Introduction to Marginal Centers : Writing Life Histories in the Indian Ocean World

This section centers on the life histories of men and women who were mobile in and around the Indian Ocean during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The articles that follow focus on soldiers, slaves, convicts, pirates, sailors, rebels, traders and travelers; people who are usually given the briefest of historical mention as somehow typical of a particular community, or who are referred to as evidence of particular historical processes or moments in time. In contrast, the collection's authors seek to piece together archival fragments from across the globe to write a series of individual life histories, and to use them as a means of exploring historically the nature, meaning and lived experiences of empire in the Indian Ocean: Dutch, French, British and Malagasy. The individuals that we center on did not write or record their own auto biographies, but left traces of their lives in the archives. Each author has engaged in piecing together and contextualizing these fragments, to present biographical snapshots produced in and through notarial records, wills, inventories, petitions, letters, diaries, court records and official correspondence. Some contributors have taken a dramatic event as a starting point for writing (and critiquing the writing of) extended histories of individuals and colonial societies. They include: instances of exile from Indonesia to the Cape under the Dutch East India Company (Kerry Ward), an accusation of poisoning leveled against two

Creole slave girls in British colonial Mauritius (James Bradley), an Australian convict's act of piracy (Ian Duffield), and the alleged treachery of two anticolonial rebels in South Asia (Anoma Pieris). Others have focused on evidence of the quotidian to produce quite unexpected histories: the remarkable wealth of an ex-slave woman from India settled in French Île de France (Richard Allen), interisland connections across the Mascarenes (Pier Larson), indigenous-settler relations in the Andaman Islands (Clare Anderson), and the presence of South Asians in colonial Australia (Devleena Ghosh). The aim of this collection is not to unveil and present the lives of "typical" men and women of the Indian Ocean. Rather, its ambition is to use life history as a critical perspective to explore the practices and processes associated with imperial expansion in the Indian Ocean and the ways in which individuals lived them.
The often marginal or marginalized position of the volume's subjects is of enormous significance to this goal. We present their social, economic and cultural positioning as contingent across time and place, to draw out some of the complexities of shifting identity as well as the oft-times indistinct tags "colonized" and "colonizer." This enables each of us to foreground the importance of context in our discussions, and to incorporate what Frederick Cooper has recently called "the politics of difference" in the drawing of lines of colonial inclusion and exclusion. 1 Each article looks through and beyond the life writing with which it is critically engaged, to embed individuals in their social worlds. As a collection the volume ranges across discussions of colonization, enslavement, convictism, forced labor, military service, domestic servitude, seafaring, and travel. Our point is not to make comparisons as such, but rather to investigate some of the ways in which the meaning of status, family, religion, work, ambition, and even career was positioned and challenged within and across colonial borders. In significant ways, the volume answers one of the most important intellectual challenges of recent years: Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler's call to overcome the colonial legacies that have produced archives as national institutions, in order to investigate "circuits of ideas and people, colonizer and colonized." 2 The volume is also centrally engaged with colonialism in the Indian Ocean, rather than with the relationship between European "centers" and colonial "peripheries." It speaks to the significance of relationships between colonies and empires, and in this respect to a broader history and historical geography of "webs" or "networks" in the Indian Ocean. 3 It does not dwell on the histories of colonies as such, but touches on intersections between them (Allen, Bradley, Duffield, Ghosh, Pieris), as well as on the overlaps between empires (Allen, Larson, Ward). The authors contend that this is important in the Indian Ocean context, for beyond placing people at the center of histories of geographical and cultural integrity, it opens up for discussion the nature of European colonial inter-relationships, and the significance of their interactions with neighboring cultures, polities and empires (Ghosh and especially Larson). 4 At the same time, the volume's concern with individuals in history lays stress on the Indian Ocean as what Kerry Ward has described elsewhere as a "peopled" rather than simply a political space. 5 Our examinations of mobility and movement within and across the region enable us to make new geographical connections, bringing together the ports and littorals of the Dutch, French, British, and Malagasy empires. 6 Individual lives network the sea with land too, so that interior cities, highlands and jungles also become part of the Indian Ocean world. Indeed, peopling the region brings together the nodal points of empire in novel ways: Bencoolen and Cape Town are linked together (Ward), alongside Bombay, Calcutta, Penang, and Sydney (Bradley, Duffield, Ghosh), Fort Dauphin, Tamatave, St Denis and Port Louis (Allen, Larson), and Lahore, Columbo and Singapore (Pieris). Tracking individuals across colonies and empires also urges us to go beyond what is usually thought of as the Indian Ocean, to envelop much of Southeast Asia and Australia, as well as to connect it with the Atlantic Ocean (Anderson, Duffield).
