Debating Indian Ocean Cultural Unity. Scholarly Perspectives

Most scholars divide the Indian Ocean into two parts: the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal. The South China Sea is sometimes added as a third zone, depending again on how far one stretches the notion of an interconnected Indian Ocean World. Additional geographic discontinuities can be identified. Great differences exist between the pelagic and the coastal Indian Ocean, or between the areas affected by the monsoon and those lying south of it. We may further note “an early version of today’s divide between north and south” in the sense that places like China and India from early times produced and exported manufactured goods, whereas the economies of Southeast Asia and East Africa largely relied on unprocessed tropical products.

Other authors, however, have stressed the ocean’s continuity. Neville Chittick characterizes it as “arguably the largest cultural continuum in the world during the first millennium and a half A.D.” Broeze, in a comparative study on Asian port cities, envisions “a string of closely related regional systems stretching from East Asia around the continent and across the Indian Ocean to East Africa,” whereas Braudel characterizes the ocean as “a series of pendulum movements of greater or lesser strength on either side of the centrally positioned Indian subcontinent.”

However valuable these characterizations may be, the degree of cultural homogeneity between the ocean’s interconnected commercial ports remains largely up for debate. At least one attempt has been made to identify the cultural connections found across the entire Indian Ocean. James de Vere Allen argues that many—but not all—regions underwent cultural influence from Indian communities, who migrated to the ocean’s distant shores from antiquity to the present. He further calls attention to a “racial” element from Southeast Asia in Madagascar, to which we will return later. The third widely shared element he envisions is Islam.

Although this religion has an equally long premodern history in the Mediterranean, Atlantic Africa, and Central Asia, the Shafr 1 school of Islam indeed displays a neatly pan-Indian Ocean distribution. The popularity of this “coastal Islam” has been explained through its cosmopolitan worldview, generally peaceful interactions with non-Muslims, and relative freedom from the strictures of “Arabic Islam.” Yet Islam never connected all inhabitants of the Indian Ocean basin. In the Bay of Bengal, Islamic networks were preceded by, and later coincided with, multidirectional Buddhist networks. In many regions, Hindu mercantile groups such as the Chettiar and Banias also coexisted and competed with Muslim traders. This would tempt us to conceptualize “plural histories” within the ocean: a “Sanskritized” Indian Ocean, a “Buddhist” Indian Ocean, an “Islamic” Indian Ocean, a “Jewish” Indian Ocean, a “Portuguese” Indian Ocean, and a “black” Indian Ocean, for example.

These ethnic, cultural, and religious differences become even more evident when one zooms in on a regional scale. To the east, the Indian Ocean borders Southeast Asia (and, of course, Australia), although opinions differ as to how far eastward the former’s sphere of influence stretched and stretches. From a deep-history perspective—including archaeology, human genetics, and linguistics—maritime Southeast Asia has more in common with aboriginal Taiwan and the Pacific. At the same time, however, all of the region’s major religions entered through Indian Ocean networks, as did the introduction of writing, metallurgy, and urbanization. As a vital chokepoint between China and the Indian Ocean World, Southeast Asia stands firmly within the cultural orbit of both. Yet, although connections with China have remained strong to this day, Southeast Asia has gradually drifted away from the Indian Ocean World, both politically and in terms of scholarship.

In the words of Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “it is almost as if a set of blinkers oblige the historian of Southeast Asia to write, on the one hand, of agriculture, and on the other hand of European trade, as if all external contact in the early modern world was limited to dealings with Europeans.” Barbara Watson Andaya adds that “even when the theme of maritime Asia is employed, Southeast Asia—located between two of the world’s great oceans—remains a shadowy presence in most classrooms.”

To some extent, these blind spots reflect a legacy of colonial thinking in which Southeast Asia was persistently dismissed as a passive region shaped by external influences rather than local agency. It should further be kept in mind that artificial scholarly distinctions between South and Southeast Asia belie the deep historical continuities characterizing the wider region. Languages belonging to the Austroasiatic family are spoken on both sides of the Bay of Bengal, and population genetics reveal complex migration patterns in multiple directions. In light of these prehistorical and early historical connectivities, it makes more sense to speak of a Bay of Bengal interaction sphere. Substituting colonially rooted ideas of one-way acculturation, the notion of an interaction sphere implies neutrality and reciprocity.

Indeed, the oft-assumed “Indianization” of Southeast Asia is to be envisioned as an outcome rather than the cause of preexisting mobilities. It would therefore seem appropriate not to ask what the Indian Ocean has done for Southeast Asia, but what experts on Southeast Asia can do for Indian Ocean Studies. Some Southeast Asianists have indeed sought to (re)connect “their” histories to those of the wider Indian Ocean. Other scholars examine cultural influence from Southeast Asia to the Indian Ocean World instead of the other way around, although the general lack of primary historical sources often renders such efforts spotty.

Africa has long been equally marginalized in Indian Ocean Studies. Leaving fewer textual records than other communities, conventional historiography rarely portrayed East Africans as volitional agents in the transregional networks connecting them with Asia. Recent scholarship has redressed much of this imbalance; Africa’s historical connections with the Indian Ocean have been viewed through the intersecting themes of Swahili cosmopolitanism, early interactions with Europeans, the rise of Islam, port cities, slave trade, and the presence of Indian diasporas, among others. It is relevant to mention here that the sixteenth-century Portuguese encountered people from Abyssinia, Mogadishu, Mombasa, Malindi, and Kilwa among the inhabitants of Malacca in Southeast Asia, then the world’s main entrepot for spices and other highly prized luxury goods.

Even earlier, gold from as far inland as the Zimbabwe Plateau found its way into these networks through the port of Sofala, in what is today Mozambique. Chinese-style ceramics excavated across East Africa and the rest of the Indian Ocean World provide an additional layer of evidence testifying to these premodern connections, few of which are satisfactorily documented in primary textual sources. An innovative step toward the academic integration of Africa and the Indian Ocean World has been to look at crop dispersals and food globalization, calling attention to a wide range of plants, animals, and foodstuffs that were dispersed across the Indian Ocean from Africa or vice versa. We will return to this issue later.

Even less prominent in Indian Ocean studies—except in the Francophone literature— are the islands in the southern Indian Ocean. Only secondarily affected by the annual monsoons, Madagascar, the Comoros, the Seychelles, the Mascarenes, and the Chagos Archipelago entered the Indian Ocean world-system relatively late. For the latter three island groups, no evidence has been found so far for precolonial settlement, although they may have been visited sporadically. Madagascar and the Comoros Islands (including Mayotte), on the other hand, were settled in precolonial times by populations of Southeast Asian as well as East African ancestry. Economically, what we may call “insular Southeast Africa” was tightly connected with the western Indian Ocean, in particular, with the Swahili Coast. Culturally and linguistically, however, Southeast Asian influence predominates in Madagascar.

In addition, various crops and other foodstuffs from Southeast Asia reached Africa in premodern times. The absence of primary sources makes it difficult to know exactly what triggered such large-scale migrations across the Indian Ocean. It is relevant to note that the Maldives islands, situated halfway across the journey, display evidence of early cultural influence from Southeast Asia, in addition to various parts of the Muslim world.

If there is anything we can learn from these scattered inferences, it would be that disparate academic fields need to be brought together to understand the full range of cultural contact between populations that often did not leave a “paper trail.” The next section offers some suggestions.