Gijsbert Oonk

The changing culture of the Hindu Lohana community in East Africa

This article describes the cultural change and adaptation of the Hindu Lohana community in East Africa. It examines changing food habits and marriage policies, both well‐known examples of the Hindu notion of ‘purity’. Initially, men of this community would marry Lohana women raised in India. Over time, however, Lohana men developed a preference for Hindu women raised in East Africa. In addition, Lohanas developed from strict vegetarians and non‐drinkers to consumers of meat and alcohol. This was not a natural, harmonious process, but one with conflicts in which painful decisions had to be made. This process of stretching and closing preferences of identity have eventually led to an Indian East African identity. To understand the creation of this identity, this article argues that there is a need to study cultural change as a local (a well‐defined geographical and historical area) and bottom‐up (using the perspective of the agent who changes, adapts, mixes, integrates or assimilates) process.

Motor or millstone? The managing agency system in Bombay and Ahmedabad, 1850-1930:

was made possible by a grant from WOTRO of NWO. the Dutch foundation for tropical research. I would like to thank my colleagues in the History Department of Erasmus University Rotterdam for creating a stimulating environment to write and develop new ideas and especially Professor H.W. van Schendel for supervising my Ph.D. project. Ferry de Goey has become a fine and critical colleague during the years. I thank Ellen Bal for her moral and intellectual support. I wish to thank Professor D. Tripathi and Professor M.M. Mehta for their detailed comments. One of the most important questions in the historiography of industrialisation in India concerns the role played by managing agencies during the industrialisation

After Shaking his hand, start counting your fingers. Trust and Images in Indian business networks, East Africa 1900-2000

textabstractIn this study I examine how ‘ethnic’ trading networks are created and recreated, but may also fracture and fall apart. This occurred among some Indian groups in East Africa, who initially strengthened their economic and cultural ties with India by maintaining intensive trade relations and taking brides from the homeland. However, after just one generation, their economic focus was on East Africa, Japan and the UK. Many of today’s well-off Indian businessmen in East Africa show little economic interest in India. In fact, Gujarati businessmen in East Africa created new, rather negative images of their counterparts in Gujarat. During the last century, their overall image of Indians in India was transformed from one of a ‘reliable family or community members’ to one of ‘unreliable, corrupt and, untrustworthy ‘others’.

Gujarati Asians in East Africa, 1880–2000: Colonization, de-colonization and complex citizenship issues

In this paper, I argue that despite the general belief to the contrary, there is a great deal of continuity in the history of the colonial and post-colonial practice of citizenship in the Indian Ocean region. This debate is usually described from the perspective of the state and its representatives. Indeed, more often than not, the position of the migrants themselves is not discussed. This paper aims to fill this gap. In the case of the South Asians in East Africa, I will demonstrate that migrants were able to negotiate their own space for identity formation and accepting and changing formal citizenship options. Indeed, they were also able to negotiate with colonial officials and, after the 1960s, Britain, Canada, India and even the United Nations about defending their rights as citizens or agreeing new regulations for international migration and citizenship. The debate on citizenship and belonging has become the centre of academic and public debate since the 1990s in Europe and the USA. However, historical cases in colonial contexts might shed some light on long-term continuity in such discussions.

The Emergence of Indigenous Industrialists in Calcutta, Bombay, and Ahmedabad, 1850–1947

This article describes and explains three patterns in the entry of Indian entrepreneurs in large-scale industries in South Asia, 1850–1947. It begins with Marwari businessmen in the jute industry in Calcutta. Then I discuss the success of the Parsi community in the Bombay cotton industries, and, finally, Gujarati (mainly Hindu) industrialists in Ahmedabad. I focus on three variables that might explain the timing, degree, and social and cultural variations in the emergence of indigenous industrialists in these cities. These variables concern: first, the colonial attitude towards indigenous industrialists in this field; second, whether or not these men belonged to a (religious) middleman minority; and, finally, their social and, in particular, occupational background.

