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Robert Rouphail, "Cyclonic Lives in an Indian Ocean World: Environment, Disaster, and Identity in Modern Mauritius" (Ohio UP, 2026)
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Dr. Robert Raphael
to the New Books Network
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Robert Raphael about his book titled Cyclonic Lives in an Indian Ocean Environment, Disaster and Identity in Modern Mauritius, published by Ohio University Press in 2026. Now, as the subtitle of the book suggests, environment, Disaster and Identity. This is a history that is investigating cyclones, natural disasters, but not just from a perspective of like when did the rain fall? We're probably going to be talking about rain. We're also, however, going to be covering these in many ways, kind of bigger questions that are about moments of disaster, but the bigger and longer term impacts as well. What does this mean for people's understandings of themselves, of their societies, of their collective histories? Moments of disaster can illuminate rather a lot. So, Rob, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast to tell us about your book.
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Dr. Robert Raphael
Thank you for having me. I'm thrilled to be joining you.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, I'm very pleased you're here as well. Could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?
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Dr. Robert Raphael
Of course. So yeah, I'm Rob Raphael. I'm an assistant professor of African history, of global history, environmental history at the University of Iowa in the United States. And I wrote this book for a number of different reasons. It was my dissertation project, so I've been working on it for the last ten years or so. But I've had a long standing interest in the Indian Ocean and environmental history. But really my sort of first principles as a scholar, first as a graduate student, now as a professor are in the sort of historical formation of identities, particularly ones in society that are marked by kind of high levels of movement and immigration and out migration in places that have sort of self consciously developed identities around notions of cosmopolitanism and creolness. And these are sort of hallmarks of Indian Ocean, Indian Ocean spaces. And you know, when I first began doing research in the Indian Ocean, this was really what I. What I was centrally concerned. And I was not an environmental historian first and foremost. And I still don't consider myself probably primarily or firstly an environmental historian. I'm a historian of sort of social and cultural worlds of the Indian Ocean. But I have also had a sort of long standing, I guess you could call it amateur interest in disasters and in meteorology and realized in the early days of my graduate work that environmental history and particularly disaster history could allow me to explore the very big questions of identity, diaspora, mobility that mark the Indian Ocean world. So I wanted to take my admittedly amateurish interest in meteorology. I have no training in meteorology or anything of the sort, and kind of refine and develop disaster as an analytical category that could intervene in a very large and dynamic historical tradition in the western Indian Ocean that looks at questions of identity formation and diaspora. And so Mauritius was just the perfect place to do this, this kind of work. I mean, there are other places in the Indian Ocean that, you know, endure these, these kinds of cataclysms regularly. The Bay of Bengal, Madagascar, I mean, increasingly places like Mozambique. But Mauritius, as you know, what colonial officials used to call a plural society and what today we would call a cosmopolitan or creole society, was a place where those storms and those deep histories of ethnolinguistic and racial religious dynamism really collided. And so it was a perfect place for me to, to explore these varied questions.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, those all sound like interesting things for us to explore further in the conversation. But I must admit that in reading the book, my attention was immediately grabbed by the fact that you've got a prologue titled Cyclones, Witches and Werewolves. Now, clearly you've done this not just because it's an intriguing combination of words. So why is that how you start
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Dr. Robert Raphael
the book, it's a great question and I have to admit it is an intriguing combination of words, but it is, of course, more than that and it's also a quite long prologue, and that's by design. The sort of short answer here is that I find these stories, particularly the story of the Woman in Black, this witch sort of figure, and the Tuni Minui, the figure of the werewolf, that are separated by a hundred years of history, Mauritius. But are these two sort of spectral figures that emerge in the aftermath of two major cyclonic events? I mean, I find them endlessly fascinating because they reveal a kind of historical essence, an essence of experience that I think is very hard to grasp in historical, scholarly work. Sometimes, you know, the story of the Woman in Black and of the Tuni Min Wee, I think reveal the kind of wonder, terror, confusion that these