Music and the Formation of Sidi Identity in Western India

Author(s): Helene Basu

Source: History Workshop Journal , Spring, 2008, No. 65 (Spring, 2008), pp. 161-178
Published by: Oxford University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25472979

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 HISTORY ON THE LINE
Music and the Formation of Sidi Identity
in Western India
by Helene Basu
Long before the current age of postcolonial globalization, the Western
Indian Ocean served as a maritime highway linking littoral settings in
Western India with Arabia, Persia and East Africa. Among the many
travellers who crossed the Indian Ocean in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, people from Africa faced a particularly gruelling fate. In contrast
to those who willingly journeyed by sea - among them Arab and Indian
merchants, Sufi masters, Islamic scholars from Yemen and Europeans -
Africans often endured a sea passage which was enforced by enslavement.
Today, descendants of former African crossers of the Indian Ocean are
dispersed over many islands and littoral societies such as Zanzibar, Oman
and Western India. Along the Western coasts of South Asia, small but
distinct communities of African descendants are settled in the Pakistani
provinces of Sindh and Baluchistan, the Indian coastal states of Gujarat,
Maharashtra and Karnataka and the former princely capital of Hyderabad,
and further south in Sri Lanka. In Gujarat and elsewhere in South Asia,
people of African origins are called 'Sidi'. From the times when sailing ships
were the only means of transport, the appellation 'Sidi' was given
indiscriminately to African slaves and sailors working on ships and in
Indian Ocean ports.1 The sea journey from Africa to distant lands in South
Asia thus transformed displaced people from the hinterland of the Swahili
coast into 'Sidi'.
This essay addresses the ways in which Sidi have created a place for
themselves in Gujarat. It considers the sea journey that brought uprooted
Africans - Sidi slaves and seamen - from Zanzibar to Gujarat and then
examines the processes shaping the emergence of a collective Sidi identity in
interaction with the host society. In both contexts - at sea and on land -
African-derived forms of music referred to as goma played an important
role. Through their music, Sidi in Gujarat reflect a significant strand in
Indian history - its maritime connections across the Indian Ocean. The
century-old transoceanic migration of people, ideas, things and practices in
dhows (the Arabic for sailing ship) resulted in the constitution of plural
societies along the Indian coast characterized by 'dhow cultures'.2 This
concept highlights the mobility of social and cultural practices in the Indian
Ocean region. More specifically, the concept draws attention to social

History Workshop Journal Issue 65 doi:10.1093/hwj/dbm069

? The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of History Workshop Journal, all rights reserved.

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 162 History Workshop Journal

diversity and the cultural mix of African, Arab and Indian people and their
ideas and practices. Dhow cultures were produced historically by seafaring,
trade and slavery. Seen from this perspective, the sea rather than the land
provides the focus for situating people and practices in specific local
contexts.3
The ethnographic fieldwork on which this article is based was conducted
in 2004 in Zanzibar, coastal Tanzania and Gujarat.4 The research was
directed at tracing the journey of African cults of affliction and their musical
practices (ngoma) through different local sites related by dhow cultural
features. A prominent site of dhow culture is Zanzibar, the hub of the Indian
Ocean slave trade from the seventeenth to the late nineteenth centuries.
Another, more hidden, site of Indian Ocean dhow cultures is found in
Gujarat. At the time, the region was closely connected to Zanzibar through
increasing trade and as a consequence of migration (of trading communities
from Gujarat and of slaves from Zanzibar, as well as of African sailors who
settled in Gujarat). Africans in Zanzibar and Gujarat seem to have
become unconsciously linked by related ritual practices that in Zanzibar
are called ngoma and are known as goma in Gujarat. From the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, and perhaps earlier, former slaves and migrant
seafarers from Africa gradually evolved their own forms of social
organization in Gujarat in which goma music played an important role.
A comparison of the processes of identity formation of former slaves in
Zanzibar and Gujarat reveals significant insights into agencies of Africans in
the Indian Ocean world, and so into a globalization of Indian Ocean sites
from below. This process seems to have been shaped by musical practices
and transformations of African spirit cosmologies. In Zanzibar and Gujarat
beliefs that spirits are supernatural agents which interfere in human life,
while displaying important differences, share significant similarities across
spatial and cultural boundaries. The concept of possession by spirits is
important not only as a vehicle of memory but also for negotiating
modernity.
In present-day Gujarat the estimated Sidi population is about 20,000
while the Sidi communities in Karnataka and Hyderabad are believed to be
smaller. The sharing of an African ancestry and the denomination 'Sidi',
however, has not resulted in a unified Sidi identity in India. Each of these
Sidi communities is deeply embedded in its respective host region and looks
back to different histories.5 Moreover, local Sidi communities are not
homogenous but include people speaking different languages, living in rural
and urban environments, and adhering to different religions (there are, for
example, Hindu, Christian and Muslim Sidi in Karnataka). Although some
elders may still remember a few Swahili expressions, the regional language
has usually become the vernacular of Sidi communities. In Hyderabad and
Gujarat Sidi identify with the wider Muslim community, but while some
sections of the community regard Urdu as their mother tongue, others speak
Telugu or Gujarati as their first language.

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 Sidi Identity in Western India 163

