Indian Ocean Retrotopia on the Western Indian Littoral

• Applicant: Dr. Deepra Dandekar, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History ; Asian Studies
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 442167561

This project undertakes a case study of coastal Western India to investigate historical processes through which Muslims in postcolonial India (after 1947) have become legitimized and recognized as ‘indigenous’ religious minorities. This research, located within the methodological ambit of current history, combines oral history with an analysis of vernacular literature in Marathi language written in the latter half of the 20th century, to explore concerns of vernacular historiography among Muslims in postcolonial Western India. The project will focus on describing and analyzing the development of an indigeneity discourse among Muslims on the Konkan-coast in the federal state of Maharashtra, using oral history, archival research, and the exploration of vernacular historiography as a methodological tool.History writing among Konkani Muslims is strongly characterized by a positive evaluation of the role played by Indian Ocean networks in the region in the past that linked India, Africa, and the Middle East in a South-South connection. This project will be informed by an understanding of these accounts of the Indian Ocean past as 'retrotopic'. Retrotopia is a concept propounded by Zygmunt Bauman that describes how individuals and communities with no scope for a happy future, negate the idea of utopia in order to draw their identity from an idealistic and empowering imagination of the past. This project will investigate the appeal of retrotopia among Konkani Muslims in their struggle to be accepted as an indigenous community in Maharashtra.The overall objective of this study is to contribute to a larger understanding of Muslim claims to indigeneity in India after its Partition from Pakistan in 1947. Muslims continue to form the largest religious minority in India after Partition and have increasingly been labeled as outsiders associated with Pakistan and Bangladesh, especially with the rise of Hindu nationalist politics in the recent decades. Since Muslim politics associated with the Partition have mostly focused on northern India, this project aims to analyze the importance of vernacular history writing as one avenue through which Muslims in other regions of India have felt enabled to lay claim to belonging and status as autochthons. The state of Maharashtra forms a particularly interesting case study due its long history of Hindu-nationalist politics in the public domain.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants