Weaving networks: The Economic decline of Diu and Indian Ocean circulations of the Vanza weavers

Abstract

Diu, on the Western India coast and Portuguese territory until 1961, was a strategic port connecting the subcontinent with Eastern Africa until the industrial mills in Western India provoked the decline of the traditional textile production systems in Gujarat and the near erasure of the maritime trade in Diu. Sustained by ethnographic and archival research, this article shows how the decline of maritime trading from Diu exposed the lack of Portuguese control over the trading routes connecting Asia and Africa. Local communities responded to changing contexts by developing new migratory connections with Mozambique. Among them are the Diuese weavers' community, the Vanza, whose role in Mozambican trade, and later postcolonial connections with European countries, is still mostly to be examined. Though a preliminary observation of their migratory initiatives we observe how lives across the Indian Ocean navigated relatively apart from colonial intentions, pursuing their own winds and tides.