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Nidhi Mahajan, "Moorings: Voyages of Capital across the Indian Ocean" (U of California Press, 2025)
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Dr. Nidhi Mahajan
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Regan Gillum
Hello, everyone, and welcome to New Books and Anthropology, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. I'm your host, Regan Gillum, and today I'm talking to Dr. Nidhi Mahajan, who is the author of the book Voyages of Capital across the Indian Ocean, published by the University of California Press. And I'm excited to welcome my fellow Cornelian to the podcast. Welcome to the podcast, Dr. Mahajan.
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Dr. Nidhi Mahajan
Thank you so much, Reagan. It's such a pleasure to be here, and it's so wonderful to see you.
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Regan Gillum
Yeah, it's great to see you, too after all these years. And I'm really excited to dive into your book. As I was saying to you before we started, now I get to see what you've been up to all those years, and so I'm just delighted that it's come out. So, before we start to talk about the book, and so in the book, of course, you focus on dhows, which are small boats that ship goods across the Indian Ocean. But before we get into that, I wanted to ask you to tell us about yourself and how you came to write the book Moorings.
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Dr. Nidhi Mahajan
Thank you. That's actually one of my favorite questions because it allows me to think about the broader trajectory of this. And, you know, when I first began my doctoral dissertation research at Cornell in 2007, I really wanted to examine contemporary connections between South Asia and East Africa. And this interest was fostered both intellectually as well as through early childhood travel with family to Kenya, as well as courses I took as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan that gave me a kind of historical context as to why I, as someone who was born and raised in Bombay in India, felt immediately at home in Kenya, even as a child and given the long histories of mobility between these two littorals or coastal areas. When I was a PhD student in anthropology, I was really interested in examining the shape of these connections in the contemporary moment and how Indian Ocean trade continued in the margins of states through small scale traders. And this, of course, has a lot to do with the city of Bombay where I grew up, where I always knew people who had been to Kenya for work or had family in Kenya. But then was also kind of bolstered by this intellectual interest through reading as an undergraduate and then as a graduate student. And of course, the guidance of mentors such as our common dissertation advisor, Viranjani Munasinge, Eric Taglikotso, Fouad Maki, Ann Blackburn, Saida Hodzig, as well as Prita Meyer, who were all at Cornell at the time, were really pivotal for thinking about South Asia, East Africa and the Indian Ocean world and really opening up, you know, what it means to think of global South Asia. And I was very lucky that at Cornell, even though many of these folks did not work on East Africa. Preetha Meyer, who's now at nyu, she's an art historian, she was a postdoc at Cornell at the time and had done extensive work on the Swahili coast and was teaching a class on African port cities, which felt really fortuitous in terms of my own work. And she really opened pathways to doing research in Kenya for me. Professor Ali Mazrooi was also at Cornell at the time, and he's from Mombasa, and he was very generous in kind of helping me getting my footing there. And intellectually at the time, I was very aware of the long history of the illegalization of daos, these country crafts on the Swahili coast, especially through the work of historians like Abdul Sharif, Eric Gilbert, and then much later, Johann Matthew. But at the time, as a student, I had no sense of the structure or scale of the trade in the present. But what I did know is that I wanted to travel and live in Kenya for research. And part of this was because I was interested in seeing Indian Ocean connections not from South Asia, which has often been treated as a center for these histories, but really from East Africa, especially port cities such as Mombasa and Lamu that have been viewed as kind of more peripheral to structuring Indian Ocean systems of trade and commerce. And at the time, I knew that Vahans, which are the type of mechanized sea sailing vessel or dhow, from Kutch that the book is about, I knew that these vahans still visited East Africa, But I really did not know how to enter this world. When I arrived in Mombasa in 2011 to do long term fieldwork, it just so happened that a dhow from Mandvi in Kutch had docked at Mombasa's old port. And my host in Mombasa, Mohammed M. Chula, who is an archaeologist, insisted that I should interview the sailors. And this involved getting, like, a research permit from the Kenya Port Authority to be able to access the port. And when I did access the port and met the sailors, they were really surprised to see me as I was them. You know, there was this, like, instant moment of recognition that, what are we doing here in Mombasa in the space of the port? And these sailors really welcomed me on board as they were very curious about a young woman from India working in Mombasa. And the captain of the vessel, who was, you know, from the Badala community, from Mandvi, and I call him Yusuf. In the book. Him and the rest of the crew really saw me as a naive young girl in need of protection and took me under their wing. And despite differences of class, caste, and gender, we really became fast friends as they invited me to spend afternoons eating lunch with them on board. We were also all new to Mombasa and were really struggling to kind of find a