Between Africa and India: Thinking Comparatively Across the Western Indian Ocean

WORKING papers Between Africa and India: thinking comparatively across the western Indian Ocean Kai Kresse, ZMO, Edward Simpson, SOAS Abstract »coasts« but also »borders« and »rims« more ge- Scholarship on the Indian Ocean is generally com- nerally. This ambiguity corresponds to processes parative in its approach. In this paper, we draw of inclusion and exclusion, integration and sepa- from our research experiences on the Swahili and ration, as two kinds of responses to social connec- Gujarati coasts in order to discuss some of the tions. Indeed, port towns are connecting platforms epistemological consequences of comparison for for related but different social worlds across the the ways in which East Africa and Western India sea. The ways then in which the similarities and have been understood. We critically examine the differences between related social phenomena, frames and terms of comparison in the work of the material culture and experience are perceived historian Thomas Metcalf and the anthropologists and conceptualized by people in their respective A.H.J. Prins, Helene Basu and David F. Pocock. We life worlds on both ends of these connections is suggest that the personal journeys of scholars, as something that we discuss in more detail below well as the sources they use, have profoundly in- under the banner of the term »equivalence«.2 fluenced the ways in which they have been able to Equivalence, as a way of seeing the familiar in write and problematize their own material. the strange, or the same in the other, presents a number of ethnographic and methodological challenges to Indian Ocean studies and comparative Introduction research more generally (not least, as we shall see, because the processes described apply to resear- This paper critically compares and contrasts some chers as well as to the subjects of research). At of the ways the Indian Ocean has been framed in the same time, considering seriously the produc- academic writing.1 The Indian Ocean is a maritime tion of phenomena and perceptions of equivalence zone, meaning that human life in the port towns provides a useful conceptual approach to address and littorals is largely sea-oriented, conditioned these challenges. Equivalence occurs at various by being positioned adjacent to a watery mass. levels of sensual experience and rationalization. This includes bridging and filtering functions in Impressions of unity and diversity, and of same- relation to the social worlds from beyond the sea. ness and difference, across the ocean have to be The Swahili coast, for example, received its name contextualized and interrogated at ethnographic from the Arabic »sawahil« (sing. sahil) denoting and historiographic levels with their specific materials and narratives as well as at the level of wider anthropological and historical exposition. Co- 1 Acknowledgements: Previous versions of this text were gnitive and imaginative worlds, we suggest, exist presented at the conference ‘Connecting Histories across the Indian Ocean: Religion, Politics and Popular Culture’ in in dialogue with the travels and travails of humans Goa, in November 2009, and at the workshop ‘Trading cultu- through the material world: as the sailor makes a res across the Indian Ocean’ at ZMO in Berlin, in July 2011. voyage, the voyage, so to speak, makes the sailor. We thank the participants and especially the organisers of both events (Preben Kaarsholm, Isabel Hofmeyr, Pamila Gupta, and Rochelle Pinto; Sebastian Prange and Prem Pod- 2 This is an idea we have taken from the work of the histo- dar) for stimulating comments and discussions. rian K.N. Chaudhuri (including, 1995, 2006). Kirchweg 33, D-14129 Berlin © ZMO Working Papers 5, 2011 Telefon: 030-80307-0 Fax: 030-80307-210 Internet: www.zmo.de E-Mail: [email protected] The structures of individual movement and perso- a German social anthropologist who has worked nal knowledge are necessarily intertwined. in Gujarat since the 1980s with low-status Sunni While the Indian Ocean is a maritime zone, all Muslims or Siddis, who are popularly thought of too often theorization of it looks from far above, as »African«. She has more recently turned to re- the theorist seeing – god-like, but far from omnis- search in Zanzibar to explore the traces of culture cient – over the waters and lands of the region. that have passed between the two coasts. The final Without dismissing the value of high theory, we author we consider is David Pocock (1928–2007), wish instead to look at the region at the human le- a British social anthropologist who conducted re- vel – ethnographically – a level at which the senses, search in East Africa and later in Gujarat with caste affections and other kinds of concrete transactions Hindus in the 1950s. shape people’s worlds in terms of meaning and The contrasting work of these four scholars structure. This exercise is an initial