Music and Community in the Indian Ocean Arena

“Whatever the relationship might be between Atlantic history and poetry,” Sugata Bose wrote in his pioneering account of Indian Ocean connections in the age of colonial empires, “there is no question that the history of the Indian Ocean world is enmeshed with its poetry and in some ways propelled by it.”1 Bose was responding to the renowned historian of North Atlantic migrations Bernard Bailyn, who had remarked that he knew of no one who was poetically enraptured by the Atlantic world. A good part of Bose's 2006 book, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire, was dedicated to the poetic and musical imaginations that had shaped the Indian Ocean interregional arena. Some of the highest expressions of these imaginations were in the journeys of the renowned litterateur Rabindranath Tagore to Southeast Asia and Iran (which Tagore had described as “pilgrimages”). But even the internationally lesser-known poet Jibanananda Das, who never left India, had been enthralled by oceanic imaginations: A thousand years have I been roaming the world's Pathways,From Ceylon to Malaya in darkness of night across oceansMuch have I traveled; in the grey universe of Bimbisara, Ashoka,Yes, I was there; deeper in the darkness in Vidarbha metropolis,A weary soul, I, life's waves all around foaming at the crest,A moment or two of peace she gave me, Natore's Banalata Sen.2Literary and artistic creations, for Bose, accommodated and transcended the cultural differences that characterized the societies in the Indian Ocean arena: Tagore, for one, saw himself as a pilgrim not just to the ancient monuments of Java and Bali, but also to Shiraz and Isfahan, sites associated with the great Sufi poets of Persia.3 The richly connected world of the Indian Ocean seemed particularly suited for cultural and creative exchanges across linguistic and religious differences.The works under review present an opportunity to explore the new directions of research on culture and connectivity in the Indian Ocean, particularly in the domain of music. Sounding the Indian Ocean: Musical Circulations in the Afro-Asiatic Landscape, a 2023 volume edited by ethnomusicologists Jim Sykes and Julia Byl, comprises fourteen essays—ethnographic, ethnomusicological, and ethnohistorical—on musical production in eastern and southern Africa, the Gulf, Mauritius, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, the Andamans, colonial Rangoon, Sumatra, and Indonesia. The geographical scope of the project, the range of contributors, and the amount of fieldwork materials amassed make the volume a remarkable intervention in the field. Two of the contributors have also published monographs that expand on the themes of their chapters: Patrick Eisenlohr's 2018 Sounding Islam: Voice, Media, and Sonic Atmospheres in an Indian Ocean World, a sonic ethnography of Muslim devotional music (na't) in Mauritius, and Andrew Eisenberg's 2024 Sounds of Other Shores: The Musical Poetics of Identity on Kenya's Swahili Coast, a study of popular sung poetry (taarab) in the Swahili coast. Together, they demonstrate the promises as well as the pitfalls of the emerging scholarly approaches to music and communitarian identity in the Indian Ocean arena.The editors of Sounding the Indian Ocean begin their introduction by evoking a pair of towns in Tamil Nadu: Nagore, the node of a network of oceanic shrines associated with the Sufi saint Shahul Hamid, and Velankanni, the site of an apparition of the Virgin Mary worshipped by mariners. Both sites, the editors note, are—not unexpectedly—frequented by Hindus, Muslims, and Christians. “Yet, we need to be forthright here,” they declare; they do not intend to only study “syncretism,” which, they imply, has become something of a cliché in studies of the Indian Ocean. “We argue that a primary reason for studying Indian Ocean musical traditions is to understand how music can both constitute and cross communal boundaries” (3).4 The rest of the introduction makes a compelling case for ethnomusicologists to engage with the growing field of Indian Ocean studies. While the organizing logic of the volume is thematic (“Listeners,” “Mobilities,” “Mediascapes,” “Communities,” and “Connections”), the individual chapters are mostly confined to communities or specific interregional connections.The most sophisticated contributions to the volume address the east African coast and the Gulf. The study of early twentieth-century taarab in the Swahili coast (chapter 2, Andrew Eisenberg) brilliantly employs the categories of mimesis and hybridity to show the negotiation of boundaries between Swahili, Kenyan, and Yemeni identities. Moving southward, the tufo