Guest Editors' Introduction

During the past decade there has been a considerable increase in literature documenting the growth of Indian Ocean port cities. Famously described as the Brides of the Sea, port cities such as Cape Town, Karachi, Bombay (Mumbai), Madras (Chennai), Calcutta, Rangoon, Singapore, and Jakarta were the bridgeheads for the establishment of European dominance. They fostered greater connectivity and intercultural exchanges, and they produced distinctive urban settlement patterns, environments, and social relationships.

Shifting Tides: The Port City of Mombasa and the First World War

Port cities across the world were deeply affected by the First World War. They had to adapt quickly to the influx of soldiers and labourers, as well as to resulting population changes that challenged and strained local structures. The pressure of these changes was especially felt in colonial port cities, as new arrivals – from abroad and from the hinterland – had the potential to undermine colonial order and control. In the period of 1914-1918 colonial authorities around the Indian Ocean saw local concerns regarding order and control overridden by global developments and imperial demands.Mombasa, located on the East African coast, provides a potent example of this situation. In the war years, Mombasa turned into a military hub, with thousands of troops passing through it to serve in the East African campaign. These external arrivals were mirrored by the movement of people from the hinterland into the city seeking to fill positions in the local war economy. In this dynamic context, racial borders, social conventions, and economic patterns were continually challenged and transgressed. This article explores these developments and reactions they triggered among Indians, Africans, and Europeans in Mombasa at the time of the global war.

William Tolly and His Canal: Navigating Calcutta in the Lake-Eighteenth Century

This article studies the making of one particular canal in the port-city of Calcutta during the early years of English East India Company rule in Bengal. Major Tolly, a Company-servant, proposed to undertake the arduous task of opening up a navigable route connecting Calcutta with the eastern districts of the province for better trade and communication facilities. In the process, he was hopeful of making a good fortune for himself as well. But the sailing was not smooth. Tolly had to enter into various negotiations with the Company government regarding land, the right to hold property in Calcutta, and the role of the Company in defining those rights. He also faced difficulties with the local zamindars regarding collection of tolls, and the issue of maintenance of the canal. The Company administrators were also not unanimous in their opinions regarding these issues, which sometimes compounded the problem for Tolly. Through a discussion of the material history of this canal, this article proposes to look at the ways in which a mercantile power sought to create and consolidate its hold over a coastal enclave in a largely riverine province, negotiating and redefining a maze of seemingly incomprehensible political-economic considerations.

The Reparation Debate after the Abolition of Indenture

While campaigning for the abolition of indenture, Indian elites encouraged indentured Indians and their descendants to repatriate to India to contain the dispersion of Indian unskilled labourers. After the abolition of indenture in 1917, the repatriation of ex-indentured communities became a source of contention between Indians globally, as many repatriates faced marginalization and ostracization within India. Some, such as M.K. Gandhi and Charles Freer Andrews, revised their position from promoting repatriation as a strategy for containing the tragedies of indenture, to arguing that Indian national liberation from empire would better position an independent Indian state to negotiate on behalf of Indians abroad. Others, such as ocean-crossing activist, Bhawani Dayal Sannyasi, and journalist, Benarsidas Chaturvedi, argued that blanket calls for repatriation ignored the needs of repatriates and left Indians in British colonies who chose not to make a life in India at the height of the Indian anticolonial nationalist movement. These diverse and conflicting perspectives surrounding repatriation shed light on the global Indian diaspora in the context of late colonial India.

Review: Wilson Chacko Jacob, For God or Empire: Sayyid Fadl and the Indian Ocean World. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019

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Review: Laleh Khalili, Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula. London: Verso, 2020

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The Askari Monument in Mombasa

The Askari Monument, like similar versions in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, was built in the 1920s to acknowledge the role of African soldiers in the First World War. At the same time, the construction of bronze statues on plinths in colonial centres represented an imposing and domineering feature of colonial rule. Such tensions of empire in port cities form a key thread of some of the articles of this issue, especially that of Daniel Steinbach, whose article discusses the paradoxes of colonial social engineering and racial categorisation in Mombasa during the First World War. Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/96/Askari_monument_Mombasa.jpg

“Owned them like a Father": Labor Contractors, Port Workers, and the Makings of Ethnicity in Singapore

