Africa Seminar: Missionaries, Traders, and Cultural brokers: Africans and the making of a modern South Asian metropolis (1750-)

Africans have played a crucial role in shaping trans-regional networks, political and religious institutions, and markets in South Asia from the precolonial era to the present. This presentation focusses on Africans in the western Indian city of Mumbai (known as Bombay before 1996). From the 1750s, Africans have come to western India as enslaved persons, traders, missionaries, sojourners, and professionals. Mumbai’s interactions with the Africana world have led to the development of new spatial topographies, created new knowledgescapes, and given rise to new trading infrastructures, which have hitherto received little attention. This presentation focuses on some key contributions made by African actors in Mumbai in the longue durée, situating them in a multiplicity of trans-regional networks spanning the Indian and Atlantic Ocean Worlds. The study of the African presence in South Asia enables us to interrogate themes in South Asian Studies and African Studies in comparative historical and anthropological frameworks, and also makes a case for re-imagining ‘Afro-Asia’ as a heuristic conceptual category in global and imperial history.

The seminar will be presented by Meera Venkatachalam, a Research Fellow at IIAS, Leiden University. Her research is focused on the transregional circulation of capital, people, and religion in the Global South, between South Asia and Africa in particular.

The seminar is co-organised with HUM:Global Talks!