Performing History and Constructing ‘Culture’: Ronnie Govender's 1949 and the Romanticism of Historical Memory

Abstract

Though both South Asian and South African literary and cultural studies boast deep critical traditions, rarely have critics specifically focused on dramatic literature and the performative acts of Indian South Africans. Theatre – as an aesthetic genre as well as a social institution – has been remarkably under-theorised within Indian Ocean communities, even though its power in Indian South African communities and within South African history and culture has been amply documented and analysed In theatre studies of South Asia, scholars have pushed new frontiers about the studies of colonial modern theatre as well as post-independence Indian theatres, inspired by a performance-studies turn, but the push to link theatre and performance studies with Indian Ocean, and migrant, contexts has yet to fully manifest within scholarly circles. Through an examination of Ronnie Govender's play 1949, this article argues that theatre as a medium offers the opportunity to create specific versions of history and community identity not visible in prose literature or the novel. These versions of history and community identity are analysed with reference to the broader history of South Africa as well as the manners in which Govender's history both incorporates particular aspects of earlier definitions of Indian identity in South Africa and innovates to create images of Indo-African shared spaces.

Key words:

• Ronnie Govender
• Indian South Africans; 1949 riots
• history and memory
• Durban
• Gandhi
• theatre and performance studies

Note on Contributor

Neilesh Bose is a historian of modern South Asia, cultural and intellectual history, diasporas and migrations, and the history and politics of theatre and performance. His books include Beyond Bollywood and Broadway: Plays from the South Asian Diaspora (2009), Recasting Region: Language, Culture, and Islam in Colonial Bengal (2014), and Culture and Power in South Asian Islam: Defying the Perpetual Exception (2015).

Notes

1. In the conclusion of Reconsiderations, Ronit Frenkel (2010) states that fiction has been the main object of critical attention to the neglect of other genres.

2. All page references are to the unpublished playscript (R Govender 1949) in the author's possession.

3. One particular example is Gandhi's notorious 1896 protest against the ‘invidious distinction’ of shared ‘native’ and ‘Indian’ entrance to the Durban Post Office, as well as the anxiety about how laws in colonial South Africa would ‘degrade the Indian to the position of the Kaffir’ (CW 1:229).

4. Personal interview with Jailoshini Naidoo (9 September 2014).

5. Ibid.

6. See Partha Chatterjee (2002:1–18).

7. See Lorenzo Veracini (2010), as well as Neilesh Bose (2014).

8. A Time of Memory (Govinden 2008) explores the work of Aziz Hassim, Imraan Coovadia and Sita Gandhi as a lens into the broader contours of memory in South African Indian contexts.