South Asian History and Culture

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Introduction: narrating Africa in South Asia

Mahmood Kooria

To cite this article: Mahmood Kooria (2020): Introduction: narrating Africa in South Asia, South
Asian History and Culture, DOI: 10.1080/19472498.2020.1827592

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/19472498.2020.1827592

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SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE
https://doi.org/10.1080/19472498.2020.1827592

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Introduction: narrating Africa in South Asia

Mahmood Kooria
Leiden University Institute for Area Studies (LIAS), Leiden, The Netherlands

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This introductory article to the special issue “Narrating Africa in South African diaspora; narratives;
Asia” situates the African diaspora in the subcontinent against the broader South Asia; racism and
backdrop of global mobilizations against systemic racism, economic casteism
inequality, inaccessible justice, and colonial educational system. The his­
torical and contemporary experiences of Afro-descendants in South Asia
are different from their North American and European counterparts on
several fronts, even though they all experienced similar trials of obligatory
migration and forced labour, slavery, marginalization, etc. In South Asia,
racism is a constricted debating point among scholars and activists while
its existence is largely rejected or downplayed in the public sphere. The
Afro-descendants have been at the receiving end of various racist and
racialist discriminations and their experiences resonate with many other
systemic conundrums in the region. Here I lay out five key trends in the
current state of research, and I argue that the narratives about them still
need to be given a critical focus, with analyses of their forms, structures,
contexts and histories. The present issue contributes to this attempt and
fills important lacunae, especially with regard to the narrativization of
racialism and racism as expressed in various genres. The contributors
compose powerful narratives to reveal nuanced layers of reflective, rheto­
rical, stereotypical, populist, racialist, racist, or caste frameworks. These
narratives horizontally and vertically command an appeal to the long
historical and contemporary realities in the subcontinent, as well as to
the struggles of African communities now gaining prominence all over the
world.

For the last decade, Africa and the African diaspora across the world have been undergoing major
historical moments, connected with unprecedented global mobilizations. Organized yet decentra­
lized movements addressed some of their quandaries, that have long-existed at least since the last
century, but were unspoken in the mainstream spheresr. After the European colonial regimes had
left most of their territories in Africa and Asia by the 1960s and 1970s and even after massive civil
rights movements arose in North America, there has been a public silence on the deep predicaments
that Africa and the African diaspora have been facing. Although political decolonization gave
independence to most countries in the continent and civil rights legislations banned overt racist
practices and disenfranchisement of African-Americans, colonial and racist mindsets dominated
the treatment of Africa and Africans in regional, national and international governments, judici­
aries, executives, and other public and private institutions. In the last decade, such issues have been
directly brought into prominence, with strong voices against systemic racism, economic inequality,
inaccessible justice, police brutality, and above all, the inherent colonial educational system on
which Eurocentric worldviews rely. Such new movements as Black Lives Matter and Rhodes Must
Fall gained national and international support, with more and more activists and supporters urging

CONTACT Mahmood Kooria mahmoodpana@gmail.com

© 2020 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://
creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the
original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.
2 M. KOORIA

