“With profound insight, Hansen explores the struggles of South African Indians to take possession of their new political and cultural liberty since the end of apartheid. Showing how they are haunted by a past they cannot openly mourn and bereft of the ambiguous certainties once ensured by a racist state, this compelling and highly original book calls on us to rethink the complex challenges that attend the meaning of freedom everywhere.”–Jean Comaroff, University of Chicago

“This excellent book provides a subtle and convincingly argued analysis of the ’embarrassment’ inherent in belonging to a community which was marginal-within-marginal to the South African mainstream. In exploring complicities and dependencies as well as forms of resistance, and in fusing together issues of politics, popular culture, and religion, it takes a substantial step beyond much of the literature on postapartheid South Africa.”–Deborah James, London School of Economics and Political Science

“Melancholia of Freedom is an extraordinarily powerful and eloquent account of postapartheid realities. Given the depth and breadth of this sensitive and insightful book, and the vast array of important issues covered, it will no doubt become a classic ethnographic text on contemporary South Africa.”–Steven Robins, University of Stellenbosch

Thomas Blom Hansen is professor of anthropology and the Reliance-Dhirubhai Ambani Professor of South Asian Studies at Stanford University, where he also directs the Center for South Asia. His books include The Saffron Wave and Wages of Violence (both Princeton).

Melancholia of Freedom

SOCIAL LIFE IN AN INDIAN TOWNSHIP IN SOUTH AFRICABy Thomas Blom Hansen

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2012 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-15295-0

Contents

List of Illustrations…………………………………………………………………………ixPreface and Acknowledgments……………………………………………………………………xiIntroduction…………………………………………………………………………………11 Ethnicity by Fiat: The Remaking of Indian Life in South Africa…………………………………..262 Domesticity and Cultural Intimacy…………………………………………………………….593 Charous and Ravans: A Story of Mutual Nonrecognition……………………………………………974 Autonomy, Freedom, and Political Speech……………………………………………………….1425 Movement, Sound, and Body in the Postapartheid City…………………………………………….1766 The Unwieldy Fetish: Desi Fantasies, Roots Tourism, and Diasporic Desires…………………………2007 Global Hindus and Pure Muslims: Universalist Aspirations and Territorialized Lives…………………223Postscript: Melancholia in the Time of the “African Personality”…………………………………..290Notes……………………………………………………………………………………….297References…………………………………………………………………………………..325Index……………………………………………………………………………………….345

Chapter One

Ethnicity by Fiat

THE REMAKING OF INDIAN LIFE IN SOUTH AFRICA

“Why can’t you just call yourself African Indians?” asked then president-elect Thabo Mbeki in may 1999 at a large meeting with self-styled community leaders drawn from the Indian community in Durban. Mbeki’s entourage consisted of a high-powered group of ANC ministers and advisers, many of Indian origin. ANC leaders hoped that the meeting could broker an electoral breakthrough among the resourceful Indians in the city, a group that had largely turned its back on the ANC since the early 1990s.

After listening to what his advisers dismissed as “perceptions, not rooted in facts,” Mbeki lost his patience with what he saw as a privileged group of people who wanted unambiguous public recognition in the postapartheid order, but only as Indians. Mbeki continued, “if you called yourself African Indians it would make a major difference in how you are perceived. In this way you’d say to your fellow South Africans, ‘This is my country, I am an African first, but I am also an Indian because my forefathers came here to work.’ … after all, what is wrong with being an African?”

Mbeki’s remarks were clearly informed by the broader project of an “African renaissance,” which he had made his trademark through high-profile conferences and nebulous rhetoric. The remarks also sought to define the terms of incorporation of people of Indian origin into the new political order in South Africa. The imperative of putting “African” first signified the overriding emphasis on autochthonous origin as a crucial defining feature of the true citizens of the new South Africa. The struggle against the illegitimacy of white, culturally alien minority rule and privilege meant that the antiapartheid movement constructed the true, sovereign people of South Africa as the black, autochthonous, and poor majority. The perception of Indians as a culturally alien, unreliable, and opportunistic minority has a long history among both white and African communities in South Africa. The accompanying desire to either deport or properly domesticate the range of communities originating in the Indian subcontinent has a long history of Durban and in what today is the province of kwaZulu-natal.

The Asiatic Question

Indians came to South Africa in two ways. The vast majority came between 1860 and 1890 as indentured laborers to work in the sugarcane plantations in the fertile coastal land of natal. most laborers belonged to lower-caste communities from the northern districts of present-day Tamil Nadu, the southern districts of contemporary Andhra Pradesh, and the Bhojpuri region in northern India. These heterogeneous groups of people spoke Tamil, Telugu, Bhojpuri, Hindi, Urdu, and Bengali (Ebr.-Vally 2001). After terminating their indenture contract, many laborers bought or leased small patches of land and began farming or market gardening in and around Durban and along the coast. By the 1940s, most of their descendants had moved to Durban and other cities. This period saw the formation of large Indian working-class neighborhoods with a rich popular culture in Durban. During the 1940s, a decade of political unrest and mass mobilization across South Africa, this Indian working class was at the forefront of labor organization and the struggle against the new racist legislation that culminated in the apartheid policies from 1948 onward (Freund 1995, 54–63).

