New Books in the Indian Ocean World

In 1914 the British-built and Japanese-owned steamship Komagata Maru
left Hong Kong for Vancouver carrying 376 Punjabi migrants. Chartered
by railway contractor and purported rubber planter Gurdit Singh, the
ship and its passengers were denied entry into Canada and two months
later were deported to Calcutta.

In Across Oceans of Law: The Komagata Maru and Jurisdiction in the Time of Empire (Duke University Press, 2018) Renisa Mawani retells this well-known story of the Komagata Maru.
Drawing on "oceans as method"—a mode of thinking and writing that
repositions land and sea—Mawani examines the historical and conceptual
stakes of situating histories of Indian migration within maritime
worlds.

Through close readings of the ship, the manifest, the trial, and the
anticolonial writings of Singh and others, Mawani argues that the Komagata Maru's
landing raised urgent questions regarding the jurisdictional tensions
between the common law and admiralty law, and, ultimately, the legal
status of the sea. By following the movements of a single ship and
bringing oceans into sharper view, Mawani traces British imperial power
through racial, temporal, and legal contests and offers a novel method
of writing colonial legal history.

The conversation also covers how the book, published in 2018, has
shaped the author’s more recent work as well as how historical methods
and approaches have evolved in the years since publication.

Helen Dewar is an historian of the Atlantic World and French
colonization in North America in the 17th and 18th centuries. She is a
professor of history at the Université de Montréal (Québec, Canada) and
the author of Disputing New France: Companies, Sovereignty and Law in the French Atlantic, 1598-1663 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022).

Helen’s institutional website
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Unruly Monuments: Disrupting the State at Delhi's Islamic Architecture (Cambridge University Press, 2025) examines
how Delhi's Sultanate and Mughal architecture, dating from the twelfth
to the seventeenth centuries, became modern monuments and were
assimilated and ordered into public consciousness as spaces for tourism,
leisure, and intellectual contemplation during the colonial and early
postcolonial eras (1828-1963). It examines the resistance that
challenges this ordering, rendering monuments unruly and unassimilable
despite state efforts to control their narrative. This exposes the
nation's contradictory claims of inclusivity while marginalizing
subaltern groups. It guides readers through picturesque landscapes,
museums, imperial displays, postcards, travel experiences, Partition
refugee camps, and cinema. Analyzing these forms reveals how the archive
of Indo-Islamic monuments was shaped through presences and absences.
Each chapter examines everyday life, untangles knowable public
transcripts, illuminates strategic excisions and hidden transcripts,
juxtaposes evidence that has not yet been analyzed in conjunction, reads
archival material against the grain, and finds archival layers in
unfamiliar places.

NBN Host: Sohini Majumdar

Sohini teaches history at University of San Francisco and Santa Clara University.
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In 1975, Kuwaiti workers orchestrated arguably the most powerful
citizen-led movement for noncitizen rights in the history of the Persian
Gulf. Their efforts built on decades of wide-ranging struggle over the
meanings and outlines of citizenship. During the twentieth century,
anticolonial nationalists, pro-democracy reformers, feminists, and labor
organizers joined forces to fight for a more equitable citizenship
regime. In so doing, they won a remarkable series of victories:
political independence, constitutional rights, and oil nationalization,
reshaping not just Kuwait, but the global petroleum order. This book reframes the history of labor activism, citizenship, and
decolonization in Persian Gulf by centering the history of social
movements—especially organized labor. In ⁠Comrades Estranged: ⁠⁠Labor and Citizenship in the Twentieth-Century Persian Gulf⁠ (Stanford University Press, 2026), Alex
Boodrookas traces how workers and their allies shaped the
world-historic transformations witnessed across the region: the
consolidation of British sovereignty, formation of autocratic states,
inrush of hydrocarbon wealth, onset of decolonization, and rise of both
mass migration and mass politics. But unions failed to incorporate
noncitizens into their movement, and as Boodrookas argues, this fatally
undermined the movements' strength. The contradictions of nationalist
and internationalist visions proved insurmountable. Comrades Estranged thus sheds light on both the power, and the limits, of citizenship and the nation-state as the framework for political action.

Dr. ⁠Alex Boodrookas⁠ is Assistant Professor of History at Metropolitan State University of Denver.

Dr. ⁠Ahmed AlMaazmi⁠ is Assistant Professor of History at the United Arab Emirates University.
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Why have moral philosophers largely ignored colonialism? In Moral Philosophy and De-Colonialism: The Irrationality of Oppression (Bloomsbury Academic, 2026), Shyam Ranganathan tells the story of moral philosophy and colonialism and reveals the benefits of drawing from a colonized tradition to a create a rigorous logic-based ethics. This is a timely exploration of the the ways in which Western colonialism has structured moral theorizing to insulate itself from criticism. In his account of the domination of the European tradition and the suppression of questions of its colonialism, Ranganathan covers the evolution of metaethics, normative ethics, and applied ethics in ancient European, Chinese, and Indian traditions of philosophy. We see the presence of white supremacy in the writings of J.S. Mill, Marx and Engels, and the importance placed on autonomy and sovereignty in Hobbes and Kant. The European influence of interpretation on our peer review of historical philosophy is evident throughout. Using South Asia as an example Ranganathan examines how colonizers are able to erase moral philosophical history and redefine cultures as religions, judged in terms of their conformity to, or deviation from, the Western tradition, which is treated as secular. His acknowledgment of Yoga as a basic ethical theory introduces us to thinking that recognizes persons as a diverse group, traversing sex, gender, race, sexual orientation, and species. Through this analysis of colonized traditions and ethics, Ranganathan is able to de-colonize moral philosophy by looking outside the colonizing tradition. If we want sophisticated and inclusive ways of thinking about how to live we must turn towards indigenous thought.

Shyam Ranganathan is a member of the Department of Philosophy and York Center for Asian Research at York University, Toronto, Canada, and founder of the Yoga Philosophy Institute.

Dr. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Indian mythology and seasoned online educator. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom where he delivers original courses applying Indian wisdom teachings to modern life.
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In a world marked by increasingly destructive ecological and meteorological upheavals, Cyclonic Lives in an Indian Ocean World: Environment, Disaster, and Identity in Modern Mauritius (Ohio UP, 2026) by Dr. Robert Rouphail offers a historical analysis of how these catastrophes shape people’s understanding of themselves, their collective history, and their relationship to the institutions that govern them. An examination of cyclonic disasters in the multiethnic Indian Ocean island of Mauritius throws into stark relief how deep histories of diasporic identity formation, of imperial governance, and of the informal practices of racial difference making graft onto how everyday people interpret these moments of loss and the futures that emerge in their wake.Cyclonic Lives shows that disasters are not only events; they are also processes through which people evaluate and rethink the most elemental social and cultural categories that give meaning to their lives. Beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing until the early postcolonial era, this book tracks, for example, how Mauritians of African descent integrated these disasters into broader collective histories and memories of the Indian Ocean slave trade, how Hindu Indo-Mauritians understood cyclones’ ecological effects as material elements to be accounted for in a broader Hindu diasporic space, and how the late colonial and early postcolonial state built infrastructures—material, conceptual, and financial—to mitigate the threats posed by these storms and ensure their own long-term durability.The increasing political, social, and economic instability that climate change has already triggered demands that humanists develop analytical geographies and methodologies that shed light on how power can modulate in asymmetrical ways at moments of crisis. If there is one central takeaway from this historical study of this small island in a big ocean, it is that catastrophic events are not things that merely happen to people; they are processes that remake them.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
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