Re-Membered Pasts, Dismembered Families

Abstract

The essay explores, first, the centrality of family structures in the practices and transmission of value-systems associated with Indianness; and, secondly, how material objects that are sourced from ‘India’ are fetishized and deployed through such performances to counter realities of cultural loss and alienation that follow migration and dislocation in three post-apartheid novels: Imraan Coovadia’s The Wedding (2001), Aziz Hassim’s The Lotus People (2002), and Ronnie Govender’s Song of the Atman (2006). These novels emerge in the context of the desire for a definitive history that both reassures Indians of their legitimate space in the post-apartheid formation and balances the tension between common citizenship founded on a non-racial constitution and the need to articulate Indianness in South Africa. For many scholars, the post-apartheid moment and its ‘rainbow-nation’ project simultaneously activates the past and the opportunity to articulate Indian identity that in the apartheid era had, for political reasons, been rejected in favour of a ‘black’ identity claimed by all the oppressed peoples of South Africa.