The numerically much smaller group of so-called passenger Indians (around 15 percent of the total Indian population in the country) arrived during the 1880s from Gujarat and North India in search of trade and business opportunities. The majority were Gujarati-speaking Muslims (Memons and Surtees), as well as North Indian and Gujarati Hindus. This resourceful group established the entire Grey Street commercial area in Durban and quickly spread into the interior, particularly to the towns and villages in the Transvaal Province and around the goldfields in Johannesburg. The Indian commercial elite was incessantly in conflict with white settlers and businesspeople, particularly in Durban, where the success of Indians in commercial life was regarded as a threat to white business and social respectability. This was the immediate background of why prominent Indian businessmen in 1893 hired a young lawyer, proficient in Gujarati and competent in British law, to fight for Indian interests. This young lawyer, Mohandas Gandhi, not only transformed the fight for narrow sectional interest into a wider struggle for Indian rights in South Africa but produced one of the founding gestures of subsequent anticolonial thought and political strategy (Swan 1985; Bhana 1997, 9–31).

The passenger Indians provided political and cultural leadership for the wider Indian community for many decades. Wealthy Gujarati businessmen sponsored educational institutions, religious sites, and cultural events, and were instrumental in maintaining links between South Africa and India through trade, family relations, and cultural exchanges. The cultural and social unity of the “Indian community” was far from self-evident, however. Wealthy Muslims were colloquially known as “Arabs” and, like other “free Indians,” were regarded “with suspicion, fear and disgust” (Palmer 1957, 47) by white settlers and planters in the province. These sections petitioned, in vain, for reclassification as Arabs in order to distance themselves from the mass of dark-skinned Asiatic laborers and gardeners, and to avoid the threat of repatriation to South Asia. Instead, white protests against the presence of Indian traders and misgivings about their alleged “unfair competition” intensified. Intense debates arose on the manner in which Asiatics could be repatriated to the Indian subcontinent. A commission headed by Sir John Lange was set up in 1919 to investigate the allegations from white settlers that “Asiatics send their money out of the country”; their allegedly “unclean habits”; the complaint “that their methods of business are different from those of the Europeans”; and finally, the warning that “they become too familiar with Europeans, especially females … and thus destroy the respect of natives for Europeans.” In what today appears like a colonial Freudian slip, the problem became known henceforth as one of “Indian penetration.”

The commission made a string of recommendations pertaining to the question of creating separate residential areas. It suggested that each town and city should have its own “Asiatic bazaar” area where Indian traders could be accommodated. Many of these ideas went into the later areas Class Bill of 1922, which recommended separation of white from “non-European” residential areas and predated apartheid’s more infamous schemes by three decades. This was far from enough, however, in the eyes of the Nationalist Party/Labor Party government that came to power in 1924 and began initiatives to prepare for large-scale repatriation of Indians. The minister of the interior, Dr. Malan, stated, “the Indian, as a race in this country, is an alien element in the population, and no solution will be acceptable to the country unless it results in a very considerable reduction of the Indian population in this country.”

In February 1926, the government introduced new policies that stripped property-owning Indians of their municipal franchise (Padayachee and Morrell 1991). In response, mass meetings and a “National Day of Prayer” was called among Indians throughout the country on February 23, 1926. The South African Indian Congress sent a deputation to India to mobilize political support for the cause of the Indians in South Africa. Mass meetings were held in various parts of India, and the viceroy of India, Lord Reading, felt pressured to send an official note of protest against the legislation to the South African authorities. Acting as an advocate of broader interests of colonial India and its imperial subjects throughout the world, the government of India pressed for a roundtable conference where the issue could be negotiated between the two governments within the empire.

A roundtable conference began in late 1926 in Cape Town. The Indian delegation consisted of six civil servants (three Indian and three British) and was led by Sir Mahomed Habibullah. The South African delegation was all white. After protracted negotiations the so-called Cape Town Agreement was signed in 1927. It stipulated a new voluntary repatriation scheme that built certain financial incentives (free tickets, a fixed sum per adult and child) into the repatriation procedure. However, the more remarkable part of the agreement was that a review of Indian education was to be undertaken with the assistance of experts in education from India; the South African government was forced to promise to provide better housing and living conditions for Indians; it was agreed that Indians should receive “equal pay for equal work”; and it was resolved that no unreasonable obstacles should be put in the way of Indian business initiatives. As part of the agreement, a permanent agent-general of the government of India was to be posted in South Africa to oversee the implementation of the agreement (Joshi 1942, 127–37).

