In the preface to her memoir Dancing with Destiny, Urmila Jhaveri recounts an incident that occurred after she moved from Dar es Salaam to New Delhi in 2009. One morning while driving in the busy streets of New Delhi, she attempts to buy a papaya from a street vendor. Noticing that she is a foreigner, he quotes an exorbitant price. Her driver gets out of the car to help her negotiate, but he forgets the keys inside and they both get locked out of the car. While waiting for help to arrive amidst the bustle of traffic and people in the Indian capital, 78-year-old Jhaveri suddenly becomes aware of the acute foreignness of the space around her. Having lived her entire life in East Africa where her parents had migrated from Gujarat in the early decades of the last century, the place that is supposedly the land of her familial origin strikes her as utterly unfamiliar: “Suddenly,” she writes,

This passage recalls Salman Rushdie’s influential essay on diasporic writing, “Imaginary Homelands.” Upon his return to Bombay after having lived away for several years, Rushdie encounters the city of his childhood home to be stripped of all familiarity. Echoing the disjunction between Rushdie’s “lost home in a lost city” and the foreignness of his home city’s present form, Jhaveri’s paradoxical experience of rootlessness precisely in a place where her roots lie reveals a fissure between her Indian identity and the space marked as “India.”²

However, there is an important distinction between Rushdie’s lost home and Jhaveri’s absent homeland. Although both Rushdie and Jhaveri conceive of their relationship with “India” through the imagination, their imagination is shaped by two very different geographies. Having lived away from India for many years, Rushdie is incapable of reclaiming the lost homeland of the past but can relate to it only through memories that become “imaginative truth” about a place where he belonged.³ Meanwhile, although Jhaveri too feels alienated in the space marked as India, the disconnect has more to do with her memories of a different place that she considers home. Rather, like Ananda Devi’s “l’Inde mythique qui m’habite” [mythical India that inhabits me], the India of Jhaveri’s mind – that runs in her “blood” and defines every aspect of her life from the food she eats to the language she speaks and clothes she wears – is located in the “familiar Dar es Salaam” in Tanzania rather than Delhi, the center of the geopolitical territory known as India.⁴ The difference between the two experiences of diaspora lies in the nature of the relationship of loss to the place considered home. Rushdie’s India is located in the past – in his past to be precise – which he can reconstruct and reclaim through his memories, no matter how fragmented and untrustworthy they may be. By contrast, for Jhaveri, the place she claims as home has never been in India but carries a trace of an earlier migration across the ocean to East Africa.

Works by Eastern African authors of Indian descent such as M. G. Vassanji and Sophia Mustafa from Tanzania, and Ananda Devi and Barlen Pyamootoo from Mauritius often evoke aspects of Indian life and landscape in the diasporic locations away from India – whether by reproducing their cultures, beliefs, and traditions or simply through the memories of places associated with the subcontinent. Such imaginative evocations of India from their particular diasporic locations give us the opportunity to consider the ways in which these texts negotiate national belonging and diasporic affiliation within the shifting discourses of racial difference in the Indian Ocean marked by histories of slavery, indenture, and colonialism. The previous two chapters demonstrated how literary texts repurpose Indian Ocean linkages from the past to reframe colonial racial narratives in East Africa and nationalist inscriptions of gender and sexuality in the Indian context. Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Desertion (2005), examined in Chapter 2, excavates repressed Indian Ocean intimacies disrupting nationalist narratives of racial difference in East Africa. Meanwhile, Ananda Devi’s Indian Tango (2007), discussed in Chapter 3, affirms queer intimacy as a mode of diasporic affiliation, challenging the Indian nation’s gendered construction as an insular political and territorial unit. This chapter connects the threads from these two preceding chapters with a comparative reading of two texts that engage with racial politics and ethnonationalisms inflected by Indian Ocean migration histories that link India to East Africa and Mauritius. Mauritian writer Barlen Pyamootoo’s Bénarès (1999) and Tanzanian writer Sophia Mustafa’s In the Shadow of Kirinyaga (2002) both evoke the proximity and distance created by the ocean in order to negotiate their belonging to their respective African locales. Bénarès alludes to the Indian city of Benares through its namesake in Mauritius, but instead of evoking India as a diasporic homeland, it calls attention to the Mauritian Bénarès, a sugar estate overwritten by its accumulative histories of displacement from the time of slavery and indenture to the closing of the mill in the 1960s. Similarly, Mustafa’s ethnographic novel places its descriptions of Indian cultural practices amidst racially stratified colonial East African society, where diasporic cultural integrity is sustained by dispossession and exploitation of Africans on the one hand and sexual control of Indian women on the other. Both novels deploy diasporic memory anarchivally, that is, instead of affirming a nostalgic attachment to a distant “homeland,” their diasporic consciousness uncovers local histories of displacement and dispossession as inextricably linked to the experience of diaspora. In other words, rather than dwelling on the trauma of separation from the place of origin, they express – to recall Avtar Brah’s theorization of diaspora space – “the intertwining of the genealogies of dispersion with those of ‘staying put’” by turning to the traumas constitutive the places of settlement.⁵ Diasporic memory drifts back from an ancestral homeland to the adoptive land, revealing their entanglements with Black mobility and migration in the Indian Ocean.

The concept of diaspora has offered powerful critiques of discourses of fixed origin.⁶ Diaspora is generally defined by its consciousness of having lost a place of origin, real or imagined, that is different from the place where the community has come to settle, often, but not always, by force or necessity. In his study of South Asian diasporic literature, Vijay Mishra locates the trauma of separation from homeland as a central feature of diasporic consciousness, resulting in an awareness of living in displacement, often made acute by experiences of discrimination and exclusion. However, Mishra cautions against collapsing historical differences and homogenizing the experience of migration to a single traumatic form. Mishra, for instance, distinguishes the “old diaspora” that emerged from the nineteenth and early twentieth century migrations from South Asia to European colonies, primarily through indenture, from the “new diaspora” associated with the post-1960s migration to Western countries in the wake of globalization and hypermobility.⁷ Likewise, even among the “old” diaspora, the Mauritian and East African Indian diasporas reflect very different historical experiences in terms of the social and political circumstances of their migration and settlement. The trauma of displacement, specifically the experience of the sea voyage and the ordeals of the plantation life, plays a central role in the diasporic imaginary associated with indenture.⁸ Mariam Pirbhai notes that the indenture narrative “memorializes ancestral struggle in the formation of character and … advancement of communal unity and cultural preservation.”⁹ Moreover, the system of indenture is historically and structurally linked to the institution of slavery and its abolition that preceded it. The experience of diaspora in Mauritius is shaped by the “seriality of abolition, indenture, and transportation,” to quote Antoinette Burton, or what Lisa Lowe calls “the intimacies of four continents” involving “the circuits, connections, associations, and mixings of differentially laboring peoples.”¹⁰ Mauritian poet Khal Torabully emphasized this intertwined past in his theorization of “coolitude” as an artistic horizon for the Indian plantation experience. Coolitude, as a diasporic imaginary, derives not from India as a place of cultural or ethnic origin, but rather through interactions between the descendants of the enslaved and the indentured peoples, “an encounter, an exchange of histories, of poetics or visions of the world, between those of African and Indian descent, without excluding other sources.”¹¹

