Churning the Kalapani: Dark Water Histories, Oceanic Origins, and Marine Deities of the Indo-Caribbean Madrasi Diaspora

Introduction: Waters of Death, Birth, and Metamorphosis

Wading through the salt marshes of smooth cordgrass, streams of yellow-clad devotees make their way to the muddy shores of Jamaica Bay, where the waters of the Atlantic Ocean connect the boroughs of Queens and Brooklyn in New York City. Clouds of camphor smoke rise to the skies as pujaris (priests) and pujarins (priestesses) set up altars on the beach. The beat of goatskin thappu drums drowns out the rhythm of crashing waves and the high-pitched calls of migrant ospreys. Pujaris, pujarins, and devotees plunge into the dark waters of the Atlantic. Emerging from the waves, they walk back to the soggy shores accompanied by their marine goddesses, Gangamma and Kateriamma, and a host of submerged ancestors and submarine spirits.

Marked by the arrival of migratory shorebirds and horseshoe crabs, summer is a busy time at Jamaica Bay. The bay is an estuary, a brackish body of water where the river meets the ocean. Its wetland ecosystem supports a large urban community of migrant birds, insects, arachnids, and amphibians. Every year in the month of July, the immigrant Madrasi community gathers along the bay’s beaches to invoke its marine histories and deities. During this time, the intertidal zone of Jamaica Bay undergoes its annual mythological metamorphosis. Its dark waters transform into a ritual portal for the Indo-Caribbean Madrasi diaspora of Brooklyn.

The Madrasis (named after their port of departure, Madras, i.e. Chennai, but hailing from different parts of southern India) are a historically marginalized religious minority within the Indo-Caribbean diaspora formed through indentured servitude. After the abolition of slavery across the British Empire in 1834, South Asians were shipped to colonies and plantations across the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic Oceans as indentured workers. The system of indentured labor produced a new kind of colonial subject—the portable indentured worker or “coolie.” Most Indian indentured laborers were recruited from the regions of modern-day Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and Bengal. They departed from the port city of Calcutta in eastern India. A smaller group of laborers, recruited from southern India, left from the port of Madras (modern-day Chennai). Many ships set sail for sugar plantations in the Caribbean, particularly in British Guiana (Guyana) and Trinidad. On these voyages, indentured workers faced hunger, dehydration, and diseases like cholera. Some committed suicide, jumping off the decks of history and into the seething ocean. The waters that witnessed this odyssey and ordeal came to be called kalapani or “dark waters.”2

The first two coolie ships, the SS Hesperus and SS Whitby, docked at Demerara Harbor in British Guiana on May 5, 1838. Arriving in port cities in the New World, the indentured laborers undertook fitness tests and were “bound” or “articled” to plantation owners. Indentured servitude was abolished in 1917 (though contracts continued into the 1920s), and by that time, about half a million South Asians had been brought to the (British, French, and Dutch) Caribbean and assigned to plantations in British Guiana, Trinidad, Guadeloupe, Jamaica, Suriname, Martinique, French Guiana, and Grenada (Dabydeen and Samaroo 1996, 1).

The Indo-Caribbean community is a jahaji diaspora. The word jahaj means “ship” in Hindustani, and jahaji means “of or from the ship.” The indentured workers who crossed the kalapani (“dark waters”) became ship-siblings (jahaji bhai, or “ship brothers,” and jahaji behen, or “ship sisters”).3 The term “Madrasi” itself has jahaji routes: the Madrasis are named after Madras, their port of departure. They cohere around various south Indian kula (“community/ancestral”) and kaval (“guardian”) deivam (“deities”), including Mariamman, Kateriamma, Gangamma, Madurai Veeran, and Sangili Karuppan, and practice drumming, spirit possession, and healing rituals associated with these deities.4 The community describes its religious practices as the “Madrasi way,” “Madrasi religion,” or the “Madrasi sect [of Hinduism].” The Madrasi community has transformed its port of departure into a port (and myth) of origin.

The Madrasis of Brooklyn are a twice-removed diasporic community. While their ancestors were shipped from the port of Madras to colonies in the Caribbean between 1838 and 1920, the Madrasis themselves have been migrating from the Caribbean to North America since the 1980s. Brooklyn has emerged as the North American center of the Madrasi diaspora and religion ever since Basdeo Mangal, a Guyanese immigrant, founded the Shri Maha Kali Devi Mandir in East New York, Brooklyn in the early 1990s. Every year, the Madrasis of Brooklyn celebrate a three-day festival called Karagam Puja. It is seen as an occasion for the Madrasis’ marine goddesses and submerged ancestors to commune with and heal the present-day Madrasi community.

