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<p>My dissertation project is an ethnographic history of "homes of capital," merchant
homes located in port-cities of Gujarat in various states of splendor and decrepitude,
which continue to mark a long history of Indian Ocean cross-cultural trade and exchange.
Located in western South Asia, Gujarat is a terraqueous borderland, connecting the
western and eastern arenas of the Indian Ocean at the same time as it connects territorial
South Asia to maritime markets. Gujarat's dynamic port-cities, including Rander, Surat
and Bombay, were and continue to be home to itinerant merchants, many with origins
and investments around the littoral from Arabia to Southeast Asia. I argue that rather
than a point of origin or return, Gujarat's merchants--many of whom are themselves
itinerants from Arabia, Persia and Northwest India--produce and produced Gujarat as
a place of arrival and departure: as a crucible of mobility. Gujarat's merchant homes
offer a model of transregional engagement produced through the itineraries of merchants
who continue to see the regions bordering the Indian Ocean as an extension of their
homes.</p><p>While historians have generally studied these merchants through the bureaucratic
archival records of imperial trade-companies, my project examines the yet-unexplored
archives that collect around historic merchant homes. Curated by a current generation
of merchant families who continue to ply old routes at the same time as they forge
new ones, merchant homes offer a way to study oceanic connections from the inside-out
and capital in cultural terms. Drawing on a rich array of collective and personal
ethnographic and historical materials within homes, including architectural form;
material objects; private journals, datebooks and travelogues; visual media; and merchant
memory, my project brings into view a mercantile space-time on ocean's edge. Though
emerging from concrete ethnographic and historical materials that cast powerful light
on Gujarati merchant mobility in the British Empire over the course of the nineteenth
and first half of the twentieth century, my account of "homes of capital" pursues
mercantile imaginings across long tranches of time routed through the political economic
transformations of the period stretching between the tenth and twelfth centuries.
I argue that these non-linear imaginings structured by oceanic mobility exist in the
interstices of imperial, colonial and post-colonial state space.</p><p> </p><p>Placing
merchant imaginings at the center of my analysis, my dissertation argues that the
Indian Ocean was and continues to be a key spatial and temporal motivator of mercantile
life. My project makes explicit the terms of this intimacy through a "chronotopic"
study of merchant homes across Gujarat. Homes of capital in its broadest sense also
include mercantile buildings like bridges, libraries, funerary sites, mosques and
community centers, which, when linked together, created shaded pathways across the
region in the face of an emergent colonial state centered on Bombay. In doing so I
also reveal a more capacious mercantile subject, showing how new kinds of nineteenth-century
circulations of Gujarati-language texts across merchant libraries, reading rooms and
homes were embedded in and shaped a longue durée oceanic topography. My project documents
the range of visual, material, textual and affective modes from within this topography
through which merchants gave and give form to such a terraqueous region.</p>
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