The Indian Ocean as a Memory Space

Matatu ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 209-231
Author(s):  
John Njenga Karugia
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Life Histories ◽  
Documentary Film ◽  
Asian Options ◽  
Future Perspectives ◽  
Memory Space ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
The University ◽  
International Research Project

Abstract This conversation with the author Neera Kapur-Dromson took place in Nairobi, Kenya, on 9th March 2018 during filming of the documentary film ‘Afrasian Memories in East Africa’ in which Neera Kapur-Dromson features. Neera Kapur-Dromson lives in France and Kenya. She is the author of the book ‘From Jhelum to Tana’. Here, Neera-Kapur Dromson reflects upon transregional interactions across the Indian Ocean as a memory space through life histories of various generations of her ancestors, various actors within the cosmopolitanisms of the Indian Ocean and her own experiences. She discusses how specific Indian Ocean societies experienced, were shaped by and negotiated multiple transformations related but not limited to nation-state politics, transoceanic trade, citizenship politics, colonial railway projects, identity politics, religion and transculturality as migrations, colonialism, and resultant interactions occurred across time and space. Her discussion visualises and demystifies the emergence of entangled Afrasian transregional spaces within the complexity of cosmopolitan societies across the Indian Ocean. The film was part of an international research project at Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany, titled Africa’s Asian Options (AFRASO). It was launched during an AFRASO symposium titled “Afrasian Entanglements: Current Dynamics and Future Perspectives in India-Africa Relations” at the University of Mumbai in June 2018.

The Graphical Records of Matthew Flinders's Voyage to Terra Australis

1984 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 94-103 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. N. Ferrar
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Memorial Lecture ◽  
South East Asia ◽  
Cape Of Good Hope ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Marco Polo ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
The Pacific Ocean ◽  
The University ◽  
Sailing Ship

This second Matthew Flinders Memorial Lecture, in a series sponsored jointly by the Royal Institute of Navigation and the Hydrographic Society with the cooperation of Lincolnshire and Humberside Arts was presented at the University of Hull on 11 May 1983 with Sir John Dudding, Chairman of Lincolnshire and Humberside Arts in the Chair. The first lecture, presented by Rear-Admiral G. S. Ritchie in April 1974 (Journal27, 3) on the bicentenary of the birth of Matthew Flinders, described the hydrographic work of this exploring navigator. Miss Ferrar concentrates on the graphical records of Flinders's Australian voyages.When Marco Polo made his journey to China, overland from Venice in the thirteenth century, the lands around the Pacific Ocean were wholly unknown to Europeans. But the silks and spices with which he returned sowed the seeds of the quest for a sea route to the ‘Spice Islands’ which was to be one of the mainsprings of exploration for nearly 500 years. The Spaniards crossed the Atlantic. But instead of finding themselves on the coast of Asia as they had expected they discovered the lands (and the wealth) of the Aztecs and Incas, and their explorations extended along the Pacific coasts of Central and South America from Mexico to Peru. The Portuguese found their way around southern Africa and across the Indian Ocean to South-east Asia, where they attained their objective and established a lucrative trade with the Spice Islands. Sailing ship routes depend upon the direction of prevailing winds, so the outward voyage took them eastwards from the Cape of Good Hope and then northwards to their destination. The homeward crossing of the Indian Ocean was in more northerly latitudes.

Introduction: The Ocean and the Historian

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 2-11
Author(s):  
Lakshmi Subramanian
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Graduate Student ◽  
Economic History ◽  
World System ◽  
Maritime History ◽  
Agrarian Question ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
The University

I feel singularly privileged to write the introduction for the first of two special JIOWS festschrift editions honouring Michael Pearson’s contributions in the field of Indian Ocean studies. My association with Mike goes back to 1979/80 when I met him at the University of Viswabharati, where my mentor Ashin Dasgupta was working with him on an edited volume devoted to the history of India and the Indian Ocean. This was a time when as a young graduate student, I was being exposed to the hotly debated and discussed sub-field of maritime history. Several senior historians questioned the need to study maritime history outside the general frame of Indian economic history, by then an established field of enquiry, driven primarily by the agrarian question, poverty and the drain of wealth paradigm. I recall how, in course of my apprenticeship, I read a range of writings that looked at Asian trade and commercial exchanges that, although written largely out of European archives, dared to tell a very different story to the dominant one of European commercial and military hegemony. This was long before the heady debates of globalization, of Asia before Europe or indeed of the world system thesis that had entered the field; instead, we were chewing over the critiques of the peddler thesis put forward by Van Leur, and of the uncritical endorsement of colonial perspectives on Asian trade embodied in the writings of scholar administrator W.H. Moreland. It was here that Pearson and Dasgupta gave us the vital tools of our trade, to look beyond the official voices in the archive, to search for private adjustments and compromises that had so much more to say about the messy world of commercial and social transactions where to look for Weberian rationality or pure economic determinism was chasing a mirage.

scholarly journals The Egyptian exploration of the Red Sea

1940 ◽  
Vol 128 (852) ◽  
pp. 306-316 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Red Sea ◽  
Present Communication ◽  
Research Ship ◽  
Oceanographic Research ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Modern Egypt ◽  
The University

The success achieved by the John Murray Expedition to the Indian Ocean, 1933-4, in the Egyptian research ship Mabahiss aroused the interest of Egypt in oceanographic exploration. When the Mabahiss returned to Alexandria in May 1934, the University at Cairo had under consideration a plan for sending out an expedition to explore the whole area of the Red Sea in 1935-6. Meanwhile, it was thought advisable to send a preliminary expedition, the experience of which might be a useful guide for the 1935-6 expedition, to its nothern regions. This preliminary expedition, which lasted from 18 December 1934 to 20 February 1935, marks the first attempt by modern Egypt to undertake systematic oceanographic research. A note on the topographical and biological results of this expedition has already appeared (Crossland 1936). The object of the present communication is to report some of its hydrographic and chemical results which are believed to have increased our knowledge of the oceanography of the Red Sea.

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