Many of us take our histories for granted - personal or collective, written or sung, remembered and forgotten.
As I watched "From Canefields to Freedom," a dance performance by the Tribhangi Dance Collective, enacting the arrival of the first indentured labourers to Natal in the late 19th century, I realised that one can derive so much of one's personal identity from a place of origin. By naming one's place of origin, one conjours its linguistic and cultural contours, evoking memories that sometimes rest firmly in the imagination. Remembering a place thus almost conveys a sense of belonging without ever having to even be there.
Despite serious misgivings about the dance performance itself - a patchouli of half-baked slideshow presentations on modern India spliced into a dance-theatre rendition of the historical journey, with too little dance and too much theatre - the performance was a reminder of how difficult it is for many immigrants to construct the narrative of their identities without a continuous, uninterrupted chain of stories. I realised that my dissatisfaction with the dance performance was less about the fact that I felt it did not live up to my exacting standards, but more about the fact that I was expecting a linear, well-constructed narrative - a narrative of someone whose memories and shared histories remained intact.
In fact, the Indian indentured labourer experience was the exact opposite. Cut abruptly from the source of all their memories, the Indian indentured labourers in South Africa carved and creolised identities for themselves based on a patchwork of memories that much resembled the choppy dance performance. Their personal memories thus became subject to the whims of sea captains and colonial officers that mandated the number of belongings they could take with them on a ship. Crossing the "black waters" or the "Kala Pani" meant that as required, lightening the ship's load literally meant that more memories were cast overboard. "From Canefields to Sugarcane," indeed, pointed out that the journey over the Kala Pani was in fact a great leveller - formerly disparate castes and cultures began to communicate and co-exist with every lurch of the ship.
Even alighting on land may not have allowed for a more grounded sense of cultural identity. Harsh labour conditions and an ambivalent place as former British subjects in a country that was quickly caught between British Natal and the independent Boer Republic (Transvaal) meant that South African Indians were constantly struggling to gain a foothold in a landscape that seemed to slip and slide beneath them, as if they were still on a ship, crossing the Kala Pani. Then the shock of living in a system such as apartheid that denied any detailed knowledge of shared cultural history that wasn't white further damaged this broken storyline.
A trip to Fordsburg (Johannesburg's Indian neighbourhood and market area) reveals that links to modern day India are alive and well - indeed, some memories were dredged out of the Kala Pani and resurrected. Oriental Plaza like any Indian bazaar worth its salt, offers tantalizing arrays of spices, fabric, footwear, utensils, bollywood DVDs, and wedding paraphernalia in a chaotic, colourful atmosphere that is almost as exhausting as a trip to Lajpat Nagar market in New Delhi (not quite). And the remarkable thing about these bazaars is that the clientele ranges from local Indians and "Indian" Indians to non-Indians of all kinds - South African and otherwise. Being Indian, in a way has become global in more ways than one - it has global reach and currency that it never had before.
Thinking on this, the concept of Indianness travels relatively well these days. What the Kala Pani adventurers has to cast overboard for fear of weighing their ship down is marketed, distributed, and sold in millions of Indian franchises across the world. Airline restrictions notwithstanding, bindis, bangles, baltis, and bollywood movies today make it safely past borders without forsaking their Indianness. Being Indian today is way more marketable than it ever was - the New Global Indian is a commercially viable entity like it never was before.