By contrast, Indian migrants in colonial East Africa during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries comprised of a mix of wealthy merchants, small-scale traders, civil servants, as well as indentured workers brought to build the railway. The relative proximity of East Africa to the Indian subcontinent, facilitated by well-established trade and transportation routes, allowed East African Indians – especially those with economic and social resources – to maintain familial, cultural, and economic ties to their places of origin.¹² Drawing on Eduard Glissant’s taxonomy, Dan Ojwang classifies them as a “transplanted” rather than a “transferred” diaspora, as they have “retained material rather than simply imaginary links with the subcontinent.”¹³ This continued affiliation, in conjunction with segregationist policies under the colonial rule, reinforced the “the stereotype of insularity” that perceives East African Indians as resistant to integrating socially, culturally, and economically into the larger East African society.¹⁴ If the experience of indenture and plantation life constitutes a collective trauma for the Mauritian Indian diaspora, Mishra locates the trauma for East African Indians in their experience of discrimination, exclusion, and persecution with the rise of racial nationalism in the late twentieth century.¹⁵ East African Indian writing, thus, responds to the tension between their diasporic affiliations to India, on the one hand, and the exigencies of African nationalism resulting from the end of the colonial rule and the rise of independent nation-states on the other.¹⁶ As Ojwang has argued, for some writers like Bahadur Tejani, the diasporic cultural inheritance was “burdensome,” preventing the integration of the community into a new national culture; meanwhile, for others, like M. G. Vassanji, pan-Indian identity does not preclude cultural identification with Africa but allows him to affirm a migrant subjectivity that rejects essentializing conflation of culture and nation.¹⁷

These differences notwithstanding, diasporic locations in the shared Indian Ocean space are constitutive of the general tension between historical ties to continental Africa and South Asia. In both Mauritius and East Africa, after the retreat of European imperial powers, the question of who can lay claim to the nation was tied up with ideas of race that emerged from the histories of slavery, colonialism, and indenture. While an inward-looking nationalism in East Africa had to contend with the diasporic orientation of East African Indians, nation building in Mauritius was similarly torn between the demographically dominant Indo-Mauritians’ claim to the memories of indenture and the linkages of Afro-Mauritian identity to Africa and to the history of slavery.¹⁸ Ideologies of racial and civilizational hierarchies loom large over both diasporic contexts, as Indian communal identity in the diaspora often operated as a racializing device through an exclusionary politics of color and a deep-rooted practice of endogamy.¹⁹

My reading of Pyamootoo’s Bénarès and Mustafa’s In the Shadow of Kirinyaga in this chapter explores a different mode of negotiating relationship to place, one that refuses to give primacy to India as the source of diasporic or civilizational identity. My aim here is to challenge these texts’ function as diasporic narratives only about Indians in Africa. Placing these texts in a shared but differentiated discourses of race and colonialism in Mauritius and East Africa, I demonstrate that they inscribe Indian cultural spaces in diasporic locations not to express nostalgia for what Sana Aiyar calls the “civilizational homeland” or to make cultural claims on the locality against competing narratives of belonging; but instead, their diasporic imagination moves through local, unresolved histories of colonial, racial, and gendered violence, uniquely sustained by ongoing forms of displacement and dispossession.²⁰ We begin in the Mauritian village of Bénarès whose name evokes both a distant land and a violent past.

A Tale of Two or More Benareses

Situated at the crossroad of French and British colonialism and marked by histories of slavery and indenture similar to their Atlantic counterparts in the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean islands of Mauritius and Réunion have generated a fair share of academic discussion on the subject of diaspora, creolization, and hybridity.²¹ Theories of métissage, creolité, and creolization based on the Caribbean have been extended and deemed applicable to Creole and multiethnic societies in these islands.²² However, considering their geopolitical positioning, it is important to be attentive to their unique maritime histories.²³ The formation of Creole identities in multicultural societies on the one hand and the notion of national identity on the other have taken different pathways, even among the islands of Mauritius and Réunion. Given their different postcolonial trajectories, one island nation emerged as independent, while the other has remained an overseas department of France.²⁴ In Mauritius, people of Indian origin, most of whom are descendants of indentured laborers brought during the nineteenth and early twentieth century, form a numerical majority, unlike in the Caribbean or Réunion.

Addressing a lack of theorizations of creolité that take into account the specificities of the experience of indenture, Mauritian poet and theorist Khal Torabully coined the term “coolitude,” inspired by “Négritude” and the word “coolie,” a derogatory word used to refer to Indian laborers. It refers to a diasporic consciousness anchored in the ocean as the site of displacement of indentured laborers. Refusing to essentialize India as the place of origin and the nucleus of diasporic identity, Torabully establishes the sea voyage as “a place of destruction and creation of identity, which is a preliminary to the ‘enracinement’ in the host country, itself comprehended as a dynamic space of the diversity of perception and cultures.”²⁵ Coolitude draws heavily on theories of Black diasporic identity posited by Caribbean thinkers such as Aimé Césaire and Edouard Glissant. This centrality of the Black Caribbean tradition to coolitude suggests that indentured diasporic cultures cannot be isolated from the African diaspora.²⁶ For Torabully, coolitude aesthetics thrive on the opacity of language – a feature also central to Glissant’s poetics of relation – which makes language “risk the disturbances arising from contact among cultures.”²⁷ Coolitude rejects transparency of meaning and accentuates ambiguity by drawing on multiple and contradictory systems of signification, extracting language from predetermined meaning and making the construction of identity an interminable process. Torabully writes, “There is no better way of breaking a compelling strand of communication than by multiplying the levels of possible interpretations, by turning language itself into a contaminated medium where the precedence of transparency is caught in the web of contradictory meanings, in what Eco has called a semiotic game, ‘jeu de la sémiosis.’”²⁸ Refusing to reduce meaning to a monosemic “truth,” coolitude projects itself from its sociohistorical context, crossed over by memories of colonialism, servitude, and cultural encounters in the plantation.

It is within this “contaminated medium” that I locate Barlen Pyamootoo’s Bénarès. The title itself betrays this contamination, a polysemy in which diacritical marks disrupt the homophonic association with Benares, the ancient city in India. This instance of what Glissant might call an “opportune obscurity in translation” not only suggests a linguistic difference, but also recalls a history of dislocation that links the tiny island off the East African coast to the Indian subcontinent.²⁹ This gesture toward India is filled with ambivalence; while seeming to turn toward the loss and memory of the ancestral homeland associated with indenture, it also calls attention to itself: the diacritical marks tell a different story. The title in fact refers to a place in Mauritius, an old village originally founded as a plantation estate by French colonists in the eighteenth century in the southeast corner of the island. Historically, Bénarès was once a thriving village thanks to the success of the sugarcane factory. But, after the mill was closed as part of Mauritius’ efforts toward economic diversification, its economy deteriorated as people lost their jobs. Many moved elsewhere while those who stayed did odd jobs to get by. Bénarès is set in this context, focusing on three friends from the village, the unnamed narrator, Jimi, who is an older mechanic and also does odd jobs for a hotel, and young Mayi, who is a fisherman. After Mayi wins some money playing cards, the trio decide to take a trip to Port Louis and spend the night with prostitutes. The novel’s primary plot involves their drive to the city and their return trip with two prostitutes Mina and Zelda, whom they meet in Port Louis. The narrative does not betray any excitement or anticipation about the trip, since the trip itself is nothing out of ordinary for the characters. The description of the journey evokes “images of immobility, silence, and inevitability,” setting a tone of isolation, emptiness, and absence for the rest of the novel.³⁰ The novel’s simple language and minimalist narration add to the effect of desolation the characters feel about their village and their relationship to the nation that has abandoned them.

