Of a different kind of African–Indian encounter and imagination

When we pay attention to the material histories of the Indian Ocean, it becomes evident that regular people have driven and shaped transcontinental connections beyond the forces of colonialism and non-aligned nation states and their representatives. Ordinary individuals have fostered African–Indian imaginaries that are nuanced, speculative and intimate, differing significantly from the assumptions and desires professed by West African leaders such as Léopold Senghor and Kwame Nkrumah. While much has been said about African–Indian connections, we rarely ask how various media and materialities influence ordinary contemporary African–Indian imagination and world making, as most studies examine these relations through the lens of nation states, non-alignment, diaspora and oceanic cosmopolitanism (Aiyar Reference Aiyar2015; Achenbach et al. Reference Achenbach, Beek, Karugia, Mageza-Barthel and Schulze-Engler2020; Harris Reference Harris1971; Jayasuriya and Pankhurst Reference Jayasuriya and Pankhurst2003; Hofmeyr Reference Hofmeyr2007; Reference Hofmeyr2012). The contemporary African imaginary of India and the Indian imagination of Africa do not necessarily originate from broader South–South globalization and infrastructural projects, nor from the Afro-Asian postcolonial accords defined by nation states and political figures; rather, they are driven by media, religious practices, performances, objects, labour, and the movements of humans and non-human agents who activate the connected histories of the two continents. As ordinary people nurture African–Indian affinities and imaginaries, they interpret Africa–India through a variety of materials (textiles, beads, shrines), visual media (performances, rituals, films, art), and mediums (spirit mediums, adepts, ritual specialists). In other words, in contemporary times, a diverse range of knowledge economies mediates African–Indian affinity as various individuals engage with different media, meet in intermediary spaces, and share migrant living and working environments in the global South.

Although the story of African saints’ migration to India (discussed later in the article) is one instance of early minor transnational exchanges, such forms of African–Indian exchange, I argue, help us reimagine discourses on what constitutes ‘Afro-India’, an often used term that is broad and equally fuzzy. Before unpacking African–Indian crossovers, it is thus necessary to delve into the heuristic dimension of the very term ‘Afro-India’ and the academic rendering of the concept of Afro-India(n). ‘Afro-Indian’ and/or ‘Afro-India’ as a concept is often treated as a universal heuristic category, like the ‘Afro-Atlantic’ (Trouillot Reference Trouillot2002), without much unpacking of how the term is read culturally in different contexts. While African–Indian connections in many academic debates represent partnerships or aspects of cultural sharing (Tan and Acharya Reference Tan and Acharya2008; Hawley Reference Hawley2008; Mawdsley and McCann Reference Mawdsley and McCann2011; Achenbach et al. Reference Achenbach, Beek, Karugia, Mageza-Barthel and Schulze-Engler2020; King and Venkatachalam Reference King and Venkatachalam2021), for Africans and Indians, ‘Afro-India’ continues to be an unspecified and mostly unused term and remains a flexible imaginary for many who retain and activate histories of African–Indian relations.

Scholars studying African–Indian imaginaries through literary representations, such as Antoinette Burton (Reference Burton2016), have observed that, while the Bandung Conference celebrated South–South solidarities, such connections were always approached through a deeply racialized and colonial-influenced mindset, especially regarding the treatment of Africans by Indians. As Burton suggests, both colonial and even postcolonial literary narratives about Afro-Indian imagination are entrenched in a racialized framing of the other and resonate with stereotypes of what constitutes Afro-Indian consciousness (ibid. Reference Burton). In a somewhat similar tone, yet as a contrasting perspective on African–Indian imaginaries, Gaurav Desai notes that Indians mostly appear as side characters in colonial and postcolonial Black African literature, and relations between the two groups are typecast as exploitative (Desai Reference Desai2013). As subjects of the Empire, Africans and Indians have been uneasy partners, set apart because of race and class, which often created visible and invisible cultural boundaries. Nevertheless, there are examples from other repertoires and texts from Africa and the Indian subcontinent where African–Indian solidarities are constructed differently and where patches and pastiches of history have been repurposed to demonstrate unique African–Indian affiliations in the present (see Shankar Reference Shankar2021).

