What is an Indian?

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Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie is the author of From Cane Fields to Freedom : A Chronicle of Indian South African Life, ISBN 0-7957-0091-1, published by Kwela Books, 2000, R175,00.

Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie is a professional historian. She is South African. And she is Indian. At the Cape Town launch of her latest book From Cane Fields to Freedom : A Chronicle of Indian South African Life on 16 August 2000, I watched as the open space of the venue, the Centre for the Book gradually filled with invited guests and token media members. Unlike the tension-filled moments of the recent public grilling of Hansie Cronjé about match-fixing proclivities, some of them in India, this gathering was more celebratory. The crowd was mostly Indian, bedecked in saris and plates of tasty samoosas (vegetarian and meat) were doing the rounds. After a dignified opening address by Ahmed Kathrada, with references to sad, silent times on Robben Island, a smallish woman with black hair stepped up to the podium. “I have not been imprisoned but I like to talk a lot,” she began. “I also have a passion for accuracy and in this book the images strike you the most.” After 18 months of hard work and research shuttling between Johannesburg, Durban and the Cape, it is in her collection of images, black and white photographs — 313 of them — that the layers and layers of stories within stories are captured.

Two weeks after that launch I am sitting in Uma’s lounge in the Cape Town suburb of Rylands, still a majority Indian neighbourhood. In the kitchen her husband, himself an academic in linguistics, is busily feeding the family’s cats. As we talk she discusses the dilemma faced by her six year old daughter Sapna. The burning question Sapna carried with her, as Uma toiled away at the book, was, “Mommy, what is an Indian? Is a Hindu an Indian? Is a Muslim an Indian? What about Muslims who aren’t Indians?” Her pre-school teacher has black hair and is a vegetarian, but to Sapna’s dismay, no, the teacher is not an Indian.

Articulating an answer is a long and complex path which is eased somewhat as I turn the pages of the book and pause to consider the images. Can a South African be an Indian? I wonder. In considering Sapna’s confusion, Uma has to call on years of professional research and still realise that in the end being Indian in South Africa is an entirely personal quest. So what’s this book about? I ask at some point in our conversation. “This book,” Uma says simply, “shows how the South African soil shaped Indians in South Africa. But it’s also about the story of any South African.” As we talk on, I try to make sense of it all.

During her book launches across South Africa, Uma has been astounded by the people she has seen coming to hear about From Cane Fields to Freedom. “I regret I didn’t take my copy of the book to be signed by all these people,” she smiles. Although the book features famous people : one of the striking series (images 234-236) show police shots of a heavily disguised Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki and Ahmed Kathrada arrested in July 1963 : the majority of these images show ordinary people. In the ordinariness of the moments captured on film, these lives are transformed into something else, something extraordinary.

As well as researching the archives of museums and institutes Uma put out notices in community newspapers asking for personal photographs. The responses comprise 53 images from those sent in and are displayed in the book’s section, “From the Family Album”. Selecting images, ensuring that an historically accurate record is maintained, was hard work : 600 photographs, all of them precious records, were pruned to make up the book’s 300-odd contents of images.

“There was this constant challenge with the book,” Uma explains, “selecting pictures of aesthetic value, but also a concern that the historical record is a story that must be told. This could have just been a beautiful coffee-table book without being historical. I constantly tried to ensure that pictures were put in a way that would still tell the story.” Because of her previous research projects in the field of Indian South African politics, Uma knew exactly where to find the types of images she needed : she sees this book as building on years of study carefully prepared by researchers and archivists, professionals and amateur historians alike.

