To change oneself as well as to be an agent of change to claim a South African national identity is the central dialectic underpinning Indian fiction in South Africa. The aesthetic richness of South African Indian writing is also nourished by developments in postcolonial literature in general and by South African and South Asian diasporic literature in particular. South African Indians have been telling their stories since the time they were transported from India as indentured labor in the mid-nineteenth century, yet their voices are only now being heard.9.
Students of the phenomenon known as the Great Indian Diaspora are just as likely to erase South African Indians from the diasporic imagination. Scholars such as Loren Kruger and Betty Govinden have commented on the erasure of South African Indian literature in the South African and South Asian "literary bibliography" (Kruger, . "black" 137, n11; Govinden, "re-teaching myself" ). Theodore Sheckels' The Lion and the Freeway: A Thematic Analysis of South African Literature (1996) mentions only one South African Indian writer, ahmed essop.18.
The Indian population of South Africa, with its mix of slaves, laborers and traders, disrupts the formulation of a homogenous 'cold' self.
Retheorizing the South Asian Diaspora and Race in South Africa
Given the importance of South Africa and the South Asian diaspora in postcolonial studies, the excavation of a script that lends wholeness and complexity to these very important fields, as well as introducing the world to a burgeoning, exciting and aesthetically dense body. of literature becomes a compelling necessity. The Indian presence in South Africa invites us to address the question of what it means to be Indian-African in a country divided into an unshakable binary of native Afrikaner versus settler African. The triangulated relationship between European settler, African indigenous and Indian diasporas is unique to certain parts of Africa, and involves a reworking of the more general formula for racial interaction in South Africa provided by the authors of the influential The Empire Writes Back : that of white settler and black native locked in an endless battle.24.
The presence of Indians in South Africa not only disrupts the binary of black natives and white settlers, but also expands migratory interaction beyond the dominant paradigm in South Asian diaspora studies: that of white natives and non-white immigrants negotiating a common (Western) space.25 Diaspora issues, esp. those of national identity, minority affiliation, cultural identity and multiple loyalties are refracted in South Africa through an East-South prism, and are also complicated by the presence of apartheid. The blurred contours of Indian identity in South Africa invite the deconstruction of rigid apartheid and post-apartheid categories of black, white, mixed race and Indian. The proclamation of a South African national identity, as well as the articulation of an enduring bond with everyday South Africa rather than an imaginary India, dominate the thematic concerns of South African Indian fiction.
Above all, the critical genealogy of Indian writing traced in this book affirms Indian allegiance to South Africa.
Historicizing South African Indian Identity, Politics, and Identity Politics
Gandhi has often been criticized for his failure to forge links with black Africans.32 Whatever his shortcomings, there is no doubt that Gandhi radicalized the South African Indian community in 1894 by organizing the Natal Indian Congress (NiC) and the newspaper to create Indian Opinion. 1903. The South African Gandhi opened a space for political consciousness among the Indian community, a social consciousness that underpins every text discussed in this book. Christopher Heywood says that "part of South Africa's Indian literary heritage is adopting, negotiating and escaping the Satyagraha [Gandhi's strategy of non-violent resistance] tradition" (231).
The 2001 census indicates that Indians in South Africa now number 1.1 million, or 2.5 percent of the total population (“South Africa . Growing”). Despite active solidarity during the apartheid period, relations between Africans and Indians have historically been strained, particularly in the province of KwaZulu Natal, where approximately 80 percent of the Indian population lives. Thomas hansen argues that the post-apartheid period saw “a restructuring of labor and employment laws to strengthen and empower the African majority.
These measures resulted in massive job losses and economic marginalization of the Indian community, which for many years lived in a relatively blissful position in the South African economy” (“melancholia,” 297).
South African Indian Identity and Fiction Today
Fiction composed in the democratic present thus indicates a movement from a tentative articulation of selfhood to a tumultuous celebration of the Indian presence in South Africa. Chapter 1, "Indians in Short: Collectivity versus Specificity in the Apartheid Story," studies the spread of the short story in apartheid-era Indian fiction. The South African Indian recovery of the migratory past demonstrates how the unique circumstances of Indian arrival in South Africa change our understanding of diasporic paradigms.
Fictions has focused on narrative acts, arguing that works of the imagination have powerful political implications for the citizenship-seeking agenda that characterizes South African Indian fiction. South African Indian fiction is not only an escape from but also a correction for the 'controlling power' of everyday ideology. This explained the invisibility of South African-Indian literature to those present at the meeting.
Since so many South African Indians are proud of Gandhi, the neglect of the ashram and the farm is all the more deplorable.
Introduction
Of course, this appropriation of Gandhi can often lead to an uncritical idealization of South African Gandhi. South African Indian fiction often speaks of the pain of relocation enforced by the group territories law. James extends the idea of "mass participation" in civilian life to the contemporary West Indies; I apply his formulations to contemporary South Africa.
Gayatri Spivak describes Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Disappearing Present as a book that "searches the chasm between global postcoloniality and postcolonial migration." This is especially true for Indian migrants in the United States who regularly send money "home" and are members of radical organizations such as vhP, rSS, etc. ” see Sarojini Nadar's essay with the same title.
Peck, Chetty argue that "politics' invasion of the private sphere meant that even writers who might have ignored politics were forced to deal with it. Taylor argues that "in most uses of the term 'hybridity' the two cultures , that hybridizes, white and non-white Other, but the complex and diverse nature of the Other or Others is not always accounted for in the discourses of hybridity" (in Oren and Petro 234). Similarly, the stories in the Noojehan collection take place in the seventies and the eighties, but many reflect the beginning of the end of apartheid.
The title of the story (“metamorphosis”) further lays out the idea of empowerment through transformation. The Indian subcontinent was the main source of slaves during the early part of the 18th century. The portability of the term in a South African context suggests similarities between American segregation and apartheid.
See also mishra ("Diasporic imaginary on the importance of the ship in the indentured imagination. Commenting on South African Indian playwright Rajesh Gopie's play Out of Bounds, hansen says, "a deeply sedimented colonial conceptualization of the native world. Kruger .points out, referring to Kafka's Curse, that "the condition of diaspora, deterritorialization and disenfranchisement attributed to the Jews also applies to other minorities, even in a possibly postapartheid moment of the 1990s" ("black" . 132).
King asserts that "if one of the most vital organs in the body is that of a Zircon, then they can no longer claim to be pure Saturnians" (16).
Conclusion
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