It is important to acknowledge that postcolonial political alliances established after the Bandung ConferenceFootnote ¹ paved the way for diverse exchanges between African countries and India, including the arrival of African students in India. In the 1950s and 1960s, African students, primarily from Anglophone African countries, came to Indian universities to study for degrees in engineering, sciences and other subjects, as Indian universities offered a range of courses in English at an affordable price. These numbers have multiplied over the years; at present, African students are enrolled in various undergraduate and graduate programmes as well as on other short-term technical diploma courses in India (see Verma Reference Verma2023). While the presence of African students in Indian educational institutions generated African–Indian fellowships, they were restricted to academic circles. They had little influence on the African imaginary among working-class Indians, nor among communities of African descent. These twentieth-century Afro-Indian cultural encounters occurred in cities, far away from Indian towns and villages and from the subaltern population who were rooted in their socio-economic conditions. This segment of the population was yet to benefit from the neoliberal momentum; moreover, they did not have access to India’s transcontinental visitors.

However, the recent migration of Africans to India consists of a diverse group, from traders to medical tourists. The emergence of a newer African diaspora in Indian megacities such as Mumbai and New Delhi represents a different kind of African–Indian world making where Pan-African subjectivities are reinvented and performed to align with the prejudices and expectations of Indian society. As Meera Venkatachalam demonstrates, this also involves the enterprise of religiosity such as the Nigerian Pentecostal-Charismatic churches that serve not only as a focal point for community interaction but also play a vital role in showcasing the markers of imagined Africanness in India (Venkatachalam Reference Venkatachalam2022).

On the other hand, on the African continent, commercial interactions and social exchanges with South Asian merchants, Islamic missions and other trans-religious networks since the early twentieth century have served as the basis for accessing Indian cultural elements. In the case of West Africa, interactions outside the influence of the Empire – or, at times, in its shadow – nurtured interesting cultural appropriations that had a remarkable influence on the spiritual and aesthetic practices of many communities. Spaces such as Indian grocery stores or the Ahmadiyya missions played a formative role in shaping Indian imaginaries through diverse visual landscapes, which continued even in the postcolonial era (cf. Shankar Reference Shankar2021). The unique forms of Afro-Indian imaginations shaped by the transmigration of people and the things they carried, and how they connect the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic worlds, remain understudied, with only a handful of studies exploring the resultant intercultural practices (see Rush Reference Rush2019; Reference Rush and Hawley2008; Shankar Reference Shankar2021; Wuaku Reference Wuaku2013). The overwhelming majority of work on African–Indian relations is still historical in nature, with histories of empires and religious economies (e.g. Basu and Werbner Reference Basu and Werbner1998; Alpers Reference Alpers, Jayasuriya and Pankhurst2003; Catlin-Jairazbhoy and Alpers Reference Catlin-Jairazbhoy and Alpers2004; Eaton Reference Eaton2006; Obeng Reference Obeng2007; Shroff Reference Shroff2007; Reference Shroff2013) and a few works on expressive cultures (Larkin Reference Larkin1997; Rush Reference Rush2013; Jeychandran Reference Jeychandran, Starzmann and Roby2016; Purdy Reference Purdy2020). Only a handful of works explore the quotidian imaginations of Africa and India as intimate geographies connected symbolically in the present through ritual, artistic and sartorial practices (see, for example, Graves Eyssallenne Reference Graves Eyssallenne2024; Hill Reference Hill2022; Rush Reference Rush2019; Shankar Reference Shankar2021; Srinivas Reference Srinivas2022).

For the immobile population, for centuries itinerant travellers (i.e. traders, mystics, pilgrims, artisans) have crafted an awareness about Africa–India connections as they have rendered diverse images of African and Asian cultural landscapes through a range of texts, materials and oral accounts. These agents and the objects they carried have not only nurtured tactile familiarities with and sensitivities to each other’s cultural codes for people far removed from them, but have also pushed back against ethnocentric perceptions about Africa in India and India in Africa. Even though this African–Indian knowingness was constituted through the mobile agent’s sensorial and corporeal engagement, wherein individual experiences might have shaped their vision of socio-political structures and cultural landscapes, their immersive understandings informed their immediate networks, who consumed and might have participated in the dissemination of their imagined imageries third-hand. This meant that West Africa and India, though faraway places, have always been accessed, imagined, mapped and mythologized through things and people. In the following sections, I discuss how known African–Indian links and lesser-known connections extending to West Africa can be mapped together to challenge conventional and scholarly ideas of connectivity and the separation of terrestrial geographies from the oceanic worlds when studying Africa and the Indian Ocean.