foothold in the city. So their hospitality, our shared homesickness and unfamiliarity with Mombasa really created a bond that transformed over time into friendship and patronage. And in the book, I talk about both hospitality and patronage as key kind of conceptual moorings for thinking about how this trade works. And this kind of hospitality that they offered me was also something that they offered to other types of strangers, whether it was government officials, merchants, or then anthropologists such as myself. Patronage, too, was a familiar form in which labor in the Dao trade is structured. But all of this to say that this initial encounter on board a Dao from Manvi in Mombasa completely altered the course of my research as well as my interests. Yusuf became a really key interlocutor for me as my research focus changed to the contemporary Vahan trade or became more focused on the contemporary Vahan trade. I spent many months kind of floundering in Mombasa, interviewing merchants, sailors, just trying to figure out the landscape of the city. But upon meeting Yousef, he insisted that to understand the Bahan trade, I would have to be as mobile and itinerant as the Bahan itself cells and become moored and unmoored in different port cities. He was the one who suggested that I interview dhow owners, such as his seat, that's the term for the dhow owner in Bombay, which is where I'm from, that I visit his family, as well as Sufi shrines in Mandvi and Jamsalaya, and also try and understand how policies and ports in India, especially the ports of Mundra and Tuna, functioned and then compare these to Dao ports of Sharjah and Dubai in the uae, as well as their connections to Somalia. So my early interest, right. Forged through this undergraduate training, graduate work, but also this encounter with the Dao in Mombasa really reshaped my interests and forged a whole new voyage across the Indian Ocean. And once the dissertation was done, I mean, the dissertation really focused on this East Africa, South Asia connection, as well as questions of sovereignty and insecurity on the coast of East Africa. But beyond that, I came to do years of fieldwork in India, the uae, Kenya, the uk, Oman, and all of that was funded through fellowships from the SSRC as well as the Africa Institute in Sharjah, where I was for two years during the pandemic. And of course, across all of these ports, different people were key to making the book possible. Possible. And, you know, I talk about this at length in the. In the acknowledgments, but really it was Yousef, or the person I call Yusuf in the book, who helped me kind of re. Envision what this project is, especially as I came to follow him and his family across these ports. I'll stop there.
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Regan Gillum
This is. That's great. This is. That was fascinating. And it, you know, I read the book, but then it helps me kind of react. Review the book in different ways, too, because obviously I read about Yusuf and you talk in the book a little bit about how you had begun thinking about the book historically, but then you moved into the contemporary. So I think it's really helpful to hear about how these projects morph and Change. Because so many of us, when we start out, the project that we have in the book is not the project that we began with. And so I wanted to start, I guess, with a context for the book. And so in the book, you follow these, as you said, these dao, or these itinerant seafaring communities that sail across the Indian Ocean to and from different ports. But I think that probably most listeners would probably not be familiar with this world. And so I wondered if you could ground us in this context. And so, you know, what are these dhows or vahans? Those are the names of the boats. Like, who are the sailors, as you just talked about meeting them? Where are the boats going? What are they delivering? Just if you could orient us to. To this, like, seafaring life that you examined.
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Dr. Nidhi Mahajan
Thank you. Yeah. I mean, you know, the label dao, it's kind of a misnomer, but at the same time, it's come to mean or come to encompass a really diverse range of wooden sailing vessels, all of which had a collective purpose, which was to carry goods, people, and ideas across the Indian Ocean. And they, of course, have this longer history. Long before European voyages to the Indian Ocean, dhows and their crews made the Indian Ocean a space that has come to be known as the cradle of globalization. And these vessels that are really of many different types were powered by the monsoon winds, right? Because they ran on a sail, on a Latin sail and capitalized on predictable cycles of the monsoon to connect East Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and South Asia across vast stretches of sea. But the term dao itself, or the label, is not a stable category, right. For me and for others who have worked on it, such as Johann Matthew, it is less a technical term and more an abstract concept that falls into the category of what Johann Matthew has called you. You know it when you see it, right? And the term really emerged from an Orientalist colonial discourse and was used by the British in the 19th century to refer to a variety of sailing vessels in the Indian Ocean. And while the term itself is derived from the Swahili term dao, right, which is. Which was used to refer to specific vessels from the region, the British popularized the term as they sought to control the slave trade off the East African coast in the 19th century. And while they were doing this or came to use the term dao, they really sought to define it, right? So in sort of documents around what a dao is, right, The British kind of try and document its form, including the use of a Latin sail, that it's made purely of Wood with older versions sewn together with coir. Rather than being