Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: The Global Transformation of Borders and Mobility
- Section I Experiencing Borders in South Asia
- 1 Spaces of Refusal: Rethinking Sovereign Power and Resistance at the Border
- 2 Border Layers: Formal and Informal Markets Along the India-Bangladesh Border
- 3 Experiencing the Border: The Lushai People and Transnational Space
- Section II Mobility in and Beyond South Asia
- 4 Of Insiders, Outsiders, and Infiltrators: The Politics of Citizenship and Inclusion in Contemporary South Asia
- 5 Renegotiating Boundaries: Exploring the Lives of Undocumented Bangladeshi Women Workers in India
- 6 ‘The Immoral Traffic in Women’: Regulating Indian Emigration to the Persian Gulf
- 7 The Journey to Europe: A Young Afghan’s Experience on the Migrant Route
- 8 Hardening Regional Borders: Changes in Mobility from South Asia to the European Union
- Section III Representations of Borders and Mobility in Diaspora
- 9 The Borders of Integration: Paperwork between Bangladesh and Belgium
- 10 Disordering History and Collective Memory in Gunvantrai Acharya’s Dariyalal 229
- 11 Fragmented Lives: Locating ‘Home’ in the Poems of Sudesh Mishra
- Conclusion
- Index
10 - Disordering History and Collective Memory in Gunvantrai Acharya’s Dariyalal 229
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 December 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: The Global Transformation of Borders and Mobility
- Section I Experiencing Borders in South Asia
- 1 Spaces of Refusal: Rethinking Sovereign Power and Resistance at the Border
- 2 Border Layers: Formal and Informal Markets Along the India-Bangladesh Border
- 3 Experiencing the Border: The Lushai People and Transnational Space
- Section II Mobility in and Beyond South Asia
- 4 Of Insiders, Outsiders, and Infiltrators: The Politics of Citizenship and Inclusion in Contemporary South Asia
- 5 Renegotiating Boundaries: Exploring the Lives of Undocumented Bangladeshi Women Workers in India
- 6 ‘The Immoral Traffic in Women’: Regulating Indian Emigration to the Persian Gulf
- 7 The Journey to Europe: A Young Afghan’s Experience on the Migrant Route
- 8 Hardening Regional Borders: Changes in Mobility from South Asia to the European Union
- Section III Representations of Borders and Mobility in Diaspora
- 9 The Borders of Integration: Paperwork between Bangladesh and Belgium
- 10 Disordering History and Collective Memory in Gunvantrai Acharya’s Dariyalal 229
- 11 Fragmented Lives: Locating ‘Home’ in the Poems of Sudesh Mishra
- Conclusion
- Index
Summary
Abstract
This chapter argues that, despite hundreds of years of movement between East Africa and India through the Indian Ocean, histories of slavery are conspicuous by their absence in Indian and Gujarati collective memories. This lack of awareness and discussion of slavery in India has increased the danger of ignoring the presence and plight of the Siddi communities, whose African heritage still shapes their position in Indian society. Within this prevailing apathetic climate, Gunvantrai Poptabhai Acharya's novel Dariyalal, which centres on Ramjibha, a Gujarati slave trader turned abolitionist, assumes a double-sided significance. Acharya's fictive novel challenges mainstream Indian history, which has forgotten or deliberately omitted the recording and narrating of unsettling encounters and relationships. It helps us to confront the erasure of the non-European communities who played a role in abolishing slavery. Concurrently, Dariyalal is also a discursive tool for negotiating a Gujarati identity that is tied to slave trade. In the end, the novel upsets a Eurocentric history only to replace it with a Gujarati Hindu-centric version of the slave trade in the Indian Ocean, illustrating the lingering impact of migration and diaspora in the region.
Keywords: Gujarat, Gunvantrai Poptabhai Acharya, slavery, Indian Ocean
Introduction
Over the course of the second half of the eighteenth century, Laxmichand Motichand, a prominent Vāniyā (merchant) from the island of Diu at the southern end of the Kathiwar peninsula in present-day Gujarat, developed significant business interests in Mozambique, in southeastern Africa. He began his career as a young boy on Mozambique Island in the early 1760s, apprenticing at his family's firm. He learnt Portuguese, the language of trade and the empire, and Emakhuwa, the African language of commerce. Soon he began climbing the commercial hierarchy and in the 1780s became the firm's main partner in Mozambique. Like the other Vāniyās on the island, Laxmichand was heavily invested in the procurement and importation of Gujarati cotton textiles.
Textiles were one of Gujarat's chief exports and Africa's principal import. Laxmichand's imported Indian textiles, which were in high demand among African consumers, were crafted to suit African consumers’ taste, styles, and designs each trading season. To be successful, he needed to be closely connected to agents in both the interiors of Africa and in Gujarat. Vital information was transmitted through multiple channels from Africa and India to Laxmichand in his firm in Mozambique.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Borders and Mobility in South Asia and Beyond , pp. 229 - 248Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2018