South African literature is today faced with two difficult tasks. On the one hand there is the need to reclaim stories that were excluded during apartheid. On the other hand there is the challenge of telling new stories — stories about a society in rapid flux, whose familiar themes seem to have lost their relevance.
It is no surprise, then, that South African Indian Writings in English reads with a kind of ambivalence. The collection of short stories, plays and memoirs by Indian writers over the past several decades aims to encourage a new, more inclusive South African canon, but is constrained by the racial categories of the old era.
This old-new conundrum is a familiar one. Recent anthologies of Jewish writing, for example, have focused obsessively on examining the profound moral dilemmas that the community faced under apartheid as marginalised members of a privileged caste. In Indian writing, that dilemma reappears as the difficulty of being somewhat privileged members of a marginalised majority. Added to that is the duality of the immigrant experience, a growing attachment to the adopted homeland coupled with an enduring curiosity about the old country. There is also the internal diversity of religious faith and geographic particularity in the Indian community.
Chetty’s anthology gives voice to these tensions and differences, as well as the common experiences uniting them. But it lacks a certain punch, as do most other anthologies of this kind. The theme unifying the book’s diverse contributions is a rather narrow one; readers and writers with a particular interest in the Indian community will find it quite captivating but others may find it less so.
Even under apartheid there existed a dialogue, however subtle and unconscious, between writers from all racial backgrounds. Even in their reflections on their separations from each other there were common threads, or at least common differences. These common differences are perhaps the road map to the future of South African literature.
Perhaps the first task must be to consolidate each of the separate spheres of the South African literary world. A whirlwind decade of transformation is drawing to a close, and people feel the need to catch their breath. In reflecting on the changes, we begin with what we believe we know best: ourselves. But there is a need for inclusive literary anthologies that will be ready to compare and contrast the writings of the past, survey the shifts of the present day, and point out new directions for the future.