dance by women in Northern Mozambique (chapter 3, Ellen E. Hebden) is explored in relation to networks of Indian Ocean travel that have transformed the dance from its Sufi beginnings to a shared space across religious boundaries. Along similar lines, investigating the category of the “Cape Malay” community reveals the oceanic routes of Asian as well as European musical instruments of the Cape Town soundscape (chapter 9, Sylvia Bruinders and Valmont Layne). The early twenty-first-century Gulf cityscape emerges as an arena of Baloch musical production, reflecting the diversity and intersectionality in Baloch identity (chapter 5, George Mürer). A fascinating study of longue durée circulations of technologies, notably print and recording technologies, reveals unnoticed relations between the musical worlds of India and the Arab world (chapter 7, Gabriel Lavin).5Accounts of the islands of eastern Indian Ocean also focus on connectivity rather than isolation. The chapter on the Andamans (chapter 4, Carola Erica Lorea) focuses on the circulation of the devotional music of a Bengali Hindu low-caste group (the Matuas), refugees from East Pakistan, who were settled in the islands after the 1947 partition of India. A diverse collection of instruments—European, Indian, and Malay—are revealed to characterize the musical life of the tiny coral atolls, the Cocos (Keeling) Islands (chapter 12, David R. M. Irving). The Baila in Sri Lanka, for its part, is studied as a field of interactions (the “bailasphere”) between Portuguese Burgher and Sri Lankan music (chapter 13, Mahesh White-Radhakrishnan). A study of the religious life of Northern Sumatra between multiple religious communities is interspersed with theoretical questions on interpreting circulations of “Hindu-Buddhist” cultural traditions (chapter 11, Julia Byl). The chapter on the Islamic soundscape of Indonesia (specifically dakwah, strengthening the faith), for its part, highlights connections with West Asia (chapter 14, Anne K. Rasmussen). Each of these accounts emphasizes how islands have emerged as complex societies integrated with cultural and political-economic networks.The chapters on much of “mainland” South Asia and its labor diasporas, in contrast, are characterized by communitarian essentializations. To begin with, none of the major riverine and coastal cities of South Asia (Calcutta, Dhaka, Chittagong, Madras, Calicut, Goa, Bombay, Karachi), all featuring historic cosmopolitan soundscapes, are represented in the volume. The reason for this editorial omission is hard for me to fathom, given that cities of East Africa and the Gulf, even Jakarta and Singapore, receive sophisticated treatment. Among ports in the South Asian region, only Rangoon manages to secure a spot: The opening chapter studies a thirteen-page poem (1903) and a seven-page pamphlet (1896) on the city by Bengali Muslims (chapter 1, Richard Williams). Privileging the Muslim identity of the authors of these texts, the chapter notes some of the sounds of the city and even mentions a Parsi theater. But apart from a discussion of an 1893 Hindu-Muslim riot and warnings to Muslim men against marrying Burmese women, little is revealed about the social or sonic life of Indians in Burma. Other chapters on South Asian diasporas are also focused on hardening communitarian boundaries. Recitation of na't among Mauritian Muslims is shown to be a matter of religious authenticity in reformist Islam (chapter 6, Patrick Eisenlohr); Sikh kirtans in Kenya are studied without any reference to other communities in the country (chapter 8, Inderjit Kaur); and the essay on the Siddis of African descent, while showing some promise of connective perspectives, mostly summarizes extant works and makes a case for state recognition of the community (chapter 10, Brian Jackson).Sounding the Indian Ocean has ended up drawing, perhaps unintentionally, an analytical divide across the Indian Ocean interregional arena: The communitarian, if not isolationist, accounts of South Asia and its labor diasporas appear, on the whole, to be rather different in tone from the sophisticated accounts of cosmopolitanism and cultural exchange in East Africa, the Gulf, and the islands of the eastern Indian Ocean. This is a disappointment in an otherwise worthy project. The editors occasionally exhibit a degree of hostility to South Asian cosmopolitan intellectuals: They endorse the historian Nile Green's somewhat contrarian rejection of the portrayal of colonial Indian Ocean networks in the novels of Amitav Ghosh (15, 23n16);6 and Byl, for her part, indicts Tagore as a “Greater India” armchair ethnographer with regard to Southeast Asia, without demonstrating familiarity with the relevant