African Diaspora Communities across South Asia

Afro-South Asia in the Global African Diaspora
May 5, 2022

Two presentations in this session. The first presentation by Purnima Mehta Bhatt is ‘Slavery and the Slave trade in India’. Slavery in India differed from slavery practiced in the New World. Questions of assimilation, acculturation and culture change in the diasporic communities will be examined along with their significant contributions. The second presentation has two parts. Part one by Prof. (Adjunct) Amy Catlin-Jairazbhoy is titled The Sidi Malunga Speaks. An ethnomusicologist describes her collaborations in music, dance, and touring with a Sidi Goma group in Gujarat as well as efforts to revive the playing of a sacred bow, the malunga. Part two by Nkosenathi Ernie Koela is titled Seeds of the Braced Bow (The Flower, the Seed, and the Bee). Focusing on the instrumentalist as alchemist, sonic healer, and cultural treasure, the speaker uncovers the reality of a rich shared consciousness of Ngoma and pre-colonial history between Afro-Asia through the making of the musical bow. Ngoma is a proto-Bantu cognate within which exists an ecology of related institutions such as the practice of medicine, divination, crafts, music, and ritual.

Throughout South Asia from Karachi and Gujarat to Karnataka and Hyderabad, there are communities of African descent. The book Afro-South Asia in the Global African Diaspora Volume 2 focuses on how these marginalized groups have confronted the challenges of sustaining community and pride while negotiating contested questions of identity, home, and belonging through religious practices and reinvented cultural traditions. Their vibrant religious practices, music, and textiles provide a basis for belonging in an atmosphere where discrimination creates additional obstacles to their social and economic well-being and advancement.

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