After the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1834, South Asians were shipped to plantations across the Caribbean as indentured workers. Indentured servitude—a system of forced migration and labor—produced the Indo-Caribbean diaspora. The Madrasis (named after their port of departure, Madras, i.e., Chennai, but hailing from different parts of southern India) are a religious minority within the Indo-Caribbean diaspora. They cohere around the goddess Mariamman and practice healing, drumming, and spirit possession rituals associated with her. Displaced by indentured servitude, persecuted by the colonial state for their religious practices, and ostracized by the Indo-Caribbean Hindu majority, Madrasis bear the burden of an exceptionally difficult transcontinental history. Since the 1980s, they have been moving to the United States as migrant workers. New York has emerged as the North American center of the Madrasi religion and diaspora. To follow the Madrasis’ voyage across the dark waters of history and examine the role of religion in the making of the Indo-Caribbean Madrasi diaspora, I combine archival and ethnographic research conducted over the course of six years in New York, Guyana, and south India. Through archival work with maritime, missionary, and plantation records, I analyze how religion was employed as a category alongside race and caste to minoritize Madrasis. Through ethnographic fieldwork among Madrasi healers, drummers, and religious leaders in New York and Guyana, however, I demonstrate how the Madrasis themselves use religion in a very different way—to bear the burden of history. The Madrasis’ understanding of religion, history, and kinship, I argue, is shaped by their experiences of migration and creolization. From their diasporic position, the Madrasis imagine a transcontinental network of multibeing and multispecies kinship. They call this migrant network the “village.” This dissertation lies at the intersection of three geographical subfields in Religious Studies—South Asia, the Caribbean, and North America—and highlights the centrality of the study of religion to research on migration, diasporas, race, caste, and the environment.

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<p>This thesis examines fictional representations of Indian women’s responses to trauma in the background of communal violence. It argues that fiction allows for the reimagination of women’s conditions during communal riots, and their responses to trauma as a result of those riots. While ethnographic research seeks answers from traumatized victims, a fictional text can open up spaces for debates about conditions of women and their responses to trauma in the background of communal violence. Through Manju Kapur’s <em>A Married Woman</em> and Anita Rau Badami’s <em>Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?</em>, this project examines women’s negotiations of their religious and national identities within the private and the public and their responses to trauma caused by communal violence.</p> <p>The Introduction draws on texts on gender and diaspora theory as well as scholarly work on the evolution and history of communalism in India. It also looks at the historical backgrounds of two events of communal violence that underpin Kapur’s and Badami’s texts, namely, the Ramjanmabhoomi-Babri Masjid controversy and the resulting 1992 riots, and Indira Gandhi’s assassination and the resulting 1984 anti-Sikh riots. Chapter 1 examines Indian women’s negotiations of religious identities in <em>A Married Woman</em>. Through the characters of Astha, Pipee and Sita, I argue that Kapur draws parallels between women as Other and religious minorities as Other. Her text shows the ways in which trauma crosses religious borders of Hindu-Muslim, and opens up possibilities for envisioning ways of ethically coexisting with the Other. Chapter 2 investigates communal violence in India and Canada in <em>Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?</em> Focusing on the characters of Bibi-ji, Leela and Nimmo, I argue that communal violence subsumes class, religion and location. Her text highlights how trauma crosses national boundaries and how the three women are torn apart by their losses.</p> <p>In my Conclusion, I suggest for new avenues of research that might contribute to a further understanding of the dynamics of communal violence and trauma, and a future investigation into the negotiation of male religious identities in the background of communal violence.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)