contribution highlights some of the successes as well as the to what we hope will be a longer project on the me- pitfalls and problems of thinking comparatively chanisms of comparison and heurism across the from shore to shore. Also, we have decided to pick western Indian Ocean, based on our respective telling examples close to our own respective re- research experiences (e.g. Simpson 2006; Kresse gions of expertise, so that our discussion, while 2007) and building on previous joint reflections focussing on general implications, may shed light (Simpson and Kresse 2007). This paper, in a sense, on one particular if broadly conceived sample of a is an ethnographic study – not of our established trans-oceanic axis that is constituted by social mo- field sites (in Kenya and India, the Swahili and Gu- vement but also, as shown in our particular case jarat coasts respectively) – but rather of the work here, by research and scholarship observing and of four scholars of the Indian Ocean who have following such movement. worked in different ways on the axis between East We should also not forget to point out a related Africa and India. Their materials allow us to re- axis of comparative relevance to the cases we are flect on the role of the researcher in generating discussing here, namely the trans-oceanic com- knowledge and frames of reason. Researchers munity constituted by Hadrami networks in the too, we suggest, become Indian Ocean travellers Indian Ocean, running between the Hadramaut of sorts, because how they conduct their research and East Africa (in a south-western direction) and often implicitly determines what and how they can the Hadramaut and South East Asia (in the eas- see, and thus what they ultimately can (and cannot) tern direction). Historians have researched these observe. in depth (for instance, Anne Bang 2003; Ulrike Therefore, our focus is less on the formal theore- Freitag 2003; Freitag and Clarence-Smith 1997; tical devices that have been used to impose order Abu-shoek and Ibrahim 2009) and recently also on an unruly space than on the ways the movement the anthropologist Engseng Ho (2006). Social in- and experience of researchers themselves, as well tegration and engagement of Hadrami diasporas as those of the subjects of their research (who are within the host communities elsewhere, through often also their ›informants‹), have implicitly given Alawiyya Sufi rituals and Islamic education, shape and form to academic writing. Our primary through trade and through intermarriage with focus is not on those commonly known for their local women, were an important characteristic forthright statements about the Indian Ocean, of these networks. Yet it seems all this happened but on those whose work has compelled them to with a view to a commonly assumed prerogative of address, in other ways, questions of authenticity, the »homeland« in the Hadramaut, to which social scale and power in the region. We regard this as links are sustained and a return expected, even if a call for a proper treatment of research as an only temporary (e.g. as pilgrims). In his interpre- epistemological practice in the multiple sites of tation of this relationship, Ho emphasizes that the the Indian Ocean. In this, the paper is a practical Hadrami Alawiyya model rhetorically insists on contribution to the literature on methodology. a hierarchical relation between Tarim in the Ha- Our first traveller is Adriaan Hendrik Johan dramaut as »ancestral source« and any other re- Prins (1921-2000), a Dutch anthropologist who gion to which connections have been established. conducted fieldwork on the Kenyan port town of This contrasts with our conceptual interest here in Lamu and the wider Swahili coast from the late circling around the idea of »equivalence« between 1950s onward, with a special focus on seafaring. connected littorals across the ocean. In the Had- His writing drew strongly on Robert Redfield’s rami case, according to Ho, things that return or differentiation between great and little traditions, are given in exchange from somewhere else »are then very much in fashion in the South Asian schol- not equivalents« but inferior (2006: 93), and »reci- arship of the period. Second in line is the American procity is not possible« (2006: 94). This argument historian of the British Raj, Thomas Metcalf. He applies to incoming people, too, who are qualified has written on the imperial connections of Britain either as »descendants« and »inferiors« (insiders in the Indian Ocean in the late nineteenth and ear- to the networks) or as »aliens or guests« (2006: ly twentieth centuries. Our third is Helene Basu, 94). Ho´s work represents an alternative model of ZMO Working Papers 5 · K. Kresse / E. Simpson · Between Africa and India 2 trans-oceanic connectivity to one ordered around While this may be unfalsifiable in the abstract, it is »equivalence« that we are trying to explore here.

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