The Indian Ocean (55 page)

These connections continue to today, most obviously via the greatly expanded hajj, but in other ways also, ways very similar to those we have described for the past. As just one example, the Swahili Muslim population in Kenya has been strongly influenced in recent decades by the push towards normative Islam, sponsored especially by contact with and people from Saudi Arabia. Some young Kenyan Muslim leaders have trained at the University of Madina. The hijab is increasingly seen in Kenyan schools. Similar trends have been found in Tanzania and Uganda. In Uganda the largest missionary movement in the world, the Jama'at Tabligh, is very active and influential. Originating in the Indian subcontinent, it is highly significant that its focus is on the existing Muslim community. As with many other revivalist movements today, it wants the Quran and
shariah
to be the only guides to conduct, and the basis of all legislation.
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Similar trends are obvious all over south and southeast Asia. One visible sign is the many mosques and
madrasas
(religious schools) funded by money from oil-rich Arab states. Yet the process whereby orthodox, normative, Islam triumphs is far from complete: to revert to earlier terminology, these authorities have not yet completely eradicated additive change and achieved substitutive
change. In Mayotte, a surviving French possession in the Comoro Islands, everyone is Muslim to be sure, but many also are spirit mediums. To avoid what seems to be inevitable conflict between the two, when people are setting off to go to a spirit ceremony they take off their amulets which contain Quranic passages.
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Even the most vigorous rectifier from the Hijaz will find it hard to eliminate completely this sort of flexibility, a cohabitation of normative Islam with older informal beliefs.

Hadhrami and other religious guides also operated in Indonesia, and indeed continue to do so to this day. Ann Bang describes how the Naqshbandi Sufi order in Indonesia recruited a mass following in the early nineteenth century. Their practice, not unusually for Sufis, incorporated pre-Islamic practice to an extent: the recitation of the dhikr, for example, was believed to make the devout invulnerable. In the second half of the century these 'unorthodox' practices came under attack from a source which we have encountered many times already, namely Indonesian scholars who had been educated in the heartland of Mecca and then came home to rectify the religious practice of their Indonesian fellows. The famous Dutch orientalist Snouck Hurgronje gave an account of these efforts in Aceh, where religious mysticism was very popular. A particular reformer started a crusade against such deviations as cock fighting, opium smoking, gambling and pederasty.

What seems to be different about reform and purification movements in Indonesia as compared with the Swahili coast is that much of the impetus in the latter came from men from outside, especially Hadhramis, or at least people who though originating on the coast had studied in Hadhrami madrassas. In Indonesia it seems that local people who had studied in Mecca played a much larger role than did men from outside, whether from Hadhramaut or elsewhere. The career of Sayyid Uthman, born in Jakarta in 1822, is revealing. He was of Hadhrami stock, though his father lived in Java. He studied in the Hadhramaut, and travelled widely. Back in Jakarta in 1862, he led campaigns against innovation and acculturation. However, his influence seems to have been very largely restricted to his fellow Hadhramis in Java; local Muslims were less impressed.
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This in turn signals that we should not too glibly write about a Muslim 'community' all around the shores of the Indian Ocean. There were pronounced divisions within the community, based on religious practice, that is adherence to different schools of law, or to different Sufi orders, and on ethnicity. One example that we have already noticed is that the Hadhramis follow the Shafi school, but this is not followed in many other areas around the shores of the ocean. In India, for example, the dominant legal school is the Hanafi. In general Arabs from what they proclaimed to be the heartland, that is the Hijaz and southern Arabia, especially Hadhramaut, kept some distance from local Muslims in other areas, be this the Swahili coast, or India, or the Malay world. Children whose parents hailed from these areas were often sent home to study. Sometimes wives were taken from home, rather than intermarry with local women, or at least the main wife would be of Arab stock even if secondary ones were locals.