Clothing Matters: Asian-African Businessmen in European Suits 1880-1980

Asian businessmen in East Africa supplied goods, services and capital to African, Arabic, Asian as well as European customers. Within this complex cultural environment, they had to choose what to wear on any given occasion. Expressing dignity, wealth, trust and reliability are key variables in making cross-cultural business contacts and when it comes to building an appropriate image. When they arrived in East Africa between 1880 and 1920, Hindus and Muslims alike wore their own traditional attire. When they left Africa - around 1970 - they wore a typical European business suit. European clothes are an indicator of their “progressive” ideas, but must also be seen as a critique of their own culture.

Nationality swapping in the Olympic field: towards the marketization of citizenship?

ABSTRACT Nationality swapping in sports is commonly assumed to be a rapidly expanding practice that is indicative of the marketization of citizenship. Sports are said to have become wholesale markets in which talent is being traded for citizenship. In this article, we seek to empirically explore such claims by analysing 167 athletes who have competed for two different countries in the Summer Olympic Games. It seems that most switches occurred after the 1990s. Then, following a citizenship as a claims-making approach, we introduce the work of Bourdieu so as to connect citizenship as both legal status and practice with normative claims. The analysis reveals that the practice of nationality switching is shaped by structural conditions of the Olympic field. First, a complex realm of citizenship laws and regulations produces conditions under which athletes make legitimate claims to citizenship. Second, through a mechanism of reverberative causation, prior migrations are often echoed in contemporary nationality swapping . Only a limited number of athletes acquired citizenship via the explicit market principle we call jus talenti. Claiming that instrumental nationality swapping is indicative of the marketization of citizenship obscures the complex interplay between structures of and practices within the Olympic field.

Book Reviews : PIETER GORTER, Small Industrialists, Big Ambitions: Economic and Poli tical Networks on a Large Industrial Estate in West India, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1996, pp. 216, Rs 395:

narrating a life lived so intensely. Dutta and Robinson have presented the corpus of ,Tagore’s letters into eighteen short phases, each highlighting a significant theme. The first letter included here was written in Bengali in 1879 from England to his elder brother, giving his impression about British life and the last-written in English----condoling a mother from his death-bed. The letters in-between, written to various men and women, known and not-so-known, on different themes reflecting different moods, have been connected by useful notes: they read like a coherent narrative and provide a wonderful account of the

Book Reviews : The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India. Business Strategies and the Working Classes in Bombay, 1900-1940 by Rajnarayan Chandavarkar. Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. 468

formation ’was influenced by and as it shaped the nature and development of industrial capitalism in colonial India’ (p. 1). It seeks to fill a gap in the historiography of labour, in which the workers themselves have until now remained silent. But it is a political rather than a cultural social history: through a study of the social formation of Bombay’s workers, Chandavarkar attempts to decipher their political perceptions and political actions. The second chapter sets out the familiar characteristics of Bombay, its transformation from a fishing hamlet into a major industrial metropolis. It describes the social geography of the city, the growth of capitalism in the region, the role of the colonial state in the expansion of Bombay, and the influence of the plague. The development of the cotton textile industry was a response to the subordination of indigenous capital, and ’not a function of its linear progress from trade to industry’ (p. 65). Economic development was uneven, most trades were liable to seasonal and arbitrary fluctuations, and capital was mobilised in small pools. Business strategies were based on rapid turnover, and this was associated with rapidly changing levels of employment. Fluctuations in the labour market played an important role in the formation of the working class, according to Chandavarkar. They heightened the importance of caste and kinship ties, the workers’ village connections, and the social organisation of the urban neighbourhoods. Chapter 3 discusses Bombay’s labour market, stressing the widespread

Book Reviews: Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India: Business Strategies and the Working Classes in Bombay, 1900-1940, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 468

Western companies have successfully implemented quality circles under different names (such as small business groups). Usually, failure of quality circles in some Indian and Western companies has been due to the top management’s lack of commitment to nurturing a quality culture and to the well-known NIH (notinvented-here) syndrome. Comments on Japanese culture at some places in the book are jarring and not quite appropriate to the subject under discussion. For instance, the author notes in Chapter 8 that ’Japanese improvements in quality have been achieved under a coercive culture which is now strained’. This is a gratuitous remark and has no relevance to the subject of enhancing quality culture in a company. Overall, the author leaves a person somewhat confused rather than enlightened after reading the book. Many practical questions remain unanswered-for example, what are the successive steps that one should take to usher in quality within a company? How does one avoid the