The sense of inertia and indifference persists throughout the novel but is momentarily diverted during their return journey, when the narrator recounts a trip he claims to have taken to the Indian city of Benares. He makes up this story to engage Zelda in conversation. Although it does not induce any significant change in mood or the characters’ attitude toward each other, this imagined memory interpolates the Mauritian landscape into a different geography. Stirring Zelda’s curiosity by explaining that there exists another Benares in India, the narrator describes Indian Benares as a sacred destination for Hindus who believe that dying in Benares will take them to Paradise. He then proceeds to describe the people he claims to have seen during his overseas visit: “il faut voir tous ces mourants qui arrivent de partout et à tout moment. Par train, bateau, rickshaw, voiture, et par avion quand ils viennent de très loin, d’un autre pays” [“you should see all those people who are dying arriving from everywhere the whole time, by train, boat, rickshaw, car and plane when they come from far away from another country.”].³¹ The novel juxtaposes this Indian Benares of the narrator’s mind – this city where people are arriving from everywhere to die – with the derelict state of Bénarès, the Mauritian village. As the conversation among the characters reveals, the latter Bénarès was abandoned by both the government and its people after its sugar mill, a vestige of the colonial-industrial era, was shut down. With its few people left unemployed, this forsaken village appears to be in mourning, its shuttered mill with erect chimney standing as a monument to a better time. When they reach the village at the end of their journey, Jimi describes the place as “un monument aux morts” (91) (a monument to the dead [my translation]).

On one level, death and abandonment thematically link the two cities, located at different historical and geographical junctures, such that “a momentary collapse [occurs] between the destination and the other place through which symbolically it was reached.”³² But on a different level, Indian Benares assumes a haunting presence in the novel, metonymically serving as a lost homeland for the Indian diaspora giving Mauritius its unique identity. The novel has inspired interpretations that read its reference to Benares as a reclamation of the memory of indenture and the atavistic links with India. Binita Mehta writes that the novel “carefully recreates the connection between the Indo-Mauritian diaspora and India. The connection is made through memory, Hindu religious iconography, the city of Benares, and the river Ganga.”³³ However, like Ananda Devi’s Indian Tango, Bénarès makes no overt references to Indian indenture or to historical or cultural links to India as the place of ancestral origin. In fact, it refuses to venture into that history: when Zelda asks why there are two places with the same name, the narrator casts the question aside as a past too distant to remember.

By placing any possible historical explanation for these dually named cities beyond memory, the narrator refuses a view of history that “would necessarily establish a hierarchy between the namesakes,” resisting the impulse to impose “chronology onto spatiality.”³⁴ The novel interrupts this historical closure through a gesture of forgetting, thereby, troubling the diasporic basis of a Mauritian nation that takes India as the place of ancestral origin and the source of identity, at the expense of local histories and processes of identity construction. By metonymically evoking Indian Benares while refusing it the status of historical sanctity, the novel questions the construction of Mauritius as what Patrick Eisenlohr calls “little India” – “a cultural politics in which the performance of diasporic traditions and allegiances to India as a land of origin becomes a hegemonic basis for cultural citizenship in Mauritius.”³⁵ The novel’s use of imaginative memory dismantles the semiotic edifice of India as the basis for Mauritian diasporic nationalism, allowing meaning to emerge from localized histories of slavery and indenture and experiences of socioeconomic marginalization. This forgetting of diasporic linkages is anarchival, in the sense that it is not an erasure of the past but a refusal of its force to determine the meaning of the present, specifically with regard to Mauritius’s cultural identity as a nation. The imaginative detour to the Indian city, on the one hand, evokes the sociocultural context of Mauritius as a Hindu-majority nation and the historical links to India via indenture. But on the other hand, it also keeps this explanation at bay allowing other histories to emerge.

Mauritius has often been represented as a paradigmatic case of multicultural and multiethnic coexistence, where a political culture based on “compromise and tolerance” has developed.³⁶ However, partly as an inheritance of the colonial era and partly due to the process of reconstituting ethnic identities after migration, Mauritian society has been structured around divisions that systematically separate communities along ethnic lines and sustain political, cultural, and socioeconomic inequalities.³⁷ The Mauritian constitution officially divides the population into four categories: “Hindu,” “Muslim,” “Sino-Mauritians,” and a “General Population” that includes both Franco-Mauritian and Afro-Mauritian Creoles. But due to the heterogeneity within these categories, diasporic processes have given rise to further cleavages based on factors such as language, religion, and ancestral origin.³⁸ Given the preeminence of diasporic identities over a “Mauritian” identity, which itself remains contested, various ethnic groups have turned to places outside the island to seek legitimacy for their ethnic identity, “cultivat[ing] to a high degree the feeling of belonging somewhere else.”³⁹

In order to approach the semiotics of “Benares” in Pyamootoo’s novel, it is important to understand the competing discourses of nationhood in the ethnically diverse and stratified Mauritian society as it emerged from the colonial rule. Over the years preceding the formal independence of Mauritius in 1968, the political discourses of Mauritian nationhood sought to reconcile the disparate histories and experiences of African, Asian, and European Mauritians under a unified national category of Mauricianisme. Mauricianisme offered an alternative to the communalist politics defined along the lines of race, ethnicity, and religion. However, various political groups appropriated the term to articulate their own political concerns. For instance, the Hindu-majority (center-left) labor party used the language of Mauricianisme as part of its rhetoric of Afro-Asian solidarity, while for its opposition, the Parti Mauricien Social Démocrate (PMSD) – representing an uneasy alliance between elite white Europeans and poor Afro-descendant Creoles – mauricianisme was an ideal of reconciliation that offered “a bulwark against anti-Black racism and the threat of ‘Hindu Domination.’”⁴⁰ During the decades following independence, the leftist party, the Mouvement Militant Mauricien (MMM), sought to define a unified national identity on the basis of Maurician Creole, as a vernacular shared by all Mauritians.⁴¹ This model of linguistic nationalism, however, did not succeed politically due to the resistance from the Hindu bourgeoisie that dominated state institutions since independence. Although spoken by the majority of Mauritians, Mauritian Creole was associated with enslaved Africans and their descendants. As a “transferred” diaspora – to recall Glissant’s taxonomy – Afro-descendant Mauritians lacked ongoing cultural or material attachments to Africa, and the language itself was established as a vernacular long before the beginning of Indian indenture. Thus, linguistic Creole nationalism threatened to displace the significance of diasporic “ancestral” cultures in the Mauritian nationalist imaginary and push Hindu Indo-Mauritians to the margins culturally and politically. As Patrick Eisenlohr writes, “despite its inclusivist pathos, Creole linguistic nationalism implies a reversal of the hegemonic order among ethnic groups in Mauritius, and was thus successfully checked as a political project by the Hindu state bourgeoisie.”⁴²

