Indian Seafarers Research Articles

Cultures of Protest in Transnational Contexts: Indian Seamen Abroad, 1885-1945

This paper offers a preliminary exploration of contexts and forms of protest and defiance of authority by Indian seafarers employed on ocean-going steam vessels over six decades to the end of World War II. Though relatively small in numbers and apparently untypical in many respects of a ‘modern’ industrial workforce, the study of Indian seafarers can shed interesting light on several wider aspects of Indian labour history. The transnational and trans-cultural context of employment of Indian seamen also helps illuminate their subjectivities, knowledges, and agencies in ways that are obscured in more insular histories, while their encounters with bosses and others in authority invite us to re-examine pervasive notions of cultural difference–‘owned’ as well as attributed.
 
 This paper is not about union-led protests, nor about ‘everyday’ forms of resistance. It dwells instead on a potentially vast and apparently uncharted middle ground of collective resistance by ships’ crews. Such resistance, perhaps simmering for weeks at sea, came to head at key moments, usually upon arrival at a foreign port, close to sailing, or when seamen were being transferred from one vessel to another. It could involve, besides the seamen themselves and their ships’ officers, a swathe of state agencies including local authorities, the police, and the judiciary, though rarely if ever, unions of local seamen.
 
 On the evidence here, the culture of work and protest of Indian seamen appears to have been informed by a certain rationality–a certain careful weighing of costs, benefits, and opportunities for engagement and disengagement, including through protest–that is altogether at odds with characteristic representations of Calcutta jute workers and British maritime workers enduring similar circumstances or facing similar ‘choices’. At the same time this culture was open to modern, secular, and transnational solidarities grounded in universalist values. Paradoxes of this nature demand a sustained effort to recover and re-interpret the complex but immensely creative subjectivities that Indian workers and seafarers (and needless to add other Asian, African, and Caribbean workers and seamen) developed and articulated within the fluid and liminal spaces they inhabited.

Technology of Indian Sea Navigation (c. 1200–c. 1800)

India has a rich and hoary tradition of maritime ventures over millennia. Since the days of the Indus Valley Civilisation, Indian seafarers have voy–aged across the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal and even beyond for trade, religious and cultural objectives. Through experience and inheri–tance over generations, these seamen acquired maritime craft skills and wisdom that formed the bedrock of a total navigational package that stood the test of time and survived till an instrumented modern technology took over.

The Winds of Change: Buddhism and the Maritime Links of Early South Asia.

Two major trends have so far dominated the maritime history of ancient India: in the western Indian Ocean, the emphasis has been on the enterprise and nautical skills of the foreigners - the Romans and Arabs who relegated Indian seafarers to coastal trade; while in the Bay of Bengal, brahmins as well as Indian merchants are credited with the expansion of Indian culture into Southeast Asia. On the basis of literary, archaeological and ethnographic sources, this text argues that a complex, indigenous maritime network existed in South Asia in the period, 400 BC to AD 400, which involved the Arabs, Indians and Oriental Greeks as well as Southeast Asian communities. Additionally, it exposes the need for a close examination of diverse techniques of boat-construction before the superiority of Mediterranean vessels is postulated, as has been the case in historical studies so far.