Mahajan follows the travels of sailors and their boats to understand how the mobility of people, goods, and even their crafts, contribute to the makings and limitations of sovereignty in commerce and finance. Within this, climate change, labor relations, patronage, risk management, faith, and family all play their part. While Mahajan’s book may be about oceanic travel and trade, it also reckons with the politics of the lands seafarers have ties to and are sometimes unmoored from. These include South Asia, the Emirates, East Africa, and Iran among others.
An Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at University of California, Santa Cruz, this is Nidhi Mahajan’s first book. It is available to read, open access, at the University of California Press website. In this interview with R. Benedito Ferrão, Mahajan discusses her over decade-long research that led to Moorings and why sea-based dhow trade continues to be an important indication of the times we live in.
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RBF: What led you to the study of dhows and trade in the Indian Ocean world?
NM: When I first began my doctoral dissertation research in 2007, I wanted to examine contemporary connections between South Asia and East Africa. This interest was fostered through early travel with family to Kenya, and courses I took as an undergraduate that gave me historical context to why I, as someone who was born and raised in Bombay, felt immediately at home in Kenya. Given the long histories of mobility between these two littorals, or coastal areas, as a PhD student in Anthropology, I was interested in examining the shape of these connections in the contemporary moment, and how Indian Ocean trade continued in the margins of states through small-scale traders.
While I was aware of the long history of the illegalization of dhows on the Swahili coast, at the time, I had no sense of the structure or scale of the trade in the present. But I did know that I wanted to travel and live in Kenya for research. I was interested in seeing Indian Ocean connections not from South Asia, which has often been treated as a center for these histories, but from East Africa, especially port cities such as Mombasa and Lamu that have been viewed as more peripheral to structuring the Indian Ocean system of trade and commerce.
At the time, I knew that vahans (a type of mechanized sailing vessel or dhow from Kachchh) still visited East Africa but did not know how to enter this world. When I arrived in Mombasa in 2011 to do long-term fieldwork, a dhow from Mandvi had just docked at Mombasa’s Old Port. My host in Mombasa, Mohamed Mchulla, an archeologist, insisted that I should interview the sailors. With a research permit from the Kenya Port Authority, I got access to the port and met the sailors, who were just as surprised to see me, as I was them.
The sailors welcomed me onboard as they were curious about a young woman from India working in Mombasa. The captain, a Bhadala from Mandvi, whom I call Yusuf in the book, and the rest of the crew saw me as a naïve, young girl and took me under their wing. Despite differences of class, caste, and gender, we became fast friends as they invited me to spend afternoons eating lunch with them on board. Besides, we were all new arrivals in Mombasa and together tried to navigate the city. Their hospitality, our shared homesickness, and unfamiliarity with Mombasa created a bond that transformed over time, into friendship and patronage.
In fact, hospitality was a key practice through which these sailors dealt with strangers, whether government officials, merchants or anthropologists. Patronage too, was a familiar form in which labor in the trade is structured. This initial encounter onboard a dhow from Mandvi altered the course of my research. Yusuf became a key interlocutor for me, and as my research focus changed to the contemporary vahan trade, he insisted that to understand it, I would have to be as mobile and itinerant as the vahan itself, becoming moored and unmoored in different port cities.
Yusuf suggested that I interview dhow owners such as his seth, the owner of the vessel, in Bombay; visit seafaring families and Sufi shrines in Mandvi and Jam Salaya; understand how policies in ports such as Mundra and Tuna functioned in India; and compare these to the dhow ports of Sharjah and Dubai in the UAE and to their connections to Somalia. My early interests and encounter with the dhow in Mombasa thus forged a whole new voyage across the Indian Ocean.
RBF: In your book, you remark that “[t]he Indian Ocean arena—long a space of connection across difference—is a particularly poignant place from which to think of encounters.” You note that “India and East Africa have had a long history of cross-cultural contact, dating back to at least the ninth century,” with dhows and their crews playing a key role in forging these connections. As you point out, “Indian seafarers have long had a presence in East Africa, predating European contact. Hindu and Muslim Indian merchants and seafarers were crucial intermediaries for European and non-European imperial powers in East Africa, including the Portuguese, the Omanis, and the British.”
Despite this, “scholars have largely focused on Indian merchants in East Africa and not seafarers,” an oversight your book seeks to correct. What does this shift, emerging from an oceanic point of view, allow us to understand differently about the contact and relations between different cultures and regions?
