Unarchived Histories,nationalism and the Indian Ocean World in M.g.vassanji's the In-between World of Vikram Lall

The Indian Ocean basin was once a fluid, multi-ethnic space of migration, culture, and trade, connecting Africa, Asia, and more in what Amitav Ghosh describes as “oceanic” or regional cosmopolitan exchanges. Postcolonial nationalism — the formation of territorial nation-states and sealed national histories — brutally terminated these long-durée connections. Territorial borders, nationalist myths, and official histories increasingly replaced the older maritime networks and erased the plural memories they carried. As Sugata Bose reminds us, by the early twentieth century a “global public sphere” (278) stretching across the Indian Ocean was being was destroyed by the post- colonial nationalism and even cosmopolitan voices like Rabindranath Tagore’s vision of an India-connected oceanic world became “the last gasps of a lost era” (278). This essay uses the Indian Ocean World framework to explain how postcolonial state formation truncated transoceanic flows and interred layered histories. We track the region’s pre-national oceanic interconnectedness and cosmopolitanism, the nationalist turn and closure of borders, the archival and historiographic erasures that followed and how novelists like M. G. Vassanji grapple with these absences in The In-Between World of Vikram Lall. Drawing on theories of “hydrocolonialism”, “tidal time”, and world-regional history, we argue that nationalism imposed a linear, homogeneous national time that silenced alternative, “deep” oceanic narratives. Literary form itself often becomes a site for excavating submerged pasts, as Vassanji’s novel mourns the lost Indian Ocean diasporic world and creates new modes of bearing witness.