Saints and place making

In contemporary times, media such as films and television produce avenues through which Africa and India can be consumed by ordinary people, but the historical circulation of everyday objects and luxury goods to East Africa and its hinterlands has linked Africa and India for centuries through practices of consumption, aesthetic displays and the efficacy of the object (Prestholdt Reference Prestholdt2008; Machado Reference Machado2014; Meier Reference Meier2015; Reference Meier2016). Both luxury and everyday international items worn, displayed, used and preserved by the mercantile community in the Indian Ocean world have enabled people (both mobile and immobile) to perceive distant cultures and places haptically (cf. Meier Reference Meier2015; Reference Meier2016). A range of goods flowed into the Swahili ports and those around the Horn of Africa, and these commodities were carried further inland, as many of these ports functioned as transit geographies that connected maritime sea lanes with overland routes. For instance, Prita Meier notes that Chinese porcelain arrived in Great Zimbabwe from the Swahili ports in the sixteenth century through the hinterland routes (Meier Reference Meier2015). Similarly, textiles from Gujarat that reached the interior of Lake Tanganyika were exchanged for enslaved Africans and ivory, thus exposing the complex economic ties of the Indian Ocean slave trade with commodity exchange. Thus, textiles, beads and spices from India were ferried inland to markets in North Africa, Sudan and Ethiopia from the Red Sea ports and carried further west along the Sahelian trade routes. Valued objects such as carnelian and agate beads from Cambay, Gujarat, reached West Africa through these routes (cf. Francis Reference Francis1990); later, commodities from the Indian Ocean that were already in circulation in the Arab markets flowed along the Sahel to West Africa after Mansa Musa’s legendary journey to Mecca in 1324, which had a paramount impact on the influx of Islam and trade goods to Mali and neighbouring regions (cf. Oliver Reference Oliver2013).

Even before and after Mansa Musa’s travels, a network of global trade routes extended across the Sahel and to regions south of the Saharan desert, connecting the empires of Ghana (300–1200), Mali (1230–1600), Songhay (1464–1591) and Segu (1640–1861), and cultivated an enormously rich material culture (see Berzock Reference Berzock2019; LaGamma Reference LaGamma2020). These precolonial material and aesthetic transfers were explored through monumental exhibitions including Sahel: Art and Empires on the Shores of the Sahara (LaGamma Reference LaGamma2020), which originated at the Metropolitan Museum, and Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time (Berzock Reference Berzock2019) at the Block Museum of Art. Important transit geographies in Misr, Nubia and Al-Habash linked West Africa and the Indian Ocean through complex trans-Saharan networks of traders, pilgrims and enslaved people, and rhizomatic systems of commodity exchanges. Cultures south of the Saharan regions were connected to Nubia and Misr from very early times; art historian Annissa Malvoisin (Reference Malvoisin2024) argues that the early cultural relationship between Nile Valley civilizations and Iron Age Western African cultures is visible through decorative representations on Nubian pottery from the Meroitic period (200–300 CE). Thus, we see a historical circulation of objects, creative knowledge and decorative designs passing through Nubia and Misr and other Sahelian transit points.

Trade objects, markets and port cities that were part of the trans-Saharan exchange routes are central to the histories and spiritual journeys of African mystics in India, the patron saints of the Sidi African-descent community. The Sidis, who view themselves as the descendants of the Black saints from Nubia, Misr and Al-Habash, carve out a place for themselves in the historical narrative of African migration to India by imagining their ancestry and making memories of generationally distant lands through commodities and places associated with their saints. Through oral hagiographies and ritual performances for Bava Gor,Footnote ² the Sidis recount different histories of their saint’s connection with Nubia, trans-Saharan trade centres and Indian Ocean mobilities. According to Sidi oral histories, Sidi Mubarak Nobi/Nubi, widely addressed as Bava Gor, hailed from Nubia. There are different, slightly varied, accounts that narrate Bava Gor’s journey to India to fulfil his saintly calling. While most accounts depict Bava Gor as a pious man who travelled to Cambay to vanquish a menacing demoness, some versions note that he was a military leader who had commandeered a group of African soldiers travelling to Gujarat. In some instances, Bava Gor and his followers and/or kin are said to have migrated from Kano in Nigeria to India following the Sahelian routes to Abyssinia and then travelling towards Mecca (Patel Reference Patel1986). Over the years, some of these narratives have either been forgotten or altered and, at times, conflated, as the socio-political context has changed. However, Sidi ritual specialists and caretakers of ancillary shrines recall the saint’s connection with West Africa and regions south of the Saharan desert.