local and national bodies to address these and similar issues. As I write, the situation has been
orchestrated by the raging protests after the brutal murder by police officers of an African-
American man, George Floyd. Demonstrators all over the world are campaigning for an end to
institutionalized racism, a shift in resources to healthcare, educational opportunities, and social
services, while concrete proposals to decolonize universities and curricula are gaining ground.
Movements among black communities in the USA have attracted most political and media
attention, not only because there they have been treated with such hostility by a super-power, but
because their mobilizations also have been massive, structured though decentralized and have more
access to new technologies of instant media, much more than ongoing struggles of many minority
communities in the world, including African diasporas elsewhere. Oppression, criminalization and
systemic racism have been similarly explicit in many other countries in Europe, Asia, Australia and
Americas, although their political systems continue to undermine this and the access to media
coverage is often censored. The usual spokespersons of the marginalized, academics, writers,
journalists, politicians and activists, are complicit in subtle and obvious forms of oppression.
Other major reasons for them to be overlooked is the inaccessibility or absence of any related
mainstream narratives, coupled with an insensitivity in racialist and racist modes of thinking and an
unwillingness to acknowledge the issue. We see this clearly across Asia, where questions of racism
are not yet even conceded, let alone addressed concretely.
Discussions on racism in Asia are limited to a restricted circle of scholarly and activist debates.
Racism, defined or not, ultimately involves multiple essential narratives emerging from and leading
to discrimination on the basis of perceived biological or quasi-biological differences varying from
appearance, heredity, sex, ethnicity, origin, colour, complexion and physique. One side consciously
or unconsciously invokes what they recognize in other side: certain words and habits that are
typecast as characteristics which are assumed to be predictive, persistent or inherent. There are
many definitions for racism in terms of biological and psychological features, but rarely do
individuals, societies, institutions and systems admit that they have been perpetrating and perpe­
tuating acts according to any recognized definitions and therefore identifiable within a related
category. Instead of falling back on any monolithic definition of the expectation of standardized
experiences, we can understand narratives which bring together elements clearly contingent on the
historical and contemporary understanding of the situation.
Narratives abound in acts, words, gestures and attitudes that lead communities to acknowledge
problems and find solutions. They are ‘a way of articulating particulars on the basis of established
general paradigms, but also as a basis for establishing general paradigms’.1 Narratives therefore are
strong tools for and against racial discrimination and identification between ‘particulars’ and
unmarked universals.2 This special issue forefronts these dimensions by exploring the narrative
acts by and on African communities in South Asia. The coastal belts and hinterlands of Eastern and
Southern Africa and South Asia have historically produced copious narratives on a number of
shared cultural traits, commodities, commands, and cosmologies. They can be observed across the
Indian Ocean world over which thousands of Asians and Africans have travelled, traded and
migrated. Seafarers found the coasts of South Asia and Africa two natural arms of the Arabian
Sea, offering hospitality and hostility on the wings of the monsoon winds. The forced and voluntary
migrations across the oceanic littoral over several centuries have reverberated in the memories,
literatures, travelogues, religious, architectural, and socio-political imaginations of both regions.
They still continue to do so in various forms and platforms. This special issue explores nuances of
related narratives on these long-term transcultural and transoceanic exchanges, with a focus on
African communities in South Asia. This would in turn help us understand some of the key
concerns the communities have been facing as Afro-Asians during their long and divergent
histories and their precarious present situations, and to compare them with the predicaments of
their counterparts elsewhere in the world.
 SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE 3

To mobilize race and history: South Asia’s Africa and Africans

In the last few years, there has been a steady increase in the assaults against Africans or people of
African origin in South Asia. Racial discrimination along with deep-seated prejudices play a major
role in such mob violence, often entangled with stereotypical accusations of kidnapping, drug-
peddling, pimping and even cannibalism. Most of the physical attacks and racist insults arise from
a widespread negative portrayal of Africa and Africans predominating in local popular and populist
narratives. They continue to happen despite the presence of Africans across South Asia for centuries
and the remarkable contributions they have made to the historical development of society, polity,
economy and culture in the subcontinent.
In postcolonial South Asia, racism has been at its worst in countries where it is downplayed or
denied in the public sphere. Until very recently, only a very small group of activists and writers
stressed the racist characteristics embedded in the social, cultural, political and psychological
mindset of the subcontinent.3 Their calls found only temporary and limited media and political
attention. During, before and after such calls, there was outright denial or diminution of claims
about racial discrimination. This shows that racism is a recent debating point undertaken reluc­
tantly in the region. Even so, synonymous commensurate notions and practices from the premo­
dern period onwards and colonial administrative and intellectual presuppositions have supported
many such attitudes.
Whether or not directly related to narratives of Africa and Africans, many forms of racism are
deep-rooted in the psyche and history of South Asia. Its own subcontinental version is more
familiar as casteism. The relationship between the two is a matter of perennial debate. The
distinction in social anthropology crossed borders in the early twentieth century to North
America, through scholars such as W. Lloyd Warner, John Dollard and Gunnar Myrdal, who
replaced the analytical category of ‘race’ with ‘caste’ to discuss divisions between Blacks and Whites
in the Deep South.4 Nevertheless, Indian politicians and governments still held to the view that
racism is external to the country while casteism is an internal issue which is outside the purview of
intergovernmental and international bodies. Perhaps because the prominent paradigms of defining
racism emerged from the West, India considered it as a foreign phenomenon, perpetrated by
Whites against African and Indian diasporas and migrants.5 India rejected any conflation of caste
and race, as can be seen from the controversy that unfolded in preparation for the Third UN World
Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance held in
2001 at Durban, South Africa. The Indian Government argued that caste discrimination was not
a matter to be taken up in the conference since it is an internal issue and has been constitutionally
prohibited.6 To acknowledge a correlation between caste and race would mean that India is racist
inasmuch as its casteism was undeniably deep-rooted and a distinctive trademark. But the Dalits,
who have been on the receiving end of caste oppressions for centuries, argued for the inclusion of
‘caste’ in the agenda, for it was ‘not only comparable but in fact tantamount to racial discrimina­
tion’. They also hoped that it would provide a wider platform for Dalit causes and would ensure the
government’s accountability in implementing the policies and decisions against casteism.7 Long
debates ensued between anthropologists, jurists, activists, historians and intellectuals. What is
striking is almost complete absence of any attempt to relate the discourse to the plights of Indian
citizens of African origin who suffer discrimination for both their caste and their race. That should
have been brought to the fore in the discussion.
The question of treating caste and race synonymously in social stratifications in the subconti­
nent is one thing, but another related one is the racial framing extended to religious groups (such
as Muslims in India, Sri Lanka and Myanmar; Hindus in Pakistan and Bangladesh) and regional
ones (such as Northeast and South Indians in India). This can develop further into internal
racism such as South Indians towards Northeast Indians and the reverse.8 What becomes
universal is an attitude towards African communities shared by other groups who are themselves
racially victimized. They unite in perpetuating discrimination. This dimension and related issues
4 M. KOORIA

