A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.Moorings follows sailors from the Gulf of Kachchh in India as they voyage across the Indian Ocean on mechanized wooden sailing vessels known as
vahans, or dhows. These voyages produce capital through moorings that are spatial, moral, material, and conceptual. With a view from the dhow, the book examines the social worlds of Muslim seafarers who have been rendered invisible even as they maneuver multiple regulatory regimes and the exigencies of life, navigating colonialism, neoliberalism, the rise of Hindutva, insurgency, climate change, and border regimes across the ocean. Based on historical and ethnographic research aboard ships, at ports, and in religious shrines and homes,
Moorings shows how capitalism derives value from historically sedimented practices grounded in caste, gender, and transregional community-based forms of regulation.
Nidhi Mahajan is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
"This is a brilliant book. It sensitively tells the stories of seafarers on dhows traversing the Indian Ocean. We hear about their struggles with caste and class prejudice, racism and Islamophobia. The seafarers aboard dhows who navigate multiple sovereignties at sea and complex border regimes on land are rendered lovingly here, in three dimensions and with all the requisite appreciation of complexity and respect for their trajectories."—Laleh Khalili, author of The Corporeal Life of Seafaring
"A stunning multisited ethnography of the ships and smugglers that underpin the global economy. Nidhi Mahajan's incisive scholarship shows us how borders, shrines, and meals are the moorings that enable mobilities across the Indian Ocean."—Johan Mathew, author of Margins of the Market: Trafficking and Capitalism across the Arabian Sea
"Draws from rich, intimate, and challenging fieldwork and emphasizes how seafarers from Western India contest and challenge their marginality by turning to the sea—in ways that follow in the footsteps of generations before them—seeking out possibilities amidst perilous circumstances."—Jatin Dua, author of Captured at Sea: Piracy and Protection in the Indian Ocean
272 pp.6 x 9Illus: 22 color illustrations; 3 maps
9780520413511$34.95|£30.00Paper
Jun 2025