storms have often generated in Mauritius. And I wanted to be able to try my hand at tackling a kind of the sort of the sensory, the spiritual, the emotional experience of these storms at the get go to really convey how important they are into this long, long standing importance in the social worlds and cultural worlds of Mauritius. And so I included those stories, or I framed the prologue around those stories, you know, alongside a discussion of Mauritian and Indian Ocean literature more broadly. And again, not to include them as merely as color, but to suggest that the stories are really central to the long standing sort of salience of these events. The longer answer, which I will keep brief, is that the material and the prologue, as fascinating as it was, could, didn't really fit into a larger, the larger argument of the book, which was really focused on developing a tight argument that linked the materiality of cyclones, that is to say, the sort of loss and processes of rebuilding, to link that materiality to debates over reconstruction and identity. And so if each chapter attempts to show how the damage brought, you know, attempts to rebuild after the storms generated these fierce debates over, over these categories, social and cultural categories, racial, ethnic, religious, national. But I find it a little tricky to shoehorn these really fascinating stories into those chapters. So while I think that material could maybe become a chapter, I don't think I was fully equipped to do the kind of analytical and methodological work to do it justice. So I include them to sort of just lay out the stakes, big picture stakes. These are very important events at every level of Mauritian society.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, I mean, I think they give us a sense, as we continue our discussion, that these sorts of debates you're going to be telling us about aren't just about sort of the immediate short term impacts of cyclones. Right. These ideas of like, just how disorienting it is, just how disruptive to everyday life it is, like is embedded in these stories that kind of keep coming back over quite long periods of time. That's useful for us to keep in mind as we start to talk about some of these cyclones and debates obviously in more detail. So starting perhaps from the earliest cyclone you focus on in the book and kind of as I think our conversation develops, we'll move forward in time. So if we're focusing in sort of 1892, identity is something that comes up over multiple cyclones. But you pinpoint perhaps this one particularly as being one where Mauritian identities were reconsidered and Mauritian society was re made. That's an argument that's not just about like, oh, we should kind of put the roof back on that house, right? What's going on here?
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Dr. Robert Raphael
Yeah, that's exactly, exactly. You know, before I get, before I sort of talk specifically about 1892, I think it's perhaps useful to begin with some of the, just briefly the big sort of conceptual categories that disaster scholars use to think about the social effects of disasters. And I can sort of tie that in to 1892. And I work very self consciously in that first chapter with the work of people like Amartya Sen and Arjun the Patarai, who are really the analytical lodestars for picking apart these sort of social and political collisions that occur, these moments of disaster. Sen. And they're both scholars writing about it in this context, famine in South Asia. But Sen writes very famously about entitlements as a kind of framework to understand how the sort of, what he calls the sort of bundle of capital, social material or otherwise, that people can tap into at moments of catastrophe to sustain themselves. And famine happens in Sen's framework when entitlements basically collapse. And a paterai sort of advances this, this model by coining this term enfranchisement, which is understanding the political landscape in which entitlements operate and take meaning. And so what I, what I was really drawn to with these categories is not just their sociological purchase, but the fact that they can be used historically because they are metrics to evaluate relationships between people. And so I wanted to make a claim that in this chapter in particular, that enfranchisement and entitlements as categories of analysis are themselves historically constructed. They expand and or impinge upon people's notions of community, race or religious, national or Otherwise. So that brings me to 1892, because it was a critical moment in Mauritian history. Not just because of the power of this storm, because it was a society really undergoing profound transformation. This storm was really the first. It was Biden, by no means the first storm that ever hit Mauritius, but it was the first real coordinated response effort that a colonial government had taken up. And so we see the state for the real first time at a scale unseen before trying to wrestle with its responsibilities to its. Its various subject populations. Now, much of that responsibility, as I talk about in the chapter, was outsourced to the sugar plantations, which in the late 19th century had really dominated the political and economic landscape of Mauritius. And what emerges a kind of bifurcated response to this major storm? I should say the storm arrives