have long been overlooked, probably because spokespersons of the marginalized groups were
equally complicit in perpetuating such discriminations. A good example of this is in academic
studies on race or racism in South Asia. Despite their limited scope, they rarely discuss the way
Africans have been the subjects of negative narration, treatment, imagination, and discrimination
in the subcontinent.9
Against this background it is worth emphasizing that the historical and contemporary experi­
ences of the African diaspora in South Asia have been different from their North American and
European counterparts on several fronts, even though they all experienced similar trials of obliga­
tory migration and forced labour, slavery, marginalization, etc. With the backing of colonialism,
racial ideologies of white supremacy and notions of the white man’s burden to civilize the world,
American and Asian colonies were fertile grounds for ideological exchanges on racism, racialism
and related policies and practices across the hemispheres. The best example is the simultaneous
creation of ‘Black Towns’ in Asia and America under colonial directions. Madras (now Chennai) in
India was ‘the first place in world history to officially designate its two sections by color’.10 The
Black Town there predated the rise of many better known divided towns, such as in New York City,
and was marked by a restrictive wall separating its residents from the Europeans of the White Town.
In both New York City and Madras the black towns historically constructed and illustrated
comparable forms of the politics of colour, as Carl Nightingale has shown. Controlled by a single
empire at the turn of the eighteenth century, that of the British, both cities (and their respective
countries) utilized simultaneous colonizing frameworks in which ‘a dichotomous color politics,
involving a prioritization of polarized concepts of “black” and “white,” began to dominate autho­
rities’ pronouncements’.11 Such divisions along racial and colour lines in India circulated among
European colonialists in Asia and beyond to North America, North Africa, South Africa and East
Africa. In South Asia, the Portuguese, Dutch and French segregated themselves from the residential
areas of the local people through new townships and urban fortresses they established. The
segregations were enforced by strict legislation and harsh penalties on locals crossing the boundary,
while Europeans were free to cross at will.12
In the late colonial and postcolonial periods, such racial and colour politics influenced how the
colonized perceived themselves, their fellow countrymen and their neighbours. This in turn
influenced the ways in which late- and post-Orientalists assessed them academically and
popularly.13 Both society and intellectuals constructed sets of characteristics for particular castes
and races vis-à-vis essential narratives and sentiments deriving from colonial divisions. Many
higher status castes had been continuously close to the colonial regimes, employed as clerks,
translators, tax collectors, commercial agents, brokers and suppliers. Consequently racial mindsets
were perpetuated in South Asian prejudices in local communities, with an overarching tendency to
identify any outsiders in the public, political and cultural narratives. These sentiments were deep
rooted when nations were made independent, partitions were drawn, decolonization was estab­
lished, and provincial divisions outlined. In the independent nations of South Asia in the mid-
twentieth century we see constant internal battles being waged against many communities who
otherwise were thought to be an integral part of the society. The search for national identity coupled
with racial othering of neighbours became a plague at national, state, local and village levels,14 and
this was directly linked to the way in which Africa and Africans were perceived in the subcontinent.
One telling example is a widespread ‘othering’ in North India of people from South India
(commonly identified as ‘Madrasi’ after the city of Madras) and consequently of Africans. One
North Indian politician recently denied the existence of racism against Africans in India by giving
evidence of Indians living with black South Indians. Although he withdrew the statement later, it
echoes many racially charged statements South Indians could hear in North India. In such
statements, South Indians are equated with black Africans on the basis of their skin colour and
their physical features. They do not connote ancient historical aspects, such as the inhabitants of the
region of the earliest human settlements, long before 'North India' was populated, nor that the first
humans to settle in India migrated from Africa.
 SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE 5