On the first day of Karagam Puja, pujaris (priests) gather along the shores of Jamaica Bay to build karagams (likely from karakam, or “water pot” in Tamil), vessels that transform into portals for their goddesses and ancestors. They fill the pots with water, turmeric, neem leaves, camphor, and bhabut (“sacred ash”) and invite their kula and kaval deivam to travel from the ocean to the Madrasi temple in Brooklyn through the karagams. From the beaches, a procession of pujaris manifesting (or possessed by) gods, ancestors, and spirits carries the karagams to the temple. The karagams stay in the temple for two days and two nights, and during that time, pujaris, pujarins, and devotees who manifest Mariamman, Kateriamma, Gangamma, Sangili Karuppan, and Madurai Veeran perform healing rituals for the members of the community. On the third and final day, devotees carry the karagams, gods, and spirits back to the dark waters of Jamaica Bay (fig. 1).

Death and birth, history and myth, healing and metamorphosis—the dark waters contain many layers. How might we observe these layers of the kalapani and situate ourselves in relation to the dark waters? What kinds of histories, myths, and deities emerge when we churn the Indo-Caribbean kalapani? In this article, I map the history, mythology, and contradictions of the kalapani. I argue that 1) the Madrasis can be understood as a kalapani kula—a community with opaque (kala) and oceanic (pani) origins—and 2) the Madrasis’ kula deivam experienced a kalapani metamorphosis to become migrant and marine deities. Archival, philosophical, and ethnographic views of and from the kalapani, I hope to show, allow us to experiment with ideas of motion and opacity, and even invert our reading of diasporic displacement to ask: how do diasporas displace our ideas of history, religion, and place?

The ocean is a historical place—an archive of the horrors of indentured labor, kalapani voyages, and burials at sea. Much like the kalapani itself, the archive of the odyssey of indenture is treacherous and opaque. On the one hand, we are confronted by logs of death that exude an air of statistical distance, while on the other, we have diaries that describe, in grotesque detail, the diseases and deaths that defined everyday life on the ships that transported indentured workers from South Asia to the Caribbean. In the first section of this article, we will encounter one such account of the kalapani crossing through the diary of E. Swinton, captain of the Sail Ship Salsette. The SS Salsette made a voyage across the dark waters from Calcutta to Trinidad in 1858; Captain Swinton’s account exemplifies the horrors of kalapani history.

Despite its dark histories of death and displacement, the kalapani is also a place of birth and oceanic origins. The Madrasi community and religion emerge from these dark waters. In the second section of this article, I will draw on Martinican poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant’s theory of “opacity” to argue that the name “Madrasi” records more than just a port of departure: it also marks the oceanic origin and birth of a “deterritorialized” community forged on and from the dark waters—a kalapani kula (Glissant 1997, 5). The opaque (kala) and oceanic (pani) origins of the Madrasis challenge land-based self-definitions and displace stable ideas of centers, homelands, and margins. If the community (kula) and its myths of origin underwent a kalapani transformation, the kula deivam too experienced metamorphosis.

Adapting to the Madrasis’ oceanic origin myth, the kula deivam took on kalapani avatars (forms). They emerged from the dark waters as the marine and migrant gods of the Indo-Caribbean Madrasi diaspora. The ambivalence of the dark waters and the metamorphosis of the gods are artfully embodied in the Madrasis’ annual invocation, during their Karagam Puja, of two goddesses: Kateriamma, the goddess of darkness (kala) and dead souls, and Gangamma, the goddess of water (pani) and life. Both goddesses are invoked from the waters of Jamaica Bay and are associated with transformative healing. In the third section of this article, I draw on my ethnographic fieldwork among the Madrasis of Brooklyn to examine the kalapani metamorphosis of the Madrasis’ marine and migrant deities.

In the context of the Indo-Caribbean Madrasi diaspora, the kalapani is a place of death, birth, and metamorphosis. It houses the Madrasis’ histories, origin myths, and marine deities. What new perspectives might the kalapani offer scholars of South Asian diasporic religions? Toward the end of this article, I connect my analysis of the Indo-Caribbean Madrasi community’s kalpani history and mythology with broader questions of diasporic displacement and oceanic perspectives. The works of geographers Kimberley Peters and Philip Steinberg, anthropologist Jatin Dua, and religion scholar Tracy Pintchman anchor my inverted reading of diasporic displacement.