NM: While scholars have focused on merchants who traveled and lived in different parts of the Indian Ocean, especially Gujarati merchants in East Africa, the seafarers who brought them there have largely been studied historically. For instance, historian Abdul Sheriff has argued that dhow sailors were crucial to forging cosmopolitanism across the Indian Ocean as they carried goods, ideas and people across the Indian Ocean. Dependent on the monsoon winds, these sailors lived for months on end in different port cities, and would often even have a wife in each port. While this was also true of some Indian merchants, power dynamics at play were rather different.
While merchants would come to settle in different parts of the Indian Ocean, sailors were always more itinerant, and they had a different kind of relationship to local populations whether in East Africa or elsewhere. Unlike merchants in East Africa, such as the figure of the shopkeeper or dukawalla who came to be viewed as exploitative or an intermediary for British commercial interests, the sailor (especially if he did not own the dhow) was always working-class. In the ports where these itinerant sailors would live and work, they mingled with a diverse cast of characters—whether Hadhrami merchants, other Swahili sailors, Somali shipping agents, or government officials. Indeed, as Jatin Dua has argued, hospitality even shaped relations between dhow sailors and pirates!
As working class, itinerant sailors, hospitality was central to making connections on strange shores. Many of these sailors came from the Bhadala community from Mandvi in Kachchh, and had long connections to the Bhadala diaspora in Mombasa. These Bhadalas in Mombasa are still associated with seafaring, even if many of them no longer go out to sea. Unlike many other Indian communities in Kenya, Bhadalas in Mombasa are often viewed as being more closely intertwined with Swahili and Bajuni populations of the coast as they once intermarried. Even today, Bhadalas are seen as part of a precolonial history of Indian Ocean connections in Kenya, as they came as sailors long before Indian laborers and merchants settled in East Africa during British rule. Indeed, a view from the dhow, and from these Bhadala communities offers a different entry point for the history of connections between India and East Africa.
In the book, I take a “view from the dhow” by focusing on these seafarers. In his work on mobilities elided by the imperial frame, Engseng Ho argues that although Bernard Cohn once described the imperial point of view as the “view from the boat,” “there were other boats as well.” The vahan is one of these boats that hold mobile lifeworlds that existed prior to colonialism and that persist today—albeit in transformed ways—its sailors responding to a series of ruptures through repetition and by continuing to traverse the Indian Ocean. This view from the dhow thus offers a non-liner history of Indian Ocean connections, and is always flexible, contingent and partial; the relationality between land and sea becoming visible through an interplay of what I call “moorings” and voyages.
Moorings here refer to regulatory mechanisms, forms of sovereignty, places, and material and social practices around which the dhow trade pivots. These moorings enable voyages, known in Kachchhi as ghos. These voyages are the unit through which time, space, and capital are lived, moved through and produced for these sailors. This interplay between sailors’ voyages and moorings enables one to see fixity and mobility, land and sea, time and space together, charting a relationality between different port cities and littorals.
NM: As you rightly point out, there is a paradox or a schism in how dhows and vahans have been viewed by state agencies and wider public discourse. On the one hand, dhows are the most enduring symbol of Indian Ocean connectivity. Across Indian Ocean port cities, the dhow has become a symbol of cosmopolitan pasts celebrated in museums, heritage projects, cultural festivals, and nationalist imaginaries of a world before European colonialism. These romantic images of dhows occasionally shatter as news reports and government agencies assume that these dhows today smuggle goods across Indian Ocean port cities.
For example, in India, dhows have been associated, by government agencies, with gold smuggling (especially before the liberalization of the economy in 1991) or then have become a locus for anxieties around securing India’s coastlines, especially after the 26/11 attacks in Bombay in 2008. Yet, dhows were not always regarded with such suspicion by the Indian government.
In the early years of independence, the “country craft trade” was bolstered by the government as an indigenous form of shipping that could contribute meaningfully to the Indian economy by connecting minor ports, bringing in foreign exchange, and acting as feeders for larger ports. Indeed, up until liberalization in 1991, the government even had a cargo reservation policy for dhows, whereby dates imported into India could only be transported by country crafts. With liberalization, these protections were taken away. Simultaneously, given India’s desire to securitize its coastlines, country crafts were also seen as easy vehicles for the unauthorized movements of goods and people.
With increasing Islamophobia in India, given that many of these dhows are manned and owned by Muslim Bhadala and Wagher communities from Gujarat, these country crafts have been viewed with suspicion by government agencies, who celebrate these vessels as part of India’s rich maritime history on the one hand, and regard them as security threats on the other. Unlike other forms of transport—such as planes, trains, buses and so on which are also used to move contraband, country crafts are especially illegible to state authorities.