Earliest migrations and settlements from Africa to India via Arabia 50,000 to 60,000 years ago are
certainly fascinating in their own right and the South Asian public is yet to acknowledge the
relevance of this prehistory in the dominant narratives of nationalism, patriotism, ethnic region­
alism, etc. However, this special issue is more concerned with comparatively recent migrations from
Africa. They are ‘recent’ only in relation to a long prehistory, yet the migrants under our focus have
travelled to and settled in the subcontinent many centuries ago through their long journeys from
hinterlands and coastal belts of Africa to South Asia. Their contributions to the making of South
Asian intellectual, political, and institutional histories and cultures differ from the trajectories of
Black Atlantic peoples, yet resonate in the stories of racial and social marginalization. Narratives of
their presence in and contribution to the subcontinental past provide strong counterpoints to the
prevailing cornucopia of national and regional narratives.

Trends in narratives
Articles in this special issue explore the ways in which Africa and Africans have been depicted in
South Asia from the premodern period onward and created a repertoire of historical, cultural and
political prominence that goes beyond stereotypes of our time and theirs. They compose a powerful
narrative of the Asians of African origin to reveal nuanced layers of reflective, rhetorical, stereo­
typical, populist, racialist, racist, or caste frameworks. The articles emerge from and deal with
a burgeoning field of studying Africans in Asia and they demonstrate predicaments of Afro-
descendants in the so-called democratic, secular citizenship states where their rights and dignity
are continuously violated.
Focusing on interdisciplinary approaches and new epistemological frameworks of narratology,
Afro-Asian studies, and Indian Ocean studies, this issue enunciates the ways in which Africa and
Africans have left deep impressions both in premodern and modern South Asian history as well as
in the present, and how those have been selectively remembered or systematically forgotten. The
African presence in South Asia and the Indian Ocean in general is an emerging field of study. In the
last two decades scholars have been regularly exploring nuances of such mobilities, and by doing so
they continue some of the intermittent studies in the last century. Although it is too early to make
a comprehensive assessment, we can at least notice five major trends in the current state of research
on Africans in South Asia:
First, due to the increasing interest in slave trade in the Indian Ocean world, many recent studies
have explored the forced mobility of Africans as slaves to the Asian shores. Commercial and
enslavement processes and abolition initiatives have dominated the discussions with more attention
to the predicaments in the African context itself.15 But some recent works, such as the ones by
Matthew Hopper and Edward Alpers, have interrelated histories of slavery with African diasporas
in Arabia, Persia and Asia at large.16 All these studies followed the important early writings on
slavery or consequent African diasporas in Asia from the last century, especially by Shepperson,
Harris and Cooper.17 In these works, attention to the collective or individual journeys to, and later
careers in, South Asia is nominal.
Historians of South Asia addressed this lacuna by focusing on the careers of African mercen­
aries and slaves in the subcontinent, where many of them rose in political and military ranks. To
unravel the life trajectories of these little known or unknown figures, scholars combined military
history, socio-cultural history and biographical studies.18 Some of these Africans had managed to
establish their own kingdoms, such as the Siddis of Janjira, who received better attention,19 while
we still wait for an investigation of the Habshis of Bengal. Similarly, the life and career of some
individual slave-commanders like Malik Ambar are better recorded in history, attracting at least
three biographical studies,20 whereas others who were less well documented have been less well
studied. Although the larger focus has been on prominent and successful figures, lately historians
have started to unearth the lives of ordinary slaves.21 As one can imagine, most studies focus on
African lives only as slaves and mercenaries without much attention to the ways in which they
6 M. KOORIA

