| Summary/Abstract |
This essay explores an unusual vernacular source of poetic writings by Asim Randeri (1904–2009), a Muslim poet from a merchant family of Gujarat, in order to understand how the imagination—particularly when engaged through poetry and piety—became a charged realm in which Indian Muslims responded to British colonial pressure on them, expressing the itinerancy at the heart of mercantile life that separated individuals from their families, port city and wider community. Recent scholarship has focused on the economic pursuits of Gujarati merchants in port cities across the Indian Ocean in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and even earlier. This article shifts the analysis to their diasporic imagination, as a correlate of itinerant commerce. Through this essay, I reflect on the many temporalities and internal social dynamics at play in the mercantile imaginations that emerge from Gujarati trader communities. These, I demonstrate, provide a sharp contrast to the short-term framing emphasised by Western historiographical traditions rooted in linear history and colonial records.
|