Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie

The Place of India in South African History: Academic Scholarship, Past, Present and Future

In 1971 Robert E. Gregory wrote a book titled India and East Africa deftly covering some 555 pages even though his narrative took him only up to 1939.1 Though the title of my survey is as far-reaching as his, I do not have the luxury of Gregorys space so I shall not even attempt a Gregory. In a foreword to a brochure published by the Indian High Commission in South Africa titled India-South Africa ; Strategic Partnership in a Changing World the then Indian High Commissioner Shiv Shankar Mukerjee pointed to three significant links between the two countries. First and foremost, he lists Gandhis presence in South Africa for well over two decades in South Africa during which he developed satyagraha and his subsequent return to India to lead that country to independence. Secondly, India played a significant role in the anti-apartheid movement. Thirdly, he points out, Indians in South Africa constituted the `important bridge between our two countries.2 These sentiments have been echoed by many others both before and since. These do to some extent provide a guide to the place of India in South African history Mr Mukherjee was indeed only penning a few paragraphs. This paper will, however, show that these parameters make no room for complexities, for other narratives the tendency is to cast this history in fundamentally romantic and heroic proportions. The paper aims also to more modestly focus on historiographical questions and the sources available to scholars. It does not provide a comprehensive historiographical focus on the entire history of Indians in South Africa but highlights certain key themes.3

The Passenger Indian as Worker: Indian Immigrants in Cape Town in the Early Twentieth Century

The article argues that the term passenger Indian has contributed to a divisive understanding of migration from the Indian subcontinent to South Africa. It has led to the stereotype of the wealthy Gujarati trader and it excludes much. By focusing on Indian migrants in Cape Town, the argument is made that the term must be redefined to include workers who came from not only Gujarat but also from Maharashtra and the Punjab and that those marginalised by simplified definitions need to be given a place in the historiography. Biographical sketches of workers are provided freeing one from the narrow chronological choices historians have made and include family where possible. Details are provided of what kind of employment Indian immigrants found in Cape Town and the severe effects of the permit system and immigration laws on the free mobility of Indians. The article points to the migrant (and circular) nature of Indian labour in Cape Town with consequences for wives and children in the villages of India and argues that parallels may be made with African migrant labour.

Cultural crossings from Africa to India: select travel narratives of Indian South Africans from Durban and Cape Town, 1940s to 1990s

Abstract This article focuses on cultural encounters by Indian South Africans from Durban and Cape Town, uniquely positioning travel accounts from autobiographies, biographies, and memoirs together with oral histories. A study of individual movements from South Africa to India provides new dimensions to a historiography which has prioritised immigration from India to South Africa and to travel literatures focused on movement from the metropole to the periphery. The narratives are read for what they reveal about identity and the impact of travel. The article argues that there are perceptible differences in masculine and feminine tellings with the latter paying more attention to the domestic and the personal. There is also a difference in the accounts of those who moved by choice and those who were forced into exile. The encounters with India vary from strong identification to isolation and discomfort. Travel sharpened an awareness of being from Africa in India, thereby providing a new definition of self. The narratives are suggestive of how Indians in India respond to the diaspora. Oral histories about dance and music point to how relocation in an Indian group area led to greater cultural activity. These draw Cape Town more closely into twentieth-century Indian Ocean cultural circuits.

South Africa/India: Re-Imagining the Disciplines

In April 2005, delegates from 106 Asian and African countries gathered in Indonesia for the 50th anniversary of the Bandung Asian-African Conference. The original meeting in 1955 had been a powerful symbolic event. The president of independent Indonesia, Ahmed Sukarno, had described the gathering as `the first intercontinental meeting of coloured peoples in the history of mankind. The event looked back to transnational traditions of anti-imperial solidarity and forward both to the end of formal colonial rule and the emergence of a new Cold War global order. Out of this Bandung tradition came a cluster of terms — non-aligned, `third world, even possibly `people of colour — that were to dominate political discussion for several decades to come. The 2005 anniversary meeting was inevitably somewhat different. The tag line of the conference, `Reinvigorating the Bandung Spirit: Working towards a New Asian-African Strategic Partnership, tried to establish continuities with the earlier meeting. So too did the commemorative activities, like the short `Bandung Walk in which delegates retraced the steps of their 1955 predecessors from the Savoy Homann Hotel to the Gedung Merdeka (Freedom Building) and the planting of an `Asia-Africa Forest of solidarity. Yet, as journalists were quick to point out, in place of the anti-imperial sentiment of the 1955 event, the language of `corporate management, apparent in terms like `strategic partnership, prevailed. For the purposes of this introduction, these two Bandung conferences stand as useful conceptual bookends. As events centrally concerned with Africa-Asia relations and global politics more generally, these two gatherings capture the changing global alignments within which South Africa and India have been positioned. Linked from the seventeenth century by global flows of labour (first

Split-Households: Indian Wives, Cape Town Husbands and Immigration Laws, 1900s to 1940s

Abstract This study of gendered migration from the Indian subcontinent to Cape Town focuses on women who did travel and those who did not. It identifies the split-household as being the dominant household formation in the first half of the twentieth century, a matter of preference of Indian male migrants. Some women also displayed resistance to leaving India. Women nonetheless suffered long periods of separation from husbands; sometimes they were abandoned once men set up alternate households in Cape Town with women of other races and ethnicities. This article also assesses the influence of immigration laws on female mobility. The provision in 1927 that minor children from India had to be accompanied by their mothers did lead to increased female migration but some women returned to India once the minor was settled. The non-recognition of polygamy in South African immigration law had consequences for women in such marriages. The article shifts focus to women who did travel and highlights bureaucratic hurdles. The final section points to lives made in Cape Town as Indian women drew on village and linguistic networks for support, acquired new skills, contributed to the household economy and to the cultural life of the broader community.