built up their careers within or alongside slave life, leaving those less presented in the narratives
of their past.
African slaves and slave-commanders and royal personages ceased to exist in colonial and
postcolonial South Asia, but their descendants continue to navigate through everyday realities.
Mainly based on ethnographic fieldwork, the third category of scholarship looks into their lives in
order to analyse questions of cultural, religious and ethnic identities, educational and social lives
and mystical and spiritual practices.22 The communities are generally known as Siddis (originated
from the Arabic sayyid, ‘master’) in India, but also as Habshis (named after Habsh or Abyssinia)
and Makranis (after the Makran Coast) in Pakistan, and Kaffirs in Sri Lanka. They defy any
homogenization for they display a rich diversity in India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. For example,
the communities in India live in Gujarat, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Hyderabad, and Goa, and speak
Urdu, Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi, Konkani and Kannada, and practice Hinduism, Islam and
Christianity. Even so, their African ancestry, memories of slavery and forced labour, stories of
marginalization and discrimination unite their narratives, and anthropologists have studied them
individually and comparatively.
The fourth trend of scholarship looks at the cultural processes of African mobility across the
Indian Ocean and South Asia with attention to cultural productions, a tangible and intangible
heritage. Utilizing the prospects of various disciplines, such as art history, ethnomusicology, visual
anthropology, diaspora studies, Indian Ocean studies, film studies, scholars have studied architec­
tural, musical, artistic, and performative presentations. In addition to works already cited that focus
on particular region or micro-community, scholars have studied multiple regions and communities
in comparative and connected frameworks and/or brought together contributions along these
lines.23 This approach also involves the second and third trends as its focus is on surviving traces
of historical communities as well as the tangible and intangible cultural heritage of the living
descendants.
A related approach reverses the table and looks at the South Asian narratives of Africa through
the accounts, fictions and memoirs of varied writers, travellers, diplomats, journalists, activists,
etc.24 This scholarship concerns Indian perceptions of Africa with occasional African perceptions of
South Asia and produced by those who crossed borders temporarily or permanently in the nine­
teenth and twentieth centuries.25 Despite the grand narratives of Afro-Asian postcolonial solida­
rities in and around the Bandung Conference, such writings revealed the racialist and racist
perceptions of Africa existing in the subcontinent, and those fed specific political and diplomatic
agendas or ‘nationalist biopolitics’.26 On the other hand, the Africans who travelled between Africa
and Asia during and after colonial times in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries entangled their
intellectual, scientific and missionary pursuits, despite the prevailing framings of racism and
slavery. The Bombay Africans are an instructive case as they navigated between India and
Eastern Africa collaborating with, but also outclassing, the European ventures into geographical
surveys, abolitionism and missionary activities.27
Among these five major trends, some may overlap, as noted for the fourth trend. In general, we
can see that the narratives about the Africans in Asia still need to be given a critical focus, with
analyses of their forms, structures, contexts and histories. The present issue contributes to this
literature and fills important lacunae, especially with regard to the narrativization of racialism and
racism as expressed in various genres. The latest attempts to decolonize narrative theory with
attention to race and colonialism28 and other narratological suggestions from scholars such as
Dwivedi, Nielsen, Walsh, Sommer and Hogan provide frameworks for the essays in this issue,29 but
individual contributions are rather concerned with historical, anthropological, cultural and musi­
cological studies of the narratives on and by Africans in South Asia.
 SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE 7