Devant l’explosion des représentations filmiques des pratiques et identités sexuelles non normatives qui caractérise actuellement la sphère cinématographique, la présente étude, dotée d’outils théoriques et méthodologiques issus de la sociologie du cinéma, des cultural studies et de l’approche féministe intersectionnelle, investit analytiquement trois longs métrages de fiction de narration conventionnelle dont des lesbiennes/ queers d’origine indienne en Occident, aux positionnements partiellement minoritaires sur les axes de division sociale que sont le sexe, la race et l’ethnicité, et la sexualité, occupent le devant et le derrière de la caméra : Chutney Popcorn (Nisha Ganatra, 1999), Nina’s Heavenly Delights (Pratibha Parmar, 2007), et I Can’t Think Straight (Shamim Sarif, 2008). Bref, l’objectif principal de ce mémoire est d’exposer les conceptualisations des expériences et subjectivités queers privilégiées par ce régime particulier de représentations, puis d’évaluer dans quelles mesures et de quelles manières il reproduit et déstabilise celles de discours académiques, activistes et nationaux postcoloniaux qui circulent internationalement. / Witnessing the recent explosion of filmic representations of non-normative practices and identities which currently characterizes the cinematographic sphere, the following study mobilizes theoretical and methodological tools from sociology of cinema, cultural studies and the intersectional feminist approach to analytically explore three long-feature fictions of conventional narrative form that show, as well as are imagined and realized by lesbian/queers of Indian origins in an occidental context who occupy minority positions on the axes of social division that are the categories of sex, ethnicity, race, and sexualities: Chutney Popcorn (Nisha Ganatra, 1999), Nina’s Heavenly Delights (Pratibha Parmar, 2007), and I Can’t Think Straight (Shamim Sarif, 2008). In short, the main objective of this thesis is to expose the conceptions of queer experiences and subjectivities privileged by this regime of representation, and to evaluate how and in which ways it reproduces and destabilizes those of academics, activists and postcolonial nations which internationally circulate.

Devant l’explosion des représentations filmiques des pratiques et identités sexuelles non normatives qui caractérise actuellement la sphère cinématographique, la présente étude, dotée d’outils théoriques et méthodologiques issus de la sociologie du cinéma, des cultural studies et de l’approche féministe intersectionnelle, investit analytiquement trois longs métrages de fiction de narration conventionnelle dont des lesbiennes/ queers d’origine indienne en Occident, aux positionnements partiellement minoritaires sur les axes de division sociale que sont le sexe, la race et l’ethnicité, et la sexualité, occupent le devant et le derrière de la caméra : Chutney Popcorn (Nisha Ganatra, 1999), Nina’s Heavenly Delights (Pratibha Parmar, 2007), et I Can’t Think Straight (Shamim Sarif, 2008). Bref, l’objectif principal de ce mémoire est d’exposer les conceptualisations des expériences et subjectivités queers privilégiées par ce régime particulier de représentations, puis d’évaluer dans quelles mesures et de quelles manières il reproduit et déstabilise celles de discours académiques, activistes et nationaux postcoloniaux qui circulent internationalement. / Witnessing the recent explosion of filmic representations of non-normative practices and identities which currently characterizes the cinematographic sphere, the following study mobilizes theoretical and methodological tools from sociology of cinema, cultural studies and the intersectional feminist approach to analytically explore three long-feature fictions of conventional narrative form that show, as well as are imagined and realized by lesbian/queers of Indian origins in an occidental context who occupy minority positions on the axes of social division that are the categories of sex, ethnicity, race, and sexualities: Chutney Popcorn (Nisha Ganatra, 1999), Nina’s Heavenly Delights (Pratibha Parmar, 2007), and I Can’t Think Straight (Shamim Sarif, 2008). In short, the main objective of this thesis is to expose the conceptions of queer experiences and subjectivities privileged by this regime of representation, and to evaluate how and in which ways it reproduces and destabilizes those of academics, activists and postcolonial nations which internationally circulate.