Rather than taking a presentist view of these security issues, this book argues that current suspicions of dhows across the Indian Ocean have emerged from a deep-rooted anxiety over the long history of trade and connection across the Indian Ocean. The anxiety about the movement of dhows reveals entanglements between long-standing mobile trade networks across the Indian Ocean and state authorities—not only imperial and colonial but also national. At the heart of tensions currently unfolding between states and mobile dhow networks, therefore, lie questions about territoriality and sovereignty.
In the precolonial period, dhow networks functioned as an “itinerant territoriality” across political entities that operated on the basis of a shared, overlapping, and layered sovereignty. Since the colonial period, mobile dhows and their dynamic trade networks have contended with the boundaries of the sovereign state, defined and delimited by colonial and then national and international law and policy. These shifts in understandings of territory and sovereignty have led to the creation of regulations that seek to tightly monitor and control mobile people, goods, and vessels.
Yet it is precisely these regulations and difference created by national borders and jurisdictional struggles at sea that have offered the dhow trade opportunities for profit. As a result of state and international policy, the dhow trade has become an intermediary in the underbelly of global capitalism, becoming vilified by states in some moments, and conscripted by them in times of need.
Dhows, once viewed as peddlers across the Indian Ocean, continue to move creatively, flexibly, and quickly between port cities, becoming what some sailors have called the “Uber of shipping.” Indeed, these dhows are “tramp shippers” that do not follow a strict, pre-ordained itinerary, but move according to the needs of their clients and are always “just-in-time” in today’s global supply chains.
In effect, the lived experiences of those involved in transnational dhow-based trading (which, ironically, are circuits that pre-date the establishment of nation-states in the Indian Ocean world,) seem to be at odds with ideas of sovereignty in this realm. What does one tell us about the other?
NM: War, conflict, and instability offer both risks and rewards for these dhow sailors and traders. Indeed, dhows operate in spaces where other forms of shipping may not be available such as in minor ports in Yemen, Somalia, and Iran. The UAE is a pivotal mooring for this trade as goods are supplied from UAE ports to places where container shipping is too expensive or risky due to high insurance costs or sanctions regimes.
For instance, dhows have acted as transhippers for goods to and from Iran, Somalia, and the UAE, even with changing sanctions regimes against trade with Iran. Disruptions in supply chains and containerized shipping also offer opportunities for these vahans—for example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, even as containerized shipping was interrupted, Dubai saw a boom in the trade through dhows as they filled the gaps in shipping across Indian Ocean ports.
Yusuf, the sailor you refer to in your question, was incarcerated in Iran during the COVID-19 lockdown in Iran as he and the rest of his crew was found transshipping essential goods— foodstuffs, medicines and cigarettes—to Iran whilst in Omani territorial waters. Yusuf negotiated his release from prison in Iran by creating a contest between different patrons who could fund his bail, in effect, arbitraging between patrons. Indeed, sailors traversing across the sea often found themselves negotiating with different legal regimes.
However, dhows moved across the Indian Ocean long before the rise of nation-states and current ideas of nation-state sovereignty. In the pre-colonial period, dhows moved across the Indian Ocean without having to cohere to a singular notion of the law, instead subject to the law of whichever port city they were docked in, these laws not extending out to sea. During the colonial period, dhows would often move between shifting legal landscapes, finding spaces that were friendly for trade through policies such as low customs dues.
For example, princely states in India, such as Nawanagar, Kathiawar, and Kutch become pivotal centers for these trades as the rules for commerce were different than they were in territories directly governed by the British. Even today, dhows seek out spaces in the gaps between different sovereign nation-states. Built into notions of national sovereignty is an idea of dominion over territory, and a singular law. However, while nation-states seek to control mobility as a performance of sovereignty, this sovereignty is always incomplete and aspirational.
Yet, jurisdictional struggles at sea and the differences in rules and regulations created by national borders offer vahans new opportunities as they engage in what I call “geopolitical arbitrage.” This geopolitical arbitrage is a practice by which sailors and dhow owners capture value through price differentials created by geopolitical conditions across the Indian Ocean as they transship goods across spaces impacted by war or sanctions. So while on the one hand, enactments of national sovereignty through border regimes, jurisdictional control or policing produce risks for dhows, it is these same borders and differences in jurisdiction and legal regimes that produce the conditions for capturing value in this trade.
War and geopolitical conditions similarly enable the continuation of this trade. The lived experience of these sailors today as they navigate multiple sovereignties in the region enables one to examine the ways in which sovereignty functions, not only on land, but also at sea, profit created through arbitraging between geopolitical contests showing us that sovereignty and the creation of capital are deeply intertwined.
