It’s complicated being a South African Indian visiting India. You return as a tourist 150 years after your ancestors left as glorified slaves; with home never far from your thoughts.
South Africa, five generations later, is unequivocally home.
I’m in the world biggest democracy, as it is euphemistically termed, to mark a century and a half since the first indentured labourers sailed from Madras and Calcutta to pour on to Natal’s sugar plantations.
For them too identities started irrevocably shifting the minute they put illiterate thumb to paper, signing away the next five years of their lives.
They planned to return. They found they couldn’t; having transcended the Indian strangleholds of ethnicity, religion, caste — and all the subtle variations of division that characterise this beautiful but complex country.
And that was just in the first generation.
One labourer was sent back labelled a madman when he put his caste down as “African”, write Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed in their book Inside Indian Indenture.
He had more foresight than most.
It wasn’t just the indentured that contributed to what is now a thriving community of South African Indians — the largest Indian diaspora by some measures. Many Indians came looking for any work opportunity, as the British Raj squeezed the subjects of its biggest colony for every drop of tax in the middle of staggering famines and economic hardship.
It is monsoon season here and every now and then a deluge of water soaks the village I’m visiting at the moment, where Indians left as merchants to work their way into forming what in many cases would become thriving business empires over generations.
They were spared myriad abuses and exploitation that marked the indentured system, where some were literally worked to death on the plantations. As I have done my research for this trip I have often been brought close to tears at the wrenching accounts of these distant ancestors, so far removed from my life of luxury.
But the end to indenture in 1914, lead by Mahatma Gandhi, was by no means an end to exploitation.
It was simply transferred.
In 1910, 88% of the workforce was Indian and 12% African. By 1925, 71% was African. It was just one of many versions of the abuse meted out to black South Africans for generations.
“I think one of the most important things the Indian community in South Africa did was to participate in the liberation struggle,” said Gandhi’s granddaughter Ela, struggle activist and former parliamentarian, when I interviewed her at her Durban home before leaving for India.
I am inclined to agree. For me, our camaraderie with oppressed South Africans is among our proudest moments and our exploitation of them — as one hears the stories about racist Indians — our darkest.
The same is true for other races in South Africa.
For white South Africans there is the conundrum of identity and “origin” too. For those who want to belong and who have been here for generations, the calls for them to go “home” are as stupid as the as the so-called firebrand leaders who issue them.
“Identities are robustly plural,” as legendary Indian economist Amartya Sen would have it, and I understand that more than ever having embarked on this journey to understand our beginnings as a South African subculture.
I love India; gorgeous and vast. Its smells, sights and colours; the warmth and complexity of its people and its raw energy as a country excites me, as it has thousands of tourists. I even love the fact that I can finally be surrounded by people who look like me (being Indian in South Africa means you’re always in the minority).
But in the end I am just South African. “Indian South African” is simply a useful shorthand term to denote what are increasingly superficial differences.
- You can read Verashni’s column every Monday here, and follow her on twitter here.