In this shared enthusiasm for new ways of thinking about empire and colonialism, though they focus on individual histories the articles presented here open up for analysis some of the large questions of "History." There is a range of themes that returns time and again within the volume: the significance of the to-and-fro of voyaging as circuitous rather than linear (Duffield, Ghosh, Larson), the contingent and ever-changing nature of social position and status (Allen, Duffield, Ghosh, Larson, Pieris, Ward), the importance of women in the construction and maintenance of family ties (Allen, Larson), and the lure of new identities made possible through the anomie of social mobility or displacement (Duffield, Ghosh, Larson). In contributor Ian Duffield's words: "The ground is never stable." Also: the prospect of death hovers close to the surface of each life history, as men and women construct their own genealogies, think through the distribution of their assets and inheritance, seek out lawyers and even copy their papers in the hope that they might eventually find their way to family and friends (Allen, Larson, Ward). Many of the people who are discussed here are both present in and erased from the archives, and often they eventually vanish, apparently without trace. The absence of a narrative resolution to their lives is an important reminder of some of the challenges of writing biographies of those who are marginal to or marginalized by society.
Given these limitations, what, then, is the value of a specifically biographical approach to addressing the themes of this collection? Ward's stress on the importance of the "peopling of empire" underpins much of the analysis here. There has been an assumption within some received colonial historiography that it is only possible to write the life histories of European elites. 7 And yet this claim sits awkwardly against a long history of writing about the lives of slaves, exiles, indentured migrants and convicts in a range of colonial contexts and across several disciplines, including anthropology, literature and history. 8 Moreover, and despite postmodern concerns about the "death of the subject," recently scholars generally have come back to a discussion of the potential merits of biography in their work. Historical geographers David Lambert and Alan Lester, for example, use the terms "new biography" or "life-writing" to distinguish their approach from old-fashioned hagiographic history writing. I am sympathetic to their idea that life-writing is "a powerful way of narrating the past," for it offers a neat way into large and complex histories. I have been much taken with their formulation of biographies as shifting kaleidoscopes through which we can look at society too, and evidently a range of scholars including the contributors to this volume share my enthusiasm. 9 Writing the lives of marginal or marginalized colonial subjects in the Indian Ocean opens up a new critical perspective on empire. It also perhaps urges us towards new research methodologies, for given the silences of the archive and the limitations of our own regional and linguistic knowledge, if we are to write about mobility and movement, it is almost impossible for a lone researcher to trace the lives of more than one or two individuals who lack fame or especial notoriety. The aim of this collection is to bring together scholars with a range of regional specialisms and language skills to explore the collective meaning of a series of life histories, of relatively or altogether unknown men and women. As authors, we have followed our subjects, figuratively and literally. Often, our material has been extremely limited, and the neat birth-to-death trajectory of elite biography has eluded us. And yet we contend that despite the limitations of our archives, the life histories that we have constructed offer a different perspective on colonialism, especially when they are placed together in a larger framework. Moreover, such an approach is only possible because scholars have come together with a shared commitment and purpose.
As a bounded, coherent, perhaps even cogent way of writing about the past, life history as an historical form perhaps lends itself particularly well to academic collaboration. Of particular significance, it seems to me, are the ways in which life histories from a range of contexts form a kaleidoscope through which we might examine imperial overlaps and geographical connectedness and mobility within and across Indian Ocean empires. Methodologically, this makes us take seriously the implications of crossing geographical and imperial borders-and thus national archives and languages. 10 Many of the contributors have pooled material as well as knowledge of the archive-and of course of time and place. It is only through working together (or at least in tandem) that we are able to write more inclusive-unbounded-histories in the Indian Ocean that go beyond colonies, nations or empires. There is also something intellectually appealing about interrogating the historical margins from a position of historiographical marginality (or at least "novelty"); and moreover of using archival fragments to write less fragmented histories.