What Sidi people do have in common, though, are constraints of poverty

which they share with millions of lower-class and lower-caste people in
India. In Gujarat Sidi have to struggle hard to make ends meet. They often
live in one-room dwellings located in decaying old towns, in slums and in
barren villages. In urban environments, they are often found working
as rickshaw and bus drivers, in factories or in grain and cloth shops or
as owners of small roadside pan (betel leaf) stalls. Women often work as
domestic servants in middle-class households. Many Sidi have no work at
all, and a few are reduced to begging. The smaller number of Sidi who live
in a rural environment are often landless labourers. In all these contexts,
it is often women who bear the main responsibility for supporting the
household. Sidi usually live in nuclear families. In the 1980s most Sidi
children had no more than three or four years of schooling. Boys started to
work at the age of thirteen or fourteen. Girls accompanied their mothers to
perform domestic service. Those few who held a government job in the
navy or in the railways, even as a cleaner, were greatly admired by other
Sidi because of their regular monthly income. In the wake of economic
liberalization and the boom it triggered in Gujarat in the 1990s, many Sidi
have generated new forms of income by self-employment. Some Sidi young
men now successfully run their own car-repair workshops. Women, too,
have entered new domains, and Beheroze Shroff in her film 'Ancestral
Links' portrays a young Sidi woman who runs a beauty parlour. Sidi are
also encountered at Sufi dargah (shrines) where they have small shops selling
flowers, sweets, soft drinks and snacks.
Neither forced mobility nor poverty has prevented Sidi in Gujarat from
creating their own ways of life and achieving dignity and self-respect. Music
in particular is of great importance in Sidi ways of life - in the present as in
the past. It is through their music that the existence of Sidi first became
known to a wider Indian public, then to western tourists and - over the past
few years - to global audiences as well. More significantly, music seems to
have considerably shaped the emergence of a 'land-oriented' Sidi identity
distinct from their 'sea-oriented' maritime past.
In the Indian Ocean maritime world music provided a mode of
communication for people working together on ships, or in ports loading
and unloading boats. Seamen and labourers in ports came from a range of
different places and cultural backgrounds and often did not understand each
other's languages. But they made music together and Sidi were known to
sing, drum and dance, on dhows and in ports. The term used in Gujarat for
this kind of music is goma, which has etymological kinship with the Bantu
word ngoma. In South, Central and East Africa, ngoma is a complex term
that contains several related meanings: first, ngoma is a type of a drum;
secondly ngoma means drumming, singing and dancing performed in a call
response pattern; thirdly, ngoma refers to performers organized in cult
associations or ngoma cells; and finally in a more encompassing sense,
ngoma is the umbrella term for cults of affliction associated with spirit

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 164 History Workshop Journal

possession and the healing of consequent mental or physical disorder.

As anthropologists working in Africa have shown, however, ngoma does
not refer to a fixed tradition but to continually shifting practices. Even
on the African mainland, ngoma has travelled with inland migrants, was
modified in the process and helped people to adapt to different urban
contexts.6 In Gujarat, the basic elements of goma performances consist of
men and women dancing in circles, of specific rhythmical styles, a collection
of instruments some of which clearly display an African origin (such as the
footed drum) and singing in a call-response pattern. Moreover, the word
goma refers to as many embedded meanings of music as ngoma. It is related
to a specific cosmology and to healing of possession illness in cults
of affliction. My point here, though, is not to trace Sidi music - their
instruments, rhythms and styles of singing - to their ethnic roots. Rather,
I want to draw attention to the influence that the historical context, slavery
and its abolition, exerted upon the migration of symbols, ritual practices and
values and the subsequent emergence of goma as a major feature of Sidi
identity in Gujarat.

HISTORICAL LINKS BETWEEN ZANZIBAR AND GUJARAT

During initial fieldwork among the Sidi community in Gujarat in the
late 1980s I sometimes met elderly members of the community who
remembered forbears who had arrived from Africa before joining the Sidi
jamat (kinship association). Some were said to have been captured as
children on the beach and sold in slavery to Gujarat; others had been
working on ships, in ports or for Gujarati merchants. Speakers usually
pointed to Zanzibar as the place these newcomers had sailed from. Even
today, Zanzibar remains an important place on the map of the Sidi past. In
the early 1970s two Sidi men visited Zanzibar. People still talk about Sidi
Abdullah bin Mubarak and Sidi Sulemanbhai, the Sidi men invited by a
philanthropically minded Gujarati businessman from Zanzibar to travel to
East Africa.7 More recently, in 2002, the Sidi goma group performed during
the Indian Ocean Film Festival held annually in Zanzibar. During my
research visit in 2004 Zanzibaris talked about how much they had felt the
Gujarati Sidi to be like them ('they have come home') when watching their
performances.
Sidi music certainly contains elements of 'African retentions'.8 These
remain meaningless, however, if they are not understood in the social and
political contexts in which identities of former African slaves were formed
in Indian Ocean sites. There are noticeable symbolic links or family
relationships between Sidi goma and Zanzibari forms of ngoma. In both
settings, words related to 'habastt (which means 'Ethiopia' in Arabic) form
conspicuous symbolic clusters of cosmological and ritual schemes in which
musical practices are embedded. In Zanzibar, where a multitude of popular
practices involve possession by spirits representing different ethnic
categories,9 ngoma ya habshia denotes a cult of affliction related specifically

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 Sidi Identity in Western India 165

to a class of Ethiopian spirits {masheitani ya habshia) and using ritual

practices to help those afflicted. In Gujarat, Sidi honour an assembly of
African-Sufi patron saints also figuring in cults of affliction, of whom one is
named 'Bava Habash'. Like habshia spirits, Bava Habash is ascribed an
Ethiopian origin and embodies himself in possession rituals accompanied
by goma music. In Zanzibar people believe that spirits follow a person going
on a journey. Ethiopian spirits followed Sidi seafarers to Gujarat,
but seemingly were transformed by their journey - from Ethiopian spirits
into Muslim saints from Ethiopia. Before looking at this process in more
detail, the historical conditions framing the forced or voluntary passages of
Sidi from Zanzibar to Gujarat require to be considered.

ZANZIBAR AND GUJARAT LINKED BY SLAVERY

The painful African heritage of slavery and forced mobility provides an
important but almost forgotten link between Gujarat and Zanzibar. In the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Zanzibar and parts of the Swahili coast
were ruled by a powerful dynasty of Omani Arab sultans. The island was
both a destination and a centre for the dispersal of African slaves. It was
also an important harbour where ships crewed by African seamen departed
and arrived. From the early nineteenth century Zanzibar was a centre of
clove production as well as of the African slave trade. One of the many
transoceanic links originating from Zanzibar led to Gujarat. While Zanzibar
became a British Protectorate in 1890, Gujarat came under colonial control
much earlier. In the first part of the nineteenth century, direct British
colonial control was established over parts of mainland Gujarat, while other
areas were ruled indirectly through local princes.
The economy of Zanzibar rested on African slaves working on clove
plantations owned by Omani Arabs and later also by Gujarati merchants.
Most of the slaves Zanzibar received from the mainland remained on the
island. But some were sold to other Indian Ocean ports including those
along the long coastlines of Kachchh and Saurashtra in Gujarat. Mandvi
in Kachchh was particularly important, and through this port many
Africans entered Gujarat while traders left for Zanzibar.10 The migration of
merchants was encouraged by a policy of free trade introduced by Sultan
Sayyid from the 1830s and the privileged treatment he promised to Gujarati
merchants.11 Gujarati merchants were involved in producing and marketing
cloves and employed slave labour on their plantations and in business and
domestic contexts in a similar manner to the Arab elites. In Kachchh, the
Muslim merchant community of Bhatiyas in particular are still remembered
as becoming rich by selling African slaves on local markets. In Gujarat,
these slaves were employed in royal courts and merchant households, and
possession of Sidi was considered a sign of prestige for both Muslims and
Hindus of high status. Sidi men served in royal courts as bodyguards,
soldiers or guards of the female quarters {zenana), while Sidi women were
kept as maids by female members of the aristocracy.