Narrating Africans in South Asia

Moving away from the usual themes on Africa-Asian connections in diplomacy, infrastructure and
investments, contributions in this special issue focus on cultural, literary and oral narratives of
connections and comparisons in the precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial periods across the
Indian Ocean. On the one hand, the narratives about and by the African communities in South
Asia are part of a long socio-historical process in which the actors consciously played a vigorous role
in the making of what should be told and what should be corrected. On the other hand, the selective
and systematic memories marginalized the course of narratives through different platforms, which
themselves appealed only to specific viewpoints at particular moments in time. The narratives and
their mediums were entangled with the production of specific identities ascribed to historical and
contemporary identities. The contributors investigate such processes on the basis of vernacular
texts, music, songs, films, newspaper reports and oral narratives in order to reveal the lesser-known
past and present of Africa-Asian links, their telling and retelling in different spatial and temporal
contexts and their significance in ongoing scenarios of racial distinction and discrimination.
The historical dimensions of narratives through memories, material evidences and journalistic
writings are pertinent to the act of narratives. The past stands as a major repertoire of narrativizing
what one is or ought to be in the present. Mahmood Kooria, Shihan de Silva Jayasuriya and
Benjamin Cohen analyse these aspects with a closer look at three distinct historical journeys of
Africans in South Asia. Neelima Jeychandran, Sonal Mehta and Beheroze Shroff advance this aspect
by amalgamating historical and contemporary narratives from within the communities. On the
basis of their ethnographic research, they show how vestiges of the past come to the centre of
community narratives as sources of power, veneration, spirituality, fear, discrimination and decep­
tion. Pashington Obeng, Fiona Almeida, Sofia Péquignot and Khatija Khader focus on the present
forms of translocal and transregional intersections and narratives internal to the community.
Attempts to build connections and networks through formal and informal organizations and the
social and personal arenas, the African/Siddi identity becomes an important factor for narrating
one’s identity vis-à-vis others and capturing the ebb and flow of both historical memory and living
reality. In these narratives from various contexts and genres, the past is reinvigorated to commu­
nicate with contemporary scholarly and popular understandings as well as the struggles of com­
munities to make sense of their past through conflicting, compromising and complementing
narratives.
In my essay, I look at a period before Africans were forced to migrate to South Asia on a large
scale and began to form communities of their own in the second half of the second millennium.
Looking at the intermittent and fragmented historical references to certain African itinerants as
evidence for epigraphic, architectural and textual recensions, I debunk the exclusive association of
Africans in South Asia with slavery and military labour. Different African Muslims worked in the
subcontinent as jurists, religious leaders, benefactors in the twelfth to late-fifteenth century. These
figures are not anomalies but rather they are representative of a larger intellectual, legal, and
religious network of people who travelled between both continents. The very fact that such
narratives have been forgotten entirely, and that they are preserved in fragmentary form, demon­
strate how systematically the community is cast into a specific set of iconographies that befits the
stereotypical understandings of South Asian society.
With a similar look into the now-forgotten yet once spectacular imageries of African commu­
nities, Benjamin B. Cohen and Shihan de Silva Jayasuriya analyse stories of African people and
music in India and Sri Lanka. Taking one of the most popular music forms from Sri Lanka,
Jayasuriya analyses the musical exchanges between Africa and Sri Lanka through which the genre
called kaffirinha (an etymon of Arabic word kafir, used to refer to non-believers at large but
Africans in the oceanic context, and the Portuguese diminutive nha) circulated since the sixteenth
century. The genre elucidates Afro-European-Sri Lankan interconnections when Africans were also
part of the colonial machinery, and demonstrate a hybrid cultural transmission that continues to
8 M. KOORIA

survive in the island as a ‘microcosm of the changing global and local socio-political and cultural
scenarios’. Cohen takes up another microcosm of change as evident in the plight of African soldiers
who were presented as a spectacle in nineteenth-century Hyderabad under the rule of Asaf Jahis,
better known as Nizams (1724–1948). Utilizing the narratives in newspaper reports and eye-witness
accounts, Cohen examines how the soldiers were presented and paraded in the spectacular annual
Langur processions. The news reports and related accounts marked their racial identity as out­
standingly different from their Indian counterparts. That way of narration reinforced racist and
stereotypical images of Africans.
Sonal Mehta and Beheroze Shroff focus on the oral narratives of Siddis in Gujarat to examine
how the community employs different narratives to assert their belonging to the region and
cultural citizenship there at a time when their heritage has been appropriated by politicians,
government officials and quasi-government bodies to cater for specific interests while relegating
them into oblivion. Mehta and Shroff combine oral narratives with historical accounts, where one
can see organized plunder of a marginalized community’s heritage while discounting its con­
temporary presence. Narratives of the community members resist such appropriations, stand as ‘a
counter-narrative to official narratives of the nation’, and militate ‘against mighty forces to take
charge of a history denied’ to them through colonial and postcolonial racism and internal
marginalization coupled with demographic decrease. Neelima Jeychandran adds to this combina­
tion of oral-historical narratives from Gujarat an additional examination of resonant accounts
from Kerala. Looking at the fragmented cultural memories relating to the shrines of towering
figures of Siddi tradition, such as Bava Gor in Ahmedabad, and of semi-historical figures, such as
African slaves in Cochin under the Portuguese, she analyses the functionalities of shrines as
‘places of memory, working as encoded cultural texts that yield multiple meanings and varied
narratives’. From various participants in those places we hear ‘a constant reinvention of the
sacrifices of the African slaves and soldiers’ and memories of African martyrdom for the places
where they are buried, even though they have been obliterated from the annals of the same
regions.
The remaining essays also take at least two Siddi communities for a comparative and connected
study in order to understand how they have struggled, strived and thrived despite the racial
vulnerabilities they have suffered. Ethnographies from different sites reveal a narrative continuum
among the communities, even if many of them knew about the other Siddis in India only recently.
Sofia Péquignot and Khatija Khader investigate the prospects and dangers of transnational con­
nections engulfing their past and present to their contemporary aspirations for a better life. With
a focus on representation and assimilation, Khader directly addresses the genealogies of race and
racism in South Asia embedded in a global matrix of knowledge production that the Siddis have to
address in their everyday life. She unravels the ways in which community members employ various
strategies to claim and access social benefits against the backdrop of their everyday experiences of
racialism in Gujarat and Hyderabad. Khader argues that ‘Siddis are perceived as and also self-
ascribe to themselves certain truths that are produced and naturalized through translocal interac­
tions’, where their aspirations for membership in a larger Muslim community becomes central to
asserting their identity among Hyderabadi Siddis. They perform, reclaim and internalize an
ahistoric Africa which becomes crucial for Gujarati Siddis. Péquignot emphasizes this latter
dimension as she looks at similar predicaments of transnational endeavours among the community
members through newly awakened narratives on global African platforms. It is intriguing to see
how the contentions against and in favour of their self-identification as a caste or tribe unfold
among them when racism and racial identities together with historical and contemporary retentions
have been catalysts of marginalization. In this struggle, the conflation of race and caste become
central to their fundamental demands for access to better social, economic and political positions.
Through identification and unification processes, the activists among them therefore strive to
escape the ‘black condition’ in India by building a national network of Siddis, by which they aim
 SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE 9