Let us begin our voyage by diving into the dark waters of history.

I The Dark Waters of History

II Oceanic Origins, Opacity, and the Birth of a Kalapani Kula

At first glance, the word Madrasi, meaning “of or from Madras,” seems to suggest a sense of stable spatial belonging. During the colonial period, the Madras Presidency served as a political and economic stronghold of the British Empire and included most of present-day Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh and parts of Kerala, Karnataka, and Telangana. The city of Madras was renamed Chennai by the Tamil Nadu state government in 1996. We can, in fact, point to Madras on a map. The Madrasis, however, are not named after Madras the city or the colonial presidency. In the maritime archive, the term Madrasi is applied to all the indentured workers who embarked upon ships from the southern Indian port of Madras (irrespective of the specific village, town, province, or region in India that they came from). The name signifies departure. Madras, the port of departure, eventually transformed into a point of origin. To understand the Madrasis—the community and their religion—we must begin with a departure from land-based self-definitions and turn, once again, to the kalapani.

The darkness (kala) of the kalapani often refers to the collective and individual experiences of the kalapani voyages and crossings. We have encountered these archived accounts of death, displacement, and disease in our reading of Captain Swinton’s diary. Yet the darkness (kala) in kalapani also accounts for the limits of our archival reconstructions of these voyages. Kala, meaning “black” or “dark,” is an optical interpretation of the dark waters. In other words, there is something obscure and opaque about the kalapani. We cannot peer into its depths or get to the bottom of it all. This limitation or opacity, however, is not confined to archival work. Opacities abound when it comes to mapping the oceanic origins of the Indo-Caribbean Madrasi diaspora and its religious traditions.

Neither archival work on the kalapani voyages nor the study of Tamil, Telugu, and Malayalam will help us answer questions of territorial (and terrestrial) origins: where do the Madrasis come from? Can we trace their worship of Gangamma to communities that reside in modern-day Andhra Pradesh? Does Kateriamma come from Tamil Nadu or Karnataka? While it is important—for historical and geographical reasons—to recognize and trace ritual resonances between practices that we might find in both coastal Andhra Pradesh and Brooklyn, or in the forest groves of Tamil Nadu and the rainforests of Guyana, it is equally useful to set aside questions of transparent origins and accept and engage with the opacity of the kalapani.

Martinican poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant steers us in one such direction. According to Glissant, both reductive and universal claims are shaped by desires and demands for transparency:

If we examine the process of “understanding” people and ideas from the perspective of Western thought, we discover that its basis is this requirement for transparency. In order to understand and thus accept you, I have to measure your solidity with the ideal scale providing me with grounds to make comparisons, and perhaps, judgements. I have to reduce. (Glissant 1997, 189–90)

The poetics and politics of difference, in Glissant’s view, likewise rely on transparency to legitimate themselves.7 In place of transparency, Glissant suggests opacity:

Opacities can coexist and converge, weaving fabrics. To understand these truly one must focus on the texture of the weave and not on the nature of its components. For the time being, perhaps, give up this old obsession with discovering what lies at the bottom of natures. (Ibid., 190)

The birth of the Madrasi community and the Madrasi religion can be understood in relation to two aspects of the kalapani: its darkness or opacity (kala) and its waters (pani). The Madrasis’ opaque and oceanic origins defy terrestrial and territorial transparency and challenge assumptions about diasporic maps of belonging. Observed from the seemingly stable shores of the South Asian subcontinent, diasporas appear displaced. This idea of diasporic displacement not only centers a terra firma viewpoint but also reproduces maps of centers and margins in which diasporas, on account of their displacement, occupy only the edges or geohistorical limits of South Asia.

The kalapani offers a different perspective of these geographical relationships. We have called Madras a port of departure, situated ourselves in the turbulent dark waters, and observed the opaque and oceanic origins of the Madrasi community and religion. Our position at sea flattens geohistorical binaries like “homeland” and “foreign land” or center and margin. The name “Madrasi” implies not only a sense of departure, but also the process of “deterritorialization” (ibid., 5). Thus, the Madrasis are a kalapani kula—a community born from the historical churning of the dark waters. What might happen to the gods of such a deterritorialized diasporic community named after a port of departure?