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 166 History Workshop Journal

Zanzibar and Kachchh in Gujarat were both significant as sites where

the British attempted to establish their supremacy over the Indian Ocean by
seeking to enforce the abolition of the slave trade. Officially, the abolition of
slavery was proclaimed in 1833. For several decades, however, the effects
were minimal. While trading in slaves was prohibited, the colonial policy of
indirect rule in both Zanzibar and Kachchh restricted interference in slave
holding by subjects of either the sultan of Zanzibar or the king of Kachchh.
The main obstacle to stopping the traffic in slaves was, as the British saw
it, the sultan of Zanzibar. The sultan was suspected of allowing the secret
continuation of the slave trade on dhows from his island dominion.
As British influence over the king in Kachchh was far greater than over the
sultan, '[the British] decided to approach the matter through the Kutchi
families, who provided the Sultan with his Wazirs [advisors], dominated
commerce in Zanzibar and handled the trade in slaves, as in all other
commodities'. In 1869, the king of Kachchh 'issued a proclamation to all his
subjects residing temporarily or permanently abroad, informing them that
he had authorized the British Government to punish them like British
subjects if they broke the law forbidding slave-trading'. The proclamation
was supported by the head of the greatest Kachchhi merchant firm at the
time.12
As a result of colonial anti-slavery policies the boundaries between
enslaved and free Sidi became increasingly blurred.13 Thriving commerce in
the nineteenth-century Indian Ocean world had increased the demand for
labour on ships and in ports. Sidi continued to be seamen on dhows but
often the exact nature of the labour relationship could not be established.
They also worked on European steamships as well as in ports, loading and
unloading ships side by side with Yemenis, Somalis and others. Some were
free-born, some freedmen and some slaves. From the 1830s the British, in
their struggle to enforce anti-slave-trading Acts, employed patrol ships in
the Indian Ocean on the lookout for dhows carrying slaves. If slaves were
found they were brought to a depot in Bombay (now Mumbai), where the
British Police Commissioner decided the fate of freed Africans in India.14
Some of the children recovered from boats were given to the care of the
African Asylum maintained by the Church Missionary Society from 1835
until the early twentieth century at Nasik in Maharashtra.15 Adult men and
sailors often remained seamen but were now enlisted in the British Navy
based in Bombay. Other men and women were sent to Indian and European
families to be employed as domestic servants.

CREATING NEW IDENTITIES IN ZANZIBAR AND GUJARAT

Once people were uprooted from as far away as Mozambique, Malawi or
Congo, they were usually not inclined to return, even if they could. In both
Zanzibar and Gujarat, former African slaves had to create new social
identities for themselves. However the visibility and the impact of African
presences upon local societies such as Zanzibar and Gujarat varied

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 Sidi Identity in Western India 167

considerably. One obvious reason is the significant difference in the size of

African populations. In late nineteenth-century Zanzibar about three
quarters of the population were African slaves or recent freedmen. As Laura
Fair has shown in her study of popular cultural practices in Zanzibar
following the emancipation of slaves, the urban society which emerged
on the island in the early twentieth century was considerably shaped by
the actions of former slaves and their descendants.16 Sidi in Gujarat,
by contrast, represented only a tiny fraction of the population. According
to the 1899 Gazetteer about 13,000 Sidi were enumerated in the
Bombay Presidency as a whole (Gujarat, Maharashtra and parts of
Karnataka).17 The Sidi contribution to and impact upon local culture was
therefore not so easily discernible. It comes to the fore, however, if one turns
to the micro-level, to local social life-worlds at the margins of Gujarati
society.

ZANZIBAR
In Zanzibar, a formal decree abolishing slavery was enforced by the British
in 1897. This date marks the beginnings of a complex process driven by the
formations and transformations of new identities of former slaves. While the
British tried to enumerate Africans in terms of fixed tribal categories, former
slaves began to identify themselves as 'Swahili'. This was a category
with fluid boundaries, open to flexible social uses. Later the term became
loaded with slave ancestry and Swahili was replaced by local categories of
indigenous African social formations or with the honourable category
'Shirazi' referring to a mythical origin in Persia. At first former slaves were
still keen to identify themselves as Swahili because the term implied free
status, urbanity and Islam. Free status in turn was closely related to
ownership of land. In addition, Swahili notions of civilization rested on an
urban lifestyle. In the process of emancipation large numbers of former
slaves moved to the town. A lively urban popular culture developed, fuelled
by new religious forms such as recently established Sufi lodges (tariqa) and a
host of musical and dancing associations. While Sufi lodges privileged male
participants, women often joined dancing clubs. These and other forms
of popular culture were important sites for the forging of post-slavery
individual and collective identities in Zanzibar. It can be assumed that many
of these dancing clubs (ngoma) overlapped with associations of spirit
possession and healing such as those encountered so frequently on the
island today.
Ngoma ya habshia denotes one such contemporary practice of a cult of
affliction in Zanzibar. Today Zanzibar is a plural, multi-ethnic society
consisting of Swahili, African, Arab, Comorian, Baluchi and a few Gujarati
families and communities. While in everyday discourse possible slave
ancestry is no longer of great concern to most people, slavery as a social
condition of the past is remembered in spirit cosmologies. In ngoma