to connect with the larger African diaspora across the world and to become part of a black
community beyond the limits of the Black Atlantic.
Pashington Obeng and Fiona Jamal Almeida add to this stream by studying the transregional
marriages between Siddi members and recent immigrants from Africa, as well as internal move­
ments across religious, regional, linguistic and customary borders in arranged and love marriages.
With a focus on the Siddis of Karnataka Obeng and Almeida demonstrate gradations of Siddi brides
and grooms insinuating their notions of modernity into the fabric of marriage while negotiating
their identities as both Africans and Indians in South Asia. In the process contemporary Siddi men
and women challenge some of the long-held ideas and practices guarded by older generations and
they ‘are not only retelling their stories that may be different from their forebears, but also, they are
re-inscribing themselves in the long narratives of Indian Ocean African diasporic peoples.’
Taken together or individually, the contributions challenge the existing narratives on the
identity, history, grouping and social and cultural position of historical and contemporary
African communities in South Asia. Narratives from within and on the community demonstrate
the genealogies of racialist and racist frameworks and depictions predominating the South Asian
past and present, while the community members strive to overcome such racialist social exclusions
and fixed categories of their identities. To do this they explore diverse avenues: oral narratives,
memory scapes, cultural assimilation, political representation, social recognition, national and
global network-building, and marital alliances. These multi-layered narratives about their long
struggles must change the way they are treated regionally and nationally while they should also help
to debunk monolithic understandings of their role in history and in the present. Their narratives
also horizontally and vertically command an appeal to the long historical and contemporary
realities in the subcontinent, as well as to the struggles of African communities now gaining
prominence all over the world.