If writing life histories in the Indian Ocean suggests a different way of producing historical knowledge-and of producing new types of history-collaboratively, so does the changing nature of history within and beyond the academy. I would like to point to two related themes that are of relevance and concern to the papers presented here. First, I would like to raise some issues around the boom in family history and its associated heritage, and the relationship of both to the methods of academic history. Second, I would like to speak to the implications of access to travel and the Internet for the writing of histories of mobility and connectedness.
I would like to contend that the growing academic interest in biography has emerged at least partly out of a broader social interest in family history. Family history is ever growing in popularity; it has been estimated that more than three million people in Britain alone are currently engaged in genealogical research. 11 It is no coincidence that some of the first systematic work to emerge on life history came out of the Australian context, where the tracing of convict genealogy, not to mention heritage and literature, is popular and socially visible. Like many academic historians, I now use genealogical archive resources in a way that was unthinkable ten years ago; these include web-based indexes and on-line census records. I have also drawn on the expertise of genealogical associations and societies, located through Internet message boards. Finally, once again through the forging of virtual contacts, I have corresponded extensively with the descendants of some of the individuals I am interested in, which has given me access to privately held documents. Even more significantly, this has led me to think about the relationship between history, genealogy and memory. Several articles presented here-by Bradley, Ghosh, Pieris and Ward-take seriously engagement with "amateur" historians, convict descendants, family historians, and heritage. Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to say that without respecting non-academic historians as producers of knowledge in their own right, and the heritage industry, much of our research would have been impossible.
It interests me enormously also that in our virtual engagement with and through our work in archives across the Europe, North America, Australasia and the Indian Ocean, the authors in this collection have become methodologically imbricated in the very processes of mobility and connectivity that we are seeking to describe. Indeed, even the displacement and circulation of archival papers themselves are relevant to this aspect of the volume's themes (Larson, Ward). Each contributor has used on-line resources and multiple archives in their research, on the Andamans, Australia, India, Indonesia, Madagascar, Mauritius, Penang, Réunion Island, South Africa, Sri Lanka, and Singapore. The methodological limitations of the archive trouble me though, for our place of global privilege in particular institutions of the western academy in Britain, Australia and the USA facilitates our access to and movement between archival spaces. Meanwhile, the continuing impossibilities of the archives-their absences and elisions-remain stark reminders of both the historical and continuing importance of marginality and the politics of postcolonialism across the Indian Ocean. In places as diverse as Madagascar, Australia, Mauritius and Burma, I would draw attention to the implications for historical research of continuing political unrest, the partial destruction of archival remnants of "shameful" national pasts, the total closure of births, deaths and marriage records lest "white" blood should be revealed as tainted with "black", and restrictions on access to travel.
And alongside each author's attention to their positionality in the writing of history, we remain acutely aware of the difficulties of our commitment to speaking for men and women long since dead-and of revealing intimate details of hope and despair, birth and blood, sex and sickness, and death. In the context of our research with family historians this raises problems beyond the use of biography as an historical kaleidoscope, most particularly around the ethics of the disclosure of information-on which the academy has been almost completely silent. What should I do when a genealogist makes contact with me about family rumors of a Portuguese ancestor transported overseas from India for murder, and I know the precise details of his trial and conviction? Or when Australian family historians enquire about my research, and it points unequivocally to their slave ancestry, shattering their belief in their genealogical Aboriginality and its associated social and political meanings? How might historians work ethically with descendants (Bradley, Pieris)? I, we, have no answers to these all too real and pressing questions, but I hope that in tackling directly work with descendants some of the papers in this collection will provide a step towards thinking about how we write about ordinary historical subjects whose genealogical and social lineage has been traced, or might be traced, by their living ancestors. For me, this is one of the most important issues faced by social and cultural historians today.
Also, the collection seeks to highlight the ways in which individuals have been collapsed into aggregated categories or histories in order to create particular types of memory and heritage for an explicitly political purpose. In the pages that follow, Pieris and Ward both discuss these issues, but perhaps Bradley has most squarely tackled them. As we will see, he unpicks life writing from within the Australian "history wars" and arguments about who speaks-and is allowed to speak-for whom, and for what purpose.
