Narrating Africa in South Asia by Kooria, Mahmood;

Short description:

This book explores nuances of various narratives on long-term transcultural exchanges between Africa and South Asia with a special focus on India. It explores the ways in which Africa and Africans have been narrated in South Asian history and culture.It was originally published as a special issue of South Asian History and Culture.

Long description:

The coastal belts and hinterlands of East Africa and South Asia have historically shared a number of cultural traits, commodities and cosmologies circulated on the wings of the monsoon winds. The forced and voluntary migrations of Asians and Africans across the Indian Ocean littoral over several centuries have reverberated in the memories, literatures, travelogues and religious, architectural, and socio-political imaginations of both the regions. And, they continue to do so in various forms and platforms.

This book explores nuances of various narratives on these long-term transcultural exchanges with a special focus on India. It explores the ways in which Africa and Africans have been narrated in South Asian history and culture in order to unravel the nuanced layers of reflexive, rhetorical, stereotypical, populist, racialist, racist and casteist frameworks that informed diverse narratives in vernacular texts, songs, films and newspaper reports. Emphasizing the interdisciplinary approaches of narratology, Afro-Asian studies, and Indian Ocean studies, the contributors enunciate how the African lives in South Asia have been selectively remembered or systematically forgotten. Through multi-sited ethnographies, multilingual archival researches and interdisciplinary frameworks, each chapter provides theoretical engagements on the basis of empirical research in such regions as Gujarat, Kerala, Karnataka, Goa, Hyderabad and Mumbai as well as in Sri Lanka. This book was originally published as a special issue of South Asian History and Culture.

Table of Contents:

1. Introduction: narrating Africa in South Asia 2. Eastern African doyens in South Asia: premodern Islamic intellectual interactions 3. From soldier to spectacle: Africans and the langar procession in Hyderabad 4. Africa in South Asia: hybridity in Sri Lankan Kaffrinha 5. Sidi voices and the Sidi Sayyid mosque: narratives of space and belonging 6. Geographies of death and memory: shrines dedicated to African saints and spectral deities in India 7. Translocal notions of belonging and authenticity: understanding race amongst the Siddis of Gujarat and Hyderabad 8. From ‘Afro-Indians’ to ‘Afro-global’ networking: contemporary identification and unification processes among Siddis 9. Siddi marriage: re-signifying contract, transactions and identities