Introduction

The historiography of colonial South Asia has witnessed important paradigm shifts in the past three decades. The turn away from elite historiography and the subsequent focus on marginal or lower class actors, led most prominently by the Marxist and Subaltern Studies schools in the 1980s, has been widely heralded and refined through internal critiques.1 While both these schools have robustly challenged the effect of nationalism on history writing, recent research in colonial studies has been animated by calls to think beyond the very category of the nation.2 Scholars recognize and critique the power of nation-state boundaries to structure both what is studied, and how it is approached. There is now a considerable wealth of research on transnational circuits of labour, capital and communication in the colonial period,3 as well as a growing criticism of the limits that state-bound archives impose on knowledge formation.4 Inspired by such currents, this volume brings together a set of chapters that present British colonialism in South Asia in a transnational light, with the Indian Ocean region as its ambit, and with a focus on subaltern groups and actors. The dominant optic for understanding colonial formations has been

dyadic, focused on the relationship between a metropole and a colony. Most authors associated with the otherwise quite innovative current of ‘new imperial history’ have not questioned the purportedly closed character of the imperial system, and have limited their analysis to the study of imperial core and colonial periphery.5 Yet colonial regimes themselves were sustained by networks of transportation and communication that exceeded the territorial units of the colonial and metropolitan states.6 Using a maritime optic allows us to view colonialism in broader, more dynamic terms. Indeed, if one takes seriously the role of maritime movement in shaping the history of this region, colonial political boundaries recede into the background. The Indian Ocean has been remarkable for its role in facilitating contact between the Arab world, East Africa, coastal India, the Malay world and Australia for millennia. As Pearson and Bose discuss, the Indian Ocean is one of the oldest and most striking spaces of cross-cultural interaction, in part as a result of how the monsoon winds have fostered contact between its various coasts. In the late colonial period, such mobility intensified with the advent

of steamships and the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, and more regular and predictable interaction between Europe and the Indian Ocean world occurred. People from a greater range of social groups began to travel these waters. It is this era that the present volume highlights; its chronological scope covers almost the entire period of British colonialism in India starting from the late eighteenth century, with a clear emphasis on the ‘high noon of the Raj’ in the second half of the nineteenth and the early years of the twentieth century. Studies of maritime mobility in the Indian Ocean have predominantly

focused on merchant networks and the movement of commodities.7 Our volume, by contrast, concentrates on the movement of subaltern groups. In using the term ‘subaltern’, we do not claim to be continuing the project of the Subaltern Studies Collective; some of our contributors, indeed, would strenuously resist such a label. The term ‘subaltern’ is, nonetheless, a useful descriptor of the social groups our authors discuss: underclasses who were problem populations in the official imagination. The chapters present the social milieus of poor Europeans, Australians and East Africans within South Asia, as well as Indian pauper pilgrims travelling abroad in the Hijaz and Indian seamen employed in the British merchant marine. This focus also departs from other scholarship on mobile subalterns in specific ways. When scholarly attention has been given to mobile underclasses, it has been for the most part to indentured or enslaved labour in colonial plantations, mines and factories.8 The circumstances of such itinerant figures as sailors, soldiers, prostitutes, escaped convicts, or pilgrims have been relatively less studied.9

The present chapters focus on subjects for whom moving between port cities was a regular activity, and who thus travelled between India, Australia, Ceylon, Kenya, and the Arabic peninsula. Some of them travelled constantly, as in the case of seamen or brothel workers in Bombay and Calcutta, while others went on pilgrimage to fulfil their religious duty or were transported during wars, such as military personnel recruited in East Africa and stationed in Ceylon. Such groups often passed through port cities or they constituted a specific and permanent stratum of the inhabitants of these cities. Port cities, the bridgeheads of mercantile imperialism, thus form the setting of many of our studies.10