1st Edition
Cosmopolitan Cultures and Oceanic Thought
This book imagines the ocean as central to understanding the world and its connections in history, literature and the social sciences. Introducing the central conceptual category of ocean as method, it analyzes the histories of movement and traversing across connected spaces of water and land sedimented in literary texts, folklore, local histories, autobiographies, music and performance. It explores the constant flow of people, material and ideologies across the waters and how they make their presence felt in a cosmopolitan thinking of the connections of the world. Going beyond violent histories of slavery and indenture that generate global connections, it tracks the movements of sailors, boatmen, religious teachers, merchants, and adventurers.
The essays in this volume summon up this miscegenated history in which land and water are ever linked. A significant rethinking of world history, this volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of history, especially connected history and maritime history, literature, and Global South studies.
Note on Contributors
Introduction
Nishat Zaidi and Dilip Menon
Section I: The Poetics of Fluvial Cosmopolitanism
1. Going Below the Waterline: Hydrocolonial Methods, Creolized Water
Isabel Hofmeyr
2.Fellowship and Aversion in the South: The Challenges of South-South Collaboration
Elleke Boehmer
3. Found in Prison: The Poetics of Oceanic Histories
Geeta Patel
4. Remembering the Bengal Delta: ca. 1450-1850
Rila Mukherjee
5. “The wind sketches landscapes of words”: Oceanic poetics in the Horn of Africa and western Indian Ocean”
Kelsey McFaul
Section II: Oceanic Narratives
6. Padmabati of the Oceans: Unfreedom and Belonging in Syed Alaol’s Padmabati
Swati Moitra
7. Senses Translated: Paṭappāṭṭus in the Indian Ocean, Circulation of Texts and Sounds across Arabic, Persian and Sanskrit Cosmopoleis
Ihsan Ul Ihthisam
Section III: Constructing Space
8. Of Those on Shore: The Dhow Trade and Mobility in the Indian Ocean
Nidhi Mahajan
9. Towards an Architecture of the Indian Ocean: Mapping the Syncretic Grammar of Coastal Cities & Architecture through Ibn Battuta’s Water Journeys (1342-1347)
Iqtedar Alam
10. Through the Eyes of the Boat People: Redefining Oceans in the 21st century
Chrisalice Ela Joseph and Vinod Balakrishnan
Section IV: Religion, Knowledge and Law Across the Oceans
11. Literate Illiterates: Arabi-Malayalam and Parallel Process of Knowledge Production among Muslims in Kerala
M.H.Ilias.
12. ʿUlamāʾ Networks across the Seas: Understanding the Trajectory of Islam in Medieval Malabar
Mohammed Shameem K. K.
13. Encountering the ‘Other: Pilgrims at Sea and Accounts of Journeys to Hejaz in the Age of Oceanic Mobility
Muhamed Riyaz Chenganakkattil
14. Christianity, Conversion and Caste: Reflecting on Identity in Dalit Christian Malayalam Writings in Post-Colonial India
Steven S. George
15. Rainbow Waters: Towards a Queer Coalition between India and Botswana
Kashish Dua
Index
Biography
Dilip M. Menon is a historian and currently the Mellon Chair in Indian Studies at the University of Witwatersrand. South Africa.
Nishat Zaidi is Professor and former Head, Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, India.
