Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Maps
- Introduction
- 1 Missionaries and Reformists in the Market of Islams
- 2 Cosmopolitan Cults and the Economy of Miracles
- 3 The Enchantment of Industrial Communications
- 4 Exports for an Iranian Marketplace
- 5 The Making of a Neo-Ismā‘īlism
- 6 A Theology for the Mills and Dockyards
- 7 Bombay Islam in the Ocean's Southern City
- Conclusions
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
7 - Bombay Islam in the Ocean's Southern City
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 May 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Maps
- Introduction
- 1 Missionaries and Reformists in the Market of Islams
- 2 Cosmopolitan Cults and the Economy of Miracles
- 3 The Enchantment of Industrial Communications
- 4 Exports for an Iranian Marketplace
- 5 The Making of a Neo-Ismā‘īlism
- 6 A Theology for the Mills and Dockyards
- 7 Bombay Islam in the Ocean's Southern City
- Conclusions
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
A MISSIONARY MARKETPLACE IN NATAL
In the course of the nineteenth century, Bombay developed numerous connections with the new port city of Durban on the southern reaches of the African continent. The traffic between the two ports has usually been framed in the familiar terms of colonialism and modernity, a role in which the transit of political forms – of imperialism or nationalism, of the apparatus of empire or new democratic associations – has loomed largest. Imperial careers certainly played a large part in trans-ocean exchanges, whether in the elevated ranks of such personnel as Henry Bartle Frere (1815–84), sometime Governor of Bombay and High Commissioner for Southern Africa, or the humbler offices of Sikh and Pathan sepoys in the policing of British Africa. The key example of the anti-colonial side of the same modern coinage is the founding of the Indian National Congress in Bombay in 1885 and its echo across the ocean in the establishment of the Natal Indian Congress in Durban in 1894. The most famous figure to connect the two movements was Mohandas Gandhi, who departed India through Bombay on his journey to South Africa. Having helped found the Natal Indian Congress, at the end of this book's period it was at Bombay's Apollo Bunder that Gandhi disembarked in 1915 to join in the struggles of its Indian sibling.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Bombay IslamThe Religious Economy of the West Indian Ocean, 1840–1915, pp. 208 - 234Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011