ABSTRACT
The Indian Ocean has been called the “ocean of the South,” as well as the “ocean of the future.” It is largely conceived as a sociopolitical space, with its long history of monsoon-enabled South–South connections, between Africa, South Asia and the Arab world. Ships traverse its surfaces, carrying the people and goods whose journeys mark a particular supra-national and sub-global political arena, constituting a distinctive oceanic world that gives shape and content to the formation of the Global South. However, particularly in a time of warming seas and changing monsoons, what also needs attention are the ways in which the ocean itself is represented. This chapter proposes a submersive method of reading, going below the sea surface to take account of three-dimensional oceanic space. It explores three stories of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Indian Ocean connection in relation to the undersea, placing stranger-than-fiction events of the deep Indian Ocean in conversation with fictions of strangeness. In the first story, deepsea fisheries centered on underwater mountains mediate the discovery of new species of large-eyed sharks; in the second, deep ocean science and mining configure new interrelationships among the old Indian Ocean networks involving India, China and East Africa; and the third reads J.M. Ledgard's novel Submergence for its linking of marine biology to conflict around Indian Ocean shores.
