Events

CHAIRPERSON

Prof Tim Bunnell, Asia Research Institute, and Department of Geography, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

In Malabar, a thriving Indian Ocean society in Southwest India tied to Arabia and the Malay Archipelago in the 16th century, Hindu caste purity and Islamic legal categories subsisted in a sea of cross-cultural relations. While the plural was not expressly valorized, an unspoken interdependence existed between purity and pluralism. The onset of European colonialism, and its unprecedented bid for hegemony across the Indian Ocean from Mozambique to Malacca via Malabar, triggered responses which reflected on the nature of social relations in Indian Ocean Malabar. One such response, a call to jihad from within the diasporic Muslim merchant community targeted by the Portuguese, based its legal arguments on a novel ethnography of castes and outcastes in Malabar, situating Muslims within a regional moral economy of interdependent purities. Here, Islamic law, anthropology and history come together to reveal collusions between Hindu and Muslim within a call to jihad against the first European bid for hegemony in the original arena of global trade – the Indian Ocean. This presentation draws on manuscript and archival sources from the work of the Alagil Chair Programme in Arabia Asia Studies in Malabar India, Yemen and Indonesia.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Engseng Ho is Muhammad Alagil Distinguished Visiting Professor of Arabia Asia Studies at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. At Duke University, he is Professor of Anthropology and Professor of History. He is a leading scholar of transnational anthropology, history and Muslim societies, Arab diasporas, and the Indian Ocean. His research expertise is in Arabia, coastal South Asia and maritime Southeast Asia, and he maintains active collaborations with scholars in these regions. He serves on the editorial boards of journals such as American Anthropologist, Comparative Studies in Society and History, History and Anthropology, Modern Asian Studies. He is the co-editor of Asian Connections book series at Cambridge University Press. He has previously worked as Professor of Anthropology, Harvard University; Senior Scholar, Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies; Country and Profile Writer, the Economist Group; International Economist, Government of Singapore Investment Corporation/Monetary Authority of Singapore, Director, Middle East Institute, National University of Singapore. He was educated at the Penang Free School, Stanford University, and the University of Chicago.

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