constructed using nails. But really, the dao as a concept has most clearly been defined in opposition to European vessels. The British colonial officials, who were trying to categorize it. In order to control its mobility. Simultaneously flattened the category of the dao While attempting to define it. And all of this was in service of tightly regulating its form and its movement. But seafaring communities across the Indian Ocean. Rarely use the term. And instead refer to specific vessels. Defined by the shape of the stern, the stem, and the hull. And there are many such examples. Such as the Arab Bagala, the Boom, the Sambuk, the Indian Kotia, and Ganja. Coastal vessels like the East African Mashua, Tepe, and so on. Right. But in their attempt to classify these different vessels, the British tried to decipher differences Based on size and shape. But ultimately, by the 1940s, came to legally classify all dhows, or what they called native vessels, as those that had. That were basically manned by native crew and were of native build, Quote, unquote. Right. So in many ways, the dhow became a kind of racialized metonym. For non European seafarers and traders across the Indian Ocean. And, of course, now the term has been widely used in both English and Arabic. As shorthand for boats from the region. And continue to be legally classified. Through their non European Indian Ocean origins In India, they're also known as country crafts. And I use the term dao specifically to refer to the kativahans. Right. The particular type of dhow I work with. And other types of Indian Ocean vessels. In order to highlight how these classificatory systems. Produce real effects. As they shape government attempts to control mobility at sea. And to just give you a sense of what these vahans do, where they come from, who these sailors are, these kutchi vahans. And the term vahan actually just means vehicle. In both kutchi and in Hindi, Urdu. These vahans are mechanized, so they don't use the sail. And they actually run on secondhand generators from container ships. So they're dependent on diesel, actually, in order to move. And they have really found a niche. In servicing minor ports in times of conflict. Right. The Indian Ocean is also kind of a space where, you know, places like Yemen, Somalia, the Persian Gulf. Right. All of this is in the Indian Ocean. So the Indian Ocean has also been a place of conflict. And these dhows basically operate in spaces. Where container ships cannot go. So vahants from Mandvi, Jamsalaya, and other small ports in Gujarat, as well as what are known as launches from Pakistan, Oman, Iran as well as the UAE continue to carry foodstuffs, even food aid for the UN diesel, electronic goods, dates, and even cars and household goods like washing machines, to minor ports across India, the uae, Oman, Kenya, Somalia, Kenya, as well as other countries in the Gulf. Bahrain used to be a major center, Iraq as well. So it all just depends on what's going on politically. And they've come to become, I mean, they've become crucial intermediaries in global shipping because they are incredibly mobile and flexible and can dock in spaces where, you know, the infrastructure for docking large container ports does not exist, or in places where container ships can't go because of the cost of insurance or because of war and conflict as well as sanctions. So for me, the Dao is also an epistemic for form. Right. And the book really takes a view from the Dao from the perspective of these sailors who voyage across land and sea. And I can talk a little bit more about what I mean by this view from the Dao, but just to give you some background about the sailors, the sailors I worked with were largely from two Muslim communities known as the Badalas and the Waghirs. And they're from two very specific towns, from the port towns of Mota Salaya in Mandvi and Jamsalaya. And both of these towns are on the Gulf of Kutch in western India. And they tend to be pretty endogamous. And seafaring has defined caste identity for both of these groups. Battalas were known to be seafarers and fishermen. Wagyars were also associated with piracy in that region, especially in the colonial period in the 18th and 19th centuries, but also much longer than that. And today they're classified as other backward classes in India or OBC in India. So contending with their marginality produced by caste and religious difference in India, they voyage out to sea, capturing profits across the Indian Ocean, especially kind of operating in spaces where sovereignty and jurisdiction are unsettled and they leave home only to return to their families in Mandvi and Jamsalaya, gendered forms of labor enabling their mobility. So today, even as we see, you know, a rise of Islamophobia, Hindutva in India and rising authoritarianism, these sailors, who are already kind of caste, are already cast, oppressed, see no other alternatives than to voyage across the street sea to allow for the accumulation of capital amidst the perils of geopolitical contests, climate change, as well as economic transformations. Yeah, so that's the kind of background, but I'm happy to return to the question of Dao, the view from the dao as an epistemic form as well.
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Regan Gillum
Great. So I might ask about that a bit later.
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Dr. Nidhi Mahajan
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Regan Gillum
So the book is of course called Moorings, and you write that moorings as an analytic refers to material and social practices deeply rooted in the social worlds of these seafaring communities and the larger political, economic context in which they sail. And I took that quote from you on page 23. And so I wondered, how did you come up with this idea of moorings? And can you talk about this analytic and just introduce us to some of the larger arguments in the book?
