KARACHI: To discuss the parameters, or lack thereof, of oceanic and territorial routes and the crossover of people, ideas and goods across the interconnected terrain of Eurasia and the Indian Ocean, the Habib University on Friday hosted a talk by Prof Edward Simpson, professor of social anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

Prof Simpson was of the opinion that “if you think of how many borders, boundaries, linguistic spheres, islands, territorial conglomerations, superpowers, visible and invisible powers, are at work in the Indian Ocean, then you truly have an arena in which all boundaries and citizenship are being played out with an intensity that could never have been played out in any previous time in history.”

The two-day conference, ‘Order Beyond Borders: Sovereignty and Citizenship in Asia and the Indian Ocean World’, is an attempt to highlight the various political transitions and transformations around the world and tie them in with the increased infrastructural investment such as through “emerging developments in Asia such as China’s One Belt, One Road (Obor) project, Turkey’s neo-Ottomanism, Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union.”

Prof Simpson explained how on the southern shores of the Gulf of Kachchh to this day, similar to Karachi, huge wooden boats are being built. “They look like arcs and people often see them and say that these must be part of an ancient tradition. However, I don’t think there is anything old or anything traditional about these.”

He recalled the time when he started his fieldwork in the late 1990s, and recounted meeting a seafarer on the shores and asking him about where he traded. Eventually their conversations led him to uncover how at the time seafarers were bypassing the trade embargo imposed by the United Nations on Iraq.

“The vessels that were built in Gujarat were trading with smaller ports in Iraq. They would say they were taking medicines, tyres, humanitarian things but you can twist that in different ways. A decade later, the entire geography of the Indian Ocean trade from Gujarat has changed. They were no longer going to Iraq, they were headed to Somalia. They went to Dubai, picked up second-hand cars, took them to Somalia and from there they came back with material such as charcoal and animals.”

A few years later Prof Simpson found out that the seafarers were headed to Yemen. “Yet another state that has been encouraged to fail, another state which has had its infrastructure removed by different kinds of international sanctions and pressures, and these guys saw an opportunity and their trade was invigorated again.”

Prof Simpson also spoke at length about Réunion island, a region of France in the Indian Ocean, where he said progress was “incremental as the roads get bigger and bigger. The island is a playground for engineers in a way that it was a place where they could play and experiment.”

To give evidence of this, he showed a short video of how several attempts were made to connect the main city with the port, and how most of these experiments that constituted making a functional road network failed and are still being worked on. “A lot of the work being done there couldn’t have been done in France.”

A question from the audience inquired whether road network construction approvals, especially in a postcolonial context, are about the idea of expanding state frontiers to reach out to those areas which are outside state control, as in the case of Balochistan.

Prof Simpson agreed with the thought expressed, and said that road infrastructures are also about “state formations, about visibility, about describing a certain tendency of modernity.”

Prof Simpson’s first book, Muslim Society and the Western Indian Ocean: The Seafarers of Kachchh, is considered to be a significant text on the Indian Ocean. His current work in progress is on knowledge practices, interrelations and motivations of road builders in South Asia.

Published in Dawn, March 18th, 2017