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| Image courtesy Nidhi Mahajan |
RBF: In apprehending the place of the divine in the lives and labor of the seafarers you studied, you regard it as “a sovereignty rooted in pasts when Sufi saints were also arbitrators of kingly power.” Nevertheless, you also see the sacred as being of “continued relevance … [because] divine sovereignty and mobility in some moments can challenge state sovereignty and at others [move] in tandem with it.”
Inasmuch as these investments in religiosity may be testament to how mariners deal with the fickleness of the seas or the inconstancy of trade regimes, is it also how they contend with being minorities, rendered so especially because of the very faith they turn to (and are of)?
NM: The sailors I worked with were predominantly Muslims of the Bhadala and Wagher communities, from Mota Salaya in Mandvi and Jam Salaya in Gujarat. Both communities are classified as “Other Backward Classes” or OBC in India, and are often viewed with derision by, both, upper-caste Hindus and Muslims in Gujarat. Seafaring has been central to community identity for both, Bhadalas long associated with seafaring and fishing while Waghers have historically been associated with piracy in the region of Okhamandel. Religious practice too has been central for self-definition for both communities, whether as minorities in contradistinction to Hindus, or in caste hierarchies amongst Muslims as well.
Since at least the 1980s, conflicts between Hindu Kharvas, who once also worked on board vahans alongside Bhadalas and Waghers, have led to increasing segregation and tension between these communities. Anthropologist Edward Simpson has suggested that in Mandvi, these religious tensions were also a manifestation of class conflict as Bhadalas came to own vahans and Kharvas were increasingly pushed into the international labor market, especially in Oman, where they worked for Bhatia merchants and former dhow owners. Yet when I began fieldwork in Mandvi, the era of rising fortunes for Bhadala vahan owners had come to an end. Bhadala vahan laborers increasingly viewed labor migration to the Gulf as a horizon of possibility for youth.
While these tensions between Hindus and Muslims were palpable in Mandvi, they are less visible across the Gulf in the town of Jam Salaya, another center for the vahan trade. This is not because of the peaceful coexistence between Muslims and Hindus but because the town itself is segregated from the rest of the Kathiawar peninsula of which it is a part. Jam Salaya has only a handful of Hindu families who continue to live there, many having moved out of the vahan trade and migrated to other parts of Gujarat or to Bombay. The town’s fifty thousand inhabitants are predominantly Sunni Muslim Bhadalas and Waghers. While Mandvi has seen waves of Islamic reformism, Jam Salaya has kept both right-wing Hinduism and reformist Islam at bay. These class and caste tensions also converged with broader patterns of polarization of Hindus and Muslims in India. Even among other Muslim communities in the region, Bhadalas and Waghers have been ostracized. In response, they craft their own religiosity based on Islamic piety in the shipyards as well as within collective bodies such as the jamaat.
For both these communities, religious identity and practice are central to self-definition. Bhadala and Wagher sailors view their lives and labor as shaped through Sufi Islamic religious practices on board the dhow and at home. Danger at sea—whether cyclones, or other adverse weather events—is managed not through secularized financial notions of risk management and insurance but through Sufi Islamic ideas of divine sovereignty and the “unity of life” according to which life and death are seen as open-ended.
In articulating a different vision of life and death, seafarers also link mobile dhows at sea to a constellation of Sufi shrines on land, especially those in their homeports in Kachchh. The Sufi shrine on land and its material life at sea become a portal through which one can examine ideas of divine sovereignty for these communities. The Sufi shrine on land becomes a spiritual, political, and economic mooring for those at sea, as well as for their kin who remain home. Divine sovereignty undergirds the laboring life of the seafarer, shaping class, caste, and religious identity on board the dhow, and back at home. These religious practices are grounded in Islamic pasts and enable these OBC Muslims to voyage out, seeking possibilities in the face of marginalization in India.
RBF: The marine world of trade that you research is largely a masculine field. Even so, you underscore how the women on land were “key financial actors. They not only managed the household income but also maintained social relations with patrons, creating the networks that allowed men to move … [I]t was often women, and not men, who were most insightful about the economic structure of the [dhow] trade, some of them even having a critical sociological view of their own communities.”
How did spending time with the women “left behind” on land, as it were, expand your understanding of the sea trade run by the men and the community more generally?
NM: As I spent time with women in both Mandvi and Jam Salaya, it became clear to me that the labor of women at home and their imbrication in debt and patronage relations were central to enabling the mobility of khalasis, or sailors, on board vahans. The transregional mobility of men was forged by the women who stayed at home, this labor being largely invisible but, yet, deeply legible to men who went out to sea. Labor in the dhow trade, such as seasonal contracts for work, and systems of remuneration, operated on a system of patronage rooted in older forms of jajmani relations that structured agricultural labor in Gujarat where landless laborers became the clients of landowners, their patrons.