In closing the introduction to this special issue, I would like to turn briefly to the substance and thematic underpinning of the chapters that follow, to aid readers unfamiliar with particular contexts in drawing out some of their common themes. In the piece that follows, Richard Allen writes about the life of Marie Rozette as a window into Indo-French slave trading and colonial society in Île de France in the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries, most particularly the economic success of gens de couleur libres (free people of color). He discusses the wide breach between legal status and lived practice and experiences of race and gender, to show how supposed marginality actually opened up opportunities for individuals. Marie Rozette was an Indian slave, but she is available to us historically because after she was freed she became a property holder, and so became caught up in various strands of the colonial archive, including notarial records. As Allen notes, she was able to exploit "the opportunities created by the dearth of marriageable white women on the island," to acquire independent legal status as the head of a household and to control her assets. Marie Rozette's life history urges us to unpick the composite categories constructed through censuses and other official records, and so to question the meaning of race in economic and social analyses of the Mascarene Islands. Moreover, with Britain's acquisition of Île de France (renamed Mauritius) after the Napoleonic Wars, her narrative opens up issues around the overlapping experiences of empire.
Pier Larson picks up the theme of the islands of the western Indian Ocean as resources for social maneuvering in his focus on the life of Aristide Corroller. Corroller was born on the Île de France of free Malagasy and French parentage in the late eighteenth century and later became a general in the military forces of the kingdom of Antananarivo, in Madagascar. Larson writes that "it is precisely Corroller's life at the margins and the ambiguities of his position that are of especial interest to the historian." Corroller left an extensive if unfinished set of personal papers, and these "document a life between islands and empires in a way that defies the more bounded and impervious representation of polities and biographies in this region that emerges from government archives". These archival fragments, Larson argues, "challenge us to rethink the fixity of certain boundaries in the western Indian Ocean" and, echoing Allen's account of Marie Rozette, to "re-evaluate the lives and strategies of that portion of the gens de couleur in the Mascarenes with meaningful ties to Madagascar." In this respect, Larson shows how Corroller in his back-and-forth between the islands marginalized his French father and emphasized his hereditary rights to the ruling class in Madagascar. Women were key to the making of multiple connections. The chapter's broader significance lies beyond its intervention in the making of genealogy, for it tracks the acquisition of Corroller's archive as a form of "colonial collecting" that ultimately made its way to New Zealand. More specifically, it places Madagascar within an Indian Ocean frame-not simply as a source of slaves, as it is so often represented historically, but as a space of inward and outward movement from the interior to the coast and beyond. In this respect, the chapter holds out the promise of dialogue with historians of other contemporary non-European empires and polities and their relationships with European powers in the Indian Ocean: for instance with the Princely States of India, Burma and Siam.
Ian Duffield's article unravels the story of "Robert de Bruce Keith Stewart," to think through the ways in which autobiography conceals as much as it reveals identity. Plain Robert Stewart was a British-born Botany Bay convict who escaped to Penang and then Calcutta in the first decade of the nineteenth century, but his fantastical reimagining of his social (and criminal) background, performance of gentlemanliness, aristocratic pretensions and tales of gallant conduct and service enabled him to penetrate social circles in the port with a remarkable degree of success. This reveals not only the contingency of convictism, Duffield shows, but the limitations of the social credentials of colonial elites in contact zones where there were almost unlimited opportunities for selfreinvention. Indeed, one might go as far as to suggest that Stewart's manipulation of codes of honor reveals the significance of imposture for the constitution of colonial Australia itself-where the exigencies of both penal transportation and free settlement meant that nobody was quite who they seemed.
If Duffield's meticulous rendering of Robert Stewart's life history resembles a detective story, in his contribution to the volume James Bradley pauses to ask us to reflect on the nature of biography and its relationship to history and fiction. Bradley presents a deconstruction of Bradley's previous work on two Mauritian slave girls who were transported to Australia as convicts in the 1830s, Elizabeth Verloppe and Constance Couronne. He draws attention to the problems of using life history as a means of satisfying particular historiographical audiences. He tracks how the cultural turn has shifted historians' attention away from the aggregation of biographies in order to answer the big questions of History and towards a recognition of its narrative limitations as a literary form. In the context of the Australian "history wars" around who speaks for whom, this leads him to investigate where the line between history and fiction is and might be drawn.
