Indian Ocean Cultures: Mobility and Interdisciplinary Study

The cultural landscape of the Indian Ocean took its present shape through the movement of people, commodities, ideas, and practices. For this reason, mobility is not only a concept, but it also has methodological applicability. Scholars working on the region often call attention to the similar lifestyles of disparate coastal people, who allegedly had more in common with each other than with nearby inland populations. The question remains, however, to what extent Indian Ocean cultures have converged beyond the domains of religion and economic growth. Some tangible instances of cultural contact will be discussed next, followed by ways to deepen our understanding of these processes.

Upon examining movement as a defining feature of the Indian Ocean World, we should focus once more on the ocean’s geographic fluidity—the so-called “pulsations” suggested by Braudel. Although one could argue that trade between the ancient Harappans and Mesopotamians marked the first stage of the Indian Ocean “globalization,” most regions beyond the Arabian Sea were in no way affected. These connections nevertheless set an important precedent to further transregional integration.

Archaeological evidence confirms that India has been a maritime nation from classical times, despite the colonially rooted stigma of being an inward-looking, “thalassophobic” subcontinent. As mentioned previously, commercial networks and other transregional mobilities foreshadowed processes of “Sanskritization” across the area stretching from present-day Afghanistan all the way to Indonesia, but less so to Africa or the Middle East. Islam, in turn, greatly energized and reshaped the ocean’s cultural landscapes, before early modern European interference finally led to its integration with the economies, including the patterns of sustenance, of the Americas and Atlantic Africa.

The boundaries of the Indian Ocean World changed significantly once more around the nineteenth century when steam-powered transportation facilitated new and more frequent connections not dependent on the monsoons. Some non-European agents in the Indian Ocean found themselves “parochialized” as a result, whereas others re-entered the stage as European-employed soldiers, sailors, indentured laborers, and/or immigrants.

At this point, it becomes necessary to reflect on the agents of cultural contact. Predictably, mobile societies played a crucial role in connecting societies separated by the ocean, regardless of whether they traveled with their state and army (empires) or without it (diasporas). In the latter category, an important role was played by members of relatively well-educated, financially advantaged elites, such as the Karimi merchants, Hadhramis, Gujaratis, Armenians, Omanis, and Middle Eastern Jews. Less privileged but equally important were bonded people, including exiles, prisoners, soldiers, slaves, and, later, indentured laborers. Migrants and refugees, such as the Rohingya, can be added as a more recent group in antagonistic relation to state power. Such heterogeneity of actors on the stage of the Indian Ocean World—some amply documented, many others less so— makes it an exercise in discrepancy to rely solely on written documents. Instead, we must return at this point to the importance of interdisciplinary approaches to retrieve additional “fragments” of the past.

Scholars have a variety of methods at their disposal to examine cultural diffusion in preliterate societies. Solid archaeological evidence—including shipwrecks—provide some of the most tangible data, although the Indian Ocean is not nearly as well excavated as, say, the Mediterranean. That aside, many of the ocean’s trade products were of limited preservability, causing systematic biases in the archaeological record. For example, we find ceramics, coins, jewelry, and glass beads throughout the Indian Ocean World, but the dried fish, textiles, spices, or rice for which these may have been traded do not easily show up archaeologically.

The study of ancient and not-so-ancient texts—such as Graeco-Roman, Middle Eastern, Indian, and Chinese treatises on maritime trade and travelogues— provides additional insights, yet reliance on philology reproduces equally problematic imbalances. The often-hard-to-access literature and oral traditions of East Africa, the Maldives, Myanmar, and parts of maritime Southeast Asia, to name but a few examples, are prone to underrepresentation in wider Indian Ocean scholarship. Other scholars have approached the issue from the perspective of language, or encouraged future scholars to do so. As we have seen in the context of Madagascar, linguistic research often proves the most fruitful way to reconstruct interethnic contact in the absence of primary textual sources. Language-centric studies on the Indian Ocean have focused on Islamic poetry, linguistic environments, textual trajectories, lexical borrowing, linguistic imaginings, and epistolary communication.

Another promising method to trace interethnic contact is a commodities-based approach, foregrounding a particular product or item, the context of its origins, and the ways it traveled geographically and cross-culturally. Such histories complement scholarship on large-scale processes—including deep history, macrohistory, and globalization studies— which inherently risk overlooking local specificities. In an Indian Ocean context, scholars have looked at the dispersal of beads, cowry shells, sea cucumbers, and areca nuts, among others. As mentioned previously, the food practices and cuisines of the Indian Ocean World have become remarkably integrated. For millennia, different types of cereals, livestock, and other provisions accompanied migrants across the Indian Ocean. Additional insights may be gleaned from a comparison of Indian Ocean culinary practices. On a methodological level, these types of studies often combine historical, archaeological, and scientific data, which is indeed the way ahead in a relatively underdocumented region.