Foreword

Summary

Performing Memories and Weaving Archives offers an insightful and rare glimpse of a two-way excavation entailing an Indian Ocean world at the crossroads. Here, the lifeworlds, ancestral knowledge, and collective memories of diasporic African communities in India and conversely diasporic Indian communities in South Africa are put into conversation. The spatiotemporal encounters Dey and his participant authors trace bear upon everyday life through these historic reverberations. This work deftly interweaves three spheres of everyday life: sacredscapes (through the spiritual mnemonic), musicscapes (through cultures of dance, music, and movement), and foodscapes (through culinary practices).

These traversals weave the ancestral knowledge, “creolization,” and “decolonial resistance” that thematically braid the multistranded narratives of South African Indians, Siddis, and other Afro-Indian communities. For a narrative that is intensely personal as much as it remains socioculturally expansive and open-ended, Dey begins with his own intergenerational biography against a seemingly familiar backdrop of postindependence Bangladesh and West Bengal in flux. Yet, against the urban fabric of childhood spaces, the portrait of a more muted, intriguing history emerges. It is that of a 15th century African kingdom in West Bengal, the Habshi dynasty, and one of many Afro-Indian kingdoms that dotted precolonial India, and long before Indian indentured labor was shipped across the farthest reaches of the British Empire. It is through these transoceanic and transcontinental interstices that Dey ferrets back and forth, between the historic and the contemporary, in offering readers an “archive of creolized memories.”

How is the Indian Ocean as a material space, metaphor, and archive of both connection and dissonance, reimagined in Dey’s transoceanic, transcontinental multi-sited ethnography? If a post-Purcellian reading of the so-called Indian Ocean as a transcultural borderland proves useful at some stage, at what point in this tracing of littoral lifeworlds do notions of hybridity, flow, and entanglement get ruptured, if ever? Indeed, Dey and his collaborators prompt us to think with/through the many sensibilities of porosity that pattern diasporic meaning-making and sentiments of belonging. For example, through an intersectional reading of identity and social hierarchy implicating class, caste, gender, and regional communalism among others, they further venture on to complicating contemporary paradoxes of colorism on either side of the Indian Ocean.