A View from the Dhow: Voyages between Art, Activism, and Anthropology in the Indian Ocean

Dhows or wooden sailing vessels have long transported goods, people, and ideas

across the Indian Ocean. While dhows once relied on the sail for movement, these days, vahans (a type of dhow from Kachchh in Western India) are mechanized and run on diesel engines, transporting quotidian goods across port cities in the Indian Ocean. Based on long-term ethnographic and artistic research and writing on dhows and marginalized Muslim sailors from India, this paper examines possibilities and perils of crossing the boundaries between art, anthropology, and activism. Focusing on multi-media art exhibitions produced for institutions across the Indian Ocean such as the Sharjah Architecture Triennial (UAE), Khoj Studios (India), the National Museums of Kenya, the Diriyah Biennale, and Hayy Jameel (Saudi Arabia) that drew on ethnographic research to produce digital art, videos, poems, architectural models, and photographs, this talk considers the possibilities of activism through an art practice grounded in ethnographic research. While scholars in anthropology have recently emphasized how “multimodal anthropology” can contribute to decolonial ways of knowing, others have underlined how collaborative art can become a tool for neoliberal governmentality. This paper centers a collaborative, research based artistic practice as a form of activism in the Indian Ocean. Can institutional forms of “intangible cultural heritage” and vernacular forms of knowledge co-create subversive political possibilities? How can an art practice smuggle a subversive story amidst political repression?