Mughals in Bombay? Border-making and itinerant belonging in a colonial port city

This lecture is part of the Royal Asiatic Society’s Maritime Asia Series

About the Talk

This is a talk about Persianate Bombay, a city that is not commonly seen as a part of the Persianate world or era, or as a border city. I argue that Bombay was both- Persianate and a border city- in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. As larger numbers of migrants arrived from the ports of the Persian Gulf following the steam revolution of the nineteenth century, Bombay’s administrators sought to criminalise itinerancy and reify the borders of the Raj by sorting “desirables” from “undesirables”. Amidst these state processes of border-making and fixing people in space through property and taxation, Persian itinerants built diverse professions and overlapping orders of social belonging as Mughals (Shias) and Iranis (Zoroastrians), tied by shared norms of Persianate adab. As the city transitioned from being an ocean-facing port city to a nation-facing mill city, so did the norms of belonging and the notions of space embedded in its neighbourhoods.

About the Speaker

Tania Bhattacharyya is Assistant Professor of the History of Capitalism at the University of Warwick. She is a historian of migration, urbanity and labour in the British Empire and specializes in the study of South Asia and the Indian Ocean. Her book manuscript Ocean Bombay: Space, itinerancy and community in a colonial port city, 1839-1945 is currently under review with Columbia University Press. It tells the story of colonial Bombay as it transitioned from an ocean-facing port city to a nation-facing mill city by following itinerants who traversed the routes between Zanzibar, Aden, Bushire and Bombay and studying the communities and neighbourhoods that formed at the interstices of these networks in Bombay.

Free and open to all.

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