Scholar Voices: Nair

Indian Ocean: Cradle of Globalization
Scholar Voices
Savita Nair

Savita Nair's studies of diaspora, "India and Africa: British Colonial Era Migration and Diaspora," seek to expand the historical geography of India. By working to incorporate South Asia's many migrants and migrant communities into the narrative of Indian History, Nair is reconceptualizing India as more than a geographical entity but also as a social, cultural, political and economic network that traverses the Indian Ocean, linking Africa, Europe and the Americas in an expanded but identifiably Indian history. Nair explores how migrants connect and are connected to multiple spaces.

One aspect of this research documents women as carriers of Gujarati culture to East Africa. Here women were simultaneously at work and at home, assisting in store-front retail business while also assuming domestic responsibilities in the house above or at the back. Thus Nair's research challenges the notion of a uniquely domestic sphere and a rigid division between public and private life, thereby resituating women's work as labor that transcends boundaries' just as the migrants themselves traversed geographical space.

Reading List:

Bhachu, Parminder. Twice Migrants: East African Sikh Settlers in Britain. London: Tavistock Publications, 1985.
Clarke, Colin, Ceri Peach and Steven Vertovec. eds. South Asians Overseas: Migration and Ethnicity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Daftary, Farhad. A Short History of the Ismailis: Trends of a Musilm Community. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998.
Das Gupta, Ashin. Indian Merchants and the Decline of Surat, 1700-1750. Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1977.
____ , and M. N. Pearson. eds. India and the Indian Ocean, 1500-1800. Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Ghosh, Amitav. "The Diaspora in Indian Culture." Public Culture 2, no. 1 (1989): 73-8.
Gopal, Surendra. Commerce and Crafts in Gujarat, 16th and 17th Centuries: A Study in the Impact of European Expansion on Precapitalist Economy. New Delhi: People's Publishing House, 1975.
Gregory, Robert G. India and East Africa: A History of Race Relations Within the British Empre, 1890-1939. Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1971.
____ , The Rise and Fall of Philanthropy in East Africa: The Asian Contribution. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1992.
____ , South Asians in East Africa: An Economic and Social History, 1890-1980. Boulder: Westview Press, 1993.
Guha, Ranajit and Gayatri C. Spivak. eds. Selected Subaltern Studies. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Hardiman, David. Peasant Nationalists of Gujarat: Kheda District, 1917-1934. Delhi; New York: Oxford University Press, 1981.
Jain, V. K. Trade and Traders in Western India, AD 1000-1300. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, 1990.
Kale, Madhavi. Fragments of Empire: Capital, Slavery, and Indian Indentured Labor Migration in the British Caribbean. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998.
Kassam-Remtulla, Aly. "(Dis)Placing Khojahs: Forging Identities, Revitalizing Islam, and Crafting Global Ismailism." unpublished paper, Department of Anthropology, Stanford University, 1999.
Ludden, David. "History Along the Coastal Zone of Southern Asia," unpublished paper, Columbia South Asia Seminar, October 18,1999.
____ , "History Outside Civilization and the Mobility of South Asia." South Asia 17, no. 1 (1994), pp. 1-23.
Mangat, J. S. A History of the Asians in East Africa c. 1886 to 1945. Clarendon Press, 1969.
Markovits, Claude. The Global World of Indian Merchants, 1750-1947: Traders of Sind From Bukhara to Panama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Mattausch, John. "From Subjects to Citizens: British 'East African Asians'." Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 24, no. 1 (1998): 121-42.
Mehta, Makrand. Indian Merchants and Entrepreneurs in Historical Perspective,17th to 19th Centuries. Delhi: Academic Foundation, 1991.
Mehta, Nanji Kalidas. Dream Half-Expressed: An Autobiography, ed. Ratilal Chhaya and trans. S.J. Pandya and V.M. Desai. Bombay: Vakil and Sons, 1987.
Pearson, M. N. Port Cities and Intruders: The Swahili Coast, India, and Portugal in the Early Modern Era. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Nair, Savita. "Masala in the Melting Pot." Sagar: South Asia Graduate Research Journal, (Fall 1995), pp. 24-49.
Pearson, M. N. ed. Spices in the Indian Ocean World. Hampshire, England: Variorum/Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 1996.
Pocock, David. Kanbi and Patidar: A Study of the Patidar Community of Gujarat. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972.
Pradhan, S. D. Indian Army in East Africa, 1914-1918. National Book Organisation, 1991.
Prakash, Gyan. "Subaltern Studies As Postcolonial Criticism." American Historical Review 99, no. 5 (1994).
Rudner, David. Caste and Capitalism in Colonial India: The Nattukotai Chettiars. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
Safran, William. "Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return." Diaspora 1, no. 1 (1991).
Subramanian, Lakshmi. Indigenous Capital and Imperial Expansion: Bombay, Surat, and the West Coast. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996.
van der Veer, Peter. ed. Nation and Migration: The Politics of Space in the South Asian Diaspora. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995.

Savita Nair
Mount Holyoke College

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