quite by surprise. It arrived about a month after the cyclone season formally ended in Mauritius. So people were really thrown for a loop. And what emerges was a, you know, a response on the part of the state that sought to delegate and provide response both in terms of, you know, funds and material to those suffering from the storm, but also to really low. To. To burden the estates themselves with providing, sort of providing with a response to those people who worked on the estates. Now, the people that worked on the estates, in large part, I mean, I assume most listeners would know that Mauritius after the abolition of slavery in the early 19th century, is one of the first places that begins to bring in indentured laborers from South Asia. And by the 1890s, a large portion of the descendants of the original. Some of the original waves of indentured laborers begin to stay. And these people begin to self consciously sort of organize themselves into villages, into religious communities, and begin to develop what we now know as merchant Creole as the language of these island. And these communities stood increasingly in distinction from the so called immigrant Indians, those who were coming more recently and could quite potentially return back to India after their contracts had expired. And the state, both the state and the sugar estates were very conscious about the different lived realities of these two disparate South Asian communities. One who was beginning to establish itself sort of more formally at the diasporic community on the island. And the other, they understood to have less both material and social permanence on the island. And the people themselves began to. These people themselves began to understood them, began to understand themselves in these terms and began to lodge claims, specifically after the hurricane, for funds for access to certain. To certain goods and services and food through this language of Creole Mauritius. A Creole Indian, meaning somebody who was born in Mauritius and had a family and life there, versus an immigrant Indian who was often floated, could simply return to India after the storm. So what I wanted to underscore here was basically we see identity becoming a modality for claim making. It's not anything as prosaic as nation building or at this point, it's something more fundamental, sort of what Hannah Arendt calls the right to have rights. They're making claims for integration into a system of a sort of nascent welfare system. But what we see is that identity becomes really the key modality for making these claims and for the, for the state evaluating the salience of those claims.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, that's really interesting to think about in terms of kind of who is meant to be making decisions and who gets to have a say in all of this. Because those themes keep coming, coming up as we move through time. Even related to this particular storm. This one seems to live quite a long time in terms of implications. We're going to make what sounds like a pretty big jump going from 1892 to 1937. That's obviously like at least really a generation we're talking about. And we're not talking about a cyclone in this moment, or at least it doesn't seem like it. We're talking about some riots around. I mean, a number of things, right, but economics, labor conditions, all sorts of things like that. Not a cyclone. And yet why is this moment in 1937 that doesn't seem to be about a cyclone actually maybe partially a consequence of what you've just described in 1892.
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Dr. Robert Raphael
Exactly, exactly. Yeah. I mean, I. One of the things I really wanted to do in this book was to emphasize that these storms are not just events, but they are themselves sort of catalysts of long term processes. And so there are chapters in the book that are ones that attend to a very specific storm. I mean, the first chapter is about the 1892 storm. The second chapter, as you've mentioned, is about these riots in 1937, this uprising. And in, in the extant literature, this 1937, the Yuba riots. And I'll explain what Yuba is here in a second, are in large part considered kind of the birth of modern Mauritius in terms of at least its political landscape. It's the moment where a sort of group of political agitators, sugar cane workers, dock workers, begin to formally organize. And it's the birth of the Mauritius Labor Party, which is the party that will eventually lead Mauritius after independence. To independence and after independence. But the riots itself, you know what kicks off these riots? In a sort of fascinating way is a particular plan on the part of the sugar estates on the island to cut the pay that they will pay out to the small cane farmers, the Indo Mauritian small cane farmers on the island to cut the pay that they will pay out to process this cane, a very specific version of cane called Yuba. And Yuba was a kind of miracle cane in large part because it was understood to be almost cyclone proof. It could bend, it was highly fibrous, it could bend in the winds of hurricanes. It also had really a really deep root structure that allowed for it to both survive in times of drought, for example, but was difficult to be uprooted. And that fibrousness in particular was really quite beneficial for small farmers because when they would