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Dr. Nidhi Mahajan
Thank you. Well, so actually the idea of moorings, it came from having spent so much time in ports that are technically, you know, moorings for, for this trade. But also in, in the dissertation I was really trying to think about questions around security because at the time Kenya had gone to war in southern Somalia, had had a military incursion into southern Somalia. And at the time there were all of these questions around, you know, securitizing the Kenyan coast, and dhows were at the center of this, but that also has a much longer history in terms of thinking about also the post 911 moment when media reports were constantly talking about how these daos are run by Muslims in the Indian Ocean, and they can easily be used to smuggle goods and weapons and people across the Indian Ocean. So I was really trying to think through what this discourse around security and the dao does. And the term mooring came about as one way to think about links to land, but also thinking about security, like what actually ties a boat down without using language that is sort of used by the state. And funnily enough, I mean, the idea came to me and this is where this is how I think the name of a bar that was in the same creek that the dao ports would dock was called Moorings. And it was literally just down the dock. And it somehow just stuck in my head that this is one form in which one can think about the space at which a dhow docks. Right? So I was really interested in thinking about these security issues. But simultaneously, as my work shifted and changed, I really came to understand a mooring as a place, a thing, a practice, as well as an action by which an otherwise floating, mobile vessel might be attached to land until it is unmoored and set sail once again, only to be moored elsewhere. So one can think of a mooring as a pile of wood or some kind of permanent structure to which a vessel is secured. It can also include ropes, chains, anchors, buoys, jetties. So these very material things that attach a vessel temporarily to land. And the temporarily part is important. The mooring always implies both past and future movements. Right? Every successful voyage has to begin and end on land. The voyage and life at sea for a sailor inextricably linked to the vessel being moored and unmoored in different port cities as they contend with multiple regulatory regimes. So it's through this kind of interplay between voyaging and mooring across different polities that profits can be made in the trade. So that's the kind of literal idea of what. What the mooring does, but also, right, this relationality between the voyage, which is also another concept that is at the center of the book, especially the kakchi concept of the voyage, or the ghosh, which marks a kind of unit of circulation of capital for these sailors and traders. It also is an itinerary across different sovereign forms and regulatory mechanisms. But it's the voyage is contingent upon the possibility of a mooring. And for me, the mooring became a kind of way to articulate material and social practices across different ports, as well as the kind of physical, sort of the spatial form of the mooring. Right. So part of this included, like, the places at which these ships. More Right. This can be the old port of Mombasa, the uae, especially ports like Dubai and Sharjah. So really, the idea of mooring became a way to talk about multiple things at the same time, but also think about this relationship between the interplay between moorings and voyages. And by taking this view from the dao and focusing on the relationality between the interplay between moorings and voyages, I really wanted to talk about more largely the relationality between capital and sovereignty. So by examining itineraries and imaginaries in the Bahan trade to show how Indian Ocean connections persist as daos continue to move between nation states and extract profit and value through differences in jurisdiction, geopolitical conditions, and weather, this interplay between moorings and voyages really helps articulate the shifting ways in which these relationships can come to fore, essentially. And, of course, like voyages, moorings to me, are not fixed and can shift and change. And so the book is organized as a series of voyages across multiple moorings that are conceptual, spatial, as well as grounded and sedimented social practices. So I talk about hospitality in the port of Mombasa. Hospitality is the conceptual mooring. Mombasa is the physical mooring. Shadow economies across India and Somalia, geopolitical arbitrage through ports in the Persian Gulf, divine sovereignty and the relationship between the moving dao and its attachment to Sufi shrines on land in Kutch, as well as patronage, gender, and kinship in the home in Kutch. So moorings and voyages also helped me kind of bring together these very different places as well as practices that, you know, when I was kind of conceptualizing what holds it all together, the actual kind of physical movement of the dao through this mooring and the voyage became central in terms of using it as a metaphor for what was happening in terms of thinking about the relationship between capitalism and sovereignty, if that makes sense.
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Regan Gillum
Yes, makes perfect sense. And it takes me to my next question. So you mentioned this, that in the book, you're also including in your arguments these ideas about sovereignty and capital. And, of course, capital is in the title, Voyages of Capital across the Indian Ocean. And so the next question kind of picks up where you left off, which is about this idea of hospitality. And so that's in chapter one, you present these scenes of hospitality with sailors on dhows and ports. And I particularly like this opening chapter because you can also see you on the Dhows having meals and, like, tea and whatnot with the sailors, right? And you see people kind of circulating in these ports. And so what does hospitality entail? And how does it smooth these tensions then between sovereigns?
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Dr. Nidhi Mahajan