The kula and kaval deities of the Madrasis crossed the dark waters with their devotees, and as a result of the crossing and churning of the kalapani, the gods underwent a double metamorphosis. Plunged into the opaque ocean, the ancestral and guardian deities emerged from the dark waters as migrant and marine gods. Thus, in Guyana and in Brooklyn, the kula and kaval deivam are invoked from the waters of the Atlantic Ocean. How do the Madrasis describe this relationship between the gods and the ocean, and how does this relationship displace ideas of centers, margins, and homelands? Let us approach this question from a secluded beach on a hot summer afternoon in Brooklyn. Here, we witness the waters of Jamaica Bay transform into a portal for the Madrasis’ migrant and marine goddesses, Kateriamma, the goddesses of darkness and departed souls, and Gangamma, the goddess of water and life.

III Waters of Metamorphosis: Migrant and Marine Kula Deivam

Pujaris, pujarins, and devotees assembled on the early morning streets of East New York, Brooklyn. They gathered ritual objects required to build beach altars for the goddesses—neem, turmeric paste, copper vessels, incense, coconuts, flags, flowers, and bamboo poles—and stacked them in the back of several pick-up trucks and vans before heading toward the bay. The morning of the second day of Karagam Puja—the Madrasis’ annual three-day festival—is dedicated to invoking Gangamma and Kateriamma from the waters of the Atlantic Ocean that make their way to the shores of Brooklyn at Jamaica Bay. Karagam Puja takes place during the full moon. The tides are high, horseshoe crabs line the shores, and migratory shorebirds soar in the sky, observing the Madrasis’ annual communion with the ocean.

The thappu drummers led the procession from the parking lot to the shore.8 Yellow-clad devotees9 carried trays of ritual offerings. They followed the beat of the goatskin drum and walked barefoot to the edge of the water (fig. 2). The drummers stood along the shore, and pujaris and pujarins flattened the sand to set up temporary altars for Gangamma and Kateriamma. They began by lining two wooden trays with banana leaves. Then, they adorned the temporary altars with coconut flowers and established copper vessels marked with neem and turmeric in the center. A pujari and pujarin were chosen to bear the altars and manifest the goddesses. They propitiated Gangamma and Kateriamma with incense and coconuts and raised a yellow flag for Gangamma and a black one for Kateriamma. The flags, attached to bamboo poles, were placed in the sand next to the altars. The thappu thundered, waves crashed onto shores, and pujaris sang Creole Tamil songs inviting the migrant and marine goddesses to accept the community’s offerings and emerge from the dark waters (figs. 3 & 4).

The smell of the ocean mingled with the fragrance of burning camphor, and incense smoke rose from the altars to the skies. Tapping his fingers on the hourglass-shaped udukkai drum, Pujari Anil, the head priest of Brooklyn’s Madrasi temple, addressed the gathering of devotees: “Today, as we perform this puja here on this beach for Mother of Ganga [Gangamma] and Mother of Kateri [Kateriamma], we join together here as a community.” He turned to face the ocean and continued, “Mother Ganga is the mother who creates the body from the water. Mother Kateri is the mother who heals the body [and] takes care of all negativity. Now, she is the one they will blame when all difficult things happen. But she is the most merciful mother because she can go anywhere to help her children”10 (fig. 5).

While Gangamma governs all water and creates life, Kateriamma takes care of all things deemed dark and negative—in life and even after death. With another tap on the udukkai, Pujari Anil signaled the tappu drummer to play “Kateri’s hand,” the pattern or beat used to invoke the dark goddess. As the sound of the thappu drowned out the din of traffic coming from Belt Parkway, pujaris and devotees sang to invite Kateriamma to emerge from the waters. They addressed her as amma (“mother”) and baigalamma (“mother of departed souls”). The pujarin chosen to manifest Kateriamma lifted the altar of the goddess. Devotees rushed to help the pujarin place the altar on her head. Another pujari stood next to her, ready to carry Gangamma’s altar. The drummers, pujaris, and devotees gathered on the beach, facing the ocean.

The troupe of thappu drummers maintained a consistent beat as the pujarins and pujaris walked toward the water, bearing the goddesses’ altars on their heads. A stream of devotees followed them into the ocean. The waves rose to their chests and the pujaris and pujarins began to sway back and forth, immersing themselves in the dark waters (fig. 6). They walked back to the beach in a back-and-forth motion and were understood to be manifesting the two marine goddesses they had invoked from the depths of the ocean. CH, a senior pujari, stood next to me and offered a correction: “The goddesses come from the water with their entourage of spirits.” While some submarine spirits were the souls of migrant ancestors or departed community members, others were lesser-known spirit-strangers. Both groups were kept in check by Kateriamma.

