Panel
2. From Oceanic Crossroads: Empires, Networks and Histories
Scholars have long fashioned the Bay of Bengal as a space of human crossings and creole belongings. This rich and nuanced literature has mapped its history in mobile, itinerant, connected, circulatory, and diasporic terms while crafting, too, innovative ways of figuring identity, community, and region. Yet in the process, this important scholarship has inadvertently reinforced the idea that seas and other bodies of water are mere infrastructures, thereby rendering the Bay less as a biological place and more as a “[basin] born of movement”: metaphorically visible but materially absent (Braudel 1972, II:168). It has been flattened in the language of Fernand Braudel’s “magnetic grid” rather than storied in the spirit of Rachel Carson’s “sea trilogy.”
Following Carson, this paper charts a different kind of story. It recovers the Bay not as a zone of cultural circulation but as a site of knowledge production, centering a history of ichthyology in and out of Madras. Through the lives of hilsa (Tenualosa ilisha Hamilton, 1822) and B. Sundara Raj (1888-1974, the first local director of the Madras fisheries bureau), among other threads, the essay explores a history from below while narrating, too, a story about the ways in which the Bay became biological, vulnerable, and mortal in the span of century (1850s-1950s). The paper sheds light on why this onto-epistemological change mattered in scientific and somatic terms and, in doing so, it suggests how following fish—as method—can reveal new ways of knowing and writing about the “ocean” in Indian Ocean history.
Anthony D. Medrano
Yale-NUS College, Singapore