Thus, the political dominance of the Hindu community, also the largest ethnic group in Mauritius, has given rise to a hegemony of Hindu cultures and traditions tied to India within the cultural landscape of Mauritius as a nation. Anjali Prabhu notes that, with “the clear Indian majority for the electorate, the Indianness of Mauritius has been exalted and celebrated to an even greater degree” since independence in 1968.⁴³ The history of Indians in Mauritius, particularly that of suffering and struggle under indenture, claims a central place in the representation of national history, marginalizing other histories, including that of slavery. Prabhu observes that in his speech on the occasion of independence in 1968, the Mauritian Prime Minister acknowledged the historical significance and presence of various groups on the island, including indentured workers, seamen, traders, and even colonists, but omitted the enslaved who were brought primarily from the African continent.⁴⁴ Similarly, Indian languages get official recognition and institutional support over Creole, even though Creole is far more widely spoken. The politics of cultural pluralism thus ends up privileging the diasporic experiences of Indo-Mauritians with an orientation fixed toward India. As Nivoelisoa Galibert observes, “au plan global, le pays est africain puisque relevant de l’Afrique de l’Est et de l’océan Indien, mais asiatique dans sa représentation locale” [Overall, the country is African because it is connected to East Africa and the Indian Ocean, but it is Asian in its local representation (my translation)].⁴⁵

Considering the cultural politics of privileging Indian diasporic practices, spatial semiotics within the island have tended to gravitate toward India, deemed the land of the “ancestors.”⁴⁶ From the early days of Indian immigration, communities of Indian migrants have sought to bridge the distance to their homelands by recreating their cultures and lifestyles. After the 1870s, when the Indian indentured laborers who had been forced to squat in camps inside sugar estates were allowed access to land, they were able to develop villages where they were “independent to reproduce the social and cultural organisations which they had inherited from their ancestral land, [and] to undergo a ‘retour aux sources’ to go back to their roots.”⁴⁷ The villages enabled Indian communities to recreate the sacred geographies of their homes and also facilitated their access to political processes.⁴⁸

A notable instance of the re-creation of sacred geography is the annual pilgrimage to the Grand Bassin, a crater lake situated in the Savanne district in the southern part of Mauritius, which was renamed “Ganga Talao,” literally “the Lake of the Ganges,” – suggesting a symbolic link between the lake and the river Ganges in India, considered sacred by Hindus. The pilgrimage to the lake was already in practice by the end of the nineteenth century, spurred by the widespread belief that it was connected to the river Ganges through an underground channel. The first person to make the pilgrimage was a priest from Bihar named Pandit Jhummon Giri Napal Gossagne who went on a search for the lake after dreaming about its connection to the Ganges. He named the lake Pari Talao after the angels, “pari,” who were dancing on the island in the middle of the lake in his dreams. In 1972, the lake was officially named Ganga Talao after the head priest consecrated it by pouring water brought from the Ganges river in Haridwar, an ancient Hindu pilgrimage site in Northern India.⁴⁹ Since independence, the state has been actively working with Hindu organizations to turn the lake into “a major and well-endowed site of Hindu pilgrimage.”⁵⁰ Notably, the Hindu Maha Sabha, one the earliest Hindu organization in Mauritius, received a 99-year lease on the land around the lake to develop it as a pilgrimage site.⁵¹ Temples consecrated to various Hindu deities have been constructed on its shores and around the area, recreating various pilgrimage sites on the banks of the Ganges.⁵² In the sacralization of Grand Bassin/Ganga Talao through the construction of shrines and the performance of pilgrimages, we can see an iteration of the holy city of Benares, the most important Hindu pilgrimage site along the Ganges – located in the state of Uttar Pradesh, which also happens to be the region of origin for a large number of immigrants who came to Mauritius as indentured workers. Thus, history and myth intersect in this annual pilgrimage in order to sustain an imagined continuity between the diaspora and the Indian homeland. Furthermore, during the height of indenture, recruiters often “station[ed] themselves on the roads leading to centres of pilgrimage” luring stranded pilgrims onto ships going overseas.⁵³ The pilgrimage to the Ganga Talao by the descendants of those whose pilgrimage had turned into a voyage across the sea more than a century ago brings a poetic closure to the historical experience of indenture as a traumatic event of separation from one’s homeland. The spatial and performative iconicity of Ganga Talao reinscribes the sacred space of the Ganges and the Indian Benares onto the diasporic landscape of Mauritius as a means to reclaim the space of migration. As Mathieu Claveyrolas argues, “As a pilgrimage centre and a sacred place, the Ganga Talao complex not only sacralizes the lake, it Hinduizes the whole Mauritian territory through the pilgrims’ circulations connecting various villages.”⁵⁴ Recreating the Indian Benares through myth, ritual, and architecture, Ganga Talao affirms diasporic memory of India as origin.

By contrast, the Bénarès of Pyamootoo’s novel reaches into a different past through its forgetting. The question about the village’s name requires one to look further back in the past, to the time of slavery. Unlike the Ganga Talao, the village was not founded by displaced Indian laborers seeking to consecrate their collective memory of a distant homeland. Instead, Bénarès was a name given to an area of land in the Savane district after it was acquired by two Frenchmen, Jean-Baptiste Chevalier and Jean Law de Lauriston in the late eighteenth century during the French colonization of the island. These men were colonial administrators of the French colonies in India in 1772, more than half a century before first indentured laborers from India stepped onto Mauritius.⁵⁵ According to twentieth-century Mauritian archivist and historian Auguste Toussaint, it was most likely Frenchman Pierre Charles Bourgault who gave the estate the name of Bénarès. Bourgault had come to the island in 1767, then called Ile de France, “in search of fortune,” and had spent a little over four years in India before taking on the management of the estate.⁵⁶ The name “Bénarès” appears for the first time in a document of land survey dated January 1779.⁵⁷

Given the lack of an archival explanation for the reason behind naming the estate after the ancient Indian city, Toussaint finds the name ill suited to the space. He writes: “Ce nom, évocateur de richesse and de faste orientale, colle assez mal au paysage de la Grand Savanne qui ferait plutôt penser à certains coins de Bretagne. Mégalomanie sans doute” [This name, evocative of the oriental richness and splendor, clings incongruously to the landscape of the Grand Savanne which rather makes one think of a certain corner of Britain. Megalomania no doubt. (my translation)].⁵⁸ We might read this misnomer as characteristic of European colonial conquest, an act of imagination fueled by egotistic dreams of power. The act of naming or renaming colonized lands was the means by which “Europeans planted their own memories on whatever they contacted.”⁵⁹ But here, memory itself reeks of another conquest in a distant land. This act of naming stands for colonial reinscription and is a witness to a double conquest of two very dissimilar lands by very similar agents.⁶⁰

The Indian city of Benares was officially under the administration of East India Company by the time the Mauritian estate of Bénarès developed into a plantation where hundreds of enslaved peoples brought from distant places in Africa and India worked to produce various cash crops. According to Toussaint, an inventory of the estate of Bénarès from 1780 shows that it contained “5,136 arpents, … 412 esclaves des deux sexes et 240 bêtes à cornes” [5,136 arpents, … 412 slaves of both sexes and 240 beasts].⁶¹ The displacement of the name mirrors the dislocation of the enslaved, who remain nameless and placeless in the historical records, reduced to objects to appear as statistics and inventory alongside other property. The silence in the archives regarding the “412 esclaves” refuses any humanity to the enslaved associated with Bénarès, as their names, their languages, and their places of origin are all lost in the displacement and degradation by “the economy of theft and the power over life.”⁶² Caught in the disjuncture between the name and the place, the story of “Bénarès,” the misnomer, encapsulates the impossibility of the enslaved who lived on the estate to belong anywhere except to inventories.

