Ocean as Method

Thinking with the Maritime

Dilip M Menon, Nishat Zaidi, Simi Malhotra, Saarah Jappie

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000575316
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Ocean as Method presents a new way of thinking about the humanities and the social sciences. It explores maritime connections in social and humanistic research and puts forward an alternative to national histories and area studies. As global warming and rising sea levels ring alarm bells across the world, the chapters in the volume argue that it is time to think through oceans to realign discourses which better understand our future.

The volume:

• Engages with the paradigms of oceanic narratives to identify connections between continents through trade, migration, and economic processes, thinking beyond the artificial distinctions between the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans;

• Discusses oceanic travel accounts by Muslim travellers to counter the idea that the colonial era was marked by European travel to Asia and Africa, without a counterflow of "native travel";

•Examines the connections between South Africa, South Asia, and South East Asia through histories of Indian indenture and the slave trade, and engages with the idea of the ocean and enforced movement;

•Compares and connects recent scholarship in the social sciences and the humanities centring the ocean to break away from inherited paradigms which have shaped world history so far.

As a unique transdisciplinary collaboration, this volume will be of much interest to scholars and researchers of history, especially oceanic history, historiography, critical theory, literature, geography, and Global South studies.

1
OCEANIC HISTORIES

From the Terrestrial to the Maritime

DOI: 10.4324/9781003279754-1

Dilip M. Menon

The oceans press on our consciousness and lives these days. Theologically, it may be the fire next time, but the city of Jakarta is sinking, and Indonesia contemplates a new capital. The South African artist Gideon Mendel’s series of photographs titled Drowning World (2007) has cameos of people standing up to their necks in water in cities across the world, defying political categories like the First and Third World. Floodlines portrays the impact of water on the lived space of the interior landscape and Water Marks on the indecipherable traces of water on the intimate records of personal photographs. Water, water, everywhere, nor do we stop to think. Even more apocalyptic is Marie Velardi’s installation Atlas des Isles Perdues, Edition 2107 (The Atlas of Lost Islands) of 2007, which has a series of ink drawings of sinking islands, as the waters of the ocean rise on account of global warming; the islands stretch across the oceans named and differentiated by humans in customary acts of hubris. By 2107, all of the depicted islands will be under water, so many Atlantises. Global warming has reminded us of the porosity of the boundaries between ocean and land, belying the hard distinctions that we have been prone to make at least since Hugo Grotius’s Mare Liberum in 1609. Ironically, Grotius’s argument for a free, open ocean simultaneously laid political claims on the freedom to trade and travel of nations. The fundamental question before us, as humans, in addition to being academics, is how we stop fragmenting the ocean along national claims and ideas of “territorial waters.” The divisions into oceans - Atlantic, Pacific, Indian - and seas - Red, the Mediterranean - while heuristically satisfying, sometimes forget the underlying fact of one body of water with its tides and seasonal winds, within which human beings negotiate and make claims.

Looking at the ocean as one body allows us to recognize the importation of the territorially incarcerative ideas of area studies into a space not amenable to such dictation. We are forced to think beyond the idea of the discrete spaces of Asia, Africa, and Europe to be more connected as much as interstitial histories. We have to learn to think athwart and betwixt the geographies of recent origin generated by a worship of the golden calf of the nation state. Temporally, too, we need to think beyond the limited chronologies of colonialism, nationalism, and modernity towards a notion of time dictated by movements across the ocean, as Braudel foundationally did, and historians like Sanjay Subrahmanyam and Engseng Ho have done more recently (Braudel, 1972; Ho, 2006; Subrahmanyam, 2012). We have been prone, as social scientists, to think about a terrestrial imagination, with the ocean on the margins of our thought. A maritime vision would require us to engage with the persistent movement of people, goods, and ideas across the ocean which has always exceeded the remit of states and empires. If we think more ambitiously, as Rozwadowski has suggested recently, with the vast movement of people across millennia that populated the world, human life may well have moved inwards from the littoral, unsettling our received trajectories of civilization which are rooted in agriculture and states (Rozwadowski, 2019). If we think about territory as created by the movement of people across space, then Amitav Ghosh in his recent novel, Gun Island, has reminded us how intimate the connections can be between the Sundarbans and Venice, and the Bay of Bengal and the Mediterranean (Ghosh, 2019).

