Performing Memories and Weaving Archives:: Creolized Cultures across the Indian Ocean

By Sayan Dey

This book engages with how the Siddis in Gujarat and the South African Indians in South Africa perform different forms of creolized socio-cultural practices in the contemporary era. Since the precolonial times, India and South Africa have developed commercial relations through sharing clothing materials, minerals, precious stones, and spices. Besides exchanging physical objects, varieties of cultures, traditions, and rituals were also exchanged between these countries. With the emergence of colonization in both these countries as Africans were brought to India as slaves and Indians were taken to South Africa as indentured laborers, a lot of objects like musical instruments, plant seeds, cooking utensils, and hand-woven clothes were carried across the Indian Ocean as cultural memories. With the passage of time, the cultural practices of the Indian Diaspora and African Diaspora got intermixed with the native local cultures of South Africa and India, respectively, and gave birth to porous, fluid, multi-rooted, and creolized cultural practices. This book brings forth some of the creolized culinary, spiritual, and musical practices of these communities, and how these performances can expand the archives of creolized cultural practices of Diaspora communities in the Indian Ocean World.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Dec 5, 2023
• ISBN: 9781839986918

Book preview

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION:

NOMOSHKAR-SANIBONA-VANAKKAM-MOLWENI-HUJAMBO…

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. With respect to the research contexts of this book, the term Diaspora has been used to refer to a particular framing of a ‘call of history’ and a particular framework for cultural self-making that people respond to according to class position, alienating political events, and their local political imagination (Hansen 2012, p. 17). Having said this, let us see how the African Diaspora and the Indian Diaspora communities have been sociohistorically shaped through multiple