The evolution of this book is widely motivated by my close association with coastal cultures and oceanic values since my childhood days. I was born in the city of Kolkata, and it is located in the coastal state of West Bengal. As a result, my social, cultural, political, historical, esthetic, and intellectual evolution is deeply entangled and interwoven with diverse coastal cultures, traditions, and lifestyles that are habitually brought into the mainstream, exclusionary, and capitalistic urban cultural spaces of Kolkata by the vegetable vendors, fishmongers, and domestic helpers. A large number of vendors and helpers in Kolkata belong to the coastal regions of West Bengal, and they come to the city in search of jobs. In the process of seeking and engaging in variety of jobs, they not only inf luence the economic structures of the city, but also transform the culturescapes through their unique spiritual, culinary, musical, societal, fashion, and other practices. For instance, as a child I remember that there were a lot of women in our locality who were from the coastal region of Digha and worked as cooks in different houses. As I had many friends, I would often be invited for lunch or dinner in their houses, and I would be served with traditional coastal dishes of sea fishes, fish eggs, and various other seafood that were prepared by the cooks. Apart from seafood, the cooks would also prepare various other vegetarian and nonvegetarian dishes that are culturally and traditionally rooted in other parts of West Bengal. In this way, I developed a multicultural palate, which allowed me to indulge in an interconnected mode of belonging beyond the narrow enclaves of sociocultural binaries.

Gradually, as I started critically engaging with various oceanic and transoceanic communities and their cultures across India and the world, the collectivity, reciprocity, and malleability of the oceans and their impact on the communities near and far from the coasts, motivated me to embrace a critical, intellectual, esthetic, porous, and fluid identity of “Oceania” that “seeks to open up different ways of being with others, relating, and dwelling in and across this ocean-interconnected world” (Wilson 2022, p. 5). This identity has served as the inceptual point of this book.