The repatriation scheme had some effect in the first five years after its implementation, but the worldwide economic crisis slowed down the pace. As stories of terrible hardship among repatriates in India filtered back into South Africa, the numbers applying for repatriation fell dramatically in the early 1930s (Palmer 1957, 105). The other parts of the Cape Town agreement concerning the provision of suitable residential land for Indians and their orderly integration into the labor market had only limited effects. By the late 1930s, the specter of “Indian penetration” once again appeared on the political agenda in Durban and Johannesburg. The so-called Indian penetration Commission was appointed in 1940 to investigate the matter. After several reports it was concluded that the population increase in the Indian community and the economic prosperity of parts of the community, along with its “desire to demonstrate equality with Europeans or to make defiance against segregation,” indeed meant that more Indians bought property in white residential areas. These findings further animated anti-Indian sentiments among whites, particularly in the Durban area. A series of new regulations limiting Indian purchase of land came into existence in 1944, of which the provisional pegging act was the most controversial.

The outrage against these strictures generated massive protests from Indian organizations, which at this point were powerfully represented by the natal Indian Congress (NIC). Unprecedented levels of Indian mobilization and assertiveness unified whites throughout the country across the usual divides between Afrikaners and English speakers. in 1946, the union government passed the highly controversial Asiatic Land tenure and Indian representation act. The act limited the land tenure of Indians to certain zones in urban areas and formalized measures to avoid what at the time was termed “the risk of residential juxtaposition”—the possibility of Indians and whites living next door to each other. The act also granted Indians a so-called communal representation in the house of assembly. This merely amounted to the representation of the entire Indian population through three appointed European representatives.

The reaction against this openly racist and discriminatory legislation was strong and vehement. Indian organizations termed it the Ghetto Act and pointed out that it violated even the highly paternalist terms stipulated by the Cape town agreement. The government of India, still under British administration, protested strongly and withdrew its high commissioner in South Africa. This reaction was prompted in part by the strong opinion in India on this question and the priority that prominent leaders of Congress in India gave to it. an Indian delegation from South Africa met Gandhi in Pune in March 1946. Gandhi assured the delegation of the unconditional support of the Indian national Congress and vowed that the matter would be taken up in the newly formed united nations. On behalf of the government of India, the issue was put before the General Assembly in 1946 as a clear example of discrimination on the basis of race and culture. A lengthy debate ensued wherein the Indian delegates eloquently defended a universalist agenda of human rights and accused South Africa of practicing racial supremacy. In response, the South African prime minister dismissed the United Nations as “a body dominated by colored peoples.” The South African delegation unsuccessfully asserted its right to treat the matter as one of “domestic jurisdiction.” In December 1946, the vote in the General Assembly went against the South African government—the first in a long series of international condemnations.

In South Africa, the international condemnation infuriated many whites. Many boycotted Indian shops and enterprises and resumed the campaigns for repatriation of Indians. The large riots in Durban in 1949, where African workers attacked Indian shops and neighborhoods, took place in a climate of extreme stigmatization of Indians in the white-owned press and among the white population. Even liberal forces within the white political establishment blamed the escalation of the conflict on the left-wing leadership of the Natal Indian Congress. Many whites saw the appeal to India and the United Nations as proof of the fundamental lack of loyalty to South Africa among Indians, and saw it as nothing short of an act of treason.

This protracted conflict over land, residential patterns, and sociopolitical recognition made many whites in Natal more amenable to the Nationalist Party’s new agenda of apartheid, which became official policy after the elections in 1948. The Asiatic Land Tenure Act was a precursor of the later infamous Group Areas Act, one of the cornerstones of apartheid’s management of urban space. The paradoxical effect of the international condemnation was that the government of South Africa was henceforth forced to treat the “Asiatic question” as a strictly domestic problem that could not be solved through repatriation. This paved the way for granting Indians de facto rights to remain in South Africa, and later formal citizenship rights in the new constitution in 1961, albeit as a form of capitis deminutio, political minors.

In 1963, the government set up a New Department of Indian Affairs that was to oversee and administer what was now called “the Indian community” in the following three decades. Three years later, it launched its official mouthpiece, Fiat Lux (literally, “light by decree”), a glossy monthly magazine that in the decades to follow was offered to every Indian household in the country. In one of the first issues, a Mr. Prinsloo, who chaired the Festival Committee, encouraged “Indian South Africans to commemorate … the quinquennium of their acceptance as South Africans.” In the following section, I will explore how biopolitical engineering, civic activism, and policing practices decisively changed the face, social structures, and self-understanding of what became known as “the community.”

The New Hygienic Indian

The political climate created by apartheid’s many new and draconian laws meant that the city council in Durban felt emboldened to begin a large-scale clearing of established settlements of Indians and Africans within the city proper. The impact of the clearings and removals was proportionally higher among Indians who had overwhelmingly settled within the city limits—in pockets and enclaves around industrial estates, markets, as market gardeners along the Umgeni River, and elsewhere. in the early years of this policy (1958-63) the city council forced more than sixty thousand Indians to leave their homes. The majority was rehoused in the new Chatsworth Township, which was built on farmland expropriated from Indian freehold farmers at a nominal compensation (Desai 2000, 13). Many more were to follow in the next decade as Cato manor and other major areas, such as Clairwood, riverside, parts of Springfield, and the (in)famous area called magazine Barracks, were cleared and turned into industrial estates and residential and recreational areas for the city’s white middle and working classes.

(Continues…)

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