Thank you. Yeah. So, you know, when I arrived in Mombasa and did work with these sailors, the thing that was simultaneously apparent to me at the time and then also not was this hospitality, right? Hospitality, like me sitting there and eating meals on board the dhow, drinking tea with the sailors. That was really the entry point into this world. And initially in the dissertation, I did not use hospitality as an analytic. But then reading the work of people like Jatindua, who has written about hospitality on daos in the context of piracy in Somalia, as well as other work on kind of boundary making and borders, really brought to the fore how hospitality becomes a way to negotiate between multiple sovereigns. So in reframing this chapter, right. That was based on my initial fieldwork in Mombasa, I really became interested in how sort of sailors arrive in a new port. Right? Arrival in a new port necessitates making connections. These are logistical, personal, operational, and governmental. And many of these connections are incredibly fragile and tentative, and they need to be tended to to ensure safe and profitable stay in port. So one imagines that the voyage is the place of risk and danger. But arrival in a new port can also be unsettling. So how do these sailors actually kind of arrive in an unfamiliar port city and come to do business? Right. And how do they actually interact with the multiplicity of actors who are in the port? And ports are, of course, places of encounter, right. The sailors are encountering anthropologists such as myself, government officials of different kind of backgrounds, merchants of different backgrounds, shipping agents. And how are they negotiating between these multiple actors? And for them in the port, I mean, these sailors live on board the dhow all the time, right? They're not like, leaving the vessel and going and staying in a hotel. The dhow really becomes the home of sailors and becomes a kind of mooring or a stable space, space in an unfamiliar port, and is also a place of hospitality where these encounters between guests and hosts forged new relationalities and made possible the business of daos. Right? So, for instance, for me, the dao was the space in which I could have these conversations with sailors, especially over lunch or tea. It was also a place where they were constantly feeding other people who would show up at mealtimes in port, whether it was Somali merchants, Hadrami or Swahili shipping agents, government officials, right? And in Many ways, this kind of hospitality, this kind of commensality on board the Dao is not a new form of making encounters possible. So Jatindua has written about how hospitality and kind of the sharing of food made possible a certain kind of relationship between pirates who would hijack dhows off the coast of Somalia as motherships to be able to get to bigger container ships. And he uses. And many others have also kind of cited the work of, you know, Ibn Battuta, who left this voyager in the 14th century, who left this account of his voyages in the Indian Ocean, who talked about how off the coast of Somalia, when a dhow would dock in Somalia, they would be met by plates of food, right, from local merchants, and whoever's food you accepted became your kind of protector on the shore and therefore was the person that you did business with, right? So Jatindua has written about this kind of hospitality as a form of protection. And for me, in Mombasa, I saw something slightly different where this hospitality became a kind of way to think about the different layers of sovereignty at play. Right? On the one hand, you have the captain of the ship who is a nakoda, right? That's the term that's used, and that literally means little God who guides a ship. So on board the vessel, the captain of the vessel is the sovereign, but then he is also subject to other kinds of sovereign forms, right? Whether it's the rules and regulations of the nation that he comes from, the nation that the ship is flagged in, or the nation that he's docked in, right? So then you have the street level bureaucrat who becomes the face of the state in the context of a port like Mombasa. You also have shipping agents and brokers who kind of make business happen in the port and act as kind of unofficial sovereigns in that space. So there's all of these layers where each of these actors is trying to kind of assert their own sovereign authority. And I mean, folks like, you know, in the literature on hospitality, much of this is about sovereignty. It is. Hospitality is about protection, but it is also a type of war as anthropologists have understood it. So for me, in doing this work, I think hospitality became a way to think about the encounter in port, but also a way to upend ideas of the guest and host, right? We assume in sort of narratives around hospitality that the notion of the guest and the notion of the host is fixed. And we see this even in kind of literature on migration, on migration debates in Europe and other places where the idea is that the Person visiting or the person migrating is the guest and the accepting country is the host. But what if we were to think about this differently, where the category of the guest and the host are not stable categories in and of themselves that they actually have to be made? So in that chapter, I really tried to think about the history of connection between East Africa and South Asia and talk about how sailors arriving in Mombasa in 2011 could never really be simply guests in East Africa because they had this longer shared history. So their role as guests was always up in question because they also acted as hosts in the site of the old port because they were feeding all of these people. And so in thinking about hospitality, I really wanted to undo this fixed idea of the guest and host and see what happens when you take away or not take away, but undo those aspects, stable categories, and actually see them as a constant negotiation between multiple actors who have a kind of different relationship to the. To the space, but are sovereigns in their own right. Yeah, I'll stop there.
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Regan Gillum
Yeah, thank you. That was a great, great description of that chapter. And I liked how hospitality, how you, of course, it's the first chapter, and then so you also welcome the reader into the, into the book and into the world of the dao. And as you just described the structure of the book in the previous answer, it also gives me, like, a larger frame to see how you also, like, structure the different chapters. And so, as you mentioned, this, too, the dhows are these small boats, and that enables them to maneuver in and out of these ports. And so they seem quite nimble, I guess, as they're able to move around the ocean, the Indian Ocean, which like larger boats and as you said, container shippers would not be able to manage. And you have this idea in the book called geopolitical arbitrage, and it's how the boats generate profits. And that seemed like a really important idea that you're putting forward and elaborating in the book. So I wondered if you could talk about that idea of geopolitical arbitrage as the daos are moving about the Indian Ocean.
