Beyond the Ocean: Maritime Infrastructure and Hydro-Narratives of Indians under the Raj (Tentative Title)

Concept Note

The imperial ships of the British Raj bore millions of Indian migrants across waterways just the way Charon ferried souls across the river Styx to an irreversible fate. Nonetheless, the Indians transformed the vicious vessels into spaces of radical rebirth and enduring kinship.

While the first volume in this series geographically mapped the global representations of Indian migration under the British empire, Volume 2 moves into a critical interrogation of colonial history through ports, maritime framework, and waterways. Moving away from land-bound histories, this volume initiates an intensive interrogation of colonial history through its maritime infrastructures: ports, dockyards, maritime records, and waterways.

This book adopts a hydrocolonial and aqua-centric hermeneutic to explore how subaltern narratives were historically erased from official imperial records, shipping registers, and mainstream historiography. It will examine the ports, vessels, inland rivers, and vast oceans that witnessed the diverse, turbulent flows of Indian populations across the globe. We invite chapter proposals that explore how literary depictions illustrate the ways the British Empire transformed global waterways into networks of imperial power, capital, and radical identity transformation.

The psychological and structural undoing of native culture began long before the ship reached the open ocean. In the liminal, high-stress spaces of the colonial dockyards and ports, social hierarchies began to collapse. Diaspora literature, folk traditions, travelogues, and ship logs frequently evoke the immediate and profound breakdown of caste and religious boundaries the moment emigrants set foot on the regimented ports. Sudden intermixing occurred in these crowded transit camps as we witnessed Brahmins consuming food prepared by lower-caste hands, Hindus and Muslims shared sleeping quarters, and sacred visual markers of identity (turbans, sacred threads, prayer beads, religious caps, and tilaks) were stripped or voluntarily discarded to avoid surveillance, standing out, or segregation upon reaching destination ports.

Once aboard, the ship itself became a volatile micro-world, sort of floating world suspended between an old life and an uncertain future. Significantly, many post-slavery labour migrations repurposed slave ships to transport new, freer workforce alongside other cargo. Textual representations from this middle passage vividly capture the horrors of overcrowding, disease, and racial prejudice. Yet, the vessel can be read as a site of profound subaltern resilience. Indian migrants forged deep, enduring bonds that acted as vital substitutes for the blood relations left behind, helping them survive the culture shock and grief of displacement. The songs, stories, and archives of this passage are filled with narratives of maritime resistance, shipboard revolts, and haunting tragedies that demand our critical attention.

Book II of the Beyond the Ocean series invites proposals that capture the Indian migrant experience from port to port during the British Raj. Echoing Kamau Brathwaite’s conceptualization of the tidal experience, we welcome essays that explore the large-scale, long-term dispersion of Indians across the global maritime network starting from the Gulf nations and the African continent to Southeast Asia, American states, and the archipelagic Caribbean islands.

Suggested themes and areas:

• Literary depictions of port architecture, custom houses, dockyards, and the initial dismantling of caste/religious identities.
• Ship as a total institution, the legacy of repurposed slave ships, and narratives of disease, discipline, and imperial surveillance at sea.
• Textual and musical representations of shipboard kinship, solidarity, and emotional survival among diverse migrant groups.
• Songs, oral histories, and literary accounts of maritime mutinies, escapes, sabotage, and shipboard tragedies.
• How the crossing of the Kala Pani (black waters) fractured and reshaped languages, creating creolized idioms, plantation songs, and hybrid oral traditions.
• Comparative literary readings of different aquatic journeys— including indentured labourers, penal convicts, Lascar sailors, Kangani System, Maistry System, Sepoys and Colonial Constabularies, and free passage merchants.
• Literary representation of Indian ocean, Atlantic Ocean, Pacific Ocean, Bay of Bengal, Arabian Sea, Red Sea, and other water bodies.
• Literary representation of ship and its infrastructure.
• Literary representation of the ocean as repository of forgotten/suppressed history and marginalized culture.
• Comparative study of the Middle Passage and the Kala Pani crossing or other hydro-crossings and its literary representation.

Abstract submission deadline:  31st July 2026

Word limit: 250- 350 words with 4-5 keywords

Submissions in a word document along with a brief bio-note to be sent to:

shubhankukochar@outlook.com

Proposed Publisher: Springer 

Explore Book I (Beyond the Ocean: Literature, History and the British Empire) by clicking here https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-95-2137-1 

Note: As Book I was published by Springer, the editors will submit the proposal for Book II to Springer as well, aiming to establish this as a long-running series.

Editors:

Dr. Shubhanku Kochar (Associate Professor, University School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University, Delhi)

Dr. Shehnaz Kabir (Research and Development Officer, Loreto College, Kolkata)