We have just written of people travelling widely around the ocean to propagate new religious ideas, and to purify the faith. Earlier we also wrote of people moving over the ocean for economic reasons, that is the dubiously voluntary movement of indentured labour (see pages 223–4). There was however also completely voluntary movement, one example being the Indian financiers, or agents of home-based financiers, whom we found dominating much of the imperial economy of the Arabian Sea in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (see pages 219–20). This movement continued, and we can now move forward into the twentieth century. In the first half of the century we will find many trends similar to those already outlined in the previous chapter; independence after World War II marks something of a break, though arguably the later phenomenon of globalisation had a greater influence on the ocean. We will first look at more recent migratory movements across the water, this time for economic reasons.

Hadhramis propagated and consolidated Islam, but many travelled for more secular reasons. Some moved to India. There was a big influx to the largest of the Princely States, Hyderabad, in the nineteenth century. Some did well out of turning themselves from military mercenaries to land controllers: indeed three of them made so much money that they were able to go back home and found minor sultanates. During the Indian Rebellion of 1857 they rejected calls to help throw out the infidel British, saying that 'we have come here to make money and not to fight about religion.'
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Other Hadhrami drew on their traditional mercantile and financial skills to acquire prominent roles in the service sector all around the ocean. In the mid 1930s about 110,000 Hadhramis lived abroad, this being nearly one-third of the total population of the area.
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Today they have largely given up on their previous destinations of Indonesia, Malaya and East Africa, and instead work in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states. Others have moved to the west, often moving on from Indonesia, where they are worried about political instability. Nor are the Hadhrami the only ones who have done well in the service sector. Two Gulf families did well operating in the interstices of the British system, classic compradors. The Kanoo family serviced the British in the Gulf before World War I, and became the representative in Bahrain of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, and of the Mogul steamship line. Later they got into pearls, and later again worked for ARAMCO. Another family,
the Alghanim, have prospered in Kuwait, basing their role on their closeness to the al-Sabah ruling family. Their present head, typically, received his business training in the United States.
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We have described large-scale movements of Indian and Chinese labour in the nineteenth century, with Chinese going mostly to the Malay world, and Indians all around the ocean from Malaya to South Africa. In recent times many of the descendants of these migrants have acquired important roles in the economies of the independent states. Chinese dominate the economy of Malaya, and play a major role in Indonesia. The population of Mauritius is now 52 per cent of Indian origin, and they dominate both the economy and politics of the island. All of these diasporic communities retain close family and business ties with their fellows, both those in the diaspora and those at home in Arabia, China or India. Indians used to have a large role in East Africa, but they have been discriminated against, and even expelled, from several former colonies after independence: Burma, Kenya to an extent, Uganda most notoriously. They have been forced to move on, to the west, or back to India. This secondary diaspora is now one not of indentured poor labour but of people who often are professionals or have considerable economic power. Again then, this is not so much a diaspora as a circulation of Indians.

Meanwhile more humble movement for work continues. The experience of people from India and Pakistan in the oil rich Gulf of the 1970s and 1980s provides a case study. In 1977 there were 140,000 labour migrants from Pakistan in the Gulf area, while in 1981 there were 276,000 Indians in Saudi Arabia. Many of these came from the west coast of India, from Goa or Kerala. In the mid 1980s Indian and Pakistani workers together sent back home about $US 6 billion, a very useful amount of foreign exchange.
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In his classic account
In an Antique Land
, Ghosh found in Kerala ports which had once been prosperous. Mangalore was lauded by Ibn Battuta, and by the Portuguese Barbosa. Then it fell into decline as the British passed it by. But more recently men from one village which is part of the larger town have worked in the Gulf and prospered; 'everything around us, the well-tended gardens and the pastel-coloured bungalows with their thickets of TV aerials, spoke of quietly prosperous, suburban lives.' In other parts of Kerala Ghosh found 'large houses, some new, with sharp geometric lines and bright pastel colours that speak eloquently of their owners' affiliations with the Persian Gulf.' Later he commented on 'a small cluster of Gulf-gilded houses.'
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The example of people from Goa in western India is in many ways typical. We are writing here about the Christian part of the population, not the Hindu. People from this enclave have migrated for centuries, long before it became part of the Indian Union in 1961. Indeed, ironically as the old Goans move out or back and forth, a flood of migrants from other parts of India has changed completely the whole aspect of Goa. Migration from Goa was and is encouraged by the poverty of their homeland, and by their having been converted early on by the Portuguese to Roman Catholicism. The result was that they had none of the food taboos which limited both Hindus and Muslims: Goans could cook any sort of food for anyone, hence their prominent role as cooks and stewards on western ships. Goans also, as
a result of a long colonial experience, were more 'westernised' than most other Indians, and so could serve as nursemaids, musicians, and so on. The widespread network of the Catholic church provided support, advice and spiritual comfort wherever a Goan ended up. Christian Goans were alert to wider changes in the Indian Ocean area. In the mid-twentieth century many more attended English language schools in Goa than those teaching the Portuguese of the colonial masters.

