Was It India146;s Ocean?

Sugata Bose makes a compelling case that the memory, culture and history of the peoples of the Indian Ocean will provide a basis for a sensible conception of the region8217;s future

THE PHRASE 8220;ADEN TO MALACCA8221; has for long summed up India8217;s strategic ambi-tions in the Indian Ocean. The search for primacy, however, has been an elusive one for New Delhi, at least until recently.

India8217;s inward-looking economic policies and its emphasis on non-alignment in the first decades after Independence disrupted the na-tion8217;s traditional economic, political and secu-rity linkages with regions to its west and east in the Indian Ocean. Thanks to economic liberal-isation and the more open-ended security policies since 1991, India8217;s weight in the affairs of Indian Ocean has begun to grow rapidly.

India8217;s aircraft carrier showed up for the first time in Southeast Asian waters last year. Indian Navy provided sea-front security to an African Union summit in Mozambique a couple of years ago. India is also negotiating free trade agreements with different regions of the Indian Ocean littoral. Companies are snapping up oil and mineral assets in the neighbourhood.

The ambitious scope and compelling ar-gument of Sugata Bose8217;s thesis at once under-lines the centrality of India in the Indian Ocean space and the dangers of a too nar-rowly conceived quest for primacy. Bose, who teaches history at Harvard University, offers a range of rare insights that challenge many traditional assumptions about this fascinat-ing part of the world.

For one, he questions the belief that the tra-ditional forces of trans-regional interaction in the Indian Ocean were disrupted by the entry of colonialism in the second half of the 18th century. He walks us through a vibrant phase of globalisation in the Indian Ocean during the 18th, 19th and early decades of the 20th cen- turies. We get to meet traders and labourers, soldiers and poets who reveal the extraordi-nary horizontal linkages across the Indian Ocean region during the colonial period.

While Bose does not underestimate the im-portance of the metropolitan colonial force in the Ocean, he carves out in bold relief the eme-rgence of independent trends8212;from the realm of commerce to that of big political ideas.

On the security front too, developments in the region were not always driven along the longitudinal axis of metropolitan interests in the colonised Indian Ocean. Many of Lord Cur-zon8217;s security policies unveiled from Kolkata, Bose suggests, were developed along a longitu-dinal axis that highlighted 8220;India-specific8221; in-terests of British power in the region.

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Bose reconstructs the latitudinal linkages across the Indian Ocean8212;whether it is the larger story of the 30 million Indians who trav-elled abroad from 1830 to 1930 or the specific account of Nattukottai Chettiars from Madras who financed the cultivation of rice in Burma and rubber in Malaya.

Bose also shuns the dominant historical perspective that focuses on the confrontation between empire and territorial nationalism. He argues that 8220;extra-territorial and universal-ist anti-colonialism8221; had 8220;co-existed and con-tended with territorial nationalism8221; amidst the political stirrings of the Indian Ocean littoral during the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Weaving in the Muslim notions of universal-ism, Tagore8217;s deep faith in cosmopolitan hu-manism and many streams of diasporic patrio-tism, he develops his thesis on the political development of the Indian Ocean region. Realists might be skeptical of Bose8217;s hopes for 8220;a new cosmopolitanism in a post colonial context8221; and his insistence that the memory and history of the peoples of the Indian Ocean will provide a basis for a sensible conception of the region8217;s future.