bring that cane to be milled, they would be sort of, they'd be paid by the weight of what they brought. So the more fibrous the cane, the heavier the cane, the more they would earn. Now, what I was interested in was how this cane emerged, how Yuba emerged and how it sort of exploded onto the landscape in the early 20th century Mauritius. And what I came to understand was that in the aftermath of the 1892 storm, the really quite celebrated institution on the island that was sort of sought to produce knowledge on hurricanes, on cyclones, excuse me, in Mauritius, was really thrown for a loop by the fact that the 1892 storm was, came by surprise. And this was considered a real, a real failure on the part of this observatory on the islands. And its leadership decided that the technological limitations were so profound in their sort of knowledge of cyclones in the Indian Ocean that the raison d', etre, so to speak, of the observatory, which was to produce a kind of body of knowledge that could help predict these storms, was just an impossibility. And what they instead turned to was to say, well, if we can't predict these storms, maybe we can transform how the central crop on the island, that is sugar, could endure the seasonal, repeated threats of these storms. And what emerges in the late 19th and early 20th century is an entire field of scientific study directed by these early meteorologists on the island and, you know, sugarcane planters and sugarcane biologists in particular, to produce a kind of cane that could endure these storms. It's a sort of search for El Dorado kind of project where repeated experiments and efforts are directed towards producing a cyclone proof proof cane. And of course, there is no such thing as a perfect cyclone proof cane. But Yuba is a kind of accident, an accidental outcome of this event. It's a mix of cane that comes from South Asia, that comes on boats bringing indentured laborers. There's evidence that part of its genetic makeup. Comes from a Dutch experiment experimental station in Java. Some from southern Africa, from Natal. But these various sort of networks of biomass and expertise. Collide in Mauritius to produce Yuba. Now, as I said before, the high fibrousness of the cane makes it such that the big planters, the biggest states who are producing at scale, you know, they have a certain enthusiasm for it at the beginning. But realize it's not actually worth their time and money to produce a very little amount of sugar. For such a highly fibrous amount of material to process. But for the agricultural poor on the island, Yuba basically emerges as this ecological bulwark. Against the social and economic pressures of the plantation economy. Yuba is a sort of. It's a method for survival. And becomes really quite critical to support supporting the everyday lives of the agricultural poor. So there is this deep environmental and history of science sort of project that's at work in the early 19, early 20th century that produces Yuba. And then by 1937, the threat to its. The cut in price that is paid for it. Is basically the straw that breaks the camel's back. It's by no means the only sort of indignity or injustice. That these planters understand themselves to have suffered. But it's the final. It's the final sort of. It's the final threshold that's crossed. And so what I went to, what I wanted to say in this chapter was, you know, there is an environmental history to this. To this specific moment. That's understood to be the beginning of modern Mauritian political history. But it also, I think. And I'll wrap up here. This is a long answer, but I'll wrap up here by saying it really also speaks to one of the major methodological questions that I'm trying to wrestle with here in this book. And I think all environmental historians wrestle with, which is the question of proportionality. Right? What. How do we right. Size the natural world in our. In our analysis, to what extent is the 1892 storm. The determinative effects of the sort of causal. The causal sort of moment of the 1937 riots? I mean, it's unlikely to be. I don't want to overstate its case. But what I'm trying to do here is to have a more capacious vision of. Of this moment of 1937. And to link it to 1892.
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Dr. Robert Raphael
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Switch upfront payment of $45 for three month plan equivalent to $15 per month required intro rate first three months only. Then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See full terms@mintmobile.com I mean no, no event is caused by one thing, right? But by having a perspective on like here are the factors that are coming together. It's helpful to understand. And of course that remains true as we move forward in time. I mean you Talked about the 1937 moment being kind of traditionally understood as modern Mauritian, the start of modern Mauritian politics. And there's a lot happening if we move sort of more towards the middle of the 20th century with that in terms of like again these questions of kind of who gets to decide and what is the economy going to look like. And we know that well beyond just Mauritius, there's all sorts of discussions happening at that point around quote, unquote development. Right. Lots happening there. Obviously Mauritius is involved in that too. But so are cyclones, right?
