Performing Memories and Weaving Archives:

Book excerpt: This book engages with how the Siddis in Gujarat and the South African Indians in South Africa perform different forms of creolized socio-cultural practices in the contemporary era. Since the precolonial times, India and South Africa have developed commercial relations through sharing clothing materials, minerals, precious stones, and spices. Besides exchanging physical objects, varieties of cultures, traditions, and rituals were also exchanged between these countries. With the emergence of colonization in both these countries as Africans were brought to India as slaves and Indians were taken to South Africa as indentured laborers, a lot of objects like musical instruments, plant seeds, cooking utensils, and hand-woven clothes were carried across the Indian Ocean as cultural memories. With the passage of time, the cultural practices of the Indian Diaspora and African Diaspora got intermixed with the native local cultures of South Africa and India, respectively, and gave birth to porous, fluid, multi-rooted, and creolized cultural practices. This book brings forth some of the creolized culinary, spiritual, and musical practices of these communities, and how these performances can expand the archives of creolized cultural practices of Diaspora communities in the Indian Ocean World.