A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (review)

This book of unusual breadth and ambition provides a panoramic view of a diverse range of connections (economic, political, and cultural) that tied together various societies around the Indian Ocean littoral, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Bose correctly points out that much of the pre-existing scholarship about the Indian Ocean focused on the pre-nineteenth-century period, gave exclusive emphasis to networks of maritime trade, and suggested that the advent of European dominance spelled the ultimate termination of these connections. Bose convincingly dispels these notions by demonstrating that the networks connecting Indian Ocean societies were re-ordered and re-adjusted during the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, flourishing both within and without the attention of the colonial empires entrenched in South Asia, Southeast Asia, East Africa, and the Middle East at the time.

The introductory chapter sets out the principal conceptual and historiographical parameters of the book, and Chapters 2 through 7 describe the kaleidoscope of activities that linked together various parts of the Indian Ocean world: the trading and banking activities of Indian entrepreneurs in Burma, Malaya, East Africa, and the Persian Gulf; flows of Indian indentured labor and Indian soldiers to various destinations across the Indian Ocean and beyond; travels of "expatriate patriots," such as Mohandas K. Gandhi and Subhas Chandra Bose; and pilgrimages, religious as well as cultural, to various destinations.

The core ideas in this work involve, first, drawing attention to the Indian Ocean world as an example of what Bose describes as an "interregional arena"—a sphere positioned between the local and the global. The author argues that this interregional arena retained its validity as a unit of study even in an era of globalization. The second core idea, and the most powerful, draws attention to the fact that the territorially delimited nation-state may not necessarily be the most relevant or appropriate entity for a better and more comprehensive understanding of nationalist identity and imagination. Bose seeks to show how Indian soldiers serving overseas, or Indian labor serving in the mines and plantations outside India, imagined and perceived an Indian homeland. Particularly interesting is the discussion of how the two iconic figures of Indian nationalism, Gandhi and Bose, during their stays in South Africa and Southeast Asia, respectively, derived valuable lessons about how to accommodate "internal" differences of caste, religion, class, etc. within anticolonial, nationalist movements.

The author thus challenges the primacy given to the territorial nation-state in existing literature on nationalism, arguing strongly for "forms of patriotism that celebrated memorialized homelands [and] were expendable and transportable by migrant communities" (51). The ultimate point of the book, however, is its celebration of "universalism." The travels of Khwaja Hasan Nizami, an Indian Muslim, to the Hajj and other Muslim holy places illustrates his affiliation to an Islamic universalism. The description of the travel experiences of the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore to Bali and Iran illuminate a universalism based on shared historical connections and a common cultural heritage.

Although the breadth of this study constitutes its strength, it also is unable to give every issue its due. A preeminent example is this concept of universalism, which deserves a more substantive and critical discussion.