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Indian Ocean Retrotopia on the Western Indian Littoral

Subject Area Modern and Contemporary History
Asian Studies
Term from 2020 to 2023
Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 442167561
 
Final Report Year 2024

Final Report Abstract

The project originally set out to investigate identity formation among Konkani Marathi Muslims located on India’s western coast in the period after the Indian Partition in 1947. In particular, the project focused on the way Konkani Muslims discursively remembered and recounted their unique identity by drawing on memories of their role in Indian-Ocean networks, and their location within the history of state-formations in Western India, analysed in the light of Zygmund Bauman’s theory of Retrotopia. The Covid-pandemic significantly transformed the manner in which research for this project progressed, and its results. Firstly, the pandemic delayed the fieldwork necessary for the data collection for this project until late in 2022, forcing me to change focus and the materials to be analysed, and shifting me to other sources that were more readily available. Furthermore, while I was able to remain in touch with some of my respondents through WhatsApp and other digital media, the violence of the Covidpandemic in India had a major impact on my respondents, including the death of several respondents, and the internal migration of respondents from rural areas to cities. Therefore, the direction of my research and of the project as a whole changed towards the historical memory of Partition and the events that followed it, which in the region of Western India had led to significant internal migration. This aspect of Muslim life is not reflected in the scholarship surrounding Partition that typically focuses on the travails of international migration between India and Pakistan. The prime focus of my research project thus shifted to exploring how the depopulation of Muslims in rural Western India after Partition led to the encapsulation of displacement within the miracle discourse of Sufi shrines. The Sufi’s miraculous, haunting presence transforms the shrine into a conduit where renewed personal relationships with the Sufis , who embodies the absent Muslim community, can be forged. These miraculous renewed relationships have served to ‘heal’ the violence of Partition, reflected in the way dargahs were seen as healing places for families displaced by Covid. This analysis, the main result of the project, will form the subject of a monograph tentatively entitled Tea with a Tiger: Dargah Miracles in Contemporary Western India. There were two other developments that resulted from the shift in my research focus, occasioned by the pandemic. The first was an engagement with the question of women’s leadership in the religious domains, based on the importance of women in Konkani Muslim society. This engagement has led to a workshop followed by an international conference on women’s religious leadership in Africa and India. The second is the increasing interest in an important Konkani Muslim intellectual and revolutionary, Hamid Dalwai, and the gain in traction in his political thoughts from the mid-twentieth century onwards. This interest has led to the formulation of a new research project, which is currently under evaluation by the DFG.

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