Unlike the enslaved workers, indentured workers arriving in the following century would carry their names mostly in mangled forms; and their languages and places of origin, preserved in historical records as well as in communal memory, would enable their descendants to reconstruct their past and the places left behind. These preserved histories make it possible for Indo-Mauritians to inscribe their imagined homelands on the Mauritian landscape and to recreate Benares and the Ganges in sites such as Grand Bassin/Ganga Talao. However, predating the arrival of the first indentured laborers from India, the name Bénarès attaches itself to the Afro-descendant Creoles and their presence long before the beginning of the indenture system; its meaning diffuses between the memories of indenture and slavery; its opacity resists an occultation of the past of slavery.

We see this refusal when Mina interrupts the conversation between Zelda and the narrator about the Indian Benares. She asks:

The narrator dodges Mina’s question, which requires him to draw on a distant past. Instead, he appears reluctant to specify the event of the naming: an event, as the archives reveal, predicated on the double violence of colonialism and slavery, of displacement and dispossession. He instead projects on Mina an expression of innocence that can only affectively register the memory of the event without naming the event itself. The narrator is unable to read the expression but can only feel the pain and the offence. This adds an air of ambiguity to the “un événement douloureux” [“painful event”], opening it to interpretations and making him “hesitate between [multiple] answers.” It suggests that the pain lingers, and the wound is far from healing. One can only acknowledge the wound, the rupture in time and history, by “look[ing] away slightly” [“détourner légèrement les yeux”]. A direct look would define it, giving it the stamp of time and turning it into a fact of history; but one can only speak of the suffering it continues to inflict.

The pain and sadness in this passage, which also permeates the rest of the text, issue from the history of exploitation and uprooting associated with the sugar industry in Mauritius. While the story of the misnomer discloses the histories of slavery and indenture under which the sugar industry flourished during the nineteenth century, the novel reveals a different, more contemporary story of Bénarès, a story that begins where the era of sugar ends for its inhabitants. The sugar mill in Bénarès was closed in 1968, coincidentally the year of Mauritius’s independence, in order to centralize the processing of sugar and cut production costs.⁶³ While the move increased sugar production as it was meant to, it also caused many village mill workers to lose their jobs. Thirty years after the mill was shut down, we follow Pyamootoo’s characters on their ride back to Bénarès, when Jimi, the older companion of the narrator and a former mill worker, recounts the devastation caused in the village following the mill closure. He explains: “Les propriétaires trouvaient qu’il y avait trop de moulins pour si peu de cannes. Ils ont dit qu’il fallait en fermer certains, que c’était pour diminuer les pertes. Je pense que c’était plutôt pour augmenter leurs profits” (44) (“The owners thought there were too many mills for so small a cane crop. They said that some had to be shut to reduce their losses. Increase their profits, more like.” [27]). The logic of profit renders the lives of the villagers disposable. Since neither the government nor the factory owners offered any kind of redress for villagers’ upended lives, Jimi recounts how they “felt forsaken” and “abandoned by everyone”:

The image of drifting at sea evokes the ocean voyage of the enslaved laborers who were first brought to Mauritius to work in estates like Bénarès in the eighteenth century. It portrays the monotony and distress of the ship journey for those who were unaccustomed to life at sea and were suddenly cut off from their habitual world on land. For Jimi, Bénarès becomes like a ship full of people left with nothing but memories that seem happy and idyllic, and hence nowhere else to turn to except the past. Without explicitly naming an event and fixing it in the past, this passage reveals a repetition of the originary violence that gave Bénarès its existence as a sugar estate. The metaphorical rupture of Bénarès from the world and the displacement of its inhabitants reenact the uprooting and enslavement of people throughout the Indian Ocean world in the eighteenth century, followed by the uprooting and exploitation of people from Asia in the nineteenth century.

Jimi’s nostalgic description of the land also points to the mythification of the past as a utopian state of autochthony, a romance mirroring the mythification of India as the land of “ancestors” in the Indo-Mauritian national imaginary. It mimics a diasporic consciousness, but without a physical displacement generally associated with a diaspora. However, on closer examination, the portrait of the “good old days” of working in the mill does not appear so idyllic: the “eyes still misty with sleep” suggest long working hours, the stones being “heaped into piles” speak of grueling physical labor, and their feet not “making any noise as [they] walked up to the mill in the mud or the powdery dust or through the wild, climbing grass” indicates the lack of shoes or proper clothing necessary for working in the cane fields, hence atrocious working conditions; all this while being shouted at by white owners whose orders “claquaient comme des insultes” (48) (“stung like insults” [30]). This portrait of exploitation and dehumanization of the workers illuminates a strange irony in Jimi’s assertion of “being one” with the earth, the stones, and the canes. The workers were treated as if they were part of the fields, as if their labor were meant to be consumed by the mill just as it consumes the cane to churn out profit for the owners. This memory of colonial industrial Mauritius evokes Marx’s critique of the subordination of labor to capital: “It is no longer the worker who employs the means of production, but the means of production which employ the worker. Instead of being consumed by him as material elements of his productive activity, they consume him as the ferment necessary to their own life-process, and the life-process of capital consists solely in its own motion as self-valorizing value.”⁶⁴ The inhabitants of Bénarès existed as the sources of labor to be absorbed and consumed by the mill, and ultimately to generate profit. Thus, their labor becomes redundant when more profit can be derived from elsewhere, following the same logic that led to the “emancipation” of slaves in the plantations who were to be replaced by “free” indentured labor.⁶⁵ As a village adrift, “à la dérive,” Bénarès accumulates the past of slavery and indenture in the event of the mill’s closing.