Irrespective of Bava Gor’s mission and place of origin, he is closely linked with agate mining and trade. Sidi zikrs (recitations) illuminate the saint’s connection to the akik or agate stones of superior quality and value. Some of the senior Sidi ritualists wear agate beads with great reverence, as they are perceived to be the material that haptically connects the saint to them. Bava Gor is credited with modernizing agate mining in Ratanpur (literally translated as ‘place of gems’) near Cambay in Gujarat. Other sources reference Baba Gor’s knowledge of drilling and carving carnelian beads. There are many accounts of Baba Gor’s connection with the agate trade. One version notes that his contribution to the lapidary was his knowledge of cooking the agate beads at high temperatures, which enhanced their lustre and the aesthetic value (Akhtar Reference Akhtar2008; Francis Reference Francis1986; Reference Francis2002; Trivedi Reference Trivedi1964). The banded agate called Babagoria is a synecdochical reference to the African holy man himself. These beads are also known as holy man’s beads and are valued by the Sufis for the appealing black and white bands that appear after the firing process. Africa and India are fused into the banded agate, as knowledge of shared technologies shaped the finished beads that were used in Islamic prayers.

According to some records, Baba Gor expanded the export of agate beads to ports such as Suakin in Nubia and Jeddah in the Red Sea by collaborating with Abyssinian merchants who had already established themselves in Cambay. In the fifteenth century, Cambay had become a principal port for travel to Mecca (cf. Trivedi Reference Trivedi1964). Pilgrims, travellers and traders from Cambay heading to Mecca and other towns in the Red Sea carried various kinds of agate, such as carnelian, with them. Baba Gor’s connection to Mecca is also evoked in Sidi zikrs, which state that mera pir aya Mecca se (my saint has come from Mecca). This Sidi recitation serves as a fragmented historical notation suggesting a complex trade network that linked Africa, Arabia and India with the flow of goods and people in which Africans participated actively or coercively. Sidi zikrs also connected Baba Gor’s Sufi brothers to the production and circulation of specific adornments, such as beads, and with the intertwined histories of the migration of Africans from Al-Habash and Nubia, thus referencing markets that engaged in the trade of enslaved Africans and goods. This historical period saw the dynamics of pre-modern Afro-Arab polities and their commercial reliance on the Islamic Indian Ocean, which enabled a small group of African mystics and agate miner-traders, such as Baba Gor and his kin, to robustly link Ratanpur and Cambay in Gujarat with coastal and inland markets in Africa. For instance, Baba Gor’s brother, Baba Saban, is credited with discovering agate bead markets in the Arab world (Trivedi Reference Trivedi1964). Given that Muslim and African traders were highly active in Indian Ocean commerce, Baba Gor likely expanded the export of Indian agate through both sea and inland trade in the Islamic world, especially since carnelian was in great demand in Arabia and Africa because of its lustrous red colour and talismanic properties (Kenoyer et al. Reference Kenoyer, Vidale and Bhan1991).