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 168 History Workshop Journal

ya habshia, a status distinction separates royal from slave habshia spirits,

both male and female. Spirits, moreover, possess a much more rigidly
defined ethnic identity than humans. In the case of Ethiopian spirits, their
ethnicity is marked by the use of distinct symbols, food items and musical
styles.
Realities of spirits form part of many people's everyday experiences.
Spirits are generally regarded as dangerous or as causing trouble only as
long as they are not recognized and their demands are not met; once they are
identified and their wishes fulfilled, they turn into benevolent and protective
agents. Spirits may cause all sorts of problems - from illnesses to various
types of adversities - but habshia spirits are capable of inflicting a particular
difficulty: the impotence of a husband. It is his wife, though, who embodies
the spirit. She experiences all sorts of physical and mental troubles and is
thus the true object of the affliction.
From fieldwork in Zanzibar relating to ngoma ya habshia, the practice
can be seen as a kind of archive for remembering the past. More than a
hundred years after emancipation, Ethiopian spirits are reminiscent of
specific aspects of slavery. In Arab households (in Arabia as much as in
Zanzibar) African slave concubines were a regular presence. From medieval
times Ethiopian females were considered to be particularly beautiful and
were in great demand. Moreover, mixed marital unions between Arabs and
Africans are recalled by ngoma ya habshia participants in their identification
with a matrilineal pedigree of Ethiopian grandmothers. Thus ngoma is
associated with kinship relationships in the present. The impotence that
habshi spirits inflict indicates another hidden detail of the history of African
enslavement: in medieval Muslim states from Arabia to India, Ethiopian
court slaves were often 'eunuchs', emasculated guards of the female quarters
of a royal court. Through these diverse aspects and associations of past
forms of slavery, the present is infused with memories of slavery going back
to the times of medieval Muslim state-building. At the same time the
overpowering of the slave, symbolized by his 'impotence' and the inability to
reproduce himself, is overcome by ritually healing his loss - just as the
initiate is liberated from her troubles by going through a ngoma ritual in
which these negative forces are brought under control.
Ngoma as a moving practice has been transformed in the process of
migration and in its subsequent localization in different social and cul
tural settings. Transformations of ngoma performed for spirits into goma
performed for African saints embedded in popular Sufism add another
strand to the plurality of religious traditions in Gujarat (a state which
is eighty per cent Hindi and twelve per cent Muslim with Jain, Parsi
and adivasi - auchtochthonous - communities) and the multitude of
hierarchically-ordered caste and community-specific cults. Spirits and
possession defined as inauspicious and inducing specific illnesses, especially
madness (pagalvanu), often form an important aspect of lower-class and
caste practices.

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 Sidi Identity in Western India 169

GUJARAT
While it is impossible for Indian Ocean historians to write about Zanzibar
without considering the emancipation of former slaves, in India the
phenomenon of slavery was almost completely silenced. New studies have
revealed how nineteenth and twentieth-century colonial discourses have
masked and ignored South Asian forms of slavery as well as neglecting the
impact of the Indian Ocean slave-trade upon India.18 As slavery officially
did not exist in British India emancipation of slaves was not seen as an issue.
In the early twentieth century Indian public discourses were concerned with
gaining freedom from colonial control. In addition the focus rested upon the
emancipation of indigenous 'untouchables' and the social movement against
the stigma of untouchability, led by Ambedkar. Former African slaves
played no role in this. Political leaders probably were not even aware of the
existence of Sidi. In the 1899 Gazetteer, Sidi are not identified as slaves but
as low-class Muslim servants, mendicants and fakirs who 'live by service and
begging'. Colonial authors who encountered Sidi servants in the palaces of
the rulers of princely states in Saurashtra and Kachchh did not refer to them
as slaves; rather, Sidi were characterized by the services they provided
(for example, 'Sidi guards'). Just as the boundaries between unfree and free
Sidi had become blurred in the Indian Ocean maritime context, the same
was true for those who stayed and settled on land.
In Zanzibar the fluid social use of ethnonyms made possible the
emergence of heterogeneous and only loosely demarcated ethnic identities
of the descendants of African slaves; in Gujarat a reverse process took place.
A wide range of people there looking back to different life stories but
sharing similar 'signs of the body' (black skin and curly hair), as well as a
common history of crossing the sea, identified with the appellation 'Sidi',
and this gradually assumed the meaning of a special community of Gujarati
Muslims. From the late nineteenth century a heterogeneous collection of
former slaves, freedmen, court and domestic servants, runaway slaves,
sailors and port-workers transformed themselves through relationships of
exchange, especially in the realms of marriage and music-making, into a
loosely structured social network spread over the whole of Gujarat and
beyond to Sindh.19 This network gradually assumed the social organization
of a Muslim kinship association (jamat). The emergence of a Sidi jamat was
significantly shaped by the ritual production of a cult of Sidi patron saints
disseminated by fakirs. Bava Habash is a major saint of this assembly of
consecrated African ancestors. According to contemporary Sidi notions,
their patron saints form a large assembly of holy men and women who
individually represent different aspects of the migration of ancestors from
Africa to Gujarat. Moreover, Sidi patron saints are the focus of local cults
of affliction, and their specialty is the cure of madness caused by evil spirit
possession.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the process of the
formation of a Sidi identity was sustained by the interplay of royal patterns

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 170 History Workshop Journal