All of this takes us to a recent kerfuffle in the American Historical Review, in which the historian Nile Green took issue with the literary scholar, Isabel Hofmeyr, over the idea of an oceanic cosmopolitanism (Green, 2018). Underlying this at one level was the understanding of disciplines as having hermetically sealed spaces with distinct protocols. Green, while lauding Amitav Ghosh’s adventurous geographies which do not recognize the concreteness of borders and land’s ends, wrote, “historical novelists, however gifted, should not set the agenda for an empirical discipline any more than potentially anachronous latter day ideologies” (Green, 2018: 847). The second target of his spleen was of course Hofmeyr’s idea of “Bandung at sea” (Green, 2018: 847): the idea that the Bandung Conference of 1955 generated an imagination that transcended the boundaries of the newly decolonized nations of Asia and Africa and was premised on affinities generated by fluvial connections of trade and religion as much as politics. This reified opposition between imagination and “fact” occludes the fact that there has been a historical dialectic between the movement of people and the imagination of the world that they create. Arguably, Bandung was made possible by the prior peregrinations of people and represented the condensation of these experiences rather than the inauguration of an absolutely new vision of the world. In this sense, the short-lived hopes of Afro-Asian affinity created by Bandung are understandable as the end of a historical process, rather than the absolute beginning of a new one. It is built upon an empirical and concrete set of “archipelagic connections” - the relation between non-contiguous spaces built on historical connectedness - in the age of nations (Lee, 2010; Eslava et al., 2017; Menon, 2018). Bandung, in that sense, was the return of the repressed. We need a more supple engagement with history, more than a mere fetishizing of the archives generated by states and imperial formations, to rethink the ocean in history. The lived cosmopolitanism generated through the movement of people is a parallel trajectory to the narratives of empire and nation.

Green also creates a false dichotomy between cosmopolitanism and the idea of difference. He equates cosmopolitanism with an idea of sameness and a bland universalism opposing it to the “challenging engagement with difference” (Green, 2018: 849) that he espouses. Needless to say, an idea of cosmopolitanism which does not work with existing differences and a recognition of them is merely an imperial universalism. The straw man of an unreflective aspiration as against, presumably, the hardness and friction of history, afflicts Antoinette Burton’s evaluation of the oceanic histories that underlie Bandung. The history of Bandung precedes Bandung, as I have been arguing. When Burton states that “Bandung needs to be re-imagined less as an emancipatory lesson than as a cautionary tale about the racial logics embedded in postcolonial states from the moment of their inception” (Burton, 2016: 6-7), it raises again the spectre of the paranoia of the Cold War and the fear of an Afro-Asian unity, this time neutering it as an impossibility. Reports on the death of Bandung appear to be highly exaggerated when we look at it through the lens of the palimpsest of oceanic histories.

The Tense Present

What troubles one most about the concept of globalization is the suggestion of a process without end: the eternal sunshine of the present continuous tense. It seems to imply both something transcendent (like the World Spirit) and something unstoppable (like a runaway train). This combination of the mystical and the empirical should make us sceptical regardless of whether we are historians or only anthropologists. Historians do not work with an idea of an ineffable flow of time without end unless they are at the service of varieties of religious fundamentalism that believe in eternity. In the current historical juncture, where we are seeing the pervasiveness of ideologies that seek to address the contingencies of the present by recourse to eternal laws and conditions (the superiority of X race or idea), it is necessary to think about both time and context. This is not to suggest that we should fall back upon an unreconstructed historicism with its unmitigated belief in origins, genealogy, and teleology. If we are to contend with the idea of globalization in its manifestation as present continuous and engage critically as we did with an earlier avatar of it - that is, modernization - we need an analytical understanding that engages the ideas of past, present, and future with due attention to the integrity of each. An anthropological focus on context and local texture needs to be supplemented by a method that moves beyond hermetic lifeworlds and takes seriously contingent connections. We need to work with the understanding that the world is not a continuous space and that what we know as history is the emergence and disappearance of connections across time and space. A striking example of historical contingency would be the Chinese eunuch admiral Zheng He’s voyages between 1405 and 1433 from Southeast Asia to East Africa, after which the Chinese as a nation never went to see again. Or, more recently, the Soviet Union’s creation of a space of affinity, from Dagestan to Delhi and from Ljubljana to Lagos, till the centre did not hold. Everything seemed forever till it was no more (Yurchak, 2005). The present continuous tense represents the myopia of humanity.

