Abstract

This chapter argues that, despite hundreds of years of movement between East Africa and India through the Indian Ocean, histories of slavery are conspicuous by their absence in Indian and Gujarati collective memories. This lack of awareness and discussion of slavery in India has increased the danger of ignoring the presence and plight of the Siddi communities, whose African heritage still shapes their position in Indian society. Within this prevailing apathetic climate, Gunvantrai Poptabhai Acharya's novel Dariyalal, which centres on Ramjibha, a Gujarati slave trader turned abolitionist, assumes a double-sided significance. Acharya's fictive novel challenges mainstream Indian history, which has forgotten or deliberately omitted the recording and narrating of unsettling encounters and relationships. It helps us to confront the erasure of the non-European communities who played a role in abolishing slavery. Concurrently, Dariyalal is also a discursive tool for negotiating a Gujarati identity that is tied to slave trade. In the end, the novel upsets a Eurocentric history only to replace it with a Gujarati Hindu-centric version of the slave trade in the Indian Ocean, illustrating the lingering impact of migration and diaspora in the region.

Keywords: Gujarat, Gunvantrai Poptabhai Acharya, slavery, Indian Ocean