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Dr. Nidhi Mahajan
Thank you. Yeah, I mean, I think you really capture, you know, in your question that these smaller boats are able to maneuver challenges and conditions that larger boats may not be able to manage. And part of that is because, not just because of their size, but also because they are, you know, following a different set of logics, right. Where they're going to places, they're tramp shippers, which means that they do not have a set itinerary. You know, it's not like a bus route, for instance, that, you know, picks up at stop A and then will stop at stop B, C, D, and end up at stop Z. But they really go where there is a cargo and there's a need to be filled. So they would often describe what they do as, you know, kind of being the Uber of shipping that wherever you need to go, we'll take you there in one trip. Right. And the larger kind of geopolitical condition that enables them to do this is, of course, geopolitical contests that are taking place in the Indian Ocean even as we speak. So part of what this interest in this concept I'm calling geopolitical arbitrage, where it came from, was really trying to think about what's going on in the Persian Gulf, especially in the context of sanctions. Right? And there's a way in which this. This can be seen as a story that emerged in the Gulf wars where there were sanctions against trade with Iraq, but these daos were moving diesel between Iran and Iraq even during the Gulf Wars. It's also present now as we see sanctions against trade with Iran, especially with oil and diesel. So many of these daos are kind of trans shipping cheap Iranian oil and diesel from the Persian Gulf to places like Somalia, and also trans shipping diesel, cheaper Iranian diesel in the Persian Gulf. So they'll supply to even container ships that may be kind of anchored in the Gulf. And this trade is made possible precisely because of sanctions regimes. Right. So in thinking about geopolitical arbitrage, I was trying to understand how this kind of practice. Right. Of arbitrage, which is generally understood as a practice whereby, you know, goods are moved from one place where they might be found cheap to another where the same good can be found, can be sold at a higher price. Right? That's what arbitrage is generally understood as. And definitions of arbitrage and financial theory typically stress that it is riskless because, you know, that this good is found in abundance and cheaply in one region and can easily be sold at a higher price in another. And many anthropologists, right, including Hiromiyazaki, have argued that, you know, that arbitrage is in fact, not risky and that it is extensible beyond financial derivatives. Folks who have worked on maritime labor, such as Adrian Manov, have talked about existential arbitrage where seafarers on board container ships kind of risk their own lives in order to basically earn a living wage, even though these wages are often, you know, lure based on your ethnic status. Essentially, these seafarers Risk, trade off the risk of poverty in their home countries for the risk of piracy that they face at sea. And the shipping industry, in effect, transfers risk to seafarers. So in thinking about the ways in which folks have written about arbitrage, I was really kind of trying to think of what this diesel trade in the Persian Gulf does, right? And what it's based on. And for me, it is really about the geopolitical, where profits in some sectors of the Dow trade are made possible by maneuvering geopolitical conditions of war, sanctions, as well as jurisdictional struggles at sea. And, I mean, many of the sailors I would talk to, they were always on it when it came to figuring out what's going on, right? In terms of, is there war happening somewhere? What would be the implication of sanctions or the closure of a port? They were constantly looking at the news and were very much aware of geopolitical conditions because they had to be. It was only by kind of moving between these spaces that they were able to produce profit. And of course, this is not a riskless profit, right? The arbitrage in the Dow trade, this kind of geopolitical arbitrage is not riskless, right? It's the life and labor of the sailor at sea. His labor is at risk, his life is at risk as he's navigating these risky conditions. And so in that particular chapter, I really focus again on uses as well as other sailors who would often be either incarcerated in Iran or then find that, you know, their. Their dhows are being blown up at sea because of mishaps and accidents because they're carrying diesel and it's flammable, right? So I focus on this kind of risk, right? What does it mean for the sailor who's engaging in this kind of geopolitical arbitrage to risk their own life as they're, you know, enabling profits that are seemingly easy, right? We know that diesel in Iran is cheaper than diesel in, in Somalia. And I also kind of go back and look at arbitrage as a strategy, a more general strategy for trading in the Indian Ocean, whether it's currencies in the Indian Ocean, multiple currencies that were traded in the Indian Ocean, or whether it's diesel and oil. So really, I think the geopolitical piece of this is that the entire trade is contingent upon navigating geopolitical conditions, right? And the UAE in this particular moment becomes a kind of pivotal mooring, a kind of stable space where, I mean, the power of the UAE is not just in its. Its location or in Its kind of policies that are favorable for trade. But it's also a stable place in the Gulf, in a region of war. Right. And we're seeing that even as, you know, Israel bombs Qatar just two days ago. And what does that mean for the Gulf? Right. Which has been seen as this very stable place as the rest of, you know, as many parts of the Middle east have been pulled into war in different moments. So part of what I was doing there is thinking about geopolitical arbitrage being made possible through these kind of pivotal stable nodes in the Indian Ocean.
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Regan Gillum
Yeah.
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Regan Gillum
So my next question is about your research methods. And your research also appeared to be quite itinerant. And you just mentioned how you structured the book. So as I was reading through the book, I noted some of the ports you were in, including Mombasa, Kenya, Dubai. Then you were also in sailing communities in India at the end. And so. And there were also instances where I was, I was very worried for you. Like you were walking a plank, I think across into, into a boat, right into a dhow. And it's like, I don't know how, maybe 30ft above water and there's water under the plank anyway. So I was just worried about you, of course, falling in, but I think you made it so it was fine. But, but, you know, but again, you're, you're, you're writing about this, this research, and I thought, oh, my gosh, there's some risk involved for you, too. And so I wonder, can you talk about how you went about doing participant observation or ethnography with these people who were so itinerant and in these ports in different locations?
