Introduction: narrating Africa in South Asia

ABSTRACT

This introductory article to the special issue “Narrating Africa in South Asia” situates the African diaspora in the subcontinent against the broader backdrop of global mobilizations against systemic racism, economic inequality, inaccessible justice, and colonial educational system. The historical 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, rhetorical, 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.

KEYWORDS:

• African diaspora
• narratives
• South Asia
• racism and casteism

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 decentralized 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, judiciaries, 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 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 perpetuating 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.

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 reluctantly in the region. Even so, synonymous commensurate notions and practices from the premodern 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 discrimination’. 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 subcontinent 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 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 experiences 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 obligatory 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 authorities’ 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 established, 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.

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 regionalism, 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, stereotypical, 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 mercenaries 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 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 architectural, 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 nineteenth and twentieth centuries.²⁵ Despite the grand narratives of Afro-Asian postcolonial solidarities 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 musicological studies of the narratives on and by Africans in South Asia.

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 deception. 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 communicate with contemporary scholarly and popular understandings as well as the struggles of communities 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, demonstrate 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 communities, 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 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 outstandingly 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 contemporary 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 combination 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 connections 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 interactions’, 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 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 movements 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.

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.

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 experiences 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; 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”.