Music and the Formation of Sidi Identity in Western India

Long before the current age of postcolonial globalization, the Western Indian Ocean served as a maritime highway linking littoral settings in Western India with Arabia, Persia and East Africa. Among the many travellers who crossed the Indian Ocean in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, people from Africa faced a particularly gruelling fate. In contrast to those who willingly journeyed by sea – among them Arab and Indian merchants, Sufi masters, Islamic scholars from Yemen and Europeans – Africans often endured a sea passage which was enforced by enslavement. Today, descendants of former African crossers of the Indian Ocean are dispersed over many islands and littoral societies such as Zanzibar, Oman and Western India. Along the Western coasts of South Asia, small but distinct communities of African descendants are settled in the Pakistani provinces of Sindh and Baluchistan, the Indian coastal states of Gujarat, Maharashtra and Karnataka and the former princely capital of Hyderabad, and further south in Sri Lanka. In Gujarat and elsewhere in South Asia, people of African origins are called ‘Sidi’. From the times when sailing ships were the only means of transport, the appellation ‘Sidi’ was given indiscriminately to African slaves and sailors working on ships and in Indian Ocean ports.¹ The sea journey from Africa to distant lands in South Asia thus transformed displaced people from the hinterland of the Swahili coast into ‘Sidi’.

This essay addresses the ways in which Sidi have created a place for themselves in Gujarat. It considers the sea journey that brought uprooted Africans – Sidi slaves and seamen – from Zanzibar to Gujarat and then examines the processes shaping the emergence of a collective Sidi identity in interaction with the host society. In both contexts – at sea and on land – African-derived forms of music referred to as goma played an important role. Through their music, Sidi in Gujarat reflect a significant strand in Indian history – its maritime connections across the Indian Ocean. The century-old transoceanic migration of people, ideas, things and practices in dhows (the Arabic for sailing ship) resulted in the constitution of plural societies along the Indian coast characterized by ‘dhow cultures’.² This concept highlights the mobility of social and cultural practices in the Indian Ocean region. More specifically, the concept draws attention to social diversity and the cultural mix of African, Arab and Indian people and their ideas and practices. Dhow cultures were produced historically by seafaring, trade and slavery. Seen from this perspective, the sea rather than the land provides the focus for situating people and practices in specific local contexts.³

The ethnographic fieldwork on which this article is based was conducted in 2004 in Zanzibar, coastal Tanzania and Gujarat.⁴ The research was directed at tracing the journey of African cults of affliction and their musical practices (ngoma) through different local sites related by dhow cultural features. A prominent site of dhow culture is Zanzibar, the hub of the Indian Ocean slave trade from the seventeenth to the late nineteenth centuries. Another, more hidden, site of Indian Ocean dhow cultures is found in Gujarat. At the time, the region was closely connected to Zanzibar through increasing trade and as a consequence of migration (of trading communities from Gujarat and of slaves from Zanzibar, as well as of African sailors who settled in Gujarat). Africans in Zanzibar and Gujarat seem to have become unconsciously linked by related ritual practices that in Zanzibar are called ngoma and are known as goma in Gujarat. From the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and perhaps earlier, former slaves and migrant seafarers from Africa gradually evolved their own forms of social organization in Gujarat in which goma music played an important role. A comparison of the processes of identity formation of former slaves in Zanzibar and Gujarat reveals significant insights into agencies of Africans in the Indian Ocean world, and so into a globalization of Indian Ocean sites from below. This process seems to have been shaped by musical practices and transformations of African spirit cosmologies. In Zanzibar and Gujarat beliefs that spirits are supernatural agents which interfere in human life, while displaying important differences...