When the narrator brings Indian Benares into the conversation, his account of the imagined journey to the city occasionally returns to the Mauritian Bénarès – as if Benares provides a reflective surface, a means to circle back to his native village. For instance, when he describes the old and sick people who go to Benares to die, who don’t have anything to do but spend their remaining time contemplating the Ganges, he says they look as if they could be “à la plage” (68) [“at the beach” (44)]. This recalls the people in his village who go to the secluded beach to smoke a joint or, as described at the beginning of the novel, for a secret romance. Moreover, the dying people in Benares resemble the existence of the village itself in their isolation from the rest of the world: “Ils semblent absents, indifférents aux files qui avancent lentement, qui font parfois plus d’un kilomètre de long. Plus rien n’existe autour d’eux, ni la pluie, ni l’air qui est une fumée noirâtre, ni le soleil qui brûle. On ne voit qu’eux, ils sont seuls avec leurs dieux, seuls sur une terre qui ne les enfantera pas” (68–69) [“They seem as if they’re not there at all, indifferent to the slow-moving lines that sometimes are more than a kilometer long. Nothing around them exists anymore, neither the rain, nor the air that’s black with smoke, nor the boiling sun. They’re all you see, alone with their gods, alone on this earth that will no longer nurture them like a mother” [44]). Here the reader is reminded of Jimi’s earlier description of Bénarès as an island cut off from the rest of the world. The forsaken village of Bénarès mirrors the dying people in Indian Benares, who have been abandoned by this world. Just like Bénarès, they are absent, barely visible on the map of Mauritius. It is as if the narrator seeks to give some meaning to the existence of his village, as we can sense in the response of the Benaresi that the narrator imagines meeting in his trip to India, whom he tells of the existence of the African namesake city. The narrator asserts: “il était fier du coup d’habiter l’un d’eux, peut-être parce qu’il avait le sentiment de s’ouvrir au monde, de faire partie d’un réseau en quelque sort, qui devait lui paraître plutôt vaste et vaguement occulte, qui lui était en tout cas insoupçonné jusqu’alors” (76–77) (“he felt proud to live in one of them, maybe because it gave him the feeling of opening up to the world, of becoming part of some sort of network which must have seemed pretty vast and mysterious, which he’d never suspected existed until then” [49]). This idea of a “network” recalls Glissant’s poetics of relation in which “every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other.”⁶⁶ It is a network without roots, and also without hierarchies, since the awareness of the existence of two Benareses decenters one’s sense of place in the world, opening oneself up to the unknown and “mysterious” other as a site of indeterminacy.

But what is peculiar about the relation between the namesakes is that it is conditioned by the nonrelationality of these places and their people. What links these places is not the historical connection between India and Mauritius, but precisely their lack of relation: the indifference of the government and factory owners toward the village of Bénarès on the one hand and the dying people in Indian Benares, who “semblent absents” [“seem as if they are not there at all”] on the other. This relation through non-relationality therefore precludes any specific historical explanation that would fill in the gaps and give closure, where the cycle of displacement and dispossession, violence and suffering has not yet come to an end. The abandoned homes that the party passes by on their journey, the village men with no employment, and the city women forced into prostitution as early as age sixteen do not paint a picture of an island paradise, but of outcasts subject to the continuing economic deprivation, a community of exiles within their own country.

Through a minimalist narration that withholds rather than reveals, tentative and uncertain, the novel’s anarchival approach unmoors Bénarès from its Indian diasporic orientation, revealing the multipolarity of the Indian Ocean world embedded within the local histories of loss. The nonrelational relation thus diffuses the historical referent of Bénarès – not an archive containing the past but one that registers the violence of the past extending into the present. The final image of Bénarès that the novel leaves us with is that of the chimney of the abandoned mill standing in the middle of a cane field. While Mina calls it “un monument aux morts” [a monument to the dead], it is also a witness to the local history of slavery and indenture, an archive of displacement and exploitation associated with the sugar industry. The mill as an existential basis for Bénarès and its inhabitants also ties the place to a past grounded in Mauritius, rather than a diasporic past that looks elsewhere. If, as Engseng Ho writes, “Absence rather than presence, everywhere shapes diasporic experience,” then the defunct chimney as a memorial marks an absence of the ancestors of the inhabitants of Bénarès – not the “ancestors” who came from places like India, but the slaves, the maroons, the indentured workers, and the laborers, who kept the mill running for more than two centuries.⁶⁷

Like the “India” of Urmila Jhaveri’s mind, the Benares of the narrator’s mind is grounded in a place where he had spent his whole life. While evoking India through the name “Bénarès,” Pyamootoo carefully avoids referring directly to the Indian heritage that remains a major part of the Mauritian national imaginary. Indeed, the narrator refers to the pilgrims in Benares as “the Hindus,” as if they are part of a different, distant world. In the context of Mauritius, where Hindu Indo-Mauritians have a cultural dominance, this gesture allows local histories and processes to come to the fore.⁶⁸ By contrast, in other parts of East Africa, such as Tanzania and Kenya, Indian diasporic communities constitute a marginalized minority and have been able to maintain familial, cultural, and economic ties with India. The maintenance of such diasporic links has also deepened the racial division between the Indian communities and their African neighbors in ways that parallel the Hindu dominance in Mauritian cultural politics. The second half of this chapter turns to Tanzanian writer Sophia Mustafa’s work as a politician and a novelist to consider the reproduction of Indian cultural spaces in a racially stratified East African context.

Mustafa and the Question of Tanganyikan Identity

Nationalist discourses in continental East African nations during the twentieth century have been closely associated with African indigeneity. Postcolonial African discourses on Indians have been dominated by anti-Indian racism and xenophobia, rooted in the general perception of Indian immigrants in East Africa as middlemen and imperial collaborators who helped drain wealth and resources away from native inhabitants of the continent.⁶⁹ When East African nations gained independence, the fate of Indians living in the region, some of whom had been living there for several generations, became increasingly uncertain. The expulsion of Indians from Uganda in 1971 by Idi Amin was an extreme manifestation of anti-Indian resentment, frequently exploited by politicians and political parties to garner popular support. The 1964 Zanzibari revolution that ended Arab dominance of the island involved racial violence targeting both Arab and Indian communities, leading to their mass exodus from the island. After Tanganyika joined with Zanzibar in 1964 to form the Union of Tanzania, government policies under the influence of popular nationalist politics in both the mainland and islands were increasingly geared against the interests of Indians, many of whom were businessmen and petty traders. Racial tensions fueled by rhetoric and sometimes physical violence targeting racial minorities featured prominently in the years leading to Tanganyika’s independence in 1961. It was under such circumstances that Sophia Mustafa, an Indian immigrant in Tanganyika, rose as a politician and an elected member of the legislative council in 1958.⁷⁰ Although Mustafa was not a member of any political party, she stood as an Asian candidate supported by Julius Nyerere’s Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), and advocated for TANU’s goal of independence and complete self-government. She served on the Legislative Council in the years leading to independence (1958–61) and on the Tanganyika National Assembly afterward.

When the Legislative Council debated who should qualify for citizenship on the eve of Tanganyika’s independence, the loyalty of Indians to Tanganyika as a nation became a major point of contention. The antagonism toward Indian immigrants reflects the influence of colonial legacies as politicians struggled to define what constituted the postcolonial nation. Racial policies under the colonial rule restricted interactions between “Africans” considered “native” and “Indians” considered “nonnative” to a hierarchy that placed Indians socially and economically above Africans.⁷¹ The lack of social mechanisms to facilitate African–Indian interactions on an equal footing reinforced racist stereotypes existing among both groups. Despite living side-by-side in an interdependent existence, Indians and Africans formed what James Brennan, following J. S. Frunivall, calls a “plural society,” where different groups live separately while sharing the same space and political institutions.⁷² Therefore, when Tanganyikans sought to conceptualize their new nation, Indians as minority outsiders and former collaborators with the British emerged as the “other” against which the new national community could define itself. Given the differences within the indigenous African populace, Tanganyikan nationalism could not be based on a common ethnicity, language, or culture. Instead, the successful construction of a national identity depended largely on “the political construction of internal and external enemies of the nation, defined in terms of race and nationality.”⁷³ For most Tanganyikans, this enemy was the “Indian.”

