(In)Visible Heritages, African Prints and Contemporary Art Across the Indian

The Newsletter No. 83 Summer 2019 19 Africa-Asia disparate “elsewhere”,2 that constitute the Indian Ocean landscapes as archives African topographies in India: (in)visible heritages, African of Afro-Asian circulations. prints and contemporary art across the Indian Ocean Icono/graphies - visual traces Integrating broader landscapes of artistic Pedro Pombo projects illuminating aesthetic and cultural flows connecting Asia and Africa, several art projects in India become sites of enquiry of he Indian Ocean is recognized as a space Triggering conversations across Using cartographic templates allows the submerged histories and the actual complex of circulations and interactions. If Asian geographies and times, African presences overcoming of geographical and chronological realities of African migrants in the country. Tcommunities are well known for having in India become visible through three limits to inquiry how past circulations of The interdisciplinary research project Coriollis settled in East and Southern African coasts interconnected conceptual frames: Africans across the Indian Ocean relate with Effect,by the New Delhi based arts collective for centuries, African circulations are equally Carto/graphies [mnemonic traces, the 1951 Bandung conference and Afro-Asian Khoj, the photographic series African Portraits significant for the cultural landscapes across geographies and their uses and meanings], solidarity movements, contemporary migration by Mahesh Shantaram or the installation the Indian Ocean. This essay discusses an Archiv/ing [material traces, representations of circuits to cities as Guangzhou, Hong Kong Dwelling Kappiri Spirits by Gabriel Lester for ongoing research that aims to understand past and future heritages], and Icono/graphies and New Delhi and with concepts around the the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2016 are among the contemporary presence of Africa in India [visual traces, artistic expressions]. Global South. In this way, space, geography recent practices that deal with the presence of interrelating three main locations: the (in)visible and their cartographic representations act Africans in India across time. While these works presence of plural Afro-Indian communities, as mnemonic archives of pluralized histories direct us to reflect on the representation of an the production of African print textiles by Carto/graphies - of exchanges that need to be registered in African blackness, they also act as a mirror Indian companies and contemporary art relation and interconnectivity. reflecting the Indian society. To confront these, projects that critically engage with African mnemonic traces and others, contemporary representations3 migrants in Indian metropolis. Intending to This conceptual frame investigates with past depictions of Asians of African origin, associate fields of research that are apparently spatial memories in the Indian Ocean Archiv/ing - material traces archives of imagery, representations and disconnected, this research establishes through a critical deconstruction of colonial Material and visual heritages are powerful social locations,4 means to connect historical dialogues between legacies of the past with and postcolonial maps. Engaging with notions repositories of history and culture. One of processes and their remnants with the contemporary Afro-Asian connections. as cartography, location, territory or scale, the possible searches for African presences contemporary circumstances and to build new it acts as surveying alternative maps across in India, and broadly in South Asia, is to cartographies of Africa in India while knitting In a contemporary context, objects and two layers: spatial templates and social interconnect scattered traces of different apparent disjunctures between the past and things became central to the new discourses geographies. scales and contexts, as well as the lexicons the present. This conceptual template also about Asia and Africa, and production, Historical port cities, which were and representations of past heritages, in order incentivizes a critical reconsidering of past consumption and even the afterlife can fundamental nodal locations intersecting to think what, and how, can be perceived as iconographies and the search for silenced and elucidate the “relation between commodities maritime networks with coastal landscapes future legacies. One of the advantages of obliterated visualities in a diversity of mediums and subjects” across continents.1 This has left and hinterland polities, and diverse this conceptual frame is to circulate among such as songs, craft traditions or cultural aside intersections between the heritages of geographical and cultural identities diverse materialities: small scale shrines for landscapes. the past and the possible cultural crossings counterbalance contemporary maps. spirits of deceased African slaves in Kochi, of the present. Renewed flows of circulations Temporarily dislocating postcolonial nation- the Kappiri Muthapan, the impressive Janjira trigger localized social and spatial interactions state boundaries around the Indian Ocean Fort, on the coast of Maharashtra, Sufi Possible mappings with ‘African’ spaces in Asian cities at different serves as an exercise of questioning alternate dargahs and devotion rituals performed by Instead of focusing on one particular scales, from neighborhoods to buildings, such geographical logics and designations: does Siddi communities, representative buildings field, connecting diverse layers where links as the famous Chunking Mansions in Hong using the old Arabic expression ‘Sea of Zanj’ as the Siddi Saiyyed Mosque in Ahmedabad, between the African continent and India have Kong or the African spaces in the Chinese city to the Western Indian Ocean change our urban aesthetic languages of port cities as been made visible or left unseen allows us of Guangzhou or the Indian city of New Delhi. perception regarding the place of Africa Surat, Diu or Kochi or materialities as mobile to understand relations and frictions amid Correspondingly, the practices of circulation and Middle East in maritime networks? Are as cotton textiles. materialities, visual cultures, and discourses. have significantly changed, connecting distinct coastal landscapes and the monsoon system As contemporary inheritances of centuries In a broader perspective, these inquiries locations without progressive cross-cultural more illuminating than land based maps of trade that sustained Western India’s textile dialogue with larger geographies of Afro-Asian processes and re-enacting imaginaries to read connections across the oceans? production, ‘African prints’ are being produced relations and critically tie disparate locations of the ‘other’. These interrogations also translate ideas in Ahmedabad, Surat or Bombay exclusively for of memory that inhabit the Asian space in order Recommending disciplinary crossings, of plurality that render visible how African African consumption. The long history of Indian to think what future heritages can be imagined I propose enquiring about the possibilities of origin populations have settled and built textiles in Africa, commonly disconnected departing from the contemporary realities. widening critical engagements with histories of cultural environments in extremely diverse from this contemporary production through Searching for African presences in India Afro-Indian fluxes and the ways in which past ways and through contrasting historical an excessive focus on the late colonial equally means to uncover additional archives, heritages have been simultaneously informing situations. While in the Western Indian period, is alive in India, one of its oldest modes of registering heritages and traces that, the present and erased from contemporary Ocean archipelagos we assist processes production centers, as well as in the more sometimes literally, are weaved throughout discourses. While the recent African migrant of creolization, in South Asia and the Persian recent production centers in China, mainly locations, material structures, sounds or communities in Guangzhou, Hong Kong or New Gulf Afro-Asians have been assimilated Guangzhou province, where African migrants personal lives. Patterns and colors, words and Delhi have been understood as connected to to local social structures under the terms build communities and businesses. Titled as images are powerful and rich sites of research, economic trends of Asian presence in Africa, it of Habshi and Siddi, in Iran, Pakistan and Mozambique Fabric or Capulana, Dashiki, and following the cyclic monsoon winds also translates the permanence of circulations India, or Kaffir, in the case of Sri Lanka. Kanga, Kente Print or simply African Wax, these might lead to Afro-Asian worlds that have across the continents and the formation of In this wider map, India is a particularly African textiles made in Asia prove that cotton been sedimented in the estuaries of historical Afro-Asian communities. At the same time, the fertile location to recognize the diversity of cloths are not material traces of past histories narratives and changing coastal landscapes. contemporary production of African prints in African presences and complicate concepts but the medium where future heritages are India, which has been overshadowed by the of slavery and bounded labor in the Indian literally drawn. The African continent, as Pedro Pombo, Goa University economic relevance of Chinese production Ocean. In the Konkan, Deccan and Gujarat a center of decision and consumption, has ASC-IIAS Fellow

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