The Indian Ocean, like the winds and the storms, cannot be restricted within frontiers. From 1500 to 1800, the Indian Ocean rim included all areas between the Red Sea and the Straits of Malacca. In the 20th century, “Australia and Southern Africa were added” to the Indian Ocean space (Khader 2017, p. 85). Gabeba Baderoon in her book Regarding Muslims (2014), argues that “the sea is a metaphor for experiences that transcend conventional categories, the juxtaposition of multiple histories, the transformation of the self, and memories of slavery” (p. 67). On a similar note, this book has reinterpreted the Indian Ocean space through the creolized culinary, spiritual, and musical memories and rituals of the African Indians in Gujarat and the South African Indians in South Africa. The fluidity of the Indian Ocean has generated fluid sociocultural practices amongst the communities residing in and around that space, as can be seen in the cases of the African Indians and the South African Indians. The various sociocultural creolized practices of the African Indians and the South African Indians, as discussed in this book, have pushed these communities into a state of “informed accommodation,” which Khatija Khader defines as a practice by communities to mark a distinct identity “by claiming membership into other larger regional or global groups—to mark similarity” (2020, p. 438). During personal conversations, the African Indians and the South African Indians shared their habitual culinary and spiritual and the musical practices that enable them to remember their “distinctive” ancestral practices, on the one side, and identify “similarities” between the sociocultural practices of the local Indian and African communities, respectively, on the other. The African Indians in Gujarat, while respecting their relationship to the local Indian cultures and traditions, never fail to acknowledge their connections to African ancestry. On a similar note, a lot of South African Indians identify their distinctiveness from the rest of the South Africans by simultaneously acknowledging their Indian and South African roots. These dynamics of informed accommodation can be thoroughly understood through the theoretical and ethnographic narratives of the struggles and resistances of the African Indians and the South African Indians. The multi-rooted sociocultural practices of these communities have led to the formation of several diaspora spaces across the Indian Ocean (Baron and Cara 2011).

Introduction: Transoceanic Roots and Routes

Apart from various types of musical instruments, as discussed in Chapter 4, the African Indians and the South African Indians traveled to India and South Africa, respectively, with seeds and saplings of different traditional plants that are local to their respective geographical areas of origin. For instance, when the Indians arrived in South Africa, they carried saplings and seeds of basil, neem, curry leaf, mango, tamarind, and many others, while the Africans in India arrived with the seeds and saplings of baobab tree, lady finger, coffee beans, tomatoes, and many others. The seeds and the saplings were not just mere objects for these communities but functioned as cultural memories through which they could remain associated with their ancestral roots, even though they were physically displaced.

Today, in the states of Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh in India, the use of Khorasani Imli in vegetables, chutneys, and pickles are quite common. In the late Middle Ages, the Persian word “Khorasan” was used to denote the present-day country of Iran, and Khorasani Imli refers to the seeds of the Baobab tree that were brought to India by the Africans from eastern, northern, and southern Africa (whitehorsepress 2018). The Baobab seeds are referred to as Khorasani because they were brought by the Africans who came through Iran with the Islamic invaders as slaves and are referred to as Imli because they taste sour like tamarinds (known as Imli in the Hindi language). On an identical note, a lot of the houses of the South African Indians in South Africa (especially the Hindus), consists of mango trees, curry leaf plants, tamarind plants, and basil leave plants. It is so because, a majority of the indentured Indians came to South Africa from the southern parts of India, where tamarind and curry leaves are habitually used in cooking. Besides consuming tamarind and curry leaves, mango leaves and basil leaves are widely used in performing various religious, cultural, and spiritual rituals by South African Indian Hindus.

Before discussing further about the culinary practices of the Siddis in Gujarat and the South African Indians in Durban, Pretoria, and Johannesburg, it is crucial to mention that the culinary practices of the Siddis in the contemporary era are no different from the local Indian communities.

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.