The cover of From Cane Fields to Freedom shows an Indian girl, her dark eyes asking questions, her identity unknown. Choosing this image by Cape Town-based photographer George Hallett, was itself a delicate challenge. “We were really stuck,” Uma relates, “not because there weren’t beautiful pictures but I was very conscious of a particular image I wanted to portray. I really didn’t want a rich, wealthy Indian on the cover and some of the older photographs weren’t that suitable … but George’s photograph of that young child was just brilliant.” Inside the book the story continues with image 154, which shows a man looking carefully at an old camera. The caption begins to unravel this visual story, this benchmark of personal history placed carefully on the page: “Mr Hallim owned Palm tree studios in District Six, Cape Town. He provided George Hallett with his first camera, which started him on a career in photography that has earned him international recognition.”

Image 153 on the same double-page spread shows Ranjith Kally sitting on top of a pile of his photographs. Previously a Drum photographer and now in his 70s, Kally still takes photographs for the Sunday Tribune Herald. In response to Uma’s call for photographs, he arrived one morning, very punctually, with mounted exhibition-size photographs and spread them all over Uma’s sitting room. “How on earth do you choose from those photos?” she remembers, “What wouldn’t I take?”

The book operates as a type of intersection point, the meeting of many varied lives, thrown into the melting pot of South Africa’s ugly past, and now offered a space of their own, room to breathe and allowed to tell the stories which are uniquely their own. I pause and then ask Uma how she maintains the balance between being faithful to an historical record and allowing individual photographs to tell their own stories. “What my book does is not the story, but is a story. It’s very much shaped by my understanding of the past. Someone else might well come with another understanding. We had to put together photographs with stories attached to others for which there was nothing known. Sometimes we don’t even have a date to a photograph : we just have to make a guess. Strangely though, other people who look at those photographs can say something about them.”

Uma was delighted at one of her launches when a woman walked up and identified the block of flats in image 81, about which nothing definite was known : Uma had made an educated guess about their location. The woman had herself lived in one of the apartments, in Johannesburg. I guess this is a moment of history actively engaging with the present, where we as readers can make profound eye contact with images on a page.

One of Uma’s concerns lies in the reading of this book, the interpretation of these pictures, the stereotypical and sometimes superficial reference points people keep falling back on. In its review, a national weekly newspaper was very quick to highlight the section which focuses on Gandhi. Although Mahatma Gandhi was Uma’s great-grandfather, she wants to see his story as one of many special lives populating the pages of her book. “For me Gandhi is a section of the book,” she explains referring to images 197 to 203. “He appears towards the end. In terms of my own personal role in the book, I was very aware that my grandfather (Manilal), Gandhi’s second son, had never quite got the credit he and my grandmother (Sushila) should have, for continuing his work: living on Phoenix settlement which Gandhi founded, running a school and clinic there and the printing press (of Indian Opinion). Gandhi left South Africa in 1913. My grandfather ran Phoenix settlement from 1918 right until 1956, and my grandmother lived there right until the 70s. So this was an opportunity for me to tell a story which people don’t really know. People would have stopped at Gandhi: I took a much bigger view.”

I was shocked in looking at Gandhi’s pictures, to see the real man: not the popularised Attenborough film version but the man himself. In images 176 I see a smooth and suave young lawyer with a carefully-tended Brylcreem hairstyle — Gandhi in 1893. Right next to it, image 177 shows Gandhi and his wife Kasturba, 21 years later in 1914 as he prepares to leave Africa. He wears the much humbler clothing of a South African Indian — a poor and indentured working class man. Uma does this consciously, holding up one story against a similar one in a different time, with images of Grey Street, Durban in 1900 and again in the early 80s (photos 19 and 20) forcing the reader to confront the passage of time, the telling and re-telling of personal stories which together weave the historical continuum. “You see these old 19th century photographs,” Uma explains, “then suddenly you have a picture of the 1930s. I asked myself ‘How did you do that: this is not historically accurate?’ but it works in creative ways as a book.”

