ICM NEW BOOKS SERIES
NIDHI MAHAJAN (Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Santa Cruz)
Moorings: Voyages of Capital Across the Indian Ocean
Monday, September 22, 2025 | 4:45 p.m. —6:15 p.m.
Klarman Hall, KG42
The Institute for Comparative Modernities is thrilled to welcome Cornell alum Nidhi Mahajan '15 to campus for a talk about her recently published book, Moorings: Voyages of Capital Across the Indian Ocean (University of California Press, 2025).
Moorings follows sailors from the Gulf of Kachchh in India as they voyage across the Indian Ocean on mechanized wooden sailing vessels known as vahans, or dhows. These voyages produce capital through moorings that are spatial, moral, material, and conceptual. With a view from the dhow, the book examines the social worlds of Muslim seafarers who been rendered invisible even as they maneuver multiple regulatory regimes and the exigencies of life, navigatiing colonialism, neoliberalism, the rise of Hindutva, insurgency, climate change, and border regimes across the ocean. Based on historical and ethnographic research aboard ships, at ports, and in religious shrines and homes, Moorings shows how capitalism derives value from historically sedimented practices grounded in caste, gender, and transregional community-based forms of regulation.
BIO
Nidhi Mahajan is Associate Professor of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz. She was recently the inaugural Fatema Mernissi Postdoctoral Fellow in Social and Cultural Studies at The Africa Institute, Sharjah, UAE, where she continued research on a new project that examines multiple contestations over belonging and notions of sovereignty in contemporary coastal Kenya. Mahajan is also a practicing artist and has developed multi-media exhibitions for the Fort Jesus Museum in Mombasa, Khoj International Artists’ Association in New Delhi and the 2019 Sharjah Architecture Triennial.
