Africa in Indian Ink: Urdu Articulations of Indian Settlement in East Africa

Abstract

This article examines an Urdu travelogue written in 1901 to analyze the discursive frameworks by which Africa was rendered knowable to Indian settlers. As a vernacular ethnography written for a readership of Punjabi migrants associated with the Uganda Railway, the travelogue provides our earliest direct evidence of colonial Indian attitudes towards the peoples and landscapes of East Africa. Envisioning the region as at once an imperial and Islamic settlement zone, the travelogue documents the emergence of an ‘imperial-Islamicate’ discourse that incorporated both littoral and interior East Africa into an industrializing oceanic culture area.

“When the Kalmyks saw me, they thought I was their black devil”: Inverting Centres and Peripheries in Colonial Travelogues Written by East Africans

“…Gaurav Desai (2013, 85-111), a scholar of English and South Asian literature, provides a narrative analysis of these texts-to my knowledge the only one that has been done. Historian Nile Green (2012) discusses in detail an anonymous settler's manual written by an Urdu engineer in the context of railway construction in British East Africa, and compares some aspects of it to the travelogues presented by Salvadori.…”

“…Travelogues generally include depictions of those people encountered along the way and at the destination of their travels. Recent studies of Western travelogues show that a typical literary device to enhance the alike (Alam and Subrahmanyam 2007;Nayar 2020;Pettinger and Youngs 2020;Idrissi Alami 2013;Newman 2017;Khair and Ghosh 2006;Green 2014). The literary voices of dependent travellers, servants, pathfinders and others are also gaining more and more attention (Forsdick, Walchester, and Kinsley 2019;Walchester 2020;Mackenthun, Nicolas, and Wodianka 2017;Smethurst and Kuehn 2015).…”

“…The Uganda Railway, however, was not a uniquely 'White' enterprise. Rather, it was considered by many South Asians in East Africa to be uniquely their project, since many engineers and most manual labourers had come from the Indian subcontinent (Green 2012;Darookhanawala [1905] 1997). In the following section I present a Parsi tourist adopting the Victorian genre of leisure travelogue, but from a uniquely Zoroastrian perspective.…”

The languages of Indian Ocean studies: Models, methods and sources

“…Traditionally, this has meant the study of Arabic in Africa, but more recent attention to the Cape Malay manuscript tradition and the nineteenth century rise of printing in Arabic‐Afrikaans (i.e., Afrikaans in Arabic script) suggests that breakthroughs can also be made in the study of African participation in both the literary and intellectual life of the ocean (Adejunmobi, 2009; Dick, 2015; Luffin, 2013; Stell, 2007; Stell et al., 2008). Attention to South Asian language materials from, for or about Africa offers parallel possibilities by way of charting the scope of cultural interaction in discursive registers that lay beyond those of colonial Anglophone elites (Akhtar, 2014; Basu, 2005; Green, 2012a; Pant, 2021), though it remains far from clear what engagement, if any, African peoples had with these languages and the ideas they articulated.…”

Historical Study of Jinja, Uganda: A City Influenced by Industrial Developments During the Early 20th Century

“…Industrial developments' contribution to founding of urban centres can therefore be restated as when the Uganda Railway introduced nodes as railway stations and termini that eventually became administrative and commercial centres for the British colonial government. Further, these urban centres presented cases that were rooted within colonial developments: the Uganda Railway construction for example brought with it a vast skilled workforce from India with 20% staying on as traders or artisans [10]. By the start of World War I, the colonial government encouraged migration and settlement of Indians in British East Africa with the anticipation that Indians would be used for military service [11], or that Indians would take on cotton and coffee farming [11], [12].…”