This expedience has meant that Goans have had several different favoured places to migrate to. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth century the focus was on the other Portuguese colonies, especially Mozambique, where they and other Indians controlled the economy. Later in the nineteenth century British India was the El Dorado, along with other British colonies in East Africa. In 1921 it was estimated that Goa's population was about 470,000, with another 200,000 living outside. For the last few decades the movement has been to the Gulf states. Today there are sizeable communities in such South Asian cities as Mumbai, Pune and Karachi, and further afield in Nairobi, Kampala, Dar es Salaam, Bahrain, Abu Dubai, and even in London, Lisbon, California, Toronto and Sydney. The village of Moira is perhaps typical. A researcher in 1980 found that half the population were Catholic, and of these 85 per cent got cash income either from remittances from those overseas, or from the superannuation of those who had returned.
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Thirty years ago one would drive around Goa and the locals would point out the large houses of people who had been chief stewards, or cooks on British ships. Today the even more elaborate new houses belong to families working in, or returned from, the Gulf, just as Ghosh noted a little further south. This hints at the way Goans, and other diasporic communities, circulated, being away much of the time but retaining strong ties with their homes and villages of origin, sending back money and hoping to retire there. In particular, Goan women over the last two centuries have been major travellers across the ocean. In this they contrast strongly with the more typical movement of men, whether Muslim or Hindu, who leave their family back home. Goan women often accompany their husbands when they go to work overseas, but come home frequently to visit parents, go to family weddings and funerals, arrange husbands for their daughters, deal with property, or attend important religious occasions such as the exposition of the preserved body of Goa's patron saint, St Francis Xavier.

These Goan women make up only one thread in the rich tapestry of people travelling around the ocean. Another is petty traders, pedlars, people who travel incessantly, chaffering their way around the littoral. Literally for millennia these people, at least by number, are the main travellers on the ocean. Some have regular routes, like transhumant pastoralists on land, others go wherever there is opportunity. By 1877 Singapore was a thriving colonial port, the crucial hinge between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. Yet it also played host to a regular arrival of humble pedlars. Lady Brassey noticed them:

Towards the end of the south-west monsoon, little native open boats arrive from the islands 1,500 to 3,000 miles to the southward of Singapore. Each has one little tripod mast. The whole family live on board. The sides
of the boat cannot be seen for the multitudes of cockatoos, parrots, parrakeets, and birds of all sorts, fastened on little perches, with very short strings attached to them. The decks are covered in sandal-wood. The holds are full of spice, shells, feathers, and South Sea pearl shells. With this cargo they creep from island to island, and from creek to creek, before the monsoon, till they reach their destination. They stay a month or six weeks, change their goods for iron, nails, a certain amount of pale green or Indian red thread for weaving, and some pieces of Manchester cotton. They then go back with the north-east monsoon, selling their goods at the various islands on their homeward route. There are many Dutch ports nearer than Singapore, but they are over-regulated, and preference is given to the free English port, where the simple natives can do as they like so long as they do not transgress the laws.
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