Once the agate beads reached the Red Sea ports, they were transported further along the Sahelian trade routes and even made their way to regions in West Africa. A case in point is the discovery of carnelian beads from Cambay in the recently excavated sites of Gao and Timbuktu in Mali, which provides more insight into the export of carnelian from Gujarat to West Africa. Gao, the former capital of the Songhai empire, was a significant trans-Saharan trade centre in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, thus linking it to Indian Ocean trade systems. The carnelian trade between Cambay, Gujarat and regions south of the Sahara and in West Africa during the pre-modern period has been examined by historians and substantiated by archaeologists through visual analyses of agate beads found in Sudan and Nigeria (Insoll et al. Reference Insoll, Polya, Bhan, Irving and Jarvis2004). In an article, A. J. Arkell (Reference Arkell1936) argued convincingly that some of the old carnelian beads he collected in Darfur, Sudan and Kano, Nigeria, originated from Cambay and reached Red Sea ports via pilgrims and traders. This assertion can now be backed by a comparative chemical analysis conducted on carnelian beads collected from major working centres in Gujarat, including Ratanpur, alongside a variety of carnelian samples gathered from archaeological sites in Gadei, Gao Ancien, Gao-Saney and Timbuktu (Insoll et al. Reference Insoll, Polya, Bhan, Irving and Jarvis2004). These locations in Western and West-Central Africa were merchant towns and transit points that were incorporated into overland trade routes, showcasing the extent of medieval sub-Saharan trade connections. As Arkell noted, the carnelians arrived in Nigeria and other West African towns via caravans, and he stated they were sourced in modern periods from towns along the Blue and White Niles by bead peddlers known as fellata, who are natives of Northern Nigeria and, at times, Senegal (Arkell Reference Arkell1936).

As Baba Gor was seen as a catalyst in expanding the agate trade, we can observe the names of places that facilitated the interconnected commerce of Sahelian systems with the Indian Ocean world, manifesting through oral narratives that are intended to celebrate Baba Gor’s spiritual charisma. Due to his contributions to the agate trade and industry, he was highly respected and venerated upon his death by the Islamic bead makers of Gujarat. His grave, situated near the agate mines, became a sacred site, serving as the saint’s resting place, while the agate minefield is regarded as sacred geography by the Sidis (cf. Francis Reference Francis1982: 22–3). In the fourteenth century, the saint’s dargah served as a pilgrimage site, visited by Muhammad Shah, the ruler of the Gujarat sultanate, after his ascension to the throne (Lokhandwala Reference Lokhandwala1970).Footnote ³ The existence of the cult of Baba Gor was noted by the fourteenth-century Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta (see Sheikh Reference Sheikh2010), and other accounts of the Indian Ocean have acknowledged that Battuta’s reference provides insights into the formation of the worship culture surrounding the shrine of Baba Gor in Ratanpur, which likely developed much later.

Like Baba Gor, his sister, Mai Misra, also occasionally referred to as Mai Mariyam, is a patron saint of the African-descendant community and is associated with the calligraphic agate bead (Trivedi Reference Trivedi1961; Reference Trivedi1964). Mai Misra is believed to hail from Misr, or Egypt, and, according to Sidi oral hagiographies, she used her shawl as the sail of a dhow to traverse the Indian Ocean and reach Gujarat. The saint’s true name remains unknown, and she has been respectfully addressed as Mai, or Mother. ‘Mai’ could also be an Arab-influenced name, and in many instances she is also referred to as Maisha/Maisa, a popular Arabic name that means life. While not much is known about her persona, Sidi recitations describe her as someone with curly hair and wearing a red tie-dye dupatta (shawl). She is often symbolically represented by the Sidis through tie-dye textiles. The tomb of Mai Misra and ancillary shrines dedicated to her are covered in multiple tie-dye textiles offered by devotees, signalling her embedded connection with such textiles. Although deities in shrines across Gujarat are adorned in tie-dye textiles, what is interesting about the modest shrines for Mai Misra is that the textiles become a marker of her symbolic manifestation – the material medium of the textiles serves as an indexical presence of a deity whose historical identity is unknown.

Gujarat has been a centre of textile production for over a millennium, with artisans mastering exquisite resist-dyeing techniques. Textile scholar Ruth Barnes notes that fragments of printed cotton made in Gujarat were discovered in archaeological sites in Egypt during the Fatimid, Ayyubid and Mamluk periods (i.e. the tenth to early sixteenth centuries), including resist-printed or mordant-printed textiles that illuminate the densely interwoven medieval trades between Egypt, India and the wider Indian Ocean (Barnes Reference Barnes2017). Another particularly striking example demonstrating the pre-modern circulation of Indian textiles is the fragments of cotton textiles from Gujarat in the Metropolitan Museum collection, excavated during the 1920s and 1930s from Fustat, Egypt. As Ayesha Shaikh points out, some designs, like the chevron pattern, were specifically produced for the Egyptian market due to high demand (Shaikh Reference Shaikh2023). These examples illustrate the expansiveness of the textile trade networks connecting India with Egypt and the understanding of manufacturing needs for the African consumer.

