This event is co-sponsored by the Center for South Asia, the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, and the Center for African Studies.

About the speaker
Nidhi Mahajan is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California-Santa Cruz. Her first book Moorings: Voyages of Capital across the Indian Ocean was published by UC Press in June 2025. She has also published in journals such as Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, Monsoon, History of the Present, and Island Studies Journal. As a practising multi-media artist, her work has been shown at Khoj Studios, Delhi; The Sharjah Architecture Triennial; Hayy Jameel in Jeddah; Fort Jesus Museum, Mombasa; Macondo Literary Festival, and Alliance Francaise, Nairobi; the Diriyah Biennale in Riyadh amongst other venues. 

About the book
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 have been rendered invisible even as they maneuver multiple regulatory regimes and the exigencies of life, navigating 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.