sources (243).7 Elite cosmopolitanism merits critical treatment, but critiques that lapse into essentializations of caste and community achieve little. Revisions to elitist cosmopolitanism are better achieved by exploring accommodations of difference across different classes, as the chapters on Africa, the Gulf, and the islands demonstrate. A good deal of new work on regional cultures in South Asia—including Jim Sykes's own monograph on drumming in post-civil war Sri Lanka—has explored precisely such shared cultural spaces across communitarian boundaries.8 As far as South Asia is concerned, the volume would have been enriched by these new works on regional accommodations of difference. For South Asian diasporas in the Western Indian Ocean, on the other hand, it is worth delving deeper into diasporic communitarian identities on their own terms. Have oceanic connections, to wit, produced communitarian identities more essentialized in the diaspora than in South Asia itself?Patrick Eisenlohr argues that Hindu and Muslim diasporic communities in Mauritius have increasingly diverged into hardened communal categories over the twentieth century, even more starkly than parallel differences in South Asia. At a key moment in his monograph Sounding Islam, he recognizes that both communities, when they came as indentured laborers to Mauritius, had shared origins in the villages of the Bhojpur region in North India, and, as one would expect, had shared performance spaces like Ramayana recitations and Muharram processions. By the 1940s, however, reform movements like the Arya Samaj and ideologies linked to Deoband served to harden the divide between the two communities. “Seen in relative terms,” Eisenlohr notes, “reformist Hindu and Islamic movements were, at the time of partition, already more influential among Mauritians of Indian background than in India itself.” In the late twentieth century, Mauritian Hindus and Muslims claimed the two religions as different “ancestral cultures” to legitimize their identities. By the 1990s, the globalization of reformist Islam beckoned to Mauritian Muslims, according to Eisenlohr, because it promised to fulfill aspirations to break free of their laboring-class origins and benefit from the education, wealth, and status of being a part of a transnational Muslim elite (48–55).Eisenlohr has treated the divergent trajectories of the two communities in Mauritius in separate volumes. His 2007 book, Little India, analyzes linguistic and religious belonging among Hindus in Mauritius.9Sounding Islam continues this exploration for Muslims, but with a clearer focus on sound, and features insightful chapters on the role of sonic atmosphere and media, based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, as well as analysis of a wealth of archives in the form of pamphlets and CDs of na't recitation, mostly in Urdu. Creatively deploying the concept of “transduction,” referring to the transformation of energy between sound, emotions, and the body, he shows the role of devotional music in the consolidation of the Ahl-e Sunnat tradition in Mauritius (see especially chapters 5 and 6).To be sure, this focus on music and transduction is valuable: Studies of “devotional music” in Islam are typically associated with Sufism and other mystical dimensions of the faith, while modern reformist Islam is represented in a relationship of antagonism to music. Eisenlohr, however, shows that even “orthodox” movements like Ahl-e Sunnat rely on the sonic and bodily experiences of the na't. But here we confront an analytical problem. Should studies of music and other cultural forms accept and explain prevalent narratives of communitarian difference? Or can cultural forms be used as alternative sources to reveal exchanges and interactions that the more mundane social and political histories cannot? The narrative of communitarian difference and essentialization that Eisenlohr adopts has long been narrated independently of the na't performances. Yet he mostly uses his sources to confirm and explain the extant narrative, rather than searching for alternative social relationships using the music. Readers are left to wonder: Do Hindus and Muslims interact in cultural frameworks other than that of reformist Islam? Are non-Muslims involved in any stage of the production or circulation of na't? In other regions of South Asia, cultural sources have helped challenge essentialized narratives of communalization. To take one example, historians of modern Punjab tended to foreground social divisions between Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs, partly due to influence of early twentieth-century reformist movements.10 Farina Mir's 2011 study of the print