Thesis (PhD)--Stellenbosch University, 2013. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This dissertation explores selected Indian narratives that emerge in South Africa and East Africa between 1960 and 2010, focusing on representations of migrations from the late 19th century, with the entrenchment of mercantile capitalism, to the early 21st century entry of immigrants into the metropolises of Europe, the US and Canada as part of the post-1960s upsurge in global migrations. The (post-)colonial and imperial sites that these narratives straddle re-echo Vijay Mishra‘s reading of Indian diasporic narratives as two autonomous archives designated by the terms, "old" and "new" diasporas. The study underscores the role of memory both in quests for legitimation and in making sense of Indian marginality in diasporic sites across the continent and in the global north, drawing together South Asia, Africa and the global north as continuous fields of analysis. Categorising the narratives from the two locations in their order of emergence, I explore how Ansuyah R. Singh‘s Behold the Earth Mourns (1960) and Bahadur Tejani‘s Day After Tomorrow (1971), as the first novels in English to be published by a South African and an East African writer of Indian descent, respectively, grapple with questions of citizenship and legitimation. I categorise subsequent narratives from South Africa into those that emerge during apartheid, namely, Ahmed Essop‘s The Hajji and Other Stories (1978), Agnes Sam‘s Jesus is Indian and Other Stories (1989) and K. Goonam‘s Coolie Doctor: An Autobiography by Dr Goonam (1991); and in the post-apartheid period, including here Imraan Coovadia‘s The Wedding (2001) and Aziz Hassim‘s The Lotus People (2002) and Ronnie Govender‘s Song of the Atman (2006). I explore how narratives under the former category represent tensions between apartheid state – that aimed to reveal and entrench internal divisions within its borders as part of its technology of rule – and the resultant anti-apartheid nationalism that coheres around a unifying ―black‖ identity, drawing attention to how the texts complicate both apartheid and anti-apartheid strategies by simultaneously suggesting and bridging differences or divisions. Post-apartheid narratives, in contrast to the homogenisation of "blackness", celebrate ethnic self-assertion, foregrounding cultural authentication in response to the post-apartheid "rainbow-nation" project. Similarly, I explore subsequent East African narratives under two categories. In the first category I include Peter Nazareth‘s In a Brown Mantle (1972) and M.G. Vassanji‘s The Gunny Sack (1989) as two novels that imagine Asians‘ colonial experience and their entry into the post-independence dispensation, focusing on how this transition complicates notions of home and national belonging. In the second category, I explore Jameela Siddiqi‘s The Feast of the Nine Virgins (1995), Yasmin Alibhai-Brown‘s No Place Like Home (1996) and Shailja Patel‘s Migritude (2010) as post-1990 narratives that grapple with political backlashes that engender migrations and relocations of Asian subjects from East Africa to imperial metropolises. As part of the recognition of the totalising and oppressive capacities of culture, the three authors, writing from both within and without Indianness, invite the diaspora to take stock of its role in the fermentation of political backlashes against its presence in East Africa. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Hierdie studie fokus op geselekteerde narratiewe deur skrywers van Indiër-oorsprong wat tussen 1960 en 2010 in Suid-Afrika en Oos-Afrika ontstaan om uitbeeldings van migrerings en verskuiwings vanaf die einde van die 19e eeu, ná die vestiging van handelskapitalisme, immigrasie in die vroeë 21e eeu na die groot stede van Europa, die VS en Kanada, te ondersoek, met die oog op navorsing na die toename in globale migrasies. Die (post-)koloniale en imperial liggings wat in hierdie narratiewe oorvleuel, beam Vijay Mishra se lesing van diasporiese Indiese narratiewe as twee outonome argiewe wat deur die terme "ou" en "nuwe" diasporas aangedui word. Hierdie proefskrif bestudeer die manier waarop herinneringe benut word, nie alleen in die soeke na legitimisering en burgerskap nie, maar ook om tot 'n beter begrip te kom van die omstandighede wat Asiërs na die imperiale wêreldstede loods. Ek kategoriseer die twee narratiewe volgens die twee lokale en in die volgorde waarin hulle verskyn het en bestudeer Ansuyah R Singh se Behold the Earth Mourns (1960) en Bahadur Tejani se Day After Tomorrow (1971) as die eerste roman wat deur 'n Suid-Afrikaanse en 'n Oos-Afrikaanse skrywe van Indiese herkoms in Engels gepubliseer is, en die wyse waarop hulle onderskeidelik die kwessies van burgerskap en legitimisasie benader. In daaropvolgende verhale van Suid-Afrika, onderskei ek tussen narratiewe at hul onstaan in die apartheidsjare gehad het, naamlik The Hajji and Other Stories deur Ahmed Essop, Jesus is Indian and Other Stories (1989) deur Agnes Sam en Coolie Doctor: An Autobiography by Dr. Goonam deur K. Goonam; uit die post-apartheid era kom The Wedding (2001) deur Imraan Covadia en The Lotus People (2002) deur Aziz Hassim, asook Song of the Atman (2006) deur Ronnie Govender. Ek kyk hoe die verhale in die eerste kategorie spanning beskryf tussen die apartheidstaat — en die gevolglike anti-apartheidnasionalisme in 'n eenheidskeppende "swart" identiteit — om die aandag te vestig op die wyse waarop die tekste sowel apartheid- as anti-apartheid strategieë kompliseer deur tegelykertyd versoeningsmoontlikhede en verdeelheid uit te beeld. Post-apartheid verhale, daarenteen, loof eerder etniese selfbemagtiging met die klem op kulturele outentisiteit in reaksie op die post-apartheid bevordering van 'n "reënboognasie", as om 'n homogene "swartheid" voor te staan. Op dieselfde manier bestudeer ek die daaropvolgende Oos-Afrikaanse verhale onder twee kategorieë. In die eerste kategorie sluit ek In an Brown Mantle (1972) deur Peter Nazareth en The Gunny Sack (1989) deur M.G. Vassanjiin, as twee romans wat Asiërs se koloniale geskiedenis en hul toetrede tot die post-onafhanklikheid bedeling uitbeeld (verbeeld) (imagine), met die klem op die wyse waarop hierdie oorgang begrippe van samehorigheid kompliseer. In die tweede kategorie kyk ek na The Feast of the Nine Virgins (1995) deur Jameela Siddiqi, No Place Like Home (1996) deur Yasmin Alibhai en Migritude (2010) deur Shaila Patel as voorbeelde van post-1990 verhale wat probleme met die politieke teenreaksies en verskuiwings van Asiër-onderdane vanuit Oos-Afrika na wêreldstede aanspreek. As deel van die erkenning van die totaliserende en onderdrukkende kapasiteit van kultuur, vra die drie skrywers – as Indiërs en as wêreldburgers – die diaspora om sy rol in die opstook van politieke teenreaksie teen sy teenwoordigheid in Oos-Afrika onder oënskou te neem.

