Lakshadweep: Learning from the archipelago
by Ananya Jahanara Kabir and Ari Gautier
Laccadive, Amindivi, and Minicoy Islands…. A chain of romantic words, changed in 1973 by an Act of the Parliament of India to “Lakshadweep.” An archipelago off the Deccan peninsula’s Malabar Coast. Marine crossroads for cultures of the Book and the boat, for people who navigate the oceans by reading the stars, where languages got tangled up in coir and tuna and cowrie shells, where matriarchs hold the keys and where tender coconut flesh breaks the Ramzan fast.
Île asile
Île exil
Île hostile
Île idylle
Rêves indociles pendus au fils graciles
Enfant, nourri de lecture de Robinson Crusoé, j´étais persuadé qu’une île était un endroit paradisiaque, désert et isolé. Cela peut paraitre étrange pour l´ enfant que j´étais, né à Madagascar, l´île rouge. Mais, ce souvenir s´était depuis longtemps étiolé dans mon esprit archipélagique.
Lorsque j´ai lu Gouverneurs de la rosée, l´île paradisiaque de mon imagination s´éclipsa
“Island:” we remember childhood heroes who survived, conquered, tamed, and civilized. “Lakshadweep:” an assemblage of a thousand islands. An archipelago of fragments. Fragments that complement and yet challenge the nation’s territory. The nation is bounded, sealed in, whole. It possesses territorial integrity. Then what are these fragments doing on the map of India, floating away from that solid, unbroken line of the coastline? Oh! As the textbooks tell us, they are a “Union Territory of the Republic of India.” The island is chained to the mainland.
Île révolte
Île désinvolte
Île menotte
Île griotte
Tes contes meurent dans un silence despote
Bruits de chaines, de révolte, de chants et de pas de danse. Ayiti : la première république Noire m´a enseigné l´histoire de la résistance et de la dignité humaine. Île rebelle, libérée des chaînes esclaves et du fardeau colonial. Ce jour-là, j´ai compris qu´une île était plus qu´une simple motte de terre entourée d´eau.
You awaken in us the futures past of other enchained islands. Vast empires have germinated from the dots of land surrounded by water. They have dried up the islands, they have zombified their inhabitants. Or so they think… The water that laps their shores replenishes them. The water is the pathway of connection. Aqueous channels join the dots. These are not islands in the sea; rather, as Epeli Hau’fa said of Pasifika, this is a sea of islands. Rebellious archipelago, your stories wash into the mainland’s language to crack it open, to creolize.
Île esclave
Île suave
Île épave
Île enclave
Au loin résonne le rythme des claves.
Make us dance to another music’s rhythm. We can learn something that is both new and old. Empires made a time of history that the new nation fell in dutiful step with. Teach us, archipelago, to bypass the march and the bugle. Don’t be captured for our darkened cinema screens; show us instead the glinting fish, playing hide and seek in the wrecked ship’s carcass.
Île, tu n´es jamais isolée.
Isolated you have never been: so, make now an archipelago of the subcontinent.
Impelled by recent political events [see, for example, here, here, and here], we realised we knew precious little about Lakshadweep. Le thinnai revi is a learning space, fuelled by le thinnai Kreyol as a platform for co-produced knowledge. In the spirit of learning from, through, and with the alternative epistemological structure we call the archipelago of fragments, we invited those who know Lakshadweep to educate us. We thank our contributors to the Lakshadweep Dossier of le thinnai revi for sharing their words, sentiments, and affective bonds to the archipelago. Because of you, we will emerge from the Dossier a little more enlightened about this creole archipelago that is both chained to and unmoored from the Nation’s coastline.
Our dossier of fresh perspectives on Lakshadweep gives our readers a sea lexicon of words from the creole language, Jeseri, and the technologies of symbiosis between humans, non-humans, and the archipelagic environment they encode; it opens up the plural worlds of the archipelago by taking you beyond “Lakshadweep” to the island of Minicoy, where people speak yet another creole language, Divehi; it showcases how those born in Lakshadweep view current depredations of the archipelagic environment and culture; it takes you through representations of the archipelago in cinema and other audiovisual media from the Indian mainland, and the kinds of media assemblages that people in Lakshadweep are generating; and it leaves you with a reading list, since the dossier will whet your appetite to know more.
Let’s keep learning from the archipelago. The Lakshadweep Dossier is also an archipelago of fragments, just one of many possible starting points.
Table of Contents:
Lakshmi Pradeep, Building a “Sea Lexicon” for Lakshadweep
Raseela P. A., Lakshadweep: Forgotten islands in India’s vicinity
Abel Job Abraham and Aarthi Sridhar, Plural Islands of Lakshadweep: Insider-outsider narratives of Minicoy
Bindu Menon, On the Edge: Media imaginaries of Lakshadweep
Mahmood Kooria, Lakshadweep readings
Un grand mersi à Annu Jalais et Luca Raimondi.
We also thank The Southern Collective for allowing us to use their photographs from the islands for this dossier.
Ananya Jahanara Kabir is Professor of English Literature at King’s College London. She researches the intersection of the written text with other forms of cultural expression within acts of collective memorialization and forgetting.
Email: ananya.kabir@kcl.ac.uk
Ari Gautier is a French novelist from Pondicherry of Indo-Malagasy origin, based in Oslo. He writes historical fiction about Pondicherry’s place in the world. In May 2020, Ari Gautier co-founded along with Ananya Jahanara Kabir, the online cultural platform, Le Thinnai Kreyol, that promotes their shared vision for a plural, multicultural, and creolised India. He has published two novels, Le carnet secret de Lakshmi (2016) and Le Thinnai (2018), and he is currently working on his third novel, Pondichéry: une saga kreyole.
Email: gautierari@gmail.com
