This lecture is organised by the Muhammad Alagil Distinguished Professorship in Arabia Asia Studies at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. It is held in conjunction with the workshop on “Remapping Manuscripts in the Indian Ocean: Textual Cultures, Knowledge Practices, and Alternative Epistemologies”.
CHAIRPERSON
Dr Sumit Mandal, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore
ABSTRACT
This talk tells the story of the voyage of the Crooked, a Kuwaiti dhow, as it sailed in 1924 from Kuwait to Basra and from there to Calicut and back. Drawing on the materials of the nakhoda ʿAbdulmajeed Al-Failakawi and his contemporaries, it charts out a transoceanic exchange of goods, people, and ideas that bound the Gulf to the Indian Ocean. Through Al-Failakawi’s logbooks, we see the process by which actors around the region actively engaged in economic thinking as they sought to transform the natural world around them into forms that could circulate around the oceanic arena. Through the voyage of the Crooked and the writings of those who worked on and around it, we can see the active constitution of a maritime bazaar – a connected world of commercial practice and thinking that extended from the Gulf to South Asia and beyond.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Fahad Ahmad Bishara is Associate Professor of History at the University of Virginia and the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies. He specializes in the economic and legal history of the Gulf, Indian Ocean and Islamic world and is the author of two books: A Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780-1950 (Cambridge: 2017) and Monsoon Voyagers: An Indian Ocean History (California: 2025). He is committed to writing the history of the Gulf and Indian Ocean world from the inside out — to asking new questions from new perspectives, and to think with sources from the region. This is, in large part, why he spends considerable time thinking about law; legal materials are among the richest sources for writing about this part of the world. Through law, he is able to think more deeply about the ways in which people engaged with one another and with the state, and the well of concepts and ideas they drew on along the way.
Sumit Mandal is Muhammad Alagil Chair in Arabia Asia Studies at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. He is a historian who researches the outcome of longstanding inter-cultural and inter-religious interaction in the Malay World – understood as a flexible and expansive cultural geography. His book Becoming Arab: Creole Histories and Modern Identity in the Malay World (Cambridge, 2018) reconsiders colonial and national understandings of the indigenous and foreign by substantiating what were significantly intermixed societies. He is currently doing research on keramat (Muslims shrines) in the Malay world as inscriptions on the landscape of a sacred history that provoke a reimagination of the Islamic Indian Ocean.
