Introduction: Creole Musicscapes and the Indian Ocean

When the indentured Indians boarded the ships to Natal and the African slaves boarded the ships to Gujarat, along with many items, they carried musical instruments like Dhamama, Musindo, Dhol, Misr Kanga, Malunga, Harmonium, and several others (Figure 9). Philip Howard Colomb, in his book Slave-catching in the Indian Ocean (1873), observes that when the African slaves traveled by ships to India, they would engage in “frantic performances” (p. 280) in the forms of dancing, singing, and playing their musical instruments loudly. On a similar note, Chats Devroop, while talking about the creolized musical cultures of the South African Indians, shared that during long journeys to Natal, one of the ways in which the Indians entertained themselves on the ships was by singing, dancing, and playing musical instruments (2022). The musical and dance engagements of the Siddis and the South African Indians on the ships have intergenerationally passed on, got intermingled with local musical and dance cultures, and gave birth to creole musical and dance practices. On the one side, the creole musical and dance practices have allowed the Siddis in Gujarat and the South African Indians in South Africa to carve out a unique noncompartmentalized cultural space of their own, which cannot be imprisoned within the parameters of the mainstream cultural enclaves, and on the other side, the creolized musical and dance practices function as the “reterritorialization of the multiplicities of sensation” (Roy 2018, p. 173) for these communities. From the ships across the Indian Ocean to the present-day cultural spaces, the reterritorialization of the multiplicities of emotions for these communities have sociohistorically taken place through maintaining the ancestral musical traditions as well as acknowledging the local musical and dance traditions.

The evolution of any form of creolized musical and dance practices is not a disconnection from the roots of the original musical and dance traditions but an opening up of cultural possibilities of porosities, fluidities, and endless continuities because “every enactment of tradition opens tradition to transformation” (Waterman 1990, p. 8). In the process of the transformation, the “present becomes past and the future present” (Martin 2013, p. 23), and as a result, the usual practice of interpreting mainstream musical and dance traditions as superior to the various ancestral musical and dance traditions of different indigenous communities gets questioned.