SOAS Research Online

Abstract

Scholarship on the Indian Ocean is generally comparative in its approach. In this paper, we draw from our research experiences on the Swahili and Gujarati coasts in order to discuss some of the epistemological consequences of comparison for the ways in which East Africa and Western India have been understood. We critically examine the frames and terms of comparison in the work of the historian Thomas Metcalf and the anthropologists A.H.J. Prins, Helene Basu and David F. Pocock. We suggest that the personal journeys of scholars, as well as the sources they use, have profoundly influenced the ways in which they have been able to write and problematize their own material.