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Dr. Robert Raphael
Yeah. The development chapter or develop. I mean it's such a fascinating story Mauritius, because on one hand, as you said, it is, it is caught up in the late colonial development moment, much like other, you know, spaces, colonial spaces across, across Africa, Asia, etc. But you know Mauritius. It's, it's a, it's a fascinating case study in large part because it's unlike the rest of at least, you know, Africa. Mauritian development projects were not paired with rapid industrial development. That comes a little later. The era of Mauritian development was an attempt to retain Mauritius as an agrarian plantation society. So there's a little bit of a different sort of trajectory that the, that the colony goes through, you know, that marks it in really profound distinction from what happens in the rest of continental Africa. And what I wanted to show in this chapter was that development was kind of embodied. It was an embodied practice in Mauritius. It sought to systematize, rationalize, categorize its really diverse social landscape at multiple and intersecting scales. I mean, I call the chapter Cyclones and Calories or Calories and Cyclones to signal the various sort of scalar approaches that are at work here. The body was really the site of intervention for the state. But the state also understood, you know, that like, it didn't just operate at the molecular level, it had to situate these subjects in the climactics, you know, landscapes they existed in. So development was something that was both inside and out. And this looks like a number of different projects like disease eradication, antimalarial projects that sought to really transform the landscape to, you know, one of the big fears was stagnant water. So you have the building of irrigation canals. You also have the building of food production infrastructure on the island. And this ramps up in the early 1940s as the Con. As a consequence of the collapse of the rice markets of the Indian Ocean and the first second World War. Excuse me. Once the Japanese basically make their way to Singapore were in the early 1940s and in to Burma, the rice markets of the ocean collapses and the Mauritian state basically scrambles to produce a quasi food independent colony. This all shifts after a series of hurricanes in 1945, where the state realizes that it has basically no funds to fund these development projects and reverses course and takes a lot of land that was dedicated to food and puts it back into sugarcane production. And so between, you know, these big climactic events and disease eradication projects, we see development happening at multiple different scales. Now part of this was also to build a kind of body of knowledge about Mauritian subjects. And some of the figures that I track, these doctors, agronomists, ecologists that sort of fan out throughout the island are collecting really detailed biometric data on everybody they can find on the island and trying to point to the fact that we need this certain kind of food to be grown because people are losing weight and children are not, you know, having sufficient amount of calories. And you know, all of this is also, which should be said, directed towards, you know, ensuring the long term durability of the sugar economy. I mean, if you people aren't eating enough, they're not harvesting enough. And what I found interesting, you know, this story is of course a kind of familiar one in the terms of like the top down, the state is interested in producing a data set on its, on its subjects and sort of. Jim Scott approach to. But in the second half of the chapter, where I think this really gets interesting is all of this data that is produced not just on the bodies, but of the. On the sort of ecological embeddedness of Mauritians gets seized upon by a cohort of newly politicized Hindu revivalist intellectuals. I talk about a number of them, most notably a man in Pandit Atmarang who comes. Comes from India to sort of work in an evangelical society, Hindu evangelical society in the early 20th century and becomes really one of the most important intellectuals. He writes a number of books about Mauritius and one of which he basically takes all of this data that's produced by the colonial states on the bodies of both, you know, Indo Mauritian Hindus and Muslims, but also those that data produced on the descendants of enslaved Africans who had worked the cane fields before indenture to basically produce a kind of a. A civilizational project that linked the religious community with a growing reliance on race. I mean, race becomes a really interesting and operative category of analysis for these early Hindu intellectuals, particularly Atmaram, who uses data produced by the colonial state to begin to argue that, well, you know, the descendants of Africans are bigger and therefore stronger on this island. You know, Hindu Mauritians are weak and enfeebled. And this poses a real civilizational risk to us in diaspora. And he begins to really make an argument that we are Hindus in diaspora and that is distinct from our sort of brethren in South Asia. We exist in a kind of a shared condition with people in the South Asian diasporas in South Africa and Malaysia and Singapore and in Fiji, et cetera. And it's here where I really try to bring in a sort of analysis from, you know, the theorized diasporic identity formation from, you know, in one part, Atlanticists who have done a lot of this work, Stuart hall in particular, but also Indian Ocean theorists of, of. Of race and diaspora creolization, et cetera, to look at how these intellectuals are beginning to build a kind of discursive repertoire around race, ecology, physical difference. And this was something new in the immediate, in the sort of. In the World War II and post war era. Post war era in Mauritius.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, so if we haven't talked about enough big topics already, we've got, let's see, labor, politics, empire, identity, agriculture, environment, calories, diet, development, race. You know, we've got a whole bunch of things. Let's, let's add more, though. If we're Talking about the 1960s cyclone, how does that help us add discussions about housing in addition to things we've been talking about around race and colonialism and independence?
