The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [30]
Several modern scholars have ruminated on the nature of the shore folk of the Indian Ocean. Middleton focused on the East African coast.
Part of the coast is the sea: the two cannot be separated. The Swahili are a maritime people and the stretches of lagoon, creek, and open sea beyond the reefs are as much part of their environment as are the coastlands. The sea, rivers, and lagoons are not merely stretches of water but highly productive food resources, divided into territories that are owned by families and protected by spirits just as are stretches of land. The Swahili use the sea as though it were a network of roads.37
We may note here that the very term 'Swahili' means 'shore folk', those who live on the edge of the ocean. As Pouwels has it, Swahili culture was 'a child of its human and physical environment, being neither wholly African nor "Arab," but distinctly "coastal", the whole being greater than the sum of its parts.'38
Islands are perhaps where we are most likely to find littoral societies, for one would expect to find here more concentrated mixings from various cultural influences. Indeed, on smaller ones there would be nothing but coastal people, for the sea would permeate the whole area. The Seychelles, the Andamans and Nicobar Islands, tiny fragments of land in the ocean, are purely littoral. Similarly, islands in the rivers can be seen as making up small littoral societies all their own, even far 'inland'. The Zambezi system had many islands, as also did other river basins and deltas: the Hugli, the Ganga, the Tigris-Euphrates, the Irrawaddy and so on.
Despite all these general statements, the precise elements of commonality of littoral society have not yet been adequately worked out. We could look at food, obviously largely derived from the sea, even if some fisherfolk prefer to trade some of their catch for cereals. Houses are usually different from those inland. As one would expect, locally available materials are usually employed. For much of the coast this means that palm trees are used to provide a housing structure, and a thatched roof. In some areas however coral is available; on the Swahili coast it is widely employed as a building material. Jacques Cousteau in fact found it to be of universal utility in the Maldives. It was used to construct the landing strip and the houses, and even the beaches were pulverised coral, not sand. 'Everywhere we saw tiny cemeteries under palm clusters. The tombs themselves, crosses and all, were made of coral. Everything here is bound up with the sea, even life and death.'39
The whole rhythm of coastal life is geared to the monsoons. Ship styles historically were relatively uniform, as we will describe in detail in the next chapter. Certainly, as we have noted, littoral society is much more cosmopolitan than are parochial inland people for, at the great ports which constitute the nodes of the littoral, traders and travellers from all over the ocean, and far beyond, were to be found. This characteristic of cosmopolitanism produced another element of unity. Certain languages achieved wide currency, such as Arabic in the earlier centuries. There are some 5,000 words of Arabic influence in Malay, and more than that in Swahili, and about 80 per cent of these are the same, that is in Malay and Swahili, so that we have a 'corpus of travelling Arabic words'.40 Freeman-Grenville tried to find links and commonalties between Swahili and the language of the Sidis of Sind.41 Later a sort of nautical Portuguese, and today some variant of English, have achieved a similar quasi-universal status.
Folk religion on the littoral similarly is to be distinguished from inland manifestations. The concerns of coastal people were usually quite different from those of peasants and pastoralists inland. On the coast religion had to do with customs to ensure safe voyages, or a favourable monsoon. Particular gods were