In his study of the evolution of Tanganyika nationalism, Brennan notes that by the 1950s, the Swahili word for nation, taifa, came to connote both race and nation. In contrast to Mauritius’s Mauricianisme, that sought to reconcile racial and ethnic differences into a common Mauritian national identity, in Tanganyika, the idea of the nation as taifa became tied to continental identity and skin color.⁷⁴ The goal of the anticolonial nationalist movement led by TANU was to claim the nation’s territory for taifa, which was understood to be “a natural product of continental descent” and excluded immigrants whose ancestry was not linked to the African continent.⁷⁵

The citizenship bill of 1961 sought to grant “automatic citizenship” at independence to anyone “born in Tanganyika if at least one of their parents was also born in Tanganyika.”⁷⁶ This inclusive citizenship law would have made it possible for resident immigrants, both Europeans and Asians, to become Tanganyika’s citizens. The bill carried the spirit of Prime Minister Nyerere’s principle of nonracialism that does not grant any kind of privilege based on race. The bill faced sharp criticism from members of the opposition as well as the ruling party, who, claiming to speak for the majority, argued that automatic citizenship should only be granted to Black Tanganyikans. Granting citizenship to immigrant groups, they argued, risked perpetuating colonial structures of oppression, given the immigrants’ questionable loyalty to a new nation ruled by Africans. The social and cultural isolationism of various Indian communities, combined with their continued attachments to India through business and kinship ties, rendered their relationship to Tanganyika highly suspect in the eyes of African nationalists.

When the citizenship bill was introduced in October 1961, a heated debate ensued in the legislature, where the opponents of the bill argued for restricted conditional citizenship for the Indian residents. First, they took issue with the language of the bill that did not distinguish between Africans and non-Africans. They demanded the bill explicitly state that the country belongs to indigenous Africans, since nonindigenous Europeans and Indians who did not have ancestral ties to the land could not have the same claims. Furthermore, the opponents argued that equal citizenship would let racial inequality persist, as the immigrants would be able to use their existing wealth to further increase their economic standing and exploit indigenous Africans without property or capital.⁷⁷ Second, the opposition disputed the loyalty of the immigrants. The proposed bill was based on the principle that “possession of Tanganyika citizenship must entail a complete and wholehearted attachment and devotion to Tanganyika, and Tanganyika alone.”⁷⁸ Opponents of the bill challenged the assumption that non-African Tanganyikans, despite being born and having lived in Tanganyika, would or could be wholeheartedly loyal to the nation. Member of Parliament Kamaliza asked, “Would the Indians shoot the Indians in India for the sake of Tanganyikans; that is what we want know,” proclaiming that “we do not want people to have one leg in Tanganyika and one leg in Bombay.”⁷⁹ And finally, the question of loyalty was directly tied to the marital practice of the Indian community, bringing the issue of gender to the forefront of the debate. Critics were against a provision in the proposed bill that allowed non-Tanganyikan women who marry Tanganyikan citizens to register for citizenship. As discussed in Chapter 2, Indian migrants tended to maintain ties to their communities in India through marriage. Even though Indians formed less than 1 percent of the total population, opponents evoked an image of numerous Indian women crossing the sea to increase the Indian population in Tanganyika and undermine the African majority. In the eyes of the opponents of the bill, Indian women, with their subordinate position, divided loyalty, and reproductive role, were perceived to be a great threat to the racial integrity of the nation.

Among the legislators participating in this debate was Sophia Mustafa, who appears to have largely remained silent as these speeches were being made. However, many others, including Julius Nyerere, spoke in support of the bill, applauding its inclusiveness in regard to immigrant communities. Denouncing racial rhetoric that called for a discriminatory basis for citizenship, Nyerere strongly asserted that the government under his leadership “has rejected, and rejected completely, any ideas that citizenship, with the duties and the rights of citizenship of this country, are going to be based on anything except loyalty to this country.”⁸⁰ Mustafa was a great admirer of Nyerere – his ethics and leadership, based on nonracialism and equal protection for all citizens. Her speech to the Asian Association during her election campaign echoes Nyerere’s views on the responsibilities of Asians toward the new nation. Aware of the various distinctions even within the Asian community, she emphasized the need among the Asians to alter “their way of thinking of themselves as separate and distinct groups, whether based on language, religion, caste, or sex.” They should, she continued, “proceed further and identify themselves completely with the country as Tanganyika citizens.”⁸¹ Mustafa’s own unlikely rise in Tanganyika politics as an Asian woman can be understood as her effort to live by her own words. The Tanganyika Way, her personal narrative of overcoming gender and racial barriers toward political engagement, runs parallel to the narrative of the nation toward independence, providing “a model of a more participatory and performative civic engagement with nation building.”⁸² The “Tanganyika Way,” the text suggests, constitutes both the inclusion of the minority by the majority toward forming a national community, as well as the struggle of the minority against the status quo and stereotypes toward full participation in nation-building.

Mustafa’s utopian vision of national belonging is, however, riddled with contradictions, as revealed by her struggle to make her voice heard in national politics as a woman belonging to a minority group. As Tina Steiner notes, Mustafa’s narrative of nation-building exposes “the conceptual ambivalence at the heart of Tanganyikan nationalist politics,” the contradiction between the vision of a unitary national community and the difficulty of integration of minority groups, fraught with a divisive history under the colonial rule.⁸³ Mustafa quit politics after a year on the legislative assembly to focus on her family, but she stayed in Tanzania until late in her life before moving to Canada to join her children. She wrote two novels reflecting back on her years in East Africa. In her fictional work, In the Shadow of Kirinyaga (2002), Mustafa navigates the contradictions inherent in the lives of diasporic Indian communities in East Africa. Like Pyamootoo’s Bénarès, the novel points to forms of exclusion underlying the process of remaking cultural home in diaspora. The emplacement of India in East Africa too becomes another fraught archive of displacement.

India in the Shadow of Kirinyaga

In the Shadow of Kirinyaga portrays the lives of Indian families in Kenya during the 1930s, when the region was under British colonial rule. Set against the backdrop of the Italian-Abyssinian war, the novel tells the story of a Muslim Indian girl, Shaira, who while still a teenager is engaged to Mussavir, a young Indian doctor volunteering in the medical corps in Ethiopia during the Italian invasion. The novel begins when Mussavir, after completing his medical training in India, returns to Kenya, where his family suggests arranging his marriage with Shaira. Progressive minded and willing to challenge traditional norms and customs, Mussavir is initially skeptical of the arrangement, but he changes his mind after meeting with Shaira. They soon fall in love and get engaged before he leaves for the war. Mussavir suffers severe mental injuries during the war, takes to drinking, and marries a Somali nurse he met at the hospital. The novel’s marriage plot ultimately fails, as the engagement is broken off toward the end of the novel.