The goddesses and their aquatic attendants flowed through the devotees. Various spirits circulated along the shore. The pujarins and pujaris manifesting Gangamma and Kateriamma were offered garlands of flowers and neem leaves. Guided by the beat of the drum and the rhythm of the waves crashing onto the beach, devotees rushed into the water, hoping the currents would carry away their sickness and suffering and that the presence of Gangamma and Kateriamma would transform the waters of Jamaica Bay into a portal of healing (fig. 7). Pujari Anil requested that the goddesses travel from the beach to the temple in the karagams or copper vessels filled with water, camphor, and neem, and the Madrasis—now drenched in ocean water—made their way back to the parking lot. The pujari and pujarin who had manifested Gangamma and Kateriamma held onto the karagams of the goddesses as they prepared for a bumpy ride back to the streets of Brooklyn (figs. 8 & 9).

Gangamma and Kateriamma’s annual invocation from the waters of the Atlantic illustrates the ambivalence of the kalapani. Though the ocean bore witness to the turbulent voyages and deaths of the Madrasis’ ancestors, the dark waters also serve as the opaque point of origin for the community. The goddesses of this kalapani kula thus not only emerge from these ambivalent waters, but also exemplify the dual and contradictory role of the ocean in the making of the Madrasis. While Kateriamma, the goddess of dead souls, embodies the darkness (kala) of the kalapani and its history, Gangamma, the goddess of life and water (pani), highlights the Madrasis’ myth of oceanic origins.

“They say more life exists in the ocean than on land,” said Pujari Anil when I asked for his perspective on the contradictions of the dark waters. “And we know that life evolved from the ocean. Gangamma represents that energy of the water,” he explained. “Now, our people believe that the souls of the people who died are trapped in the ocean. So, when we invoke Mother Kateri, all the trapped souls join the feast,” he added. Not only do Gangamma and Kateriamma represent the ambivalence and contradictions of the kalapani, but they also embody its marine rhythm. As we observed earlier, the Madrasi pujarins and pujaris who manifest Kateriamma and Gangamma move their feet in a constant back-and-forth motion. According to Pujari Anil, this “momentum” of the ocean helps pujaris and pujarins manifest and manage the “energy” of the goddesses. “[The energy of the goddesses] is like waves or tides. The movement [of the feet] is a representation of the ocean. They bring them from the ocean,” he explained. To invoke and manifest the marine goddesses and then carry them to land, the Madrasi pujaris and pujarins must move in waves and tides.

Here, we can extend Pujari Anil’s idea about the momentum of the ocean. The back-and-forth motion enables Madrasi pujaris and pujarins to manifest their marine goddesses, Katerimma and Gangamma, who jointly represent the back and forth of death and life. Moreover, the Madrasis themselves are shaped by the back-and-forth impulses of their kalapani history and oceanic origin. Finally, the Madrasi community and religion emerged from the back-and-forth churning of the kalapani. The oceanic origins of the Madrasis and the marine momentum of their goddesses urge us to reconsider the geography of homelands and diasporas. We have already observed that from the perspective of the kalapani, all land appears on the margins. Situating ourselves on the ocean and in relation to the dark waters necessitates giving up a stable sense of center and periphery. In Pujari Anil’s view, the kula deivam can adopt this shift in perspective with ease because the Madrasis’ gods are “attached to people and not to land.” Let us turn, at last, to a kalapani view of the land.

Conclusion: A Kalapani View of Diasporic Displacement

In her recent monograph on the Parashakthi Temple, a Hindu goddess temple in Pontiac, Michigan dedicated to Karumariamman, Tracy Pintchman, drawing on the work of Thomas Tweed and Anna Tsing, employs the language of crossings, flows, and friction to analyze the geographic, ritual, and epistemological boundary and border crossings that shape diasporic temples, communities, and goddesses. At the end of her monograph, Pintchman reflects on definitions of diaspora. The idea of “diaspora,” she points out, often “presumes a center-periphery stand towards place, identifying a principal location toward which other locations and communities are oriented and in relation to which they occupy a marginalized position.” Pintchman reminds us that such definitions “focus exclusively on the experience of human communities.” Our understanding of diasporic religions “becomes more complex,” she suggests, “if we take seriously such communities’ discourse about the experience of their deities.” The devotees of the Parashakthi Temple consider their goddess to be “as fully present, if not more present” in Pontiac “as she is in the Indian landscape.” Thus, Pintchman asks, “In the case of the Parasakthti Temple, for example, how accurate is it to think of India as the Goddess’s homeland?” (2024, 199). We can extend this question to the case of the Indo-Caribbean Madrasi diaspora and the Madrasi religion.

