BENGAL STUDIES
9 * 14 SEPTEMBER 2002
HEIDELBERG, GERMANY
Subaltern Networks in the Indian Ocean Region
"Subaltern Networks" in the Indian Ocean Region', seeks
to bring together original research on socio-economic, cultural, and
political aspects of 'subaltern networks' as well as on modes of communication
that were used for their establishment and maintenance. South Asia
was, in many cases, the hub of trans-regional network creation in
the Indian Ocean region. Social, cultural, and economic networks extended
over the whole of the Indian Ocean region, from Aden to Singapore,
even before colonial rule and were thoroughly transformed in the course
of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Historians who have studied
them have usually focused on mercantile networks while those that
were created by lower strata of the region's societies have generally
been neglected. A significant exception is, however, the growing and
stimulating corpus of studies on Indian indentured labourers, which
indicates the potentialities of such research. Yet it is rarely acknowledged
that a wide range of other social groups (including soldiers, sailors
and prostitutes of various ethnic backgrounds) were too, involved
in what could be called the creation of 'subaltern networks'. These
networks need to be understood as a double-edged phenomenon in terms
of power relations. On the one hand, they were an expression of a
colonial division of labour (and hence of subordination) on the other
they could be appropriated by the subordinated to remould their household
strategies and life styles (and thus as a means of socio-cultural
reassertion).
Our panel focuses on 'subaltern networks' in the colonial
period, which were created either by 'subalterns' of South Asian origin
or by those with nodal points of trans-regional networks located in
the Indian subcontinent. *
Please
contact the panel organizers:
Ravi
Ahuja (Centre of Modern Oriental Studies,
Berlin) and
Harald
Fischer-Tiné (Humboldt University,
Berlin).
E-mail: Ravi.Ahuja@t-online.de