The Camel and the Prophecy

Moving from the ‘Dreaming’ stories that structure Aboriginal geographies to Muslim practices of dream interpretation in Beltana, Chapter 5 examines the Ahmadi variety of Islam that flowered along Australian camel tracks. Established in Punjab in the 1880s, the Ahmadiyya movement grew as its founder issued prophecy after prophecy following vivid dream after dream in Urdu, Persian, Arabic and occasionally English. Piecing together the traces Ahmadi dreams left in Australian newspapers, I plot a practice of dream interpretation that circulated across the Indian Ocean during the era of camel transportation.

The Book of Sand

Chapter 6, examines an Arabunna story of encounter at a lonely railway siding in South Australian deserts in around 1895. The tale of what happened when two South Asian men met two Aboriginal women at Alberrie Creek continues to circulate in Arabunna families today. I undertake a camping trip through South Australian deserts with Reg Dodd, the Chairman of the Arabunna People’s Committee, and show that these Arabunna histories of South Asians can offer glimpses of the terrain on which Arabunna historiographical traditions are inscribed.

Seven Voyages of Khawajah Muhammad Bux

Reading a seafarer’s travelogue that circulates today in Urdu and English, this chapter examines seven of Khawajah Muhammad Bux’s voyages. Beginning his life as a lascar at the bottom of the racial hierarchy of a British ship, Bux was a wealthy merchant by the end of his days in 1920s Lahore. He recounted a lengthy family history to his scribe that was published recently in Urdu as Lahore Ka Sindbad (Sindbad of Lahore), and as ‘Memoirs of Khawajah Muhammad Bux’ in English. Placing the text within a wider world of Indian Ocean circulations of narratives, I examine the path the text lays out for future generations of South Asians crossing the seas.

To Hear

Returning to the copy of Kasasol Ambia in Broken Hill, chapter 8 revisits the central question that underpins this book: Who brought the com- pendium of Bengali poetry to this inland Australian town? Focusing in upon the aural forms of knowledge transmission that this book was embedded in, I show that the forms of historical storytelling that the book reveals remain in circulation today in both contemporary South Asia and Australia. With the Kasasol Ambia pointing to another epistemic ground on which past South Asians situated historical storytelling, I demonstrate that we can use the text today to produce new forms of human ontology. This concluding chapter argues that at our current juncture of not only escalating state violence and racism, but also ecological crisis, historians and activists alike must challenge the epistemic arrogance of colonial-modern thought if we are to glimpse better futures.

The Train at Beltana

In Chapter 4 I follow the trail that the very first South Asian camel drivers traced inland to Beltana—a hilly region in Kuyani lands where the first Australian camel depot was established. From the 1860s, Beltana emerged as a transportation hub atop an existing, cosmopolitan center of Aboriginal trade. Telling the history of the settlers and the Aboriginal groups who gathered in Beltana in the evening in 1885 when the very first steam train was due, I piece together the contours of the contested epistemic terrain onto which South Asians led the earliest camels. Contrasting the logic that belied English accounts of the train, with accounts of Beltana in Wangkangurru and Kuyani – two of the many Aboriginal languages spoken in the region – this chapter challenges the imperial myth of emptiness that shaped how settlers saw the lands they invaded.

The Book of Books

Examining past ‘misreadings’ of a copy of Kasasol Ambia in the Australian mining town of Broken Hill that has long been mislabeled a Quran in Australian history books, this chapter challenges one of the central problems of English language historiography today: The systematic subjugation of colonised knowledges to produce dead objects and artifacts. Examining the Indian Ocean geography that the Kasasol Ambia circulated I piece together the contours of colonial-modern historical storytelling in South Asia and Australia. Placing Australia within histories of the Indian Ocean world, I approach this arena as a key terrain of Anglo empires and a site of ongoing epistemic struggle. Showing that the Kasasol Ambia can offer clues for how to use colonised people’s knowledge traditions to think, theorise and understand the Indian Ocean world, this chapter develops a framework for producing anti-colonial knowledes about the region.

The Book of Marriage

From 1860 to the 1920s, Muslim merchants and workers from across British India and Afghanistan travelled to Australian shores to work in the extensive camel transportation network that underpinned the growth of capitalism in the Australian interior. Through marriage, South Asian women in addition to white women and Aboriginal women became part of families spanning the Indian Ocean. Challenging the racist accounts of gender relations that currently structure histories of Muslims in Australia, I turn to the intellectual traditions of colonised peoples in search of alternatives to orientalist narratives. Redeploying the Muslim narrative tradition of Kitab al‐Nikah (Book of Marriage) to write feminist history, this chapter proposes a new framework to house histories of Muslim women.

Stories of the Prophets

Approaching the 1895 edition of the Bengali Kasasol Ambia that remains in a Broken Hill mosque as a history book, this chapter examines the historical storytelling techniques that this Sufi text employs. I argue that this particular non-modern history book was underpinned by a relationship between humans and knowledge – an epistemology - quite distinct to colonial modern methods of truth production. The chapter makes a methodological argument for animating and reinvigorating non-modern strategies for producing truths about the past and claims continuity to non-modern historiographical traditions.