Around the story of Shaira and Mussavir, Mustafa depicts various characters, mostly Indian and a few African, as the couple navigate their relationship with each other in an internally diverse, hierarchized, and sometimes divided Kenyan-Indian community, that maintains their ties to their homeland across the ocean. The narrative movement of the novel’s central plot is punctuated by descriptive passages that take an ethnographic form. Unlike Pyamootoo’s minimalist style in Bénarès that suspends its claims to a cultural lineage in India, Mustafa’s prose uses extensive description, providing a glimpse into the ambience of Indian life in colonial East Africa – its customs, traditions, hierarchies, and differences. This serves as a testament to the lives of East African Asians and shows heterogeneity among an immigrant community too often represented under a single homogenized category in the mainstream political discourse. By placing vignettes of “India” within a narrative set in “East Africa,” the novel sutures Indian life into an East African context. More specifically, by transposing traditions and practices brought from India within the spaces of indigenous Kikuyu culture, symbolized by Mount Kirinyaga (the Kikuyu name for Mount Kenya), the novel deconstructs the naturalized association between culture and place. Belonging, the text suggests, does not have to be restricted to a single place, ethnicity, or nation but can be simultaneously anchored in more than one place. This allows the novel to critique both the arguments for assimilation put forth by the nationalists and the diasporic orientation of Indian immigrant communities, the latter resulting in their compartmentalization and isolation.

The title In the Shadow of Kirinyaga unmistakably evokes Facing Mount Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta’s ethnographic rendition of Kikuyu lifestyle and culture. Published in 1938, the monograph was among few anthropological works published in the West written from the African point of view. The book describes various aspects of Kikuyu tribal life in meticulous detail, including systems of land tenure, initiation rituals, the traditional education system, marriage, and religion. According to Kenyatta, Mount Kenya, referred to throughout the book by its Kikuyu name Kere-nyaga, holds significance as both the spiritual center and the geographical point of reference for the Kikuyu people. In Kikuyu mythology, it was from the top of the mountain that Kikuyu, the founder of the tribe, was given a vision of the land on which to establish his tribe. Believed to be the “earthly dwelling-place” of the Kikuyu god Ngai, “Kere-nyaga” is where the community members turn to offer their prayers and sacrifices during important ceremonies, such as choosing elders to form a government and performing wedding rites.⁸⁴

Unlike the diacritics in the title of Bénarès that diffuses its referent, the mountain’s Kikuyu name in the title of Mustafa’s novel gives it a definitive geographical orientation, giving precedence to the indigenous history of the place even though the novel focuses on the lives of nonindigenous Indian characters. The title places the novel within a genealogy traced by earlier iterations of “Kirinyaga,” whether textual in Kenyatta’s work or ritualistic in Kikuyu cultural practices, creating a tension in the narrative centered on a people rooted in a land across the ocean. The mountain makes its first appearance in the opening scene of the novel, which takes place in Mussavir’s house, located in its vicinity. In this scene, after Mussavir refuses his mother’s proposal that he marry a cousin, he looks at the mountain: “Turning his head, he looked out the window towards Mount Kenya, as if hoping to find a witness in the great mountain.”⁸⁵ Mussavir’s gesture invokes the Kikuyu custom of facing the mountain in order to call it to witness important rituals like marriage, although here Mussavir vows to go against the Muslim custom of marrying one’s cousins and relatives. The sacred Kikuyu mountain becomes a motif throughout the novel, imposing itself on the background as the narrative unfolds. This causes the reader to turn toward it, even when the characters of Indian origin turn across the ocean toward the subcontinent.

Besides the mountain evoked in the title, the novel’s frequent recourse to ethnographic description is another way it echoes Kenyatta’s work. Mustafa shares with Kenyatta the intention of accurately representing and recording the social life of a group of people who have been erased or misrepresented in the interest of dominant forces – European colonialism in the case of the Kikuyu and African nationalism in the case of postindependence East Africa. Just as Kenyatta’s account focuses on precolonial Kikuyu society, Mustafa’s novel is set in colonial East Africa existing prior to the time when a surge of racial nationalism began to marginalize the people of Indian origin. However, Mustafa’s ethnographic portraits diverge from Kenyatta’s anthropological approach in significant ways. Kenyatta’s goal was to repudiate the common European assumption that African cultures lack organization and coherence, by demonstrating that African societies have been governed by centuries-old institutions that European interference has thrown into chaos. In order to make a case for “complete emancipation,” with which he closes the book, Kenyatta portrays Kikuyu society as an integrated, organic community free from internal conflicts and exploitation.⁸⁶ As Bruce Berman writes, functionalist social anthropology, championed by Kenyatta’s mentor and anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, enabled Kenyatta to depict “a golden Kikuyu past of organically integrated peace and harmony” as well as to denounce “the disruptive changes brought by colonialism.”⁸⁷ By contrast, far from a harmonious, integrated whole, of Kenyatta’s Kikuyu, the East African society depicted in Mustafa’s novel is marked by divisions and hierarchies of race, religion, ethnicity, sect, caste, and gender. The cultural isolationism of Indian communities in Mustafa’s text suggests a fractured society, in a rather dystopian contrast to the orderly, integrated “social system functioning perfectly well until the advent of an alien and repressive force” we find in Kenyatta’s account.⁸⁸

Mustafa’s social realism depicts divisions along the lines of race, caste, and religion through both descriptive and narrative movements. The effects of a racial caste system are most evident in the portrayal of African characters, who are often described doing onerous physical work for either Europeans or Indian businesses and families. One of the minor African characters is Odera, who works as a domestic help for Shaira’s family. At one point in the novel, Odera is arrested and imprisoned for possessing Bhang, an ingredient made of cannabis used in food or drink. This incident gives us a glimpse of the colonial criminal justice system designed to criminalize and surveil Black Africans and their cultural practices. At the moment of the arrest, Shaira’s elder brother exclaims in frustration, “I am only sorry that they are going to stamp his kipande, which so far has been clean” (216). Kipande was an identity card system used by the colonial government to control the movement of Africans. Getting a stamp on his kipande would permanently record Odera’s conviction, affecting his mobility and employment in the future – a consequence Indians did not have to worry about, since kipande applied only to Africans. Odera’s immobility contrasts from the mobility of Indians, specifically their ability to travel to and from India.

The novel also begins to dismantle the homogenized racial categories imposed by colonial structures and nationalist rhetoric by pointing to internal differences within these categories. For instance, tribal antagonisms between the Kikuyu and the Luo are revealed when another domestic worker Mwangi who happens to be a Kikuyu, warns his employer not to engage a Luo: “They are snooty, Mama, and don’t like to work for Indians. They are also not trustworthy” (180). The Indian community is similarly shown to be composed of various religions, sects, and castes often living separately, coming together only on certain occasions. Marriages are conducted within the confines of religious and sectarian circles, although weddings provide the occasional opportunity for people of different religions and sects to come together. Shaira’s family attends a Punjabi Hindu wedding, for example, while Hindu neighbors are invited to Mussavir’s Muslim friend Latif’s wedding feast, where the hosts accommodate their dietary needs according to their religious practices. However, this kind of cultural coexistence is restricted by class and caste boundaries, as shown by an episode involving a lower-caste sweeper woman. During a wedding feast that brings both upper-caste Hindu neighbors and European employers to a Muslim household, a woman introduced as “Luggi’s wife” brings flowers for decorations. She is not allowed to enter the house, because she

This passage reveals the processes by which communal boundaries are demarcated and maintained between “us” and “them.” The upper-class and caste perspective of this passage is evident in the way it deflects upper-caste accountability by saying “the [untouchable] families