of patronage and the agency of Sidi fakirs. Even when a king had acquired
his Sidi servants from an Indian Ocean slave-trader, once they joined his
court they were treated more or less like other palace servants, though with
the major difference that Sidi court servants could be given away to another
patron. Sidi like other court servants received grants of urban land for
building houses. Many of today's small Sidi neighbourhoods in the former
capitals of princely states in Gujarat - such as Bhuj, Jamnagar, Junagadh,
Rajkot, Bhavnagar, Vadodara and Rajpipla - are on land originally granted
to Sidi forbears serving a ruler.
Two factors seem to have specifically influenced the emergence of a new
Sidi identity from the late nineteenth century: the provision of land by royal
rulers; and the transfer of musical practices from a maritime to a land-based
setting where they embedded and blended with local cults of affliction
attached to popular Sufism. The latter process was greatly facilitated by the
land grants given to Sidi serving at royal courts, which furnished uprooted
people from Africa with spatial rights in Gujarat. In many princely states
Sidi royal servants also received grants for building a religious shrine
(dargah) dedicated to their patron saint. These shrines were developed by
Sidi who redefined themselves as fakirs. Sidi crossers of the sea transmitted
embodied forms of knowledge of ngoma that assisted their transformation
from status-less slaves and strangers into a community with a socially
ascribed status of religious specialists. Fakirs took a leading role in working
out the concepts and ritual practices through which a complex collective
identity of Sidi in Gujarat was created. A distinction between 'ritual' and
'real' kinship as articulated by fakirs was of particular significance for the
unfolding of sociality on different levels. Black skin was not enough to
become a fellow Sidi. Rather, the assimilation of strangers into existing
Sidi networks was achieved through relationships of exchange, especially
by marriage. Kinless status was a fundamental consequence of the social
uprooting inflicted on slaves, but in a milder form it also marked other
crossers of the sea. By evolving a multilayered system of kin relatedness, Sidi
fakirs invented a remedy for dislocation. Sidi conceived of marriage not
primarily as a tie between two individuals but rather as a bond between
groups. As a consequence, a stranger who had no family could not marry a
Sidi girl. In such a case, the person went through an initiation ritual which
gave him a social status. In the same way, local non-Sidi women and
sometimes even men were integrated into the Sidi kinship association
(jamat). Just as dispersed Africans acquired a social status through initiation
into a Sidi kinship group, initiation of fakirs and laypersons into a Sufi
order confirmed the religious status of the Sidi collectivity as Muslims in
Gujarat. In regard to musical practices, the Sidi's assimilation into the
Muslim community is indicated by a translation of the term goma into the
Sufi term damal. In Indian Sufism 'damaP is derived from dam, 'breath' in
Urdu, and may cover different types of Sufi music and dancing that
commonly involve experiences of ecstasy and trance. Sidi fakirs, however,

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 Sidi Identity in Western India 171

have given damal a meaning specific to performances that have more in

common with Zanzibari ngoma types of dancing spirit-possession than with
North Indian Sufism.
All Sidi shrines provided important contact zones for former Africans -
whether servants, dockers or strangers - but one shrine in South Gujarat
became the conceptual, organizational and material centre of a Sidi fakir
brotherhood. This shrine is known by the name of the leader of Sidi patron
saints, Bava Gor, who is described as the elder brother of Bava Habash. As
the shrine was locally known to shelter the tomb of an 'Ethiopian saint' well
before the nineteenth century, it provided a safe shelter for Sidi servants who
had run away from their masters - which happened quite frequently - as
well as for those who had left seafaring or work at a port. When Sidi
remember such people in the present they say 'he started doing the work of
fakirs' (fakiri). This meant independence from human masters: a fakir
accepted orders (hukm) only from god and his spiritual representatives, the
saints. Fakirs mediated the healing powers of the patron saints to those in
need - Sidi and local people alike. Peripatetic fakirs who lived on alms
collected for singing and dancing goma moved around with women and
children and thus spread knowledge about the powers of their patron
saints - among fellow Sidi servants as well as among lower class-Gujarati
rural and urban populations. Although the nature and the afflictions
attributed to spirits in different cultural contexts such as Zanzibar and
Gujarat was not the same, the reality of spirits was taken for granted in
both. On the basis of this shared conviction a syncretistic cult of healing
possession-illnesses was able to flourish. Big and small shrines attracted
therefore not only Sidi but also local Muslims and people afflicted by spirit
induced madness who sought treatment from Bava Habash and other
Sidi saints.
In Zanzibar, processes of identity formation of large numbers of former
African slaves resulted in various popular ngoma practices reflecting
different social, religious and musical contexts. In Gujarat, by contrast,
the collective identity of comparatively few Sidi took shape in one particular
type of goma / damal performed with slight variations in a range of different
settings. Sidi performed goma / damal for their patrons, at Sufi shrines and,
of course, at their own shrines. Here, servants, dockers and fakirs regularly
met to honour African Sufi saints in the only appropriate way: by
performing Sidi goma. At saint's day celebrations - referred to by the Sufi
term 'urs, the death anniversary of a saint - large groups of Sidi (women and
men) would drum, sing, dance and together become possessed by the spirits
of dead African ancestors. On such occasions, moreover, largesse from the
grants given to Sidi shrines was redistributed amongst all Sidi attending the
ritual feast, whether fakirs or lay servants.
In contemporary Sidi life the urs celebration still constitutes an event of
great significance. On such an occasion many Sidi families travel from
distant localities in Gujarat to meet at the shrine of Bava Habash, his elder

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 172 History Workshop Journal

brother Bava Gor and their sister Mai Mishra in South Gujarat, to perform
goma I damal together in their honour. Today, moreover, an 'urs celebration
at this dargah is no longer (if it ever was) an exclusively Sidi affair. Many
other believers, mostly Muslims but also a few Hindus and adivasis, attend
the ritual days and nights as well, watching the Sidi dance goma/damal.20
It is through goma / damal performances that the realities of the saints are
performatively evoked. As in ngoma ya habshia in Zanzibar, moreover, the
mythical chart of Sidi patron saints contains a host of historical hints related
to African presences in India. These are remembered and reinterpreted
through goma practices at the sacred place of the saints' tombs.
The saints are defined according to the same classificatory logic as
characterizes the classes of spirits encountered in Zanzibar. Bava Habash is
distinguished by several features from his elder brother Bava Gor and his
sister Mai Mishra. The first is his mode of travel: he is depicted as a crosser
of the sea who came in a dhow from his home in Ethiopia, as did Mai
Mishra, who is said to have followed her brother. Only Bava Gor took the
land route. Two of them were accompanied by other Sidi. Bava Gor is
remembered as an Ethiopian military leader who brought a Sidi army from
Africa to Gujarat. Mai Mishra was the leader of Sidi women travelling with
her in a dhow from Africa to Gujarat. Only Bava Habash came alone.
Sidi communicate with the saints in the medium of goma / damal music.
In this various types of drums are highly valued.21 They are considered
sacred because the saints speak through them. Each saint is associated with
one type of instrument which also has an agency of its own. Sidi cults of
affliction are conspicuously concerned with madness. Notions and practices
of possession and the distinctions made between them reflect tacit semantic
links between slavery and madness. Both states signify a special mode of
displacement: slavery through forced uprooting of people from their homes
and relatives and their subsequent treatment as dehumanized things;
madness through the loss of control of an individual over his thoughts
and actions whereby a person is fundamentally alienated from her or his
social context, becoming a 'non-person'. The moral community which
emerges through the possession of African ancestor saints contrasts with the
disorder and chaos created by rebellious evil spirits in the present and by
slavery in the past. Against the loss and displacement experienced by former
slaves, in goma and possession by powerful ancestor saints, a new Sidi social
order is performatively recreated and affirmed. The emotional energy
created in goma music therefore appears as a significant means for healing
individual and collective disruptions alike, such as madness and slavery.
While slavery is rarely talked about by Sidi directly, its memory is
indirectly evoked through material and symbolic links between Zanzibari
ngoma and Sidi goma. In the ritual process through which the presence of
Bava Habash is invoked, certain of the paraphernalia used resemble those
employed in ngoma ya habshia. Bava Habash consumes the same things as
Ethiopian spirits in Zanzibar: black kavo and halva. Black kavo is dark, hot