Performing Memories and Weaving Archives offers an insightful and rare glimpse of a two-way excavation entailing an Indian Ocean world at the crossroads. Here, the lifeworlds, ancestral knowledge, and collective memories of diasporic African communities in India and conversely diasporic Indian communities in South Africa are put into conversation. The spatiotemporal encounters Dey and his participant authors trace bear upon everyday life through these historic reverberations. This work deftly interweaves three spheres of everyday life: sacredscapes (through the spiritual mnemonic), musicscapes (through cultures of dance, music, and movement), and foodscapes (through culinary practices).

These traversals weave the ancestral knowledge, “creolization,” and “decolonial resistance” that thematically braid the multistranded narratives of South African Indians, Siddis, and other Afro-Indian communities. For a narrative that is intensely personal as much as it remains socioculturally expansive and open-ended, Dey begins with his own intergenerational biography against a seemingly familiar backdrop of postindependence Bangladesh and West Bengal in flux. Yet, against the urban fabric of childhood spaces, the portrait of a more muted, intriguing history emerges. It is that of a 15th century African kingdom in West Bengal, the Habshi dynasty, and one of many Afro-Indian kingdoms that dotted precolonial India, and long before Indian indentured labor was shipped across the farthest reaches of the British Empire. It is through these transoceanic and transcontinental interstices that Dey ferrets back and forth, between the historic and the contemporary, in offering readers an “archive of creolized memories.”

How is the Indian Ocean as a material space, metaphor, and archive of both connection and dissonance, reimagined in Dey’s transoceanic, transcontinental multi-sited ethnography? If a post-Purcellian reading of the so-called Indian Ocean as a transcultural borderland proves useful at some stage, at what point in this tracing of littoral lifeworlds do notions of hybridity, flow, and entanglement get ruptured, if ever? Indeed, Dey and his collaborators prompt us to think with/through the many sensibilities of porosity that pattern diasporic meaning-making and sentiments of belonging. For example, through an intersectional reading of identity and social hierarchy implicating class, caste, gender, and regional communalism among others, they further venture on to complicating contemporary paradoxes of colorism on either side of the Indian Ocean.

The primary question dealt with in this book—whether identities are fixed or do they travel across economies, geographies, epistemologies, and ontologies?—reminds me of Sara Shneiderman’s (2015) question of “is ethnicity a rock or a river?” (p. 3) While looking at how ethnicity as an identity is understood and practiced among the Thangmi community in Nepal and parts of India, she underlined that while community members, to gain state recognition of their ethnicity, performed ethnicity in a way that led to the framing of their identity as a fixed object, deep down in the community’s consciousness, ethnicity was truly processual—never in a state of being but always becoming (Anthias 2006; Bhambra 2006).

Framing identity as a “rock” or as a fixed object leads to the reification of identities, something that Nancy Fraser (2000) warned us against while talking about the “identity model.” Consequently, one can experience blockages and disruptions to the flows, of intermingling between identities and cultures, which Dey has touched upon when he writes about the racial discrimination faced by African Indians in Gujarat or when he discusses how caste consciousness among upper-caste Hindus in South Africa leads to their racist behavior toward local black Africans. This book, thus, comes at an important time when identities are increasingly being turned into fixed entities and are politicized—the rise of right-wing fascist regimes all over the world is an indication of that.

In such a world, Dey in turn decides to focus on the “porosity and hybridity,” the flows, and “non-purity.” This has allowed the work to open up discussions surrounding belongingness, which is in line with scholars such as Deleuze and Guattari (1987) and Yuval-Davis (2011). Deleuze and Guattari (1987) question fixity, linearity, cyclical, and binary thoughtprocesses, including belongingness, by placing the image of the root, which is always “tracing” origins, goes in one linear direction, and works with binary logic, in opposition to the image of the “rhizome.” As opposed to the “root,” the rhizome is nonlinear, multiplies in any direction, and works with the principles of connection and heterogeneity. The rhizome does not reproduce like tracing in exact ways; it is a map that draws unique connections and is opposed to any fixed structure. A root reterritorializes, but a rhizome deterritorializes, and then it may again reterritorialize and again deterritorialize, and this goes on without any order.