Politics is central to Kerry Ward's discussion of exile from Indonesia to the Cape in the mid-eighteenth century too, as she explores both the making of family histories in Southeast Asia and the relationship between the Cape and Indonesia under the Dutch East India Company. Ward shows how in precolonial Java claims to legitimacy were based on political status rather than on blood ties. Families therefore wrote genealogies as a means of making political claims, often bestowing glorious histories on lowborn rulers. This adds a further layer of complexity to our understanding of the potential variegations of social lineage and blood ties within life history writing, most particularly when we consider Ward's claim that in Southeast Asia genealogical manuscripts may even have been written specifically for purchase by Europeans-and have been used subsequently by historians to write seamless histories of Indonesia. Moreover, whilst there is now a generalized memory of exile from Southeast Asia to the Cape, very few individuals are memorialized in any meaningful way.
Anoma Pieris continues the themes of politics and geographical connectedness through her work on the transportation of rebels Bhai Maharaj Singh and Tikiri Banda Dunuwilla from the Punjab and Ceylon to the Indian penal colony of Singapore in the mid-nineteenth century. In bringing together the Sikh, Kandyan and British empires through their life histories, Pieris reveals some of the overlaps of indigenous and colonial polities in the Indian Ocean. She also speaks to the importance of oral and community history in piecing together snapshots of subaltern lives, and draws on the importance of religious sites and festivals as well as family memory and shifting place names in accessing life histories from beyond the colonial archive. Pieris is concerned with the meaning of contemporary silences around convict transportation, and argues that Indian convicts have been almost totally written out of histories that seek to play down Singapore's penal past.
My own contribution to this special issue explores the lives of two Andamanese women, both known to the British as "Topsy." After the British colonized the Andamans in 1858 it came to rely on women as go-betweens between the penal colony and the Islands' indigenous peoples. The article is concerned with understanding how sexual violence against islanders informed colonial policy, and how islanders were incorporated into colonial efforts at "pacification" as well as the networks of Empire that crisscrossed the Bay of Bengal during the nineteenth century. It discusses kidnap, confinement, domesticity and servitude in the Islands, and the extreme violence that was never far from the surface of colonial life. It also focuses on the repeated name of Andamanese women "Topsy," to reflect on the importance of the legacies of slavery, as well as cultural aspects of the relationship between America and the British Empire. That we have only the briefest glimpse of the lives of women given a single name is an important reminder of the difficulties of writing about the Andamans-and colonial history more broadly-from an indigenous perspective.
The closing article of this issue, by Devleena Ghosh, explores the presence of Indians in Australia during the later part of the nineteenth century. She draws especially on two sources. The first was a travel diary written by Fazulbhoy Visram, a man of relative privilege from Bombay. Much of his commentary dwells on the weather, and he notes at great length visits to beauty spots as well as colonial law courts, asylums and prisons. And yet it is also evident that Visram had a vast network of commercial connections, and sought out large numbers of Old Indiamen. Visram was a man of relative status in India who had little in common with the Indian lascars and port workers of Australian port cities, and yet his "middle elite" status granted him both mobility and social access. Ghosh uses his diary, which was published in part in The Times of India, alongside that of Khawaja Mohammad Bux, a hawker cum shopkeeper cum camel trader during the same period. She explores the absence of Indians from histories of Australia, and explains how the Indian presence in the Australian colonies has been lost in simple "racial" binaries between aboriginality and white settlement.
And so we bring the social margins to the center of historical analysis. We present a series of intertwined themes to reveal the Indian Ocean as a dynamic and porous space. We decenter both ocean and empire, to suggest the importance of overlapping networks as people move around and across both geographical spaces and imperial polities. We seek to upset strictly defined area studies, as also the idea of linear relations between "metropoles" and "peripheries," and between colonies. Rather, we show how people, assets, ideas and cultural forms flowed in multiple directions across and around the Indian Oceanand beyond. This enables us to think about colonialism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a process of "crossings," rather than as an interaction between "contact zone" and "frontier." 12 We insist on marginality as a socially and politically contingent process, and this reveals also something of the importance of context in shaping liminality and hierarchies of dominance-though not, as many of the articles show, powerlessness. At the same time, by centering on life histories, we access details of some of the big questions of history. These include the nature and extent of colonization, enslavement, forced migration, piracy and commercial activity (and their management). The breadth of our engagement is significant, and we present a collection that we believe is unique in its focus. But there remains much work to be done on subaltern lives in the Indian Ocean, to incorporate the Portuguese Empire, the Persian Gulf and Arabian Peninsular, South China Sea and east coast Africa, as well as the relationship between land and sea. We present this collection as a first step in that endeavor.