Recultivating Connections across the Indian Ocean

Abstract

ABSTRACT How did enslaved people in the Dutch East India Company’s empire use food to maintain their cultural identities? These people – from Malabar, Coromandel, Bengal in present-day India, together with the eastern part of today’s Indonesia – were forcibly transported across the ocean to the Company’s ports littered along the littoral. By shifting our perspective away from colonial elites, we can grasp a very different sense of the ocean, one that speaks of lost homelands, families, and selves. This article explores food from the perspective of enslaved cooks and cultivators on Ambon, the Company’s first conquest in the Indian Ocean,, in present-day Indonesia. By spotlighting how enslaved people transported, grew, and processed familiar plants from their homelands, it explores how the ocean signified both disconnection and loss as well as opportunities for reconnecting with their cultural identities through food. Using food as an analytical object, the article reconstructs how enslaved people used food to grapple with their disconnection from their homelands, forging links, however partial and incomplete, with memories of self before their enslavement.