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Indian Ocean World

“Historians visualizing the Indian Ocean,” wrote the Sri Lankan academic Sinnappah Arasaratnam, “have been like the five blind men in the old Indian fable conceiving of an elephant by feeling different parts of its anatomy. They have come up with partial views of sections of the Ocean, or of the Ocean viewed from sections of bordering land or from the perceptions of different people who traversed the Ocean.”¹ But not the ocean as a whole. The Indian Ocean world stretches far beyond coastal areas—in other words, it is a region linked to, but not limited by, a body of water.

The ocean-as-world perspective is generally attributed to the French historian Fernand Braudel of the Annales school who used the Mediterranean Sea, not territorially bounded units such as kingdoms or principalities, as the framework for study. Similarly, the Indian Ocean world is a vast interconnected region, from interior Africa to the Middle East to China, whose boundaries have shifted in time and space as military, economic, and cultural empires have risen and fallen. It was built on commercial networks, including the slave trade, the movement of peoples and their cultural assimilation, and the spread of religions, particularly Hinduism and Islam. In his introduction to the essay collection Trade, Circulation, and Flow in the Indian Ocean World, Michael Pearson concludes that “ties and connections, elements of commonality, stretching all over the Indian Ocean” mean that “we can indeed write of an Indian Ocean World.” With the rise of India and China and competition for sea lanes, oil, and African minerals and markets, “the Indian Ocean world represents a strategic arena where the forces shaping a post-American world intersect most visibly.”² Foreign policy analyst Robert Kaplan describes the Indian Ocean as “the coming strategic arena of the twenty-first century.”³ The concept of an Indian Ocean world allows me to venture beyond coastlines and port cities to interior regions, linked to the ocean by rivers, colonial conquest, trade, migration, and culture.

MAP 2.1 The Indian Ocean world (map by Belén Marco Crespo)

What ties together four seemingly diverse countries—Madagascar, India, Bangladesh, and Indonesia—besides their proximity to the Indian Ocean and its historic trade and settlement routes?

First, there is the monsoon. It has different names and comes at different times, but it always comes. The monsoon determines when you plant and harvest, when and where you travel, even when you get married, have children, or bury your dead. It is both a curse and a blessing. It brings death and destruction yet provides the water vital to survival. In northeastern Madagascar, the cyclones of January and February sweep away bridges and roads and leave communities stranded; six months later, farmers harvest cash crops of cloves, lychees, and vanilla. In Bangladesh in 2017, the first rains came early (in April), ruining the first rice crop in several regions. When I returned in August, the waters of the Padma (Ganges), Jamuna (Brahmaputra), Meghna, and their tributaries had left northern regions under water, washed away roads, bridges, and railroads, and forced as many as eight million people to abandon their homes. Yet when the waters recede, they deposit the alluvial soil that makes Bangladesh one of the most agriculturally fertile countries in the world.

Second, each country is the creation of a colonial power—the British, French, or Dutch. Even Madagascar, which makes the most geographic sense because it’s an island, was formed only when one ethnic group subjugated others, a conquest that was administratively consolidated by the French. In the others, European powers cobbled together tribes, ethnic groups, and independent kingdoms (maharajahs, sultans, and emirs) into colonies where unity remained fragile. At independence, British India and the Dutch East Indies were sliced and diced, creating new fissures. Despite half a century of nation building, the boundaries drawn in the colonial era remain a challenge to unity and identity.

There are common threads to the national narratives of colonialism, and to a historical schizophrenia in which the colonizer is both resented as the agent of oppression and exploitation, and admired for transforming the economy, building infrastructure, expanding education, and establishing political institutions. As Shashi Tharoor, a former UN diplomat and Indian cabinet minister, notes: “Whether through national strength or civilizational weakness, India has long refused to hold any grudge against Britain for 200 years of imperial enslavement, plunder and exploitation.”⁴ This ambiguous relationship to the colonial past has shaped national development and public discourse. As my Malagasy colleague Richard Samuel puts it: “All actions by our government are taken in support of France. It’s neo-colonialism. More than half a century after we declared independence, we have still not achieved it.”

Third, all four countries face daunting environmental and climatic challenges—devastating floods, droughts, earthquakes, tsunamis, urban pollution, saline intrusion, deforestation, and desertification. The benefits of economic development—from mining to cash crops, from logging to tourism—come with social costs. Governments, foreign and domestic business interests, international agencies, environmental groups, and local communities are engaged in high-stakes conflicts over land, natural resources, and water. The technocrats who decided to address the Madagascar government’s budget deficit by leasing more than half the country’s agricultural land to a South Korean conglomerate did not consult with the people farming the land, let alone offer them any compensation. In the furor that followed, the government was overthrown in a coup.

Fourth is the movement of people. Internal and external migration are most often driven by economic factors: historically by the global and national slave trades and the transportation of indentured laborers to rubber and sugar cane plantations; today by economic opportunities, particularly in the Persian Gulf, where remittances from migrant workers support families and boost domestic GDP. Some migrations are caused by natural disasters or climatic shocks. Yet the most disruptive population movements are occasioned by war, civil conflict, or political change—interethnic conflict in Madagascar, the 1947 partition of British India, Bangladesh’s 1971 Liberation War, separatist movements and conflicts in regions of Indonesia.

Fifth is political change. Since achieving independence, and throughout the Cold War era, these countries have vacillated between autocracy and multiparty democracy, between state control of the economy and media and open markets and press freedom. Even in India, where political institutions are well established, strong leaders have emerged—Nehru and the Gandhi dynasty, and today, Narendra Modi. In other countries, where institutions are more fragile, the leaders of anticolonial resistance movements all too often became homegrown despots, amassing power and wealth for their families and associates and ruthlessly suppressing opposition, often with support from the West or the Soviet bloc.

Are We in Africa—or Asia?

It had been a long lunch at Ku-de-ta. Andrew and I decided to walk for an hour or so before returning to the hotel to try to figure out if we could rescue the UNICEF research project. We strolled to the ridge of the haute ville where a great stone staircase descends to the market area and looked west toward the hills and the rice paddies. Most of the people on the streets, with their dark brown skin color and straight black hair, were Asian in appearance. If it weren’t for the French-language signs, cobbled streets, and colonial-era architecture, we could have been in a hill town in Indonesia.

It was more than a millennium ago—somewhere in the Malay Archipelago, near where my journey ends—that a small group of people set sail in their outrigger canoes, heading west with the trade winds across the Indian Ocean and avoiding the monsoon. They stopped for water and supplies at harbors in the Bay of Bengal and Arabian Sea before sailing south and landing on a large island, previously uninhabited by humans. It’s a journey that took years, maybe even generations, with trade and intermarriage along the way. They were Madagascar’s first settlers.