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 Sidi Identity in Western India 173

and tastes very bitter from large quantities of ginger. Halva, the luxurious
sweet dish craved by habshia spirits, is also a favourite of Bava Habash.
Moreover, a comparison of Zanzibari ngoma ya habshia and Sidi goma for
Bava Habash reveals a complementary relationship in regard to the memory
of gendered enslavement of Africans. The former emphasizes a female aspect
of slavery in Indian Ocean history, the keeping of slave concubines by free
masters, whereas the latter is reminiscent of a specifically male predicament
of slavery, namely the emasculation of eunuchs. In medieval Indian
sultanates, Habshi eunuchs often served as palace guards of the female
quarters. In both cosmological settings, the powerlessness associated with
sexual violations of gendered slave identities has become a template for the
many afflictions that are 'healed' by habshia spirits and the Habshi saint as
they reinvigorate and empower suffering people.
Although the social, cultural and political settings in Zanzibar and
Gujarat which constrained the struggle of former slaves to overcome the
disruptions inflicted by slavery were quite different, people in Zanzibar and
Sidi evolved similar ways of 'healing' their experiences through music and
cults of affliction. In Gujarat practices of ritual music and dancing provided
means whereby a new collective Sidi identity emerged through ritual
interactions based on the symbolism of strangers and 'renewers-from
the-margin' associated with terms related to habshi. In both Gujarat and
Zanzibar, the symbolic cluster of habshi words is associated with diverse
and even seemingly contradictory notions such as social prestige, slavery
and strangers. It therefore refers to the semantic context of embodied forms
of knowledge that are performatively evoked in ngoma and goma musical
practices. In this sense habshi is a token of memory, or rather of fragments
of broken pasts remembered by former African slaves in different Indian
Ocean sites.

THE MEANINGS OF GOMA IN CONTEMPORARY

CONSTRUCTIONS OF SIDI IDENTITY
So what kind of conclusions may be drawn from the migration of symbols,
instruments and embodied practices (goma) along with people uprooted
from Africa, in regard to the meanings attributed to them in contemporary
Sidi lives in Gujarat?
First of all, goma drumming and dancing are still considered by many
people of all ages and men and women alike as sacred actions. In this way
the collective social identity of Sidi is constructed in ritual terms - rather
than a purely economic definition. As music and dance performances were
intricately linked to the formation of a collective Sidi identity, practices of
goma I damal strengthened solidarity, the emergence of a common symbolic
universe and a defence against the stigma attached to dark skin in
Gujarati schemes of social classifications. In the collective self-image
proposed by the Sidi community, dark skin and curly hair are considered

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 174 History Workshop Journal

positive. It consists of embodied signs of the gifts the Sidi received from their
ancestor saints, most importantly their music. Goma music has provided Sidi
in the past and in the present with a form of cultural capital that shapes
a range of social relationships constitutive of Sidi identity.
The embedding of goma performances in specific social relationships,
however, is not fixed but continually shifting into different and new
contexts in historically constituted processes. Although Sidi have always
remained at the margins of Gujarati society, through their shrines
and through goma as a major practice of ritual exchange they were included
in local social hierarchies. The latter were greatly unsettled in the
modernization process accelerating in the second half of the twentieth
century. As a result, Sidi faced new challenges as well as new forms of
marginalization. In order to understand contemporary meanings of goma,
it's necessary to take into account the changes that have transformed
Gujarat after independence and the ways in which these are perceived and
experienced by Sidi people today. For Sidi, the abolition of the princely
states after independence in 1947 marked a significant turn because they
lost an important source of patronage that, both materially and
symbolically, had given them a place in Gujarat and sustained the social
formation of a community.
In addition to growing impoverishment, Sidi in the newly emerging state
of Gujarat experienced a decline of social recognition. According to their
views, dancing goma had conferred prestige and honour (izzai) upon Sidi.
They had customarily danced goma for royal and merchant patrons in
whose houses many of their relatives worked. Sidi performances generated
laughter and were associated with fertility and abundance. Especially on an
auspicious domestic occasion such as the birth of a son or a marriage, royal
patrons used to call Sidi men and women to drum, sing and dance for a
palace audience. Thus many of my informants in the 1980s imagined that
the past shaped by kingship had been a better time for Sidi than the present.
'At the time of the kings (raja na vakaif, said Mr Raman, grandson
of a coachman who had served the Maharaja of Rajpipla, 'Sidi had more
value [he used the English word] than today. We were trusted servants. We
had honour (izzai). We were called to perform goma in the palace and the
family of the Maharaja enjoyed our play so much that they gave large gifts
(bakshish). Today, Sidi have no value'.22 Views such as these express more
than the baggage of a feudal ideology mistakenly picturing a rosy past; they
tacitly assume that the 'value' of people is created in moral situations
of ritual exchange.
In an increasingly commercialized environment dominated by the rise of
modern middle-class standards, literacy - and education more generally - is
the critical mark that distinguishes 'progressive' castes and communities
from 'backward' ones. In 1947 the majority of Sidi people were illiterate.
Literate individuals such as the famous Sidi Abdullah bin Mubarak who
held the post of private secretary to the Maharaja of Bhavnagar were