Introduction: Creole Musicscapes and the Indian Ocean

When the indentured Indians boarded the ships to Natal and the African slaves boarded the ships to Gujarat, along with many items, they carried musical instruments like Dhamama, Musindo, Dhol, Misr Kanga, Malunga, Harmonium, and several others (Figure 9). Philip Howard Colomb, in his book Slave-catching in the Indian Ocean (1873), observes that when the African slaves traveled by ships to India, they would engage in “frantic performances” (p. 280) in the forms of dancing, singing, and playing their musical instruments loudly. On a similar note, Chats Devroop, while talking about the creolized musical cultures of the South African Indians, shared that during long journeys to Natal, one of the ways in which the Indians entertained themselves on the ships was by singing, dancing, and playing musical instruments (2022). The musical and dance engagements of the Siddis and the South African Indians on the ships have intergenerationally passed on, got intermingled with local musical and dance cultures, and gave birth to creole musical and dance practices. On the one side, the creole musical and dance practices have allowed the Siddis in Gujarat and the South African Indians in South Africa to carve out a unique noncompartmentalized cultural space of their own, which cannot be imprisoned within the parameters of the mainstream cultural enclaves, and on the other side, the creolized musical and dance practices function as the “reterritorialization of the multiplicities of sensation” (Roy 2018, p. 173) for these communities. From the ships across the Indian Ocean to the present-day cultural spaces, the reterritorialization of the multiplicities of emotions for these communities have sociohistorically taken place through maintaining the ancestral musical traditions as well as acknowledging the local musical and dance traditions.

The evolution of any form of creolized musical and dance practices is not a disconnection from the roots of the original musical and dance traditions but an opening up of cultural possibilities of porosities, fluidities, and endless continuities because “every enactment of tradition opens tradition to transformation” (Waterman 1990, p. 8). In the process of the transformation, the “present becomes past and the future present” (Martin 2013, p. 23), and as a result, the usual practice of interpreting mainstream musical and dance traditions as superior to the various ancestral musical and dance traditions of different indigenous communities gets questioned.

Are our identities fixed, or do they travel across races, communities, religions, societies, cultures, economies, geographies, cosmologies, epistemologies, and ontologies? This question is not new. Sociohistorically, this question has been asked and addressed from multiple geopolitical vantage points. But one should never stop asking this question. This question is a consistent reminder of our existential liminalities, fluidities, porosities, and ambiguities that we habitually perform through our thoughts and actions within diverse spatiotemporal contexts. I am initiating my book with this particular question because this question lies at the heart of the thematic and theoretical arguments of this book. As we travel across different states, countries, and continents, we are welcomed in different cultural spaces in different ways. The ways of greeting each other are often characterized by various similarities. The similarities are not mere coincidences but are underpinned by the ancestral histories and memories of social, cultural, political, and economic exchanges across different spaces and times. For instance, Lewis R. Gordon, a professor from the University of Connecticut, always begins his lectures by greeting the audience in Hindi, Hebrew, English, Tamil, Xhosa, and Zulu. This is not any form of “attractive gimmick” (Ngai 2020, p. 1), but a benevolent and sincere way of remembering his ancestral roots and remembering the routes through which his ancestors have traveled across cultures. Lewis believes that his process of scholarship building is interwoven with the constellations of ancestral knowledge that he has intergenerationally imbibed from his foremothers and forefathers, and it is necessary to acknowledge such multiple rootedness in shared academic and activist spaces through greetings.

Greetings perform powerful social, cultural, political, and esthetic roles in making us feel “welcomed” and “unwelcomed” within cultural frameworks. Whenever we meet strangers who greet us in our respective languages, we immediately feel emotionally and esthetically connected to them, irrespective of not knowing them. This is how greetings function as “conditions for social encounters” (Duranti 1997, p. 63). Now coming to thematic and the theoretical contexts of this book, on a similar note, the evolution of the African Diaspora in India and the Indian Diaspora in South Africa has been based on multiple levels of territorial, geographical, commercial, political, social, economic, and cultural encounters. Before progressing further, it is necessary to clarify the perspective in which the term “Diaspora” has been used in this book.

