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Film
Review |
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From
Africa to India: Sidi Music in the Indian Ocean Diaspora (USA, 2003).
Directed by Amy Catlin-Jairazbhoy and Nazir Ali Jairazbhoy. 74 mins. English
narration. Available on VHS from Apsara Media (http://apsara-media.com/).
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World historians increasingly see cultures
not as bundles of particular "traits" fixed to specific geographical places,
but rather – to quote a 1997 White Paper by the University of Chicago's
Globalization Project – as "precipitates of various kinds of actions,
interaction, and motion—trade, travel, pilgrimage, warfare, proselytization,
colonization, exile, and the like." This approach is familiar from the scholarship
that treats Atlantic and Mediterranean "worlds" as meaningful units of historical
investigation.1
While teaching resources on those two zones abound, the same is not true
for the equally consequential Indian Ocean world. From Africa to India:
Sidi Music in the Indian Ocean Diaspora, a documentary produced by
UCLA ethnomusicologists Amy Catlin-Jairazbhoy and Nazir Ali Jairazbhoy,
will help fill that gap. Focusing on African-descended Sidi communities
along India's western coasts from Gujarat to Karnataka, the film interweaves
contemporary music and dance performance, a narrative of Sidi history, and
glimps glimpses into the Sidis' contemporary – and often difficult
– status in Despite occasionally amateurish camera work, From
Africa to India compellingly conveys the region's complex heritage.
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For over two thousand years, commercial navigation,
exploiting predictable monsoon winds, connected East African, Arabian, and
Asian coasts. This Indian Ocean trade nurtured globalization centuries before
fixed-wind Atlantic or Pacific trade emerged. The cultural synthesis fostered
in Indian Ocean littoral societies participating in this regional exchange
challenges frequently essentialized and sometimes racialized notions of
"African," "Arab," and "Indian" cultures hermetically sealed from one another.
The idea that the Indian Ocean functioned as an "Afrasian Sea" can usefully
upend students' preconceptions.2
The documentary's Sidi subjects embody the legacy of the Indian Ocean trade
system. |
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The Sidis trace their origins to two Indian Ocean
diasporas. From the twelfth century, Africans worked as sailors, as merchants
and, in Muslim lands, as military and domestic slaves. From the sixteenth
century, a smaller number of Africans labored as slaves and soldiers, first
for the Portuguese and eventually for French and British residents of India's
coastal entrepots such as Kacch and Calcutta. The film's account of this
complex history is dense; teachers may wish to present this history themselves,
moving directly to the film's gripping dance performances. These feature
Sidi musical instruments and rhythmic patterns that, according to Catlin-Jairazbhoy,
are not only derived from "African models'' but also resemble those found
in Afro-Brazil. Particularly striking are the portions of the documentary
that address the ecstatic Sufi rituals at the shrine of Gori Pir (Baba Gor),
an Abysinnian who came to Gujarat in the 14th century to mine and trade
agate. |
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To underscore for students the cultural synthesis
at work in Sidi history, as well as that of the Indian Ocean would be to
play in class Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's readily available "Mustt Mustt" after
students have heard the very similar Qawwali-style piece "I'm in Baba Gor's
intoxication," sung in the documentary by a Sidi Fakr. After showing the
film, instructors might also ask students to compare identity formation
in Indian and Atlantic Ocean African diaspora communities in the Indian
and Atlantic Oceans using the concept of "'routes' versus ‘roots'" proposed
in Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic (1993). |
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Fritz
Umbach
John Jay College, City University of New York |
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Endotes
1Area Studies,
Regional Worlds, white paper produced by the Globalization Project at the
University of Chicago, 1997.
2 Pearson, M. (1998).
Port Cities and Intruders: The Swahili Coast, India, and Portugal in
the Early Modern Period. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press,
chapter two. |
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