Bollywood cinema continues to evolve. As a result, it has become a transnational/cultural role player for Indian audiences worldwide. There has always been a strong link between Bollywood cinema and Indian society. Over the years, it has contributed to the dialogue on women’s roles and position in Indian society. In the past, Bollywood filmmakers were faithful to representations of women who were bound by patriarchal structures in the sense that they were expected to be loyal to ancient Indian traditions and belief-systems. Based on the increase in Indian migration, contemporary Bollywood filmmakers are now catering to the demands of the Indian diaspora and therefore, a more global market. The impact of transnationalism on the representation of women in many Bollywood films has further added to the creation of open spaces for the Bollywood heroine. In this regard, the films of auteur director Karan Johar are valuable because they provide audiences with material that suggests re-thinking patriarchal structures in a transnational world. This study will examine the representation of women in three selected films of Johar within the framework of feminist theory (Indian context). The impact that transnationalism has had on the Indian diaspora and the manner in which this translates into the narratives and representations of female characters in Bollywood films will be discussed. / Afrikaans & Theory of Literature / D. Litt. et Phil. (Theory of Literature)

Bollywood cinema continues to evolve. As a result, it has become a transnational/cultural role player for Indian audiences worldwide. There has always been a strong link between Bollywood cinema and Indian society. Over the years, it has contributed to the dialogue on women’s roles and position in Indian society. In the past, Bollywood filmmakers were faithful to representations of women who were bound by patriarchal structures in the sense that they were expected to be loyal to ancient Indian traditions and belief-systems. Based on the increase in Indian migration, contemporary Bollywood filmmakers are now catering to the demands of the Indian diaspora and therefore, a more global market. The impact of transnationalism on the representation of women in many Bollywood films has further added to the creation of open spaces for the Bollywood heroine. In this regard, the films of auteur director Karan Johar are valuable because they provide audiences with material that suggests re-thinking patriarchal structures in a transnational world. This study will examine the representation of women in three selected films of Johar within the framework of feminist theory (Indian context). The impact that transnationalism has had on the Indian diaspora and the manner in which this translates into the narratives and representations of female characters in Bollywood films will be discussed. / Afrikaans and Theory of Literature / D. Litt. et Phil. (Theory of Literature)

The theoretical challenge of conceptualising South African Indianess is suffused with a plethora of variables that suggest complexity. While being misleadingly homogenous, Indian identity encompasses a multitude of expressions. This thesis seeks to reconceptualise notions of South African Indianess through personal narrative. The research context is contemporary South Africa with a specific focus on Johannesburg’s East Rand Reef. Inspired by the dearth of literature on contemporary Indianess this study addresses the gap in the present discourse. Following the autoethnographic work of Motzafi-Haller (1997) and Narayan (1993) the thesis presents a layered narrative by juxtaposing the experiences of research participants with my own. Using multi-sited autoethnographic data the thesis explores the question of what it means to be Indian in relation to South Africa’s Apartheid past. By drawing on concepts in popular diaspora theory and critiquing their application, the thesis illustrates the inadequacies inherent in the definitions of diaspora and suggests a broader understanding of its application. Through exploring layers of Indianess the thesis illustrates the inherent complexity in reconceptualising South African Indianess. The study suggests that as a result of changing global and local flows, South African Indians are reconceptualising what it means to be South African Indian.