Sugar-coated stories? Plantation literature by selected South African Indian writers

Abstract

This article will focus on what can be called plantation literature in South African: that is, writing which has as its spatial focus sugar farms or plantations, defined as single units of agricultural production that raise crops for local consumption and export, largely situated on the KwaZulu-Natal coastal belt. The term ‘plantation’ is more commonly used in the Atlantic world but, in common with the sugar plantations in South Africa linked to the Indian Ocean, the communities of such farms in the nineteenth century were characterized by the existence of two sets of people: a wealthy elite of plantation owners and a large, poor population of plantation workers. The descendants of such labourers – in South Africa comprising Indian indentured workers from the subcontinent – together with descendants of ‘passenger’ Indians, have survived to tell the tales of their forefathers and, by extension, their own. The literature that has emerged from this theme,‘plantation literature’, engages with issues of memory, suffering, identity and bearing witness to the past.The 150th anniversary of the arrival of the first indentured Indian labourers in South Africa in 2010 saw a spike in the number of works written by South African Indian writers, with the ‘sugar texts’ prominent among them.A few will be discussed in this article. In particular the work of Aziz Hassim’s Revenge of Kali (2009. Johannesburg: STE Publishers), Rubendra Govender’s Sugar Cane Boy (2008. Reservoir Hills: Bambata Publishing), Neelan Govender’s Girrmit Tales (2008. Durban: Rebel Rabble) and Tholsi Mudly’s A Tribute to our Forefathers (2011. Wandsbeck: Reach Publishers) will be studied as examples of engagement with plantation literature by selected South African Indian writers.

Key words:

• Neelan Govender
• Rubendra Govender
• Aziz Hassim
• identity
• indenture
• memory
• Tholsi Mudly
• South African Indian writing
• sugar plantation

Notes

1 This is true too of the literary movement described as ‘coolitude’, which can be defined as ’an intellectual interpretation, a poetic and artistic immersion into the world of the vanished coolie’ (Carter and Torabully 2002, back cover). Torabully wrote in 1996:

It is impossible to understand the essence of coolitude without charting the coolies’voyage across the seas. That decisive experience, that coolie odyssey, left an indelible stamp on the imaginary landscape of coolitude … The crossing of the Kala Pani constitutes the first movement of a series of abusive and culturally stifling situations. By making the crossing central, Coolitude avoids any essentialism and connection with an idealized Mother India, which is clearly left behind. It discloses the coolie’s story which has been shipwrecked (‘erased’) in the ocean of a Western-made historical discourse as well as a world of publication and criticism. (in Carter and Torabully 2002: 11, 15)

An adaptation of the negritude and créolité movements which, however, gives particular focus to Indian diaspora, coolitude as an artistic movement combines the experiences of indentured labourers wherever they were sent in the colonial world. As Desai and Vahed point out, kuli in Tamil ‘referred to payment for menial work for persons from the lowest levels in the industrial labour market’ (2007, 13) – the conflation of people into money neatly sums up the dehumanizing effect of the indenture system. Changed to ‘coolie’, the word went on to assume racist connotations during South Africa’s apartheid era. ‘Coolitude’ in name and aim is, thus, in essence a project of reclamation and a re-imagining of the ‘coolie odyssey’ world-wide.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lindy Stiebel

LINDY STIEBEL is Professor Emeritus of English Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. She is also currently Visiting Professor at CISA, University of the Witwatersrand. Her research interests are linked by a deep interest in the relationship between writers and place: the South African colonial and post-colonial novel with a special focus on Lewis Nkosi; Indian Ocean studies, particularly literary interconnections between South Africa and Mauritius; and literary tourism. Older research interests include the maps and journals of Thomas Baines, together with Rider Haggard’s ‘African romances’.