It can be argued that Mai Misra’s association with tie-dye textiles and beads represents a memory-making process in which Sidi oral histories related to migration, religious practices, craft, trade and labour collectively illustrate a gendered history of African arrivals in India and their contributions to the creative sectors. Sidi elders recount that women worked in craft production, mining, textiles and dyeing industries. Even today, Sidi women in Jamnagar and Surat, both major textile centres in India, continue to engage in the informal textile sector as tie-dye or bandhani patternmakers, a role that requires the precise skill of creating tiny knots on fabric to produce intricate designs. The techniques of tie-dye and resist dyeing were forms of knowledge that circulated along the Indian Ocean rim and the Sahel, with each culture along the trade route sharing, adapting and reinventing dyeing styles, knot-securing techniques and complex designs. It is quite possible that African women who arrived in India either already possessed these skills or quickly acquired the techniques of tying knots in fabrics in Gujarat, thus becoming intrinsically linked to bandhani textiles. The tomb of Mai Misra is adorned with multiple tie-dye textiles offered by devotees, and the home altars of the saint are decorated with screens of tie-dye textiles to distinguish her shrine and suggest her identity as a mystic draped in a tie-dye veil or purdah.

The saint Mai Misra’s connection to agate beads and textiles is symbolically preserved through the Sidi musical instrument, Mai Misra, which is a coconut rattle similar to the African shakers found in regions south of the Sahara and around the Indian Ocean. The Mai Misra musical instrument is made from dried coconut shells filled with small agate beads, and a wooden stick is inserted to hold the instrument and to create a sound when shaken rhythmically. The coconut shakers are wrapped in red tie-dye textile – a reference to the saint’s identity – and play an important role in Sidi performance repertoires, including possession ceremonies. They are often placed on top of or beside the chilla or satellite shrines for the saint, Mai Misra. In Sidi ritual performances, the rattles are used by musicians alongside other traditional Sidi instruments such as the mugarman (standing drum) and damama (small cylindrical drum) (cf. Graves Eyssallenne Reference Graves Eyssallenne2024).

The brother of Bava Gor and Mai Misra, Bava Habash, also known as Habash Khan or Baba Abbas, is associated with the Al-Habash region and the military slavery of the Indian Ocean. While some accounts describe him as an Abyssinian military leader who crossed the Indian Ocean, others identify him as Bava Gor’s brother who managed his agate business in Cambay (Trivedi Reference Trivedi1964). Bava Habash is also referred to as Darya Dulha (groom of the ocean/sea) due to his extensive knowledge of oceanic waters and his navigational skills, possibly indicating an oceanic network he utilized. Such historical references demonstrate the interconnectedness of African bead traders with the Arab–African slave trade to western India during the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, a period when African soldiers played a crucial role for Islamic sultanates in the Indian subcontinent, safeguarding their reign amid political upheaval and conflict (see Eaton Reference Eaton2006). In the Sidi legend, the three saints are believed to have embarked on their journey from distinct regions of Africa, suggesting that they may not be related but were instead united through spiritual and creative kinships.

The intertwined history of Indian trade objects intended for markets south of the Saharan desert and the known provenance of African saints and their careers suggests rhizomatic connections, revealing how these objects shaped African–Indian exchanges. The journey of these trade goods simultaneously illustrates the extensive links through which West Africa was connected to India – a largely overlooked narrative of transcontinental ties in pre-modern times that continues to resonate today, as Sidis sing and dance the hagiographies of these saints. Later, during the transatlantic trade, some of the Cambay carnelians made their way to the Caribbean (cf. Handler Reference Handler2007).

These early connections with Africa are expressed in various ways in India and West Africa. For instance, the Indian high commissioner to Nigeria in 2012, during an event organized by the Kano state government, cited Baba Gor’s migration from Kano to demonstrate Nigeria’s centuries-old cultural ties with India and the alliance between the two nations – an alliance that was established before any non-aligned partnerships.Footnote ⁴ For the Sidis, recalling places such as Kano and Nubia in their recitation of zikrs bookends the historiographies of migration. Although we can observe a process of fabulation in the historical recollection of places, the African saints’ association with the trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean routes through the movement of sails, textiles and beads is a history that cannot be overlooked.

