Textual Cultures of the Indian Ocean World

Roundtable Convenor(s)

• MK

  Mahmood Kooria

  University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Roundtable Chair(s)

• MK

  Mahmood Kooria

  University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Roundtable Participant(s)

• AB

  Anne Bang

  University of Bergen, Norway
• RM

  Raphael Michaeli

  University of Bergen, Norway
• RR

  Ronit Ricci

  Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
• IU

  Ihsan Ul-Ihthisam

  University of Chicago, United States
• AJ

  Abdul Jaleel PKM

  National University of Singapore (NUS), Singapore
• AG

  Annabel Teh Gallop

  British Library, United Kingdom
• SC

  Salih Cholakkalakath

  New York University, United States
• AR

  Anne Regourd

  French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), France

Roundtable Abstract:

Thanks to several digitalization projects in the last two decades, a large number of manuscripts and printed books from across the Indian Ocean littoral have become widely available in the public domain. Most of these materials provide enormous resources to explore the past and present of diverse communities in maritime Asia and Africa on their own terms, and they address the age-old complaint that the Afrasian regions lack indigenous historical sources and the long-existing justification for depending heavily on European colonial archives to write about them. The newly available collections thus have immense potential to change the way we approach Africa, Asia, and the Indian Ocean that connects them, especially if we analyze them from comparative and connected perspectives. Scholars are yet to take any large-scale steps in this direction and to assess their implications across a broad spectrum. This roundtable takes an initial step to bring together specialists from diverse disciplinary, regional, and linguistic backgrounds to think collectively about potential collaborations for studying these collections.

As the Indian Ocean world was the most important transcontinental highway, a large number of people and communities moved across its shores. In their journeys, many of them carried diverse ideas and texts, which, in turn, influenced the scholarly and literary milieus in the places where they arrived or settled. These exchanges contributed to both local and broader intellectual spheres, and the materials from the region provide compelling evidence of such cultural and literary developments. Due to these interactions across different ends of the ocean, there are many similarities and differences in the corpora. One major similarity is the significance of Islam and Arabic, which connected diverse maritime communities from Canton to Cape Town. They reflect a universal vocabulary adopted from Middle Eastern circles, but the Indian Ocean communities also developed their own textual cultures while vernacularizing their religion through commentaries, translations, and genres. Closer investigations into these textual cultures would enlighten us about the nuanced engagements of the oceanic communities in their selections of literary genres, scribal methods, codicological features and intellectual orientations.

This roundtable explores these areas to identify common themes and develop a broader framework for studying materials that were previously inaccessible to earlier generations of scholars. With input from South and Southeast Asian and East and South African contexts and experiences, we can consider how to proceed further and what we can accomplish together exploring the Indian Ocean textual cultures.