Asian Studies Program, Anthropology Program, Africana Studies Program, and Historical Studies Program Present

A Haunted House: Gujarati Merchants and Plantation Histories between Mauritius and Gujarat

Despite their centrality to Mauritius’s plantation economy, merchants from Gujarat (western India) remain in the shadows of histories of slavery and indentured labor migration on the island. This talk takes stock of these erased histories by retelling the story of one plantation, Bel Ombre, which was variously owned by French planters and Gujarati merchants in the nineteenth century. Moving between the space of Bel Ombre today, records in the Mauritius National Archives, and old ports in Gujarat, I analyze the archival processes through which Gujarati mercantile intimacies were recorded and obscured. I argue that the archival segregation of records about plantation property ownership and indentured labor was central to the erasure of Gujarati merchants from histories of racial capitalism on the island. I show that the colonial state enacted gendered violence on indentured women whose sexuality was policed and pathologized while Gujarati merchants were able to marry across racial lines through sanctioned property and marriage arrangements. These silences were amplified by Indian anticolonial nationalists who arrived on Mauritius in the twentieth century to take up the cause of Indian indentured workers but who, ironically, papered over racial capitalism in favor of a pan-Indian identity. In old ports in Gujarat, merchant families built and maintained houses (havelis) which were scrubbed clean of these messy intimacies across the ocean. Reaching across the ocean from Gujarat to Mauritius and back, this talk suggests that these are haunted houses and histories.

Ketaki Pant is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on South Asia and the Indian Ocean arena from the late eighteenth century to the present day. Her current projects examine interlinked histories of racial capitalism, gendered belonging, minoritization, and displacement centered on Gujarat. Recent publications include an article in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies and a chapter in the Routledge Handbook of Asian Transnationalism.

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For more information, call 845-758-7662, or e-mail [email protected].

Time: 3:30 pm EDT/GMT-4

Location: Hegeman 106

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