IATIO · India and the Indian Ocean in the Early Decolonial Period: Archipelagic Imaginaries, 1950s-1970s

India and the Indian Ocean in the Early Decolonial Period: Archipelagic Imaginaries, 1950s-1970s

The project IATIO mobilises the concept of ‘archipelagic imaginaries’ to examine Indian intellectual and literary investment in the Indian Ocean region during the 1950s-1970s. The research shifts focus from teleological readings of Indian Ocean history and territorial perspective on postcolonial Indian culture, to advance a non-territorial epistemological framework for theorising postcolonial India through a renewed investment in archipelagic theory and geocritical approaches. The temporal framework of the project ranges from around the time of the post-World War II decolonisation to the 1970s, a period of far-reaching political, cultural and economic change for the entire Indian Ocean region. By tracking the ideas, imaginings and movements of a group of intellectuals, writers, and a host of other agents – statespeople, journalists, magazines, and even navy ships –, IATIO tells a story of how India looked at the Indian Ocean region in the mid-twentieth century, and how communities in the Indian Ocean looked back at India. To tell this story, the project employed an interdisciplinary methodology that combines tools and insights from history, literary criticism and cultural studies, and proceeded along three interrelated research strands, each focused on a different set of figures and primary sources. The first strand entails a reconstruction of the conceptual geographies of India and the Indian Ocean as thematised and negotiated in journals and magazines by key figures of postcolonial cultural imagination as well as lesser-known intellectuals. The second strand involves a reassessment of now-canonical Indian fiction in light of the narrative potential of archipelagic imaginaries and of individual writers’ experience in the Indian Ocean. The third strand is based on the production of a few case studies on sites that, regardless of their peripherality with respect to the political centre of gravity of the Indian nation, constituted the material nodes of ‘archipelagic India’. The project has achieved three primary objectives, corresponding to the research strands outlined above: investigating ideas and meanings of the Indian Ocean articulated by a range of Indian intellectuals and policymakers; establishing how these archipelagic imaginaries seeped into the literary geographies of the early decolonial period; identifying a number of nodal points triangulated with the Oceanic space, and tracing the movements of texts and individuals across local and transnational scales.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union