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 Sidi Identity in Western India 175

exceptional. In today's world, lack of education is regarded by Sidi

themselves as a major obstacle to a less burdensome future. Educated Sidi
point to events in the 1970s when Sidi almost lost control over their most
esteemed shrine in South Gujarat because the fakirs in charge of it were non
literate. With the value of education and the ever increasing need for cash,
the lifestyle of itinerant fakirs has become much less attractive than
apparently it was in the first half of the twentieth century. Even in the 1980s
more people than today still identified themselves as fakirs. In the present
fakiri (the work of fakirs) has become more or less synonymous with
begging. It is done mostly by old people who cannot depend entirely on the
support of sons or even daughters whose economic situation often barely
meets the needs of their own children.
If the itinerant lifestyle of fakirs in the past marked the passage from
mobile maritime goma to musical practices localized on land, today new
forms of Sidi goma mobility have emerged that are embedded in Indian state
patronage as well as in global markets for ethnomusic. In the early 1980s
the Indian Government started sponsoring cultural festivals designed to
instil greater awareness of the diversity of 'tribal traditions' found in India
and so to promote the integration of these communities into the modern
nation of India. In some areas in postcolonial Gujarat - especially on the
peninsula of Saurashtra, which has hardly any adivasi populations (original
inhabitants) - Sidi were listed as a 'Scheduled Tribe', so giving them right of
access to local affirmative action-style programmes. Their existence thus
came to the notice of those in the Ministry of Culture organizing the cultural
events. Since then, Sidi groups of twelve to sixteen men regularly travel all
over India to perform goma in newly invented costumes for Indian middle
class and foreign tourist audiences. Almost every town in Gujarat now has
its own 'Goma group', which compete with each other for contracts for
staged performances. These groups are usually loosely structured around a
leader who interacts with officials, secures contracts, makes the travel
arrangements and generally manages the group. In this way, quite a few Sidi
households all over Gujarat have counted on an additional cash income
brought home by sons and husbands from Goma tours. In accordance with
Sidi economic practices as well as norms of equality, initially groups going
on tours had few regular performers. Different people travelled to perform
goma at a cultural festival at different times. For example, when the
man who went last time had to fulfil another obligation (work or ritual), he
gave his brother a chance to join the group in his place. Goma, Sidi strongly
believed, came 'automatically' to them, without any effort. 'Anybody
who has Sidi blood in his or her veins can do goma' is a common saying
among Sidi.

CONCLUSION
This exercise in tracing the role of music in the formation of a collective
Sidi identity began with an inquiry into the symbol of 6habshf and its

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 176 History Workshop Journal

relationships with musical forms referred to as ngoma in Zanzibar and goma

in Gujarat. Seen through the prism of the Indian Ocean maritime
connections, the transformations of ngoma into the multiple and changing
forms of Sidi goma in Gujarat reveal past translocal African movements of
subaltern people and their practices. In the last hundred years these practices
have travelled with and sustained dispersed and displaced Africans in
Gujarat as much as in Zanzibar. While the comparison of Sidi goma with
ngoma ya habshia reveals similarities and differences in collective memories
of slavery and forced migration, in both sites 'Ethiopian' simultaneously
epitomizes an African slave and a stranger. The healing propensities
inherent in both cults are closely associated with the ambivalent position
attributed to the stranger 'who came and stayed'. Those who were strangers
from Ethiopia in a distant past - whether spirit or saint - have come to
symbolize 'renewers-from-the-margin' in Zanzibar and Gujarat, showing
troubled people a way out of their afflictions and sufferings and a means of
restoring social identity.
An inquiry into how Sidi musical practices have emerged from the wider
Indian Ocean maritime context also shows what happened after dhow traffic
from East Africa to Western India gradually came to a halt in the 1950s (or
changed into traffic by container ships). Ngoma ya habshia and Sidi goma
are as much results of past connectivity as of present distances between
Indian Ocean sites. The development of independent nation-states in East
Africa and South Asia has promoted land-oriented world-views with their
emphasis on frontiers and boundaries. Historically open social formations
such as the dhow cultures in Indian Ocean sites and their transoceanic
connectedness have been increasingly forgotten. As a result the develop
ments of ngoma ya habshia and Sidi goma have taken different turns.
A comparison of Sidi goma in Gujarat with ngoma ya habshia in Zanzibar
shows, in particular, differences in the social exchanges that constitute both
practices. A useful analytic tool is the distinction that can be made between
long-term-cycle transactions, dominated by the reciprocal exchange of gifts
embedded in cosmological schemes, and short-term-cycle transactions,
dominated by the transfer of money in market settings.23 Seen from this
angle, the acts of giving and taking whereby humans and spirits interact
(food, music, visits by spirits) are orchestrated by transactions ordering a
long-term cycle of gift exchange. Aspects of kinship (differences between
patrilineal and matrilineal kinship relationships) and cosmology (habshia
as one class of many spirit classes) are constituted by a transformation of
cycles of exchange from short-term into long-term. Commodities bought
in a short-term-cycle transaction with money are transformed in the
ritual process into gifts imbued with the spirit of the giver. The cult of
Bava Habash in Gujarat is similarly constituted by long-term cycles of
gifting. Sidi goma is in this context regarded as the counter-gift that Sidi owe
to their ancestor saints for the gift they have received from them, that is
music. Goma performed by fakirs was embedded in long-term cycles of

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 Sidi Identity in Western India 111

exchange too because the giver of alms gave money for a ritual purpose for
which he received holy blessings in return. In the popular religious
imagination in Gujarat, Sidi fakirs represent the religious category of the
'holy poor', gifts to whom bring merit for the giver.
In the more recent past, the holistic integration of economic and religious
interests through doing goma as part of long-term-cycle transactions -
characteristic of goma performed at shrines or for the ritual benefit of
patrons - has become increasingly unsettled. Whereas ngoma ya habshia has
very much remained a cosmologically embedded practice designed to affirm
a moral community instead of presenting a public performance, Sidi goma
has become more differentiated and includes different strands, including
'sacred goma' performed at shrines and 'cultural goma' performed in the
modern national and global cultural economies. Both are constituted by the
simultaneous recognition of goma in long-term and short-term cycles of
exchanges that relate Sidi to different scales of a global order. In publicly
staged presentations in India and elsewhere, Sidi goma has become a
commodity transacted in short-term cycles of exchange. Each performer
receives for each performance a fixed payment. These goma performances
now have a price and once the performance is over and the money paid no
further contacts are expected. In this way, processes of modernity such as
increasing differentiation and autonomy of functional systems observed at a
macro-level are sustained by similar processes evolving at a micro-level. The
history of the Sidi jamat constitutes one such process happening at the
micro-level. Here, formerly embedded practices of music have become
disentangled by the expansion of their inclusion in short-term cycles of
exchange. This process, moreover, is fuelled by the remarkable creativity
Sidi people have shown throughout their history in engaging with adversities
and opening new fields of action for themselves by recourse to music.