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Dr. Robert Raphael
So this, the 1960s cyclone, Cyclone Carol, you know, if you ask anybody in Mauritius, you know, what is the most famous cyclone to ever hit Mauritius? Carol will most likely be the answer you get. It is it holds a privileged place in Mauritius in Mauritian memory, in part because of its power. I mean, it was really catastrophic. It makes landfall not long after another one, another cyclone named Alex. But Carol is the sort of cyclone that dominates at least contemporary Mauritian popular memory. It's also really important because Carol shapes the Mauritian urban landscape in really profound ways that shape it to today. Basically, when the storm makes landfall, about a quarter of the island's housing infrastructure is basically swept into the Indian Ocean. Tens of thousands of people are left homeless. And what the late colonial state attempts to do in its wake, in Carol's wake, is to build a brand new infrastructure of housing on the islands. And they do so by building what are called cites. These are concrete constructed houses and apartments, but mostly houses that look different in different parts of the island. But these cites explode in the early to mid to late 1960s in the wake of Carol, to house those who are left homeless after the storm. Now, one group of people who are left, you know, acutely vulnerable are what are today called Creole, Mauritians, Creoles, that is said, the descendants of the. Of enslaved Africans. And this is because this community had, since emancipation in the 19th century, had long lived on the margins of Mauritian society, both metaphorically and quite literally away from the urban centers of the island in remote fishing villages, but also, you know, much longer maroon communities in the mountainous southwest regions of the island. And these communities basically have the option, in the wake of Carol, the years following Carol, to move into these cites. And while it is by no means a project that is solely directed at Afromuritian Creoles, it's this community that becomes quickly quite associated with the, with the, with the cites. And when I spoke to, you know, community elders throughout the island who had, who, who had experienced Carol and who moved into the cites, what it did was offer a kind of vehicle, both materially and conceptually for entry into modern Mauritian life. Home ownership became not just a kind of way to integrate oneself into the financial infrastructure of the state, but a way to make claims. You know, much of Afro Mauritian cultural and social memory in Mauritius had been dominated by a sense of impermanence, of, of being left out of the Mauritian story, of being forcibly removed from the African continent, of basically being marginal to a story dominated particularly in the middle to late 20th century of Hindu Mauritian political ascendancy. And so what Carol and the cities did was basically offer a vehicle for more political, to tie them, to tie this community much more tightly to the Mauritian project, so to speak. In the book I talk about how one woman, and I'm paraphrasing her, said to me that Carol saved her from slavery. And it was a very, it was a fascinating comment because of course, slavery had been, you know, abolished in Mauritius for over 100 years at this point. But what she meant was that the conditions, the deep conditions of racism, of economic and social marginality that slavery, the history of slavery had produced at Mauritius, that the storm and the CITES had offered a vehicle to correct those long term injustices. Now I should say here that the CITES today are really sites of profound material neglect. They are places where all of the kind of, the fear of all the social pathologies of the island of, you know, of violence, of drug use, of sexual impropriety are sort of, are located in the CT's. And so I don't want to, I want to be careful not to make any claims that these, that these projects somehow did do this, how they, you know, corrected these long term injustices. But what I really want to emphasize is at this moment, the moment of the mid to late 1960s, the moment of political independence in Mauritius, all of these various trajectories intersected to offer a kind of hopeful moment in the wake of the storm where housing could really serve to build a new nation and to correct these long term historical injustices.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's a really interesting thing to be thinking about, linking kind of everyday housing to these really big picture sort of political and historical questions. If we're talking though, about everyday housing, there's also the kind of dynamics within those houses and between those houses that I think is worth investigating as well. You talk about this in the book in terms of gender and family dynamics in the wake of the changes that came about in 1960. Can we talk about that a bit?
