Tamara Surani Fernando

Free diving for pearls relied on embodied labor and complex navigational, nautical, and naturalistic expertise that required a lifetime of training at sea and underwater. Until the 1930s, coastal communities practiced and honed these skills, which constituted the bedrock of a several-thousand-year-old industry in the Persian Gulf, the Gulf of Mannar, and the Mergui Archipelago. This project explores the persistence of and transformations in this form of work at the height of the largest commodity boom for natural pearls in the late nineteenth century, braiding vernacular sources with colonial-era materials. It asks how this labor was transformed during the period when the meteoric rise in the value of the pearl was coterminous with the encroachment of the British Empire into the major sites of supply of pearl-bearing oysters between 1880 and 1925. During this time, diving work constituted vernacular or local scientific knowledge but was increasingly made into a form of primitive, racialized labor. Attending to how local maritime expertise was displaced by new scientific “experts” on the sea, serves to historicize the modern means of meeting the ocean’s waters, creatures, and materials.