Helene Basu is professor of social anthropology at the Westfaelische

Wilhelms-Universitaet in Muenster. Her areas of research include migration
and social exchange in the Indian Ocean World, popular Islam and cultural
psychiatry.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

My thanks to the Fritz-Thyssen-Stiftung for a generous travel grant making possible the
research on which this paper is based. I also want to thank Abdul Sheriff for supporting my
research in Zanzibar in numerous and most helpful ways. Jim Giblin and Blandina Giblin have
been very generous hosts in Dar-es-Salaam to whom I feel deeply indebted. Rafiki Yohanan
helped with translations from Swahili. Last but not least my thanks to the people of Zanzibar
and the Sidi in Gujarat who freely shared their knowledge with me.
1 The designation 'Sidi' has been subjected to a wide range of spellings, probably
corresponding to local pronunciations, such as Siddhi, Sheedi or Siddi. Another name for
Africans often found in historical works is 'Habshi', a term derived from 'Habash', the Arabic
name for 'Ethiopia' or Abessiniya'. In Sindh (Pakistan) 'Habshi' is the preferred name of
former Africans. In South India and Sri Lanka they are also referred to as 'Kaffir'.

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 178 History Workshop Journal

2 The concept of the dhow culture is developed in Abdul Sheriff, The Dhow Culture of
the Western Indian Ocean', in Journeys and Dwellings: Indian Ocean Themes in South Asia, ed.
Helene Basu, Hyderabad, 2007.
3 For the concept of 'seascape' for the same phenomenon, see Space on the Move:
Transformations of the Indian Ocean Seascape in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century, ed.
Jan-Georg Deutsch and Brigitte Reinwald, Berlin, 2002.
4 In Gujarat I first conducted ethnographic research among Sidi from 1987 to 1989 - the
fieldwork conditions in 2004 in Gujarat and Zanzibar were inevitably very different. My
research in Gujarat tied up with fieldwork carried out earlier in Gujarati, whereas in Zanzibar
and Tanzania I had to establish new contacts and worked with a Swahili interpreter.
5 For example, Sidi in Karnataka are said by historians to have originated with slaves
from Portuguese Goa - Ann M. Pescatello, 'The African Presence in Portuguese India', Journal
of Asian History 1:1, 1977, pp. 26-48; Sidi in Hyderabad were brought by the Nawab in the
nineteenth century together with Yemenis - Helene Basu, Kerrin von Schwerin and Ababu
Minda, 'Daff music of Yemeni-Habshi in Hyderabad (Deccan)', in Journeys and Dwellings:
Indian Ocean Themes in South Asia, ed. Helene Basu, London/Hyderabad, 2007 forthcoming.
6 John M. Janzen, Ngoma: Discourses of Healing in Central and Southern Africa, Berkeley,
1992.
7 Helene Basu, 'Politics of Travelling in the Postcolonial Indian Ocean World:
Sidi Abdullah bin Mubarak's My Journey to East Africa', Ziff Journal 2, 2005, pp. 46-64.
8 Edward Alpers, 'The African Diaspora in the Indian Ocean: a Comparative Perspective',
in The African Diaspora in the Indian Ocean, ed. Shihan de S. Jayasurya and Richard
Pankhurst, Trenton, 2003.
9 Kjersti Larsen, 'Spirit Possession as Historical Narrative: the Production of Identity and
Locality in Zanzibar Town', in Locality and Belonging, ed. Nadia Lovell, London, 1998.
10 Edward Simpson, Muslim Society and the Western Indian Ocean: the Seafarers of
Kachchh, London, 2006.
11 Robert G. Gregory, India and East Africa: a History of Race Relations within the British
Empire, 1890-1939, London, 1971, pp. 18ff.
12 Laurence F. Rushbrook Williams, The Black Hills: Kutch in History and Legend (1958),
Ahmadabad, 1981, pp. 245-6.
13 Janet Ewald, 'Crossers of the Sea: Slaves, Freedmen, and Other Migrants in the
Northwestern Indian Ocean, c.1750-1914', American Historical Review 105: 1, 2000, pp. 69-91.
14 Captain George L. Sullivan, Dhow Chasing in Zanzibar Waters (1873), Zanzibar, 2003;
Joseph Harris, The African Presence in Asia: Consequences of the East African Slave Trade,
Evanston, II., 1971, p. 270.
15 Raymond W. Beachey, The Slave Trade of Eastern Africa, London, 1976, pp. 89f.
16 Laura Fair, Pastimes and Politics: Culture, Community, and Identity in Post-Abolition
Urban Zanzibar, 1890-1945, Oxford, 2001, p. 13.
17 Gujarat Populations: Musulmans and Par si, Bombay Government Publication, 1899,
IX: II, p. 11.
18 See the introduction to Slavery and South Asian History, ed. Indrani Chatterjee and
Richard M. Eaton, Bloomington, 2006, pp. 1-16.
19 Helene Basu, 'Theatre of Memory: Performances of Ritual Kinship of the African
Diaspora in Sind/Pakistan', in Culture, Creation and Procreation in South Asia, ed. Aparna Rao
and Monika Boeck, Oxford, 2000.
20 Helene Basu, 'Redefining Boundaries: Twenty Years at the Shrine of Bava Gor', in Sidis
and Scholars:Essays on African Indians, ed. Amy Catlin-Jairazbhoy and Edward Alpers,
Delhi, 2004.
21 A one-string fiddle called malunga was and still is used by itinerant fakirs but not
in goma/damal performed in ritual contexts at a shrine. The malunga is considered emblematic
of the more specific lifestyle of a Sidi fakir.
22 Informal interview, 23 Feb. 1988.
23 'Introduction', Money and the Morality of Exchange, ed. Jonathan Parry and Maurice
Bloch, Cambridge, 1989.

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