- [41:45]
Dr. Robert Raphael
Absolutely. And this was really the first, this was the first really sort of archival find that got this project started, the last chapter of the book now, but in the building of these cites, as you said, so, so, so clearly there arose not just a question of, of sort of race and sort of big picture questions of inclusion in the Mauritian project. What also came was the sort of ways in which the material transformations of the island through the CITES and through the building of these homes would also generate questions about gender and the family in particular. And one of the threads that's running through the 1960s, in addition to decolonization, is a more global anxiety about overpopulation. I mean, this is the decade of the population bomb, where really early, really early environmental, global environmental politics is centered around this question of overpopulation. And it's worth sort of sitting on this for a second because, you know, disaster or the history of the disaster, as an object of empirical sort of inquiry, at least in a sort of Western genealogy, has really long relied on gender as an object of analysis. And when we think to Robert Malthus famous, you know, 1798 essay on the principle of population, where he sort of elucidates this thesis that population grows exponentially while food production grows linearly, meaning that basically that the incongruency of those horizons of growth will lead to famine. I mean, this rears its head quite profoundly in the 1960s. And any question about population really centers around the role of reproduction and women's position in that debate. So what I found is that as the CITES are being built, so too emerges a new infrastructure of family planning that fans out into the CITES to transform the kind of conjugal lives of Mauritians away from a family structure that would have been, let's say, desirable or beneficial to an agrarian economy, that is to say, a mother and a mother and a father and multiple children to work the fields into a more recognizably Western and domestic one, a nuclear family with two or three children, and that the house itself would be the place, the cyclone proof house would be the place where that family was to be to be built. Now, it's worth saying here as well that the building of the CITES and the very intense interest in family planning that grew alongside the CITES should be understood less as a project of sort of benevolence the late colonial state, but more one of trying to build its enduring Capacity, the family planning project at its core. And this is, you know, not, this is not clearly found in the newspapers of the time, but I, you know, I, it became clear when I was reading the papers of the economists who were the economists and the demographers who were, who were behind the scenes here, was to effectively unhook families from the state. The largesse of the state, so to speak, was to say we simply cannot hand out, you know, funds in the wake of these storms to enormous families. Rather, if we tie these families more tightly to the states, to the financial institutions of the state through like mortgages and things like things of that nature, rents and shrink the size of the family, we can better insulate Mauritian society from these boom and bust cycles of an agrarian society that endures constant catastrophe via cyclones. I mean, sugar is harvested only twice a year. And so if a hurricane hits at a specific moment and the canes are destroyed, this is not just a question of the sugar estate not making its margins, but rather deep, deep crises of unemployment. And so the sense was this housing could better insulate families from this boom and bust and bust cycle. So what emerges then are different sort of institutions that fan out into the CT's, some religious, some secular, but try to basically equip women with various sorts of tools, men with various sorts of tools, social and scientific tools, or the threat of, you know, eternal damnation from the Catholic Church to shrink the size of the Mauritian family. And the cyclone proof cites are really the venue where this happens most profoundly.
- [47:25]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that is rather a lot of, kind of quite direct in many senses, intervention in, into people's everyday lives and sort of everything that then spirals out from that. But we're not done talking about cyclones. We've got another one. The 1975 cyclone is next, please. And maybe we could talk about this one in terms of sort of Mauritius place within the Indian Ocean world, given that by this point, you know, we're in a somewhat different phase of discussion around decolonisation, for instance.
- [47:55]
Dr. Robert Raphael
Indeed, indeed. I mean, Mauritius gains independence in early March of 1968. So by 75, Mauritius is an independent nation. And I want to thank you for sort of pointing to that again. One of the reasons I organize the book in the way I do is to really step out of the established political chronologies of the island to really establish a chronology, sort of a chronology of crisis, so to speak, outside of the sort of the established political ones. And so by 75, yeah, things are quite different on the island in terms of the political landscape. It is an independent nation, but it is one sort of struggling to find itself in an Indian Ocean landscape gripped by the Cold War. Mauritius is by no means a radical actor in the Indian Ocean in the sense of, of the sort of non aligned project and third World as projects advanced by, you know, Egypt or Tanzania or India or even the neighboring Seychelles. But it is for all intents and purposes an Afro Asian project by its own history. So it's navigating this really sort of, this messy world of trying to build a kind of set of political alliances for survival with its former colonial master, the British, the new global hegemon, which is the United States, but also to still very much integrate itself with the currents, the sort of currents of decolonization and you know, Afro Asian solidarity that are, that's existed, that