ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the historical and contemporary ties between the Indian diaspora in South Africa and different cultural coordinates abroad. These include India as a product of Empire, transnational sites of Islamic solidarity, and a crass materialism suggestive of Western modernity. The chapter explores and destabilises the notion of cultural authenticity on which patriarchal and heteronormative controls over female bodies often depend. Focusing on the inherent malleability and mobility of Indianness as a cluster of cultural identities, the chapter shows how a transformative gender politics emerges from within a dynamic and inclusive Indianness, despite attempts to police fictions of authenticity from within. The chapter also traces the constitutive overlaps between certain constructions of diasporic Indianness and the residue of apartheid biopolitics in the present. The relationship between same-sex sexualities and the Indian diaspora is explored using Shamim Sarif’s novel The World Unseen (2001) and Zinaid Meeran’s novel Saracen at the Gates (2009). These novels are used to chart the transnational routes of cultural flows and their restless transformations in apartheid and post-apartheid settings.