Objects and transmigratory histories

With the arrival of the Portuguese and Dutch in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, precolonial routes of transcontinental commerce became realigned as European vessels began carrying textiles and beads from Gujarat and spices from the Malabar Coast to the Guinea Coast. European vessels travelling to ports in the Gulf of Guinea and the Gold Coast capitalized on the West African demand for international goods and carried tons of beads and textiles, which were exchanged for gold and later for captured Africans (cf. Alpern Reference Alpern1995). A range of agate beads, including jasper, agate cups and vases from Cambay, and textiles from Cambay and the Coromandel Coast flowed into the West African markets through the sea lanes (cf. Alpern Reference Alpern1995; Trivedi Reference Trivedi1964). Some of these objects were also carried across the Atlantic Ocean to the Caribbean islands. Jerome Handler, who examined the goods of a slave burial site, interred from 1660 to 1820 in the Caribbean, notes that necklaces with carnelian beads were found buried with people in their graves. Although the story of how the beads made their way to Barbados is perhaps open to conjecture, the carnelian from Cambay must have been regarded as a valuable item and perhaps was carried with permission or smuggled across the Atlantic (Handler Reference Handler2007).

As the transatlantic slave trade gained momentum, the European trading companies used Indian cotton and silk cloth to purchase slaves on the West African coast. The West African demand for Indian textiles grew (Kobayashi Reference Kobayashi2019); this is evident from the records of the Dutch vessel The Unity for its transatlantic journey in 1761–63. About 47 per cent of the cargo of The Unity consisted of textiles (i.e. 18 tons of thirty-five different textiles),Footnote ⁵ with the majority produced in India and with some Indian-style textiles manufactured in Europe. The Unity’s records show that at different ports of call in Liberia, the Ivory Coast and the Gold Coast, a range of textiles, including red rumals (handkerchiefs) and blue rumals known as Guinea cloth, was mainly traded to purchase slaves. For instance, during The Unity’s stay from 23 February to 8 May 1762, about twenty different types of textiles were traded for slaves (ibid.). Indian tie-dye textiles or bandhani, like the cloth associated with Mai Misra, were luxury goods that were later supplanted in West Africa by the English-manufactured tie-dye designs called bandanas. Along the Gold Coast, from the seventeenth century, we see chintz and silk tie-dye symbolizing social status for the Fante and Akan elites, and these materials became part of lavish displays of power, wealth and purpose.

Aside from cloth, other objects made of textiles, such as parasols or umbrellas produced in India, were given to Ghanaian chiefs and kings as diplomatic gifts by the Portuguese, Dutch and English, who often competed for lucrative trade benefits on the Gold Coast. Sharon Patton notes that Europeans were well aware of the popularity of the Indian umbrella in the Asante kingdom, and from the seventeenth century, the English and Dutch gifted silk and velvet umbrellas with rich embroidery and fringes with ornamental metal handles to the Asante court (Patton Reference Patton1984). In Asante durbar rituals and other royal settings, the umbrella became an insignia representing political rank and status. Although local artists had made umbrellas before the arrival of the Indian domed umbrellas, the Akan shapes and styles were different and less elaborate. With the Asante amassing power, the richly decorated umbrella became a ubiquitous political emblem, and we see the kings and chiefs using different styles and sizes of umbrellas to represent their political status. The local craftsmen catered to this rising demand and often emulated Indian designs and masterfully blended pastiches of various international fabrics such as chintz and damask, creating mixed multicolour patterns (ibid.: 66). The circulation of Indian trade items to West Africa not only reveals the integration of Atlantic slave trade commerce with that of Indian Ocean commodities but also brings to the fore how trade items were incorporated into cultural and political ceremonies.

Like the umbrellas, some of the Indian trade cloth that arrived in West Africa became the desired fabric of choice for urban elites. This was especially true for Eurafrican women merchants living in coastal trading towns, from Saint Louis in Senegal to Freetown in Sierra Leone. They incorporated imported cotton and silk handkerchiefs and ribbons as well as Indian, European, Chinese and African textiles into their outfits to display their wealth (Benjamin Reference Benjamin, McGregor, Akou and Stylianou2022). Other textiles gained cultural significance as ritual objects and became an indispensable part of lifecycle ceremonies even in contemporary times. For instance, the Indian Madras or injiri, a fabric produced by weavers along the Coromandel Coast in south-eastern India, has material significance for the Kalabari in the Niger Delta as it is gifted, exchanged and worn during ritual events and at a range of community gatherings (Evenson Reference Evenson1990). Injiri, translated as ‘cloth from India’ in the Kalabari language, is a brightly coloured plaid fabric used as a wrapper by men and women. Merchants also referred to the fabric as ‘real India’ in Kalabar, to distinguish the Indian handloomed and 100 per cent cotton textiles from factory-produced imitations that arrived in West African ports in the nineteenth century.