Notes
1. Dwivedi, Nielsen and Walsh, Narratology and Ideology, 6; and cf. Hogan, Narrative Discourse.
2. Kim, “Introduction.”
3. Roy, “Indian Racism towards Black People”; and Louis, Casteism is Horrendous than Racism.
4. Led by Warner, this Caste School of Race Relations sustained in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. The seminal work
in this school is a brief essay by Warner, but for an emphatic rejection, see Cox, Caste, Class and Race.
5. Baas, “Curry Bashing”; Bhatia, American Karma; and McDuie-Ra, Debating Race in Contemporary India.
6. Reddy, “The Ethnicity of Caste.”
7. Ibid., 558.
8. McDuie-Ra, Debating Race in Contemporary India, 32-55.
9. Robb, Concept of Race in South Asia; and McDuie-Ra, Debating Race in Contemporary India.
10. The racially demarcated “Black Town” of Madras was established by the officials of the English East India
Company in the late seventeenth century. Its segregation was stricter than in New York City, and the local
residents had to pay for the wall built to force them into that ghetto and to restrict their mobility and access to
the White Town. See Nightingale, “Before Race Mattered.”
11 Nightingale, “Before Race Mattered,” 50.
Nightingale, “Before Race Mattered,” 50.
12. Such segregated localities became sites of colonial paranoia, enactment of power, systemic oppression,
economic exploitation, intellectual curiosities, all embedded in a European tendency to universalise experi­
ences and superimpose them onto the segregated sites and thus onto the larger world.
13. Bayly, “‘Caste’ and ‘Race’.”
14. The more micro one goes the more layered the othering becomes.
15. For example, see Campbell, Abolition and its AftermathI; Campbell, Structure of Slavery; Clarence-Smith,
Islam and Abolition of Slavery; Allen, European Slave Trading; and Allina, Slavery by Any Other Name.
16. opper, Slaves of One Master; Mirzai, “Slavery, the Abolition”; Larson, “Horrid Journeying”; Pereira,
“Nineteenth Century European References”; and Alpers, African Diasporas.
17. Shepperson, “African Abroad or the African Diaspora”; Harris, African Presence in Asia; Alpers, Ivory and
Slaves; Beachey, Slave Trade of Eastern Africa; Cooper, From Slaves to Squatters; Cooper, Plantation Slavery;
10 M. KOORIA

Sheriff, Slaves, Spices and Ivory; Clarence-Smith, Economics of the Indian Ocean Slave Trade; and Sikainga,
Slaves into Workers.
18. Ali, Malik Ambar; Eaton “Rise and Fall of Military Slavery”; Ali, African Dispersal in Deccan; Chauhan,
Africans in India; and Lal, Muslim Slave System.
19. Robbins and McLeod, African Elites in India; and Chitnis, History of Janjira.
20. Ali, Malik Ambar; Tamaskar, Life and Work of Malik Ambar; and Chowdhuri, Malik Ambar.
21. Chakravarti, “Mapping ‘Gabriel’”.
22. Shroff, “Voices of the Sidis”; Shroff, “Juje Jackie Siddi”; Catlin-Jairazbhoy, “Sacred Pleasure, Pain”; Obeng,
Shaping Membership, Defining Nation; Basu, “Drumming and Praying”; Basu, “Theatre of Memory”; Basu,
“Hierarchy and Emotion”; and Minda, An African Indian Community.
23. Jayasuriya, African Diaspora in Asian Trade Routes; Jayasuriya, African Identity in Asia; Jayasuriya and
Angenot, Uncovering the History of Africans in Asia; and Singh, “African Indians in Bollywood”.
24.. Devika, “Decolonizing Nationalist Racism?”; Burton, Africa in the Indian Imagination; Sabitha, “Darkness
Invisible”; and Ravindranathan, “Politics and Poetics of the Namesake”.
25. This trend should not be confused with the South Asian migration to and its historical presence in Africa or
the colonial and postcolonial interactions between both regions. Those are well developed fields in themselves.
26. Devika, “Decolonizing Nationalist Racism?”
27. Pereira and Patel, “Terra Nova”; Pereira, “Black Liberators”; and cf. Burton, Africa in the Indian Imagination,
chapter 3.
28. See note above 2.
29. Dwivedi, Nielsen and Walsh, Narratology and Ideology; Ryan, Foote and Azaryahu, Narrating Space/
Spatializing Narrative; Hogan, Narrative Discourse; Mikkonen, Narrative Paths; and Sommer,
“‘Contextualism’ Revisited”.

Acknowledgments
I am grateful to the contributors, the reviewers, and the journal editors for making this special issue possible.
Throughout its many stages, Omar H. Ali (University of North Carolina at Greensboro) and Clifford J. Pereira
(University of Hong Kong) have provided constant support and I am sincerely indebted to them. I also thank
R. Benedito Ferrão (College of William and Mary), V. Abdul Lathief (Sree Sankaracharya University of Sanskrit), M.
C. Abdul Nazar and A.K. Abdul Hakkeem (University of Calicut) for their valuable inputs. The idea of this special
issue emerged from a panel I had organised at the second edition of the “Africa-Asia: A New Axis of Knowledge” at
the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania on 20-22 September 2018. I am thankful to its participants for their
feedback, and to the International Institute for Asian Studies for financial assistance to some of the panellists.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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