The Madrasi diaspora is a kalapani kula—a community whose origins are opaque (kala) and oceanic (pani). Adapting to the Madrasis’ sense of departure and deterritorialization (exemplified in the community’s port-based name), the kula deivam of the community underwent a double metamorphosis. They emerged from the historical and mythological churning of the dark waters in their kalapani avatars (“forms”) to become migrant and marine deities. As migrant and marine deities, the Madrasi gods and goddesses are not “fixed” in place. They neither reside in some imagined “original” homeland (in South Asia) nor occupy the margins of a map drawn to the scale of diasporic displacement. The kula deivam, Pujari Anil reminds us, “are attached to people, not land.” The Madrasis and their migrant and marine deities offer us a kalapani view of diasporic displacement. Situating ourselves in the kalapani, we can experiment with, invert, and displace ideas of centers and margins. We might begin by recognizing that it is geographically impossible to “locate” ourselves in water.

Currents, waves, and tides define not only the back-and-forth movement but also the molecular constitution of the ocean. Thinking through the problems of “thalassography” or ocean writing, Steinberg summarizes the challenges faced by geographers: “We can never truly ‘locate’ ourselves within the ocean. Or, if we must locate ourselves, we require a different kind of ‘map’” (Steinberg 2016, xv). Making space for oceanic thinking, Peters and Steinberg proposed the concept of “wet ontology” in 2015. Drawing on Lagrangian fluid dynamics, they describe the ocean “not as a space of discrete points between which objects move but rather as a dynamic environment of flows and continual recomposition where, because there is no static background, ‘place’ can be understood only in the context of mobility” (ibid., 257). While continents, even in their movement, “retain an ontological stability” afforded by the structure of solids, water remains in a permanent state of reformulation on a molecular level (ibid., 258). In addition to being fluid, the ocean is also opaque. It is the ocean’s volume—that is, “its existence as a hydrodynamic arena in which waves (of water) restrict investigators’ ability to observe the reflection of other waves (of light and sound),” Peters and Steinberg remind us—that poses a challenge to observation, governance, and surveillance (ibid., 254). To gain perspective on and from the opaque ocean, we have to remain in a constant state of motion. This oceanic motion is sustained by displacement.

Moving (in any direction) on the surface of the ocean (on a boat or ship) demands that we displace and become displaced by water. Reflecting on his ethnographic work on cargo ships and global shipping routes, Jatin Dua discusses how displacement is central not only to ethnographic fieldwork, but also to calculating the movements of ships at sea. Seafarers of all kinds learn to calculate displacement tonnage—the “weight of the water displaced when the vessel is in water.” At any point, the “weight of the water displaced by the vessel below the keel should be equivalent to the vessel’s weight.” The ship moves, Dua explains, not by “occupying space,” but by “constantly moving and displacing volume as a dynamic process” (Dua 2024, 43). The displacement tonnage changes throughout the voyage (because of the changing weight of the ship as cargo is loaded and unloaded, crew sign on and off, and ballast water is pumped in and out). This displacement shapes the lives and communities of the sailors on board (India, Dua tells us, is the fourth-largest provider of seafarers employed by global shipping industries).

From the kalapani, all land appears to be in the margins. When we think of and from the diasporic ocean, we cannot locate stable centers or margins. Moreover, we cannot expect transparency from the dark waters. In place of stability, transparency, and place, the kalapani gives us three different tools to think with: motion, opacity, and displacement. Like the ambivalent kalapani that contains death and birth, history and myth, the concept of diasporic displacement opens up two streams of inquiry and interpretation. While we can study diasporic displacement as a historical event, we may also invert the idea of “diasporic displacement” and turn it into a thinking tool to ask: how do diasporas displace (i.e., invert, play with, and/or challenge) our assumptions about geography, communities, history, and religion?

Primary Sources

References