- [48:09]
Dr. Nidhi Mahajan
Thank you for that question. Because it also, you know, there's many things you write in a book, but there's also many things you leave out, right? Which is like, what did this actually feel like at the time? And, you know, I talk about, like, walking up that plank for the first time. And that was just one moment in which, you know, the risk of doing this kind of work was very physical, very embodied, right? What would it mean to fall off it? But then there were also questions around sort of gender, being a woman in male field, basically, right? And that had its own set of challenges and problems, right, That I was, I mean, I was young and a little bit stupid, to be honest. And I would just kind of go on any ship and there were encounters I had that were deeply unpleasant and very gendered, right? And not surprisingly, I mean, these are sailors. So I would often have encounters where sailors would assume that I was. And this is where, you know, race also plays a big, a big role. I was read a certain way in Mombasa, right, Which, like, South Asian women are not in the public space of the old port, for instance. So I was sometimes read as a prostitute, even though I did not present as one. Right. I was often read as a wealthy benefactor, even though I was not. I was also often read as. I mean, people always wondered, is she, like, I don't know, a CIA agent or a security person? But then they would look at me and be like, well, she's not very limber. She's not that serious. She seems super naive. She doesn't have the affect of somebody who's insecurity in any form. And I have an Indian passport, so none of it made sense. So I was, in moments, completely illegible to people and in other moments, very legible. I think that what helped make the work possible was, again, friendship, right, with somebody like Yusuf, who then became, you know, as I was doing work in multiple ports, he would put me in touch with people who he trusted, right? And he, like, even when I was doing work in Mandvi I lived with his family, even if he was not in town. And he would put me in touch with different, different people across multiple ports. And we would stay in touch, and not just with him, but with many of the sailors I worked with. I'm still in touch with them on WhatsApp. Right. This became a form of. It's the form in which they communicate with their families while they're at sea. It's a form in which we communicated. So having that longevity of connections, even though we may not have been in the same place was crucial because they came to know me as I also grew up and got older. Right. This has been years and years of work. So I think being in touch with the same people and maintaining those relationships really made fieldwork across these multiple ports possible because it never felt like I was entering a space without knowing anything about it or anybody there. I always knew somebody who was there because of these almost, you know, because of these, these connections. And getting to know the women in the family was actually super crucial in, in terms of being able to do this kind of work because the women then adopted me as well as somebody who was moving across these spaces, but could also help them move across these spaces in some ways. Right. I would bring them presents. I would be talking to their husbands, their children, checking in on them, giving them news about how they were doing if they were in Dubai. So it was really kind of made possible through these interpersonal connections that spanned many ports, but were really kind of grounded in connections with these very tight knit communities. Right. And of course, this took a long time. I mean, this book was, has been long in the making because doing this work across multiple places does take time, money. Right. And an openness to kind of follow people wherever they are and to be able to cycle back. I keep going back to these places still, and it really became a kind of way of life because that's what, you know, the folks I work with who have, who are now, you know, more than just interlocutors, they've come to visit me in my home in India, have met my family and vice versa. Right. So there's a way in which having that close relationship really made possible this kind of itinerant work because it felt like the anchor or the mooring were the people themselves and not necessarily the places, if that makes sense.
- [53:13]
Regan Gillum
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Very well said. As you were saying that, I thought. Oh, just what you said, the people were the mooring. Yeah, I really, really like that. And then also in the book, you separate the chapters with Poetry. And so just as an example. So there's poetry that falls in between each of the chapters. But just as an example, in the last chapter of the book, you talk with the family, and as you just said, mainly the women in the family who. They stay in place as the men are off at sea. And then there's. There's a poem written from the perspective of the sailor, and he's wondering about what his wife is doing while he's gone and about the rhythms of life at home. So that's just an example. And so I wondered, where is the poetry from? And did the poetry. Was this, like, part of your method, part of your writing practice, or just. Can you talk about the use of poetry in the book? Because I think that was also very unique. I've not seen. See, I do a lot of these interviews, and I don't think I've seen that yet. So. Yes. So tell us about it.
- [54:22]
Dr. Nidhi Mahajan
Thank you for asking that question. Because I was like, when submitting the final manuscript, I was like, should I include this? Should I not? But the poems were written by me, which is why they're very experimental. But they were also written at a time when I was doing the research. Right. And I don't talk about this often, but I also have an art practice, and I had this exhibition at this artist residency. Well, at this artist space in New Delhi back in 2017. And at the time, I was in the midst of doing research on this kind of seasonal dynamic of the trade and was really looking at, you know, patterns of debt and patronage and gender kinship in the dao trade. I was in Jam Salaya during that time as well as in Manvi, and then produced a little video installation called From Akhar to Mossam, which is like, you know, the two different seasonal patterns, and had a sound, a little sound installation as well that looked at, you know, these kinds of WhatsApp messages that people would send and then layer it onto a feature in a Sufi shrine that I talk about, the shrine of Shah Murad Bukhari, where there used to be this feature in the shrine called the Window to the Sea, where, you know, in the past, women who. This was obviously before WhatsApp, but women who wanted to know whether their loved one at sea was alive would go into this window and the saint would tell them whether they were alive or not. So