Erekosima and Eicher (Reference Erekosima and Eicher1981), who have extensively studied Indian Madras, note that the Kalabari who lived and traded in the Niger Delta had access to imported textiles even before the arrival of the Europeans. Eicher labels these textiles ‘Intorica’ or ‘Indian to Africa’; this refers to trade cloth that is woven in India specifically to cater to African markets (Eicher Reference Eicher, Nosch, Feng and Varadarajan2014). The Kalabari transformed the Indian Madras into their own artifact by pulling out the cloth threads, thus creating new patterns; they called this pelete bite. Both Indian Madras and pelete bite are significant cultural items and are featured in birth and death ceremonies, conveying international value and domestic artistry (Erekosima and Eicher Reference Erekosima and Eicher1981). These fabrics are also used to veil the face of masquerades, especially the masquerade of water spirits, probably to suggest the spirits’ oceanic connections and potencies (Eicher Reference Eicher2004). We see a similar use of imported objects in rituals associated with the Mami Wata pantheon of water spirits in which international commodities are incorporated into the performance and altars of the spirits to suggest wealth and economic power that come from afar (cf. Drewal Reference Drewal2008; Rush Reference Rush2019; Reference Rush and Hawley2008; Hill Reference Hill2025).

The channelling of powers from India carried across the water is a recurring theme in mystic arts and performances in different parts of West Africa. For instance, in the Islamic mystic practices of Sierra Leone, the jinns that come to people to bring healing power and tutelage energy are from India. Samuel Anderson, who has extensively studied Islamic mystic performers in Sierra Leone, notes that supplicants whom he met narrated that they attained mystical powers after they went underwater and were contacted by jinns from India or somewhere afar.Footnote ⁶ In many mystical arts and masquerades, oceanic linkages with India through a range of things bring healing power and other mystic abilities that ritual specialists and supplicants harness. On the one hand, while these practices reveal transoceanic links and affinities mobilized by spirit mediums, non-human agents such as jinns and objects with power in West Africa, these materialities also highlight the different amalgamations and the attendant meanings of Indian trade objects in African social and cultural settings at different periods.

Particular ritual practices in West Africa are remarkable examples of amalgamations that suggest how Africa and India adopt one another visually. Take, for instance, the Hindu temple in Osu, Accra, where different faiths from the Indian subcontinent are given a place on the temple’s altar. We see Hindu gods and goddesses, the Sikh religious text Guru Granth Sahib, images of the Sikh gurus and a large photograph of Sathya Sai Baba, a marble murti of Shirdi Sai Baba and busts of Jesus and Mary all occupying places on the central altar of the temple (see Jeychandran Reference Jeychandran, Srinivas, Jeychandran and Roberts2022). The striking cross-pollination of Ghanaian and Indian worship cultures can be seen during the Thursday evening puja for the Indian saints Shirdi Sai Baba and his incarnation Sathya Sai Baba. Africa and India converge every Thursday through visual symbols, objects and devotional singing performed by Indian diasporic and Ghanaian devotees with African drums as musical accompaniment. During the Thursday puja, a chair wrapped in Kente cloth is placed in front of the altar to symbolize the presence of Sathya Sai Baba. Kente, an Akan cloth reserved initially for royalty and for wrapping obosom shrines (cf. Silverman Reference Silverman and Ross1998), is used to upholster the chair for Sai Baba, which is a likely representation of the seat the Indian saint occupies during his audiences with devotees. The seat thus anchors his divine presence in the Osu temple. For devotees of Sai Baba, it is the most Ghanaian way of demonstrating their devotion to the saint, as the Kente cloth is a marker of Akan prestige and a garment reserved for the highest order. Such African–Indian convergences are evocative and affective and lend a different understanding to histories of contacts – of people, of cultures – and the reciprocal, impactful imaginaries and hybridities they produce.