WE IN SOUTH Africa are the descendants and inheritors of the Indian diaspora. To inherit is to be given a gift, indeed many gifts: the riches of culture, history, tradition, memory, family, community, love. To be inheritors is also to be time-travellers, to live simultaneously in the present (here and now); in the past (the places and people we came from), and in the future (the unfolding of what we are becoming, people both old and new).
Diasporic becoming happens over and over again.
First, leaving the homeland, and second, creating new homes, new ways, new lives, that bind a community in multiple ways, within itself, to its new land and that land’s people and histories, and also to the memory of the homeland. We here are Indian by ethnicity,…