I was trying to think about, like, affectively and emotionally think about what this rhythm of life is, right? The seasonal kind of rhythm where people are gone for nine months of the year, are back home for three months. And oddly enough, that's also how our own academic calendar works and how I live my life, which is three months in India during the summer, nine months away, right? And that became a point of connection as well. And so the poems were written during that time as I was trying to kind of. Well, those two poems were written at that time as I was trying to take in the kind of emotional world of the sailor and his wife at sea. I mean, the sailor at sea and his wife at home. And the form in which those two poems are written. I tried it, didn't quite it. It's not exactly that, but it's a form of aghazal, which is a kind of form of love poetry. And the type of love that we're talking about is worldly love, right? It can be about a man and a woman, or a woman and a woman, or a man and a man, but it's also about love for the divine, right? So this. This notion that the beloved is always a little bit out of reach is a. Is a Sufi idea, right? And the desire is always to be one with the lover, who's. Both can have a human form, but it's also about love for the divine. So I was in that. In. During those days, I was in these Sufi shrines with these women, thinking about distance and so on, and experimented with this form. And in writing the chapters, which came much later, the poems became like an affective mooring for me. It was like, what is the sensibility of this chapter? What are you trying to do here? And I mean, folks like Nomi Stone, right? Nomi Stone is a poet and an anthropologist, and she has used poetry as a kind of way to what she says to do a scene, rather than say it. And I found that as like, a very effective way to think about what I was trying to do there with the poems. And the other poem in the book was really, again, a way to anchor myself in the affective and emotional world of the sailor who's imagining what life in Dubai might look like, right? That's one of the other poems. But it's also a form that, like being South Asian, right? Like, these kinds of poetry is such a big part of daily life and also the Islamicate world of the Indian Ocean, that it became sort of almost instinctive to do it. And some of the poems are, you know, work better than others, but to me, they were really their emotional anchors. But they also allow for a kind of. And many of the poems are in, like, multiple languages, right? Like, they use words from Kachi from Hindi, Urdu. That may not be legible to a reader who's not familiar with that world. But for me, it was a space. Space where you can do a lot very quickly. Right. I was also running up against page limits and I was like, this is where I can capture a whole world without having to analyze it, without having to kind of parse it out and really get across the affective orientation of the book.
- [59:35]
Regan Gillum
Yeah, yeah, no, that's really. I love that. So that, that's something that I think readers will also really find valuable about the book as well, as well as your arguments and whatnot. But your use of poetry and the feel of the world is also something that's noteworthy about it. So thank you so much for telling us about the book. We've taken up a lot of your time. So I'm gonna ask you usually the last question, which is, do you have any new projects that you're working on? Like, what are you thinking about now that Maureen's is out in the world? What do you have coming up on the horizon?
- [60:18]
Dr. Nidhi Mahajan
Thank you. And thank you for all of these very generous questions. So the first thing on my mind once this book is out is actually rest and fun and recovery. And I don't know how long that's going to take, but I think it takes a while. And I think we have to acknowledge that often, I mean, you know this, right? Like, we need a breather. So I think taking. Taking a break is really important. But that said, like, I know I have these projects that I've been thinking about for a long time. One of them is I'm working on a co edited special issue for our journal on feminist Indian Ocean worlds, where we have folks with, you know, it's interdisciplinary, but really kind of thinking about what feminist literatures do to thinking about the Indian Ocean as a field of study. And then another project that has been part of, been with me since the dissertation that actually didn't make it into the book is this project on infrastructure on the coast of Kenya. And it's centered around the Lamu Archipelago, which has now become. Which is this kind of ancient port city, but it's now Alamo is an ancient port city, but it's also now become a kind of space where there's been this massive investments into new infrastructure, including what is known as the Lamu Port. And Lamu, Southern Sudan, Ethiopia transport corridor, or Lapsat. And what that project aims to do is to create a trans African transport and logistics network where Lamu would become the most important Indian ocean terminus for a rail land bridge that would eventually traverse the entire breadth of the continent. That's the aspiration. But LADSAT has become a kind of flashpoint for competing visions of coastal Kenya's oceanic past, present and future. And I have a couple of articles out on this, but I'm also trying to think through whether this is a larger book project and thinking about, you know, forms in which indigeneity have been understood on the Kenyan coast, but also thinking about the making of private property, whether that's on land or at sea. Right. So this is part of what I'm thinking about. And the economic, environmental kind of not just impact but effects of such large scale infrastructure projects that are already in some ways seen as a failure. Right. What does that do in terms of thinking about the kinds of space that an old port city and an archipelagic form such as Lamu, which is an archipelago where new ideas of indigeneity are surfacing. What does that actually mean? So that's one project and I'm not sure whether this is going to take the form of just articles or books. And then the one that, you know, that has been a dream project is to write a novel. So I'm a novel, an Indian Ocean novel, but that is yet tbd. I think the first thing is to rest.
- [63:47]
Regan Gillum
Yes. So we wish you much rest and then we will look out for those other projects and we will keep our fingers crossed for this novel. So happy resting and happy writing. So I'm Regan Gillum. I've been speaking with Dr. Nidhi Mahajan, who is the author of the book Voyages of Capital across the Indian Ocean published by the University of California Press. Thank you so much for writing this book and thanks for sharing it with us on the podcast.
- [64:17]
Dr. Nidhi Mahajan
Thank you so much, Regan. It's been such a pleasure, truly. Thank you.
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