Despite the importance of ports to the Indian Ocean world, labor contracting systems in ports remain understudied. By focusing on ethnic divisions of labor among port workers in colonial Singapore from the 1930s to the 1950s, this article shows how labor contractors constructed these divisions and how social organization in modern Singapore is rooted in labor contracting at the port. Past scholarship has explained merchants’ propensity to form partnerships within the same kin or ethnic circles with the notion of trust: that those of the same kin or ethnicity could be trusted more easily. However, this article argues that labor contractors often recruited migrant workers from the contractors’ home villages and regions because shared kinship and ethnicity allowed contractors to better control workers’ laboring, social, and cultural life. Performances of shared kinship and ethnicity gave contractors power as both employers and community leaders. After World War II, port workers also solidified ethnic divisions by organizing into unions along the lines of ethnicity, and they secured benefits as ethnic blocs, rather than for all port workers. This post-war moment of organizing labor by ethnicity has shaped labor activism in Singapore today as migrant workers continue to strike in ethnic blocs to protest disparities in working conditions between workers of different ethnicities.

Central Margins: Paradox and Transformation of Dichotomies in Two English Language Novels by Mauritian Lindsey Collen

The Indian Ocean region embodies the paradox of a marginalized crossroads. Its islands and coastal societies reflect the multiple influences of its position as a commercial center during colonization and accompanying slave trade. Yet its island nations, particularly their literature, are little known relative to their mainland Asian and African counterparts. Mauritius further reflects these ironies. Although Mauritius has attained a positive reputation for stability, growth, and tourist appeal, deep inequalities resulting from economic globalization persist, to the detriment of its citizens. Uninhabited until the arrival of the Dutch in the sixteenth century, its national identity is the most multicultural of the Indian Ocean islands. Despite its history as a British colony and the designation of English as the language of school instruction and government administration, English-language Mauritian literature remains scarce. A primary exception is the work of novelist Lindsey Collen. This paper examines Collen’s There Is a Tide and The Rape of Sita as examples that reveal margin and center as imagined divisions, created by patriarchal assumptions about power and humans’ relationship to the earth. Theories of hybridity and postcolonialism, as well as of feminism, eco-feminism, and ecocriticism, introduced to challenge these assumptions, have revealed both deeply intertwined concepts and continuing problems of cultural domination, despite efforts to counter legacies of colonial injustices. The reactive nature of many of these theories and the advocacy on which they are based ironically often reinforce the aforementioned dichotomies between center and margins. Collen’s novels deconstruct and transform these dichotomies by narrating the human condition across gender, class, nation, and time in ways that are difficult (if not impossible) to do through theoretical categorization.

Editorial Introduction

The Editors are proud to present the first issue of the fifth volume of the JIOWS. This issue represents a number of innovations in IOW studies and for our journal.Firstly, we present a special feature on port-towns in the IOW, organized and guest edited by Vidhya Raveendranathan and Duane Corpis. This special feature stems from an interdisciplinary conference held at NYU Shanghai in 2019 and adds perspectives focusing on labour and infrastructure to our understanding of the IOW’s port-towns, past and present. Raveendranathan has written a historiographical primer and has introduced the four articles contained within the feature in the Guest Editors’ Introduction. We are also thrilled to announce that she has agreed to join the permanent editorial team as a Managing Editor following the publication of this issue. We look forward to continuing our work together moving forwards.Secondly, we present two articles dealing with separate issues in IOW studies. Nancy Wright engages the work of Lindsey Collen, a Mauritian novelist, to challenge the thematic paradigms of ‘centre’ and ‘margins’ in the literature of the IOW. She argues that, through using the English language and folklore in her writing, Collen brings the margins to the centre, thereby obliviating an assumed analytical dichotomy. Collen’s work transforms this and other dichotomies by narrating the human condition across gender, class, and nation. Meanwhile, Heena Mistry re-visits the repatriation debate in India following the abolition of indenture in 1917. By drawing on the work of an ‘ocean-crossing activist’ and a journalist with significant links to South Africa, she sheds new light on Indian diasporic perspectives of late colonial India and the IOW. Here, the IOW perspective challenges better-known histories of Indian Nationalism and anticolonialism that focus largely on developments occurring within India itself.Finally, we are proud to launch the Book Reviews section of the JIOWS with Zozan Pehlivan as Book Reviews’ Editor. As Pehlivan is a former postdoctoral fellow at the IOWC, we are especially excited to renew our formal collaboration with her in this new role. In this issue, we present reviews of two exciting publications in IOW studies: Wilson Chacko Jacob’s For God or Empire and Laleh Khalili’s Sinews of War and Trade. We hope to build on and expand our book reviews section moving forwards, making the JIOWS the prime location in which scholarship pertaining to the IOW is discussed and analysed.