it could be argued that globalization can be understood in the present perfect tense. It describes something that happened in the past, but perhaps the exact time it happened is not important. What is important is the relationship with the present. Such an idea would be anathema to a conventional historian, since the profession lays much emphasis on origins and causality. Again, the idea of a completion - or, as journalistic wisdom has it, the achievement of a flat earth - carries with it a degree of triumphalism. It is an idea of a world without contingency or indeed without “friction” (Tsing, 2011). Living as we do in the age of borders and camps, with the world divided into narrow fragments, it is clear that the very idea of globalization lives now amid the backlash against it. The Polish plumber in Britain became the metaphor for Britain’s exit into an autarkic realm of nostalgia for empire and the presumed comforts of a class order. And, of course, the Muslim at the gates of Europe has led to a fiercely ingrown imagination that has sparked the growth of chauvinist political parties. Globalization had happened. Or at least the understanding that it had happened led to the fierce digging in of heels against the possibility of a future continuous tense. Even as there are calls for a new philosophy for Europe (Esposito, 2018), such intellection is located in a sense of immediacy, a misrecognition of a history that had already violently involved Europe in the lives of distant others. What we see now is the return swing of the boomerang of history, in Césaire’s words, implicating past, present, and future. The call to history comes from this need to address amnesia, an anxiety born more out of a present and imminent sense of danger and less from a solipsistic desire for vindication, or of dèjá vu. In contrast to our insistence on contingency in response to the present continuous (“everything was forever till it was no more”), one can say here that “nothing is over until it is really over.” The earth is not as flat as a naive account may make it.

Finally, there is the no-nonsense, practical approach that does away with any notion of tense. The world has always been thus, always already connected. If one thinks about the process of populating the world once the first anatomically modern humans started their peregrinations out of Africa about 40,000 years ago, then the time span of one’s argument achieves new dimensions. It raises the fundamental question of how far back we have to go in order to write a history of the present. There were two routes out of Africa. A northern route would have taken our ancestors from eastern sub-Saharan Africa across the Sahara Desert, then through Sinai and into the Levant. An alternative southern route may have charted a path from Djibouti or Eritrea across the Bab el-Mandeb strait and into Yemen around the Arabian Peninsula. The Bab el-Mandeb, one of the world’s busiest shipping channels, would have been a narrow channel about 15,000 years ago. The southern migration ran across from northern Africa to Southeast Asia and Australia and by the Pacific coastal route to South America. The implications of this early globalization are profound for our understanding of both the idea of a common stock of humanity and a genetic dispersion that does not allow for any bounded and unmiscegenated idea of racial identity. In fact, this account may even upset the traditional historical accounts of the origins of civilization, focused as they are on rivers, land, agriculture, and states. It has been suggested that perhaps the movements of humans across the vast expanses of the oceans, hugging the coastline, may have been the way that civilizations originated and spread, from the littoral inward (Rozwadowski, 2019). To cautious academics following Voltaire’s suggestion of cultivating one’s own garden, or indeed discipline, all of this might seem a trifle enthusiastic. We might prefer more recent themes, for example, the age of ocean voyages by Europeans, or colonialism, or capitalism. Then one could locate the idea of globalization within bite-size portions of time, rather than adopt a gourmand’s appetite for time and space. However, in either case there are historical arguments to be made that are less the product of anxiety and more about precisely defining the extent of one’s garden against that of others.