The book is divided into four specific divisions but sorting the photographs and finding the right place for each one became more of a fight to resist pigeon-holing the images and allowing them to find the right spaces for themselves. The sections are: 1. Indentured workers, free Indians and traders; 2. Private and public lives; 3. Gandhi and after; and 4. From the family album. “In the beginning it was very frustrating for me,” recalls Uma. “I knew we had these beautiful pictures and I was trying to keep to those initial categories. Somehow it just wasn’t looking right and then: when freed from all that, it became more creative. I said let’s not talk about the categories and just put the images down as we’d like to see them.”

“I’ve not seen reviews that look at the themes we’ve selected,” Uma continues, “reviews that ask `What are public spaces?’ and ‘What are private spaces?’ No-one’s really looked at how we’ve structured the book.” All through the book stories and images overlap, specific slices of history lie side by side with other bites from the South African samoosa. “These sections exist in the book,” Uma explains, “but they merge. They’re not deliberate sections any more. The minute you allow yourself to start thinking freely, the book just looks so much better.”

If one of the main thoughts traversing the timelines of this book is identity, then it raises important questions. Uma was disturbed recently to learn that her daughter was being taught to sing the Indian national anthem because her teacher felt that India was “the motherland”. Uma strongly disagreed, with other parents, and now the children also sing “Nkosi Sikelel’”. An ongoing struggle is the balance between asking “Am I a South African?” and “What do I make of my Indian identity?”

Uma points to Indian people who still refer dismissively to “the blacks” when her own responses to Black Consciousness and the legacy of Steve Biko’s thoughts in the context of South Africa’s collective consciousness differ. “My generation,” she explains, “the younger educated, saw ourselves as black. I’ve always said ‘I’m a black South African,’ throughout the 70s and 80s. I went to Yale in 1989 and spent two terms there as a research fellow. The people who ran the program used to refer to me as ‘the Asian fellow’. I got incredibly upset, really upset thinking ‘I’m not from Asia: why are they calling me Asian?’ That was a shock to me: I’m a black South African. Today when I fill out official forms and they give you a choice, I still tick off black South African.”

Uma feels strongly that making sense of your identity is important. “I am very proud to say I’m a black South African. The BC (Black Consciousness) contribution is very underestimated. All this talk of the Congress dominates but BC subconsciously played a very important role in preparing people.”

But back to the book. Uma tries to explain the essence of it, what it was like to put it together. “In researching the book I had to interact with a whole lot of people. Now that the book is out, I can just feel it’s reaching people in a way that an academic book could not have. Working with these pictures has been a wonderful experience. After my PhD I moved away from the history of South African Indians. I always collected books and articles but never wrote on that. I’ve moved into the subject of Group Areas, forced removals, that kind of thing: I teach that: I already had a manuscript on that. I find it so ironic that in January 1999 Kwela Books phoned to say they’d like me to do this book. I said, `I’ve got a book already, wouldn’t you like to look at it?’ The general response from publishers is that academic monographs are a dying breed. So to get published I know I needed to transform my academic work into a popular project.”

As our interview draws to a close, Uma remarks that a review in a weekly newspaper (yes it’s the same paper I mentioned earlier), by a person from India, unsettled her because its conclusion reads something like “This book will appeal to all Indiaphiles”. People tell Uma it’s a good review but she’s not so sure. In Uma’s words, “This book is not written for people who love India. It was written about Indian South Africans whom are not quite understood, about whom many stereotypes exist and this whole book was to show how the African soil shaped Indians in South Africa: how very South African we are: despite all these cultural and religious affiliations. It’s not for an Indian audience. It’s for any South African. Indiaphile! I nearly fainted. What’s an Indiaphile?”

When I confess to Uma that I have actually read her introduction to the book, she is astounded, counting me amongst perhaps three people she knows about who have. I laugh. And as we stand on Uma’s veranda, saying our goodbyes, Sapna runs up to her mother. We stare at three of Uma’s cats stretched out lazily in the late afternoon sun. Uma strokes her daughter’s hair and playfully asks, “So Sapna, what is an Indian?” Sapna smiles and we all laugh at the question, each of us carrying a photograph of the answer in our heads.

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