culture of folktales and plays, however, opens up a way to understand how a shared social Punjabi linguistic space continued to thrive across communitarian boundaries.11 If such analytical innovations could be applied in Punjab, the province that witnessed the bloody partition along religious lines in 1947, there is no reason it cannot be attempted in the connected societies of the Indian Ocean area.12Andrew Eisenburg's recent monograph on taarab charts out a promising direction to break free of communal essentializations and explore the multiplicity of musical cultures made possible by oceanic circulations. Focusing on the performance of taarab from the 1930s to the early twenty-first century, Eisenberg shows how the history of the tradition went into the heart of the contradictions, ambiguities, and paradoxes of being Muslim and “Swahili” in the postcolonial Kenyan nation-state. Deploying relational analytics such as mimesis and appropriation, the story begins with the transformation of taarab into a modern, mass-produced form by Siti binti Saad in late 1920s Zanzibar (chapter 1) and proceeds to describe the role of radio performances in 1950s Mombasa in shaping a Swahili cultural identity in an age of ethnic territoriality (chapter 2). Eisenberg then analyzes the multiple cultural strands of taarab in the second half of the twentieth century: Indian taarab, with its share of comedians and clowns (chapter 3); Hadhrami Arab taarab in men's wedding celebrations (chapter 4); and the combination of Egyptian, southern Arabian, and African music in the work of the singer and oud performer Zein l'Abdin (chapter 5). The final chapters explore the decline of the genre, particularly due to the influence of Islamic reformism (chapter 6), and its recent revival in relation to hip-hop-oriented youth music (chapter 7).One of the most important aspects of Eisenberg's connective musicology is the refusal to shy away from questions of identity and community in the age of postcolonial nation-states. Far from using its cosmopolitan approach to ignore questions of community, the book never loses sight of the significance of a minority Muslim and Swahili identity in the postcolonial politics of Kenya. Yet it never reduces taarab performers to their ethnic or religious identities. Eisenberg's notion of “Swahili space” has enough flexibility: The Swahili-space schema posits Swahili ethnicity as a territory that individuals and communities dwell within or move into or out of. This harmonizes with lived experience on the Swahili coast, where being or becoming “Swahili” has always implied existing within or entering into the cultural and moral context of the Swahili town. . . . The Swahili-space schema captures not only the poetics of Swahili ethnicity but also its dynamics, serving as a vernacular sociological model. (15)Since Eisenberg at times over-relies on theoretical models, such as the works of Mikhail Bakhtin and Arjun Appadurai, to make his point, it is worth emphasizing that this notion of a dynamic Swahili space is born primarily out of lived experiences of social relations. Drawing on multiple musical traditions of the Western Indian Ocean has not made taarab practitioners any less Muslim or Swahili; if anything, a distinct communitarian identity, with multiple and competing cultural strands, has been strengthened by oceanic connections. In stark contrast to Eisenlohr's argument of oceanic circulations of devotional music aiding uniformization of Islam in Mauritius, Sounds of Other Shores places oceanic multiplicity at the core of Muslim Swahili identity.Connective cultural studies of the Indian Ocean will continue to grapple with this tension between uniformity and multiplicity. It is perhaps this tension that sets oceanic studies of culture apart from those of economic connections: Culture, particularly the notion of cultural authenticity in relation to national and transnational identity, poses specific analytical challenges in relation to processes of movement and exchange. Oceanic connections, on the one hand, may be interpreted to produce cross-regional uniformities by providing to cultural that aspirations as for the Mauritian Muslims for Eisenlohr, or for the for But the may also be on the other hand, as a context that communitarian identities and from other as we in the Swahili in the tufo in or even in the in Sri The tension between these two approaches has the to be long as we do not sounds of the Indian Ocean into between and or between cosmopolitanism and communalization. against the lived experiences and interactions of societies by oceanic connections. by different and the of the Indian Ocean arena have long their own while to the music of their