exist in the ocean at that time. Now the 75 Hurricane Gervais is famous for its power and its, its destructive capacity. But what it does, and this is the epilogue of the book, is that it really brings to the fore once again the role of Mauritius and Mauritians or what it means to be Mauritian on an Indian Ocean scale. In part because the people that suffer the most in this, in this storm in particular, are effectively a refugee population from the Chagos Islands. Chagossians who find themselves destitute after the storm, after this storm, and whose role in Mauritian society is really up for debates are these people who are basically forcibly expelled from the Chagos Islands not long after Mauritian independence to accommodate the building of an American and British naval base, Tico Garcia. They're sent to Mauritius and basically left vulnerable. And this storm again raises questions about who gets to benefit from the state's response. Is this community one that whose ties are sufficient enough to the Mauritian state or Mauritian society? Or are they not? And they become a political football of sorts. I mean there is, I mean, for all intents and purposes no longer a left political party in modern Mauritius. But the Mauritian left at this point really takes up the cause of the Chagossians as a, as a sort of blunt force object against a really weak coalition government that, that's sort of teetering on the edge. In the early 1970s. Others see their plight as necessary for Mauritians to endure so that they can more tightly bind themselves to postcolonial powers. And of course, I mean this, this debate, you know, the hurricane is a venue for this in the 1970s, but this debate is an ongoing one. As recently as the last few months in the news, where, you know, Mauritian control is a perennial sort of debate over the Chagos Islands today. But I think it serves as a really nice epilogue for the book because in as in so much as the analysis of the five body chapters are firmly located in the sort of colonial, late colonial era. What I wanted to show was that the story continues long after the end of empire, that these questions of identity, community and national belonging are enduring ones in any Indian Ocean society.
- [52:36]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Are they enduring ones even now? Are cyclones still socially and politically salient?
- [52:41]
Dr. Robert Raphael
And Mauritius, you know, to a certain extent, I mean, they're Mauritius. The sort of, the way that cyclones are talked about now is really quite interesting because there has not been a major storm in about a generation. The last really, really Powerful one was 1994, which in which I opened the book, the one of the werewolf. And so people today, older generations, over the course of my research would say to me, I mean the younger generation just does not know the effects of these storms the way that we do. You know, some people kind of, you know, in casual conversations we'll hypothesize maybe this is climate change. You know, Mozambique is getting these storms in ways that we used to get. So maybe these storms are being pushed further west. And then alternatively there is the sort of repeated the big one is coming kind of a, kind of a talk. But I mean I opened the book with the kind of conversation about the modern, modern day experience with cycloge is quite different in the sense that, that they're not perceived to be as big of a threat as they used to. You know, there's a really robust prediction infrastructure. People will get texts about these storms and it's kind of considered a day off. There are deep and enduring threats. Flooding has emerged, particularly as Port Louis, the capital city's growth, this island's growth in general has just exploded. The sort of road infrastructures, the highway infrastructures, now the light rail infrastructure on the island. The unwitting outcome of this really explosive growth has been really profound flooding threats on the islands with hurricanes. But I think the sort of sense is that there is a big one due. We just don't know when.
- [54:30]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, we shall have to see. We certainly can't predict the future for those sorts of things that, well still anywhere. So I guess we will find out at some point. But in the meantime, what might you be working on now that this book is done, whether or not it's related to what we've been discussing? Anything you want to give us a sneak preview of Absolutely.
- [54:47]
Dr. Robert Raphael
I mean, it's the question we all love answering, I think, you know, the chapters on the CITES in the book really sparked an interest in me in, you know, deeper histories of environmental ideas vis a vis urbanization. Role of the city in an era of climate catastrophe really sort of piques my interest as of late. And so I've moved away from focusing solely on Mauritius, although Mauritius will be part of new work that looks at the role of urbanists and architects as intellectuals who were producing a kind of shared knowledge on the relationship between urbanization in the Afro Asian world. That is to say, I guess, urbanization in the global south, the explosive growth of Afro Asian cities and the climate crisis, and what role urbanist architects and activists around cities have played in positioning African and Asian megacities as constitutive elements in a sort of bigger geopolitical political moment. Met or to meet the to meet climate change. That's sort of what I'm working on now.
- [56:01]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, that certainly sounds intriguing and timely, so best of luck with that research. And of course, while you're pursuing it, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled Cyclonic Lives in an Indian Ocean World, Environment, Disaster and Identity in Modern Mauritius, published by Ohio University Press in 2026. Rob, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [56:22]
Dr. Robert Raphael
It was a pleasure. Thank you so much.
- [56:24]
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