworthy.

It is impossible to point to a single moment which birthed Indian Ocean historiography or served as a conceptual beginning for the meaning of the Indian Ocean. Throughout this historiography, regardless of method or vantage point, or indeed, Arab navigators, South Asian merchants or Chinese explorers, is the ever present problem: does this ocean bring to mind a structure or many horizons, one big ocean or ships passing in the night, enmeshed networks or disconnections and forgotten heritages?

It would be facile to insist on presenting the Indian Ocean as simply a story of one of the following: syncretic knowledge, cosmopolitan sociability, long-term migration and trade, or European imperial impact. If there is one lesson from this survey of its historians, it is that no singular mode of writing this ocean will survive these waves and its navigators. The pull of others waters, the Mediterranean, the Pacific and the Atlantic, though problematic, has prevented a divorce of the Indian Ocean from its neighbours. In turn the Indian Ocean has given rise to histories of islands, bays and passages, exemplifying more granular approaches. The Indian Ocean teases its narrators by dissolving and cohering in turn, never appearing as an easily isolatable or standardised subject. It has served as a space for exercises of power in as much as mythic imaginaries of resistance, self-making, intellectual prospecting and future prognosis. If the historians of this sea over the centuries are a guide to the future, there can be no doubt that Indian Ocean historiography will continue to be lively.

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Source: Armitage David, Bashford Alison et al. (eds.). Oceanic Histories. Cambridge University Press,2018. — 338 p.. 2018

No Single Line Across the Ocean

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