Within this patronage system, it was often women who found new patrons/dhow owners for their male kin to work with; it was women who went to dhow owners to ask for credit during the year; and it was often women who ensured that khalasis were paid the salaries owed to them at the end of the sailing season. Although women did not move with men, their labor of being in relation, which included their movement between homes, care-work, and maintenance of social networks, made the movement of men across the ocean possible.
Women also owned dhows and were given dhows by their families as their dowry, thus shaping the fortunes of the homes they married into. Women acted not only as care givers in the absence of male kin but also harnessed their networks, which extended from one household to another to shape family fortunes.
By examining women’s labor at home and men’s labor at sea together, I argue that mobility across the Indian Ocean is moored to the home, especially through relations of patronage between dhow owners and sailors, as well as between men and women as kin, and that these relations are central to community identity. The monsoon regulates these relationships of patronage and labor, as contracts for work were drawn up on a monsoonal calendar, suggesting that the dhow economy, as an intermediary in global shipping lines, requires cultural and environmental forms that elide binaries of nature/culture and change/stasis. Instead, the entanglement of nature, culture, and the contours of gendered labor are at the heart of global shipping and capital.
By spending time with women and examining these relations of production that are seemingly out of place in capitalist forms of exchange, I realized that patronage, gendered labor, and the labor of being in relation are central to Indian Ocean trade networks and capital today. These forms of labor are often presumed to belong to economic systems that characterized different eras—feudalism or nonwage markets—but I suggest that they are the very moorings for capitalist production. These forms of production do not simply disappear with the rise of a global capitalism but in fact moor capitalism to an Indian Ocean setting that extends from the home to the ship, becoming a mode through which global capital articulates with the local.
Indian Ocean, the fastest warming ocean, has seen rising sea levels, an increasing frequency of tropical cyclones, and other adverse weather events.” As they find themselves so often moored and unmoored from multiple lands, what lessons do dhows have to offer in these climatically challenging times?
NM: Sailors are intimately aware of the way in which climate change has impacted their lives. They would matter-of-factly describe how the monsoon now arrives in India later than it once did, how adverse weather events such as tropical cyclones and storms are more frequent, and that the sea itself is more tempestuous. Dhow sailors and families who live along the Gujarat coast now face increased danger at sea and in coastal regions. Indeed, sailors are in awe of nature—they notice small changes in the environment, and pay close attention to wind, waves, and shifts on land. This is not only due to climate change, but because understanding these subtle changes has long helped sailors navigate the Indian Ocean.
Historically, dhow sailors from Kachchh read the winds, sky, and sea, using methods such as sighting of birds, sea snakes, the color of water, and sand to navigate across the ocean, and predict the weather. Today however, conditions at sea are read, documented, and communicated through weather applications like Windy.com, video footage, voice notes, radio, and other forms of digital communication. Yet, like sailors of yore, contemporary dhow sailors continue to be in awe of nature, and layer older ways of reading the weather with new forms of communication.
However, they understand that human agency is limited, and that even the most sophisticated technologies can fail. For instance, in 2018, Cyclone Mekunu, the most powerful cyclone to hit the Arabian peninsula in recorded history, severely impacted sailors who were in the region. While the cyclone had been predicted by weather monitoring systems, it changed course suddenly. The cyclone was an instance where scientific forecasting systems failed, and sailors who survived the cyclone were deeply grateful for having been saved, remaining in wonder of nature.
Even in taking care of the dhows themselves, sailors are deeply attuned to the ways in which vessels must be repaired regularly and with care based on seasons and climate. As they repair leaks, clean and waterproof the entire vessel at least once a year, they come to care for it through an intimate understanding of the effects the elements have had on the vessel. This method of repair is slow and requires consistent maintenance, usually all done slowly by hand and not by machine, thereby allowing sailors to take even greater notice of the effect of the elements and human agency on the vessel itself.
Through these intimate ways of knowing the environment and the vessels they use to cross the sea, sailors teach us that first and foremost, we need to have a deep respect and awe for nature. They know that human agency is limited and that disregard for the environment has unimaginable effects. They also teach us to be more attentive in reading the subtle signs that the weather and environment give us. Through the careful and consistent care of dhows that are repaired slowly each year, they teach us that caring for the environment, human life, and infrastructure is a slow, intimate process, one in which human beings are not at the center, but subject to a power greater than themselves.
From Scroll.
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