Gujarati Shoemakers in Twentieth-Century Cape Town: Family, Gender, Caste and Community

Noting the Natal and Witwatersrand-centredness of the historiography of Indian South Africans, and this historiographys neglect of caste amongst Gujarati Hindus where caste mattered, this study focuses on the Gujarati shoemaker caste in Cape Town. Through narratives of those engaged in making, repairing or selling shoes, the article seeks to understand caste as occupation and explores how caste organisation facilitated economic and social mobility beyond the world of shoemaking. By drawing attention to female shoemakers, for whom the South African setting was challenging yet empowering, the article disturbs an androcentric reading of the term shoemaker and points to the family as a crucial economic unit.

The Form, the Permit and the Photograph: An Archive of Mobility between South Africa and India

Inspired by recent scholarship that calls for a more critical engagement with archives and knowledge production, this article plots the biography of an archive in Cape Town. Unravelling the layers of paperwork, it locates the origins of the archive in a repressive state project of excluding Indian immigrants and controlling those within the borders of the Cape Colony. The paper trail reveals documents of identity and the state’s attempts to verify identity. In seeking to answer the question as to how the historian should approach such an archive of control and surveillance, it concludes that a social history and gendered approach to migration is possible and the real treasures are those documents that enter the archive beyond the limits of state intentions.

Writing the Life of Manilal Mohandas Gandhi

Manilal Gandhi was the second son of Mohandas (later Mahatma) and Kasturba Gandhi. Unlike his father who spent just over two decades in South Africa, Manilal spent close to five decades of a life (which spanned sixty-four years) in South Africa. Most of these years, in particular, were lived at Phoenix Settlement in the Inanda countryside on the communal farm that Gandhi had started in 1904. For thirty-six years of his life (1920-1956) Manilal was editor of the newspaper Indian Opinion which his father had had a crucial hand in establishing in 1903. This Gandhi, however, is relatively unknown in South Africa. To remedy that I wrote his biography, published in 2004.1 Sufficient time has passed for me to reflect on the writing of the book, its objectives, the sources used, the reception of the book and especially its portrayal in the media in South Africa and in India. This reflection provides an opportunity for the historian to examine the practices of biographical writing but also to cast some understanding on what Judith Brown referred to as the “Gandhi phenomenon” that hit India in the 1920s but which continues to manifest itself world-wide despite the fact that the Mahatma died almost six decades ago.

Durban and Cape Town as Port Cities: Reconsidering Southern African Studies from the Indian Ocean

This special issue arose out of a workshop titled ‘Durban and Cape Town as Indian Ocean Port Cities: Reconsidering Southern African Studies from the Indian Ocean’, held at the University of the Western Cape in September 2014. The volume is located at the intersection of southern African studies and Indian Ocean studies, and explores this exchange as a site for enriching southern African transnational historiographies. This introduction begins with an overview of emerging transnational trends within southern African studies, and locates Indian Ocean studies within this field. Until recently, southern African studies fell outside the remit of work on the Indian Ocean world on two counts. First, the region is located outside the monsoon zone, which constitutes the canonical core of Indian Ocean studies; secondly, Africa as a whole has been marginalised by South Asia in the field. For some time, then, southern Africa has been considered as a belated arrival both chronologically and historiographically in the field of Indian Ocean studies, drawn into the latter arena only during the age of European empires. This collection complicates this picture, exploring the effect of pre-colonial Indian Ocean slave and trade networks on southern African colonial formations. These re-configured geographies, in turn, open up possibilities for drawing new linkages among different southern African historiographies. The articles articulate landand sea-based systems of labour migration and control, suggesting connections between the inland historiographies of mining and migration, on the one hand, and maritime port cities, on the other (and indeed, between these port cities themselves). The volume raises questions of method and scale, and the introduction touches on problems associated with an oceanic approach (how to factor in the ‘sea-ness of the sea’). In concluding, the introduction asks how best to switch between region or area and a global perspective.

Betwixt the Oceans: The Chief Immigration Officer in Cape Town, Clarence Wilfred Cousins (1905–1915)

Drawing on the personal and official papers of an immigration officer, this article highlights his personality, social life, and the quotidian aspects of his work at the port. By placing the officer at the centre, instead of the usual tendency in South African historiography to focus on ethnic immigration histories, one secures broader insights into the administration of policy, such as the writing test (an exclusionary mechanism) and repatriation, which are often associated with state policies against Indians. While the article draws on examples of arrivals at the port from both the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, arguing against a focus on only Indian Ocean traffic, it emphasises how arrivals from India played a role in shaping the immigration bureaucracy. While scholars have recently begun to see Cape Town as an important Indian Ocean port, this article points to settler society’s unease with what sea traffic from Bombay and Durban might bring and how Cape Town sought to establish a disconnect with the East.