At the start of the project, work was focused on the formulation of the key concepts that inform the three research strands, in particular “archipelagic India”, “archipelagic memory” and “Indian Ocean quotidian”. An archipelagic approach to research was devised, shifting the vantage point from the periphery to the centre, thus foregrounding the perspective of island spaces and proceeding inwards from there to the Indian subcontinent along concentric circles of national belonging. Accordingly, archival research started in Mauritius and continued in Pondicherry, two regions connected by an earlier colonial history and by continuing linguistic affinities which endow them with a standpoint on national developments that are eccentric, not only geographically but also epistemologically.
Across all strands, work has involved research into a series of periodicals from Pondicherry, Mauritius and the Indian Ocean region from whose pages an intense intellectual effort of ‘world-making’ emerged, veered towards the geopolitical, ideological or cultural rapprochement of different Indian Ocean regions between 1947 and the early 1970s. Archival research was also focused on the analysis of works by writers from India or of Indian origin whose politics or poetics speak to the challenge of thinking India ‘archipelagically’, and on the genre of literary anthologies.
Research visits were useful towards the production of a few case studies examining places that, regardless of their peripherality with respect to the political centre of gravity of the Indian nation, had a significant purchase on the conceptual and imaginative geographies of Indian writers and intellectuals and constituted the material nodes of ‘archipelagic India’. In Mauritius, the research focused on selected memorial sites and literary representations of plantation lives in Western Indian Ocean islands; in India, a series of locations in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka that have enabled a reading of R.K. Narayan’s Indian Ocean fictional geographies against the metaphorical representation of India as an urban-rural archipelagic continuum; in Indonesia, the sites of the Bandung 1955 conference.
In addition to the project publications (listed under Results) and a series of presentations at academic seminars and international conferences, findings have been disseminated to the scientific community and communicated to the larger public through a series of activities, including the seminar series "Archipelagic Indias" (2021-2024, partly available on YouTube); the webinar "Conceptualising Archipelagic Memory" (01/02/2022, available on YouTube); the international conference "Archipelagic Memory: Intersecting Geographies, Histories and Disciplines" (Mauritius, 2-4 August 2022); the event "Writing and imagining history: Narrating the Indian Ocean world", with writer Amitav Ghosh (London, 28 November 2024).