Art at the End of the World

The most immediate sense of globalization that we have is that of global warming and the rise of the ocean levels due to the melting of the polar ice caps. Regardless of where one is located on the globe, the rising waters press on our consciousness, and we are becoming more aware that the Biblical prophecy of the fire next time may be a red herring. This sense of an interconnected history brings together for the first time the intertwined fates of humans, animals, and other beings on the planet, sentient or otherwise. Whether we locate this history in the distant historical past with the origins of agriculture and the destruction of the environment with war, clearing of forests, and the origins of states, or the more proximate and accelerated destruction arising from industrialization, history attends on our reflections (Steffen et al., 2011). The idea of the Anthropocene has shifted us away from the benign temporality of the Holocene (from the Greek holos, “whole”) reminding us precisely of the lack of wholeness of the epoch that we occupy. However, there is a considerable continuity of the narcissism that puts the human at the centre of the universe, whether as the rightful owner/depredator of the world (as in the book of Genesis) or as the agent who has wreaked destruction. It reminds one of Benjamin’s reading of Paul Klee’s painting of the Angel of History, being blown backwards into the future, surveying the ceaseless piling up of the debris of history in his wake (Benjamin, [1940] 2003). We may be returning to more theological ideas of the Great Chain of Being or indeed the idea of the equal culpability of all creatures for their actions, as with the early modern church and its understanding of the actions of insects and animals on the environment and the actions of humans as equally moral or otherwise (Ferry, 1995). The renewed interest in human-animal interaction arises as much from an understanding of the hubris of an anthropocentric view as from the fact of a common fate. That the ongoing degradation of life and the environment has a history of human occlusion of the non-human in history has made historical rethinking necessary about processes described hitherto in the abstract jargon of successive ages of progress. Decentring the human becomes possible only as a result of catastrophic thinking, the imagining of what comes after the apocalypse. As Samuel Johnson observed, “When a man knows he is to be hanged ... it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”

The art biennale in the southern Indian coastal city of Kochi summons up the many histories of humans and non-humans and their interactions with nature. Kochi itself emerged as a port in 1342 CE when a flood in the Periyar River silted up the historic port of Kodungallur (Cranganore or Muziris in the Roman records). Its coming into existence was a result of the human impact on the environment as much as the inexorable rhythms of water and the monsoons. The founding myth of the state of Kerala - indeed, of many regions along the western coast of India - has the legendary figure Parasuram reclaiming land from the ocean by throwing the axe with which he had slain 21 generations of warriors into the waters. The ocean recoils in horror at being asked to accept this bloody offering, opening up a narrow strip of land for inhabitation. The idea that what belonged to the ocean is a gift easily recalled is reflected in historical events like the flooding of the Periyar as much as the clear and present possibility of the city of Mumbai being swallowed by rising ocean waters by 2050. Not an alarmist scenario if one considers that the city of Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, is no longer habitable because it is sinking at the rate of ten inches a year. In this case, however, it is a direct result of human action - both domestic and industrial consumption - in draining the aquifers.

It is alarming when floodwaters enter homes, raising visions of the universal deluge, but what about that which is happening on the periphery of our visions and understanding? The Swiss artist Marie Velardi (2007) raises this issue in her installation Atlas des Isles Perdues 2107 (Atlas of Lost Islands 2107) at the Kochi Biennale. In a room where the walls are painted a cerulean blue hang a series of framed sketches - contour maps of islands across the globe - spanning the oceans. On a table in the centre is a leather-bound volume with the title mentioned earlier. What viewers realize as they walk through the room is that some of these islands from the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans - some familiar, some not; some inhabited, some not have already disappeared under the waters, others will disappear soon, but by 2107 all of them will be submerged. It is a visual conflation of tenses, past, present, and future: an entire history of the earth in one fell swoop. This is a history that moves beyond the limited imaginings of modernity, the colonial and postcolonial eras, and so on and addresses the time of the present through an ongoing past and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgement
• 1 Oceanic Histories: from the Terrestrial to the Maritime
• 2 Thinking With the Ocean: a Quartet of Conversations
• 3 Oceanic Encounters With the “Other” in the Age of Empire: late-Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Travel Accounts of Indian Muslims
• 4 Indians in South Africa Before Indenture: a Story of Deep Oceanic Connections
• Index