Performing History and Producing “Culture”: Ronnie Govender's 1949 and Indian South African History

The 1940s serves as a pivotal decade in the modern history of both South Asia and South Africa through two long-lasting processes that mark the modern history of both regions. In South Asia, the complex and multi-directional process of decolonization began in 1947 through the violent partition of Bengal and the Punjab, resulting in two new nation-states of India and Pakistan. In 1948, the formal institution of apartheid, also took shape and directed formal politics and social relations in South Africa for nearly the next forty-six years until its dismantling in 1994. During this decade of World War II and impending transfers of power throughout the Asian and African imperial worlds, Indian activists in South Africa like Yusuf Dadoo had traveled frequently to India and many Indian politicians, such as Mohammed Ali Jinnah, and Jawaharlal Nehru, commented extensively on South Africa’s political situation as well as the Indian role in South Africa’s future. I begin a conversation about the transnational nature of Indian political identity during this decade with the appearance of Ronnie Govender’s play 1949, about the Indo-African riots that occurred in Natal in the summer of that year. Through an analysis of the play, its production history in the 1990s and 2000s, and an investigation of the social history of the riots and what images they brought forth, I argue that Indians in South Africa in the apartheid period (1948-1994) constructed a romantic sensibility of Indian history and “culture” via continual emphasis on imagery from the 1940s decade, both from India and South Africa. Far from  simply replicating Indian anti-colonial politics, South African Indians were selectively appropriating particular Indian symbols and imagery that appealed directly to South African political exigencies, yet reproduced a version of Indian “culture” that cemented apartheid boundaries of race.