Introduction: Spiritual Relationalities of the Ocean

The history of the creolized spiritual practices of the African Diaspora in India and the Indian Diaspora in South Africa unpacks complex narratives of “sacredscapes” ( Jeychandran 2019, p. 17) that emerged around the Indian Ocean littorals during the movements of the slaves and indentured laborers. Makrand Mehta in “Gujarat Sufis, “Sants,” and the Indian Ocean World in Medieval Times” (2019) observes that “along with the exchange of commodities, information, and ideas, knowledge was also shared” (p. 163). The movements of the indentured Indian laborers to South Africa and the African slaves to India gave birth to “multiple worldings in an emergent world of many worlds” (Uimonen and Masimbi 2021, p. 35) through the development of porous and fluid creolized spiritual practices in their respective geographical spaces in the forms of coastal shrines and transoceanic worship cultures. The creolization is specifically visible in terms of the emergence of transoceanic and interreligious folklores; the preparation of creole foods as offerings to gods, goddesses, and devotees; the usage of Afro-Indian creole languages in religious songs; and the usage of multicultural worship procedures.

It is also important to note that with respect to the creolized spiritual practices of the Indian Diaspora in South Africa, this chapter has exclusively focused on the spiritual practices of the Indian indentured laborers because the Hindus who came as passenger Indians mostly from Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh rejected any forms of transcultural influence on Hinduism, adhered to high caste puritan religious practices, and did not regard the indentured Indians as “genuine” Hindus because of their tendency to interweave Hindu spiritual practices with local African and other spiritual practices. The economically flourishing situation of the Hindu passenger Indians enabled them to bring in Brahmin priests from India (Kumar 2012; Lal and Vahed 2013). The Brahmin priests were brought from India because they were “informed largely by the Sanskrit ritual texts” (Kumar 2012, p. 392) and could assist the high-caste Hindu passenger Indians to re-establish their puritan Hindu practices in South Africa. Such an adherence to high-caste puritan Hindu religious practices has led to the foundation of organizations like, South African Hindu Mahasabha and the Hindi Shiksha Sangh.

The transcontinental and transoceanic exchanges of people and cultures between India and the continent of Africa got regularized with the arrival of the European colonizers. Before the arrival of the Portuguese in India, the movement of Africans to India was not regular and was not restricted to slavery (Toninato and Cohen 2010). As discussed in Chapter 1, Africans with diverse professional affiliations arrived in India with diverse professional intentions. On May 20, 1498, when Vasco da Gama reached the coast of Calicut from the East African coastal town of Malindi, he was received by “two North African merchants from Tunis who reportedly spoke both Spanish and Italian” (Alpers 2014, p. 68). This encounter between Christopher Columbus and the Africans shows the professional and linguistic diversity that the African immigrants had in India before the arrival of the European colonizers. It was with the arrival of the Portuguese colonizers in India that the African slaves in India were racially dehumanized and compartmentalized. As the Portuguese came to India, they brought with them African slaves from Mozambique, Eritrea, Somalia, and South Africa, which diversified the already existing population of Abyssinian slaves in the country (Shah et al. 2011; India Today Web Desk 2016; Vallangi 2016). The Portuguese subjected the African slaves to severe states of existential inhumanity, as they did with the indigenous communities in other parts of the world. As a result, many slaves escaped from the clutches of the Portuguese into the forests of Goa, Maharashtra, Karnataka, and Gujarat. This is how the African settlements in Gujarat came into existence.

The sociocultural diversity of the African Indians in India can be traced back to the different names by which they are known. Historically, the African Indians in India were known as Siddis and Habshis. Several narratives revolve around the origin of the term “Habshi” and “Siddi.” According to Fitzroy Baptiste, the term “Habshi” can be traced from the ancient Egyptian word “Khebtsi,” which was used to refer to the people of Punt (ancient Ethiopia) (Baptiste 2008, p. 121). Sergew Sellassie, in her book Ancient and Medieval Ethiopian History upto 1270 (1972), mentions that ancient Ethiopia was also referred to as “Neter” by the ancient Egyptians, which means the “the land of the Gods” (p. 21). Many historians claim that the “Habshis” were referred to those Africans who came to India from Ethiopia.