ABSTRACT
Historians have viewed the monsoon as bringing unity to the Indian Ocean as it enabled the movement of wooden sailing vessels, or dhows, that transported goods and people across the littoral. These days, contemporary dhows from the Gulf of Kachchh in western India traverse old routes across the Indian Ocean. These vahans are mechanized and no longer depend on the wind for movement. Yet, a monsoon temporality continues to undergird quotidian social life, rituals, labor, debt, and kinship relations for dhow sailors, dhow owners, and their families in Kachchh. Based on ethnographic research on board dhows and in the homes of sailors, I examine how a monsoonal temporality and relationality enable mobility across the Indian Ocean, drawing it into a networked space. I argue that this transregional monsoonal relationality comes into being not only through the physical movement of sailors, all of whom are men, but also the women who do not move with them, their capital, and phatic labor enabling mobility. By looking at the dhow and the home together, I show how this monsoonal relationality depends on both mobility as well as stasis, that defines the lives of those who leave, and those who stay across the Indian Ocean littoral.
