As part of its Fall Lecture Series, the Ali Vural Ak Center hosted Nile Green from UCLA on November 1 to present his book on the extraordinary story of Bombay’s growth in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. His acclaimed book, Bombay Islam: The Religious Economy of the West Indian Ocean, has won praise for its insightful look at the various factors that contributed to Bombay’s emergence as a unique hub of production and social activity in that time.
Green outlined a number of these factors in his talk, most prominently being the rise of global industrialization nearly 150 years ago. Advancements in technology and transportation in Bombay attracted migrants from the more isolated regions around the Indian Ocean as well as from Muslim communities in East Africa and the Middle East. Charismatic religious figures gained a strong foothold in the area selling their services and devotional items as Bombay became a central transit point for Muslim pilgrims en route to Mecca. Similarly, as a center of printing and photography, Bombay also became increasingly vital to the export of Islamic texts and other religious materials across the Indian Ocean.
The combination of these and other factors over time, Green explained, established what he termed the “religious economy.”
“My claim is that nineteenth-century Bombay creates a pluralizing, competitive, and highly productive religious economy in which enchanted productions…are the most successful, and they successfully outcompete reformist or modernist Islam in this particular oceanic, wide religious economy,” Green stated, essentially challenging the widely accepted scholarship on Bombay in this period which tends to present a less nuanced and connected narrative.
He then described the social landscape and cultural makeup of Bombay that made its character so unique. Influential Muslim mystics offered miracles or prescribed certain prayers for people in times of distress or travel. Islamic schools and institutions thrived. The city’s diverse Muslim communities, such as Indian Ismailis, East African laborers, or merchants from modern-day Iran, all added their own flavors of Islamic culture to Bombay, creating a sense of enchantment throughout the city and expanding the “religious economy.”
The export and “reproduction” of the city’s religious economy continued to grow as some members of these communities would return to their ancestral lands, reintroducing certain forms of Sufi, or “customary”, traditions to Persia, for example. Elsewhere, the footprints of Muslim organizations, or “religious firms” as Green termed them, that called Bombay home appeared as far away as Durban in South Africa where local, customary Bombay celebrations were being held and shrines were built dedicated to Bombay’s saints.
The evolution of Bombay’s social makeup and these connections between communities across different continents, Green argued, signaled the rise of Bombay as a truly global city at a transformative time in world history. The model of a “religious economy” to analyze the city’s history proved to be a more effective way to assess its influential role in early globalization and, as Green believes, can also be easily applied to the analysis of other regions besides the Indian Ocean.
To watch Nile Green’s lecture, click on the video below.
November 05, 2012
