T

he ‘mobile societies’ of the Indian Ocean are a widely dispersed, tightly networked congeries of people and cultures (Ho, 2017). The Malabar, Konkan, Gujarat and Swahili coasts have been valorized, particularly in historical literature, as early (if ‘pre-modern’) harbingers of cosmopolitanism (Sheriff, 2010). Buoyed by the monsoon, trading communities established connections and grew their networks across cities in the Indian Ocean World including Muscat and Salalah, Bharuch and Surat, Mombasa and Zanzibar. Kochi (lit. A Small Place), a port city on the western coast of south India, is an exemplar of societies that are mobile, spatially expansive, and interactive. It is “one of the few cities in India where the precolonial traditions of cultural pluralism refuse to die” (Nandy, 2000: 295).

This extensive network was also the vector for a long, and more-or-less continuous trade of enslaved peoples (Campbell, 2014). The Dutch and the Portuguese were active participants in consolidating the institution of slavery – described as “the world’s oldest trade” – in the Indian Ocean basin (Vink, 2003:132). The struggle to dominate this trade contributed significantly to the Luso-Dutch conflict of the seventeenth century. The British historian of Dutch and Portuguese maritime and colonial history, Charles Boxer, characterized it as “the real First World War”, since it involved sites as distant from one another as Pernambuco, Angola, Kochi, Sri Lanka and Macau (Boxer, 1969:106). When Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VoC), the Dutch East India Company defeated the Portuguese and wrested control of Kochi on 8 January 1663 the retreating Portuguese are said to have buried many of the people they had enslaved – Kappiris – who were shipped in from East Africa, along with their wealth; suppressed sentinels keeping guard over fabulous treasures.

It is hard to glean when the first Kappiri thara (lit. platform; here, an altar) was built in Kochi, but the worship of the Black Slave God – evoking the Indian Ocean slave trade that resulted in the forced movement of people from Mozambique and Abyssinia to Gujarat, Goa and Kochi – is an everyday and ordinary, yet striking reminder of the presence of the past, and of the centrality of mobility and movement in our subaltern worlds. Built into niches in public walls Kappiri tharas continue to be cared for, and patronized by worshippers, even as the city itself changes and transforms. The humble, lit wax candles are the most common of votive offerings, while on special weekdays Kappiri Muthappan receives gifts of chutta (local cheroot), a glass of toddy and unsalted meat.

In a religious landscape of innumerable gods, Kappiri Muthappan is distinctive for the absence of form or figure. Lacking in iconicity, Kappiri’s spectral presence is distributed across Kochi, while the thara gathers meaning and functions to concentrate the aspirations and desires of believers. The prayers to Kappiri ‘to keep watch over us’ might evoke the notion of a kaaval deivam or a guardian deity; Kappiri is also called on to shower their believers with luck, material prosperity and to intercede on their believers’ behalf for a favorable result or outcome.

Even when Kappiri is understood as a key feature of a memoryscape that ‘narrates an obfuscated historical past’ (Jeychandran 2020) and a manifestation of ‘tacit memories’ (of a) ‘community’s secret self’ (Nandy 1995 and 2000), it presents us with a hermeneutic challenge: Is the worship of the Kappiri a ‘work of the imagination’ as social practice (Appadurai, 1997)? How do we understand the connection between dialect and language? And what is the relationship of the fragment to its unified whole? Walcott cautions us against ‘...purists (who) look on such ceremonies (the Ramlila in Trinidad) as grammarians look at a dialect, as cities look on provinces and empires on their colonies… fragments and echoes of real people, unoriginal and broken’ (Walcott 1992). In another register, the “fragmentary” point of view, Pandey suggests, has the capacity ‘to resist the drive for a shallow homogenization and struggle for other, potentially richer definitions…’ (Pandey 1992).

Kerala is home to an extensive practice of the worship of ancestral spirits (Aiyappan 1976); Kappiri Muthappan, however, is distinctive, and is outside this pantheon. Kappiri worshippers, moreover, are not a cohesive, coherent community. They neither invoke a past, nor commemorate slave ancestors when lighting candles on the Kappiri thara. In the devotion to Kappiri Muthappan we recognize the potential to address gaps in the official, historical archive, and highlight the multiple interconnections and networks produced across diverse geographies of the expanded Indian Ocean region. These networks were, in its turn, successively unmade and remade in the time of colonialism by the Portuguese, the Dutch and the British.

The worship of Kappiri Muthappan is an element of the ‘structures of feeling’ that constitutes the Indian Ocean World (Williams, 1978) – and nudges us towards the realization that ‘the present’ is suffused by a ‘sense of the past’, both quotidian and subaltern; a recognition of the centrality of mobility and movement in our everyday worlds. Reading Williams enables us to grasp the past as experience and embodied sensation. The everyday act of worshipping a Slave-God in a roadside shrine dramatically devoid of iconic presence provides us with potentially insightful resources towards understanding both the salience and silence of history, on the one hand, and the potential to generate a critique of the manner in which ‘heritage’, ‘memory’, and indeed ‘mobility’ has been theorized without an adequate understanding of the structure and dynamics of historically mobile societies.

References

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Appadurai A (1997) Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. University of Minnesota Press.

Boxer C (1969) The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 1415-1825. London: Hutchinson.

Campbell G (2014) The Question of Slavery in Indian Ocean World History. In: Sheriff A and Ho E (eds) The Indian Ocean – Oceanic Connections and the Creation of New Societies. London: Hurst.

Ho E (2017) Inter-Asian Concepts for Mobile Societies. The Journal of Asian Studies, 76(4): 907-928.

Jeychandran N (2020) Geographies of death and memory: shrines dedicated to African saints and spectral deities in India, South Asian History and Culture, 11:4, 421-432.

Nandy A (1995) The Savage Freud: The First Nonwestern Psychoanalyst and the Politics of Secret Selves in Colonial India. In: The Savage Freud and Other Essays on Possible and Retrievable Selves. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 81-144.

Nandy A (2000) Time Travel to a Possible Self: Searching for the Alternative Cosmopolitanism of Cochin. Japanese Journal of Political Science 1(2): 295-327.

Pandey G (1992) In Defense of the Fragment: Writing about Hindu-Muslim Riots in India Today. Representations 37: 27–55.

Sheriff A (2010) Dhow Cultures of the Indian Ocean: Cosmopolitanism, Commerce and Islam London: Hurst.

Vink M (2003) “The world's oldest trade”: Dutch slavery and slave trade in the Indian Ocean in the seventeenth century. Journal of World History, 14 (2): 131-177.

Walcott D (1993) The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory. The 1992 Nobel Lecture. World Literature Today 67(2): 261-268.

Williams R (1977) Marxism and Literature. London: Oxford University Press.

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George Jose is Visiting Associate Professor of Anthropology, New York University, Abu Dhabi (NYUAD), and Reviews Editor, ‘South Asia: The Journal of South Asian Studies’. He researches metropolitan transformations in the global south, with a focus on urban peripheries in Asia. Jose was Dean of the Jyoti Dalal School of Liberal Arts, NMIMS University, Mumbai; Fellow, Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin and the inaugural Program Director for Asia Society India. He is the co-editor of ‘Mumbai / Bombay: Majoritarian Neoliberalism, Informality, Resistance, and Wellbeing’ (2022). This essay is an outcome of ‘That Impossible Blue’, a collaborative research project undertaken at NYUAD’s ‘Heritage, Memory and Mobility’ Research Kitchen.