Voices of the Sidis: Indians of African Descent

Abstract

As an outcome of late slave trade of the Indian Ocean, displaced Africans living in Gujarat lacked a coherent identity. They gathered around the shrine of Abyssinian saint Bava Gor and forged a new identity as mystics and healers, thus reconstructing their lives as “fakir” in their adopted home. This paper mentions the ethnographic work done at the Bava Gor shrine and presented in my documentary film entitled “Voices of the Sidis: The Tradition of Fakirs” (2011). In the film, two older Sidis “fakirs,” interrogate the significance of this tradition for the younger generation. In this paper, I also discuss my own connection to Sidis through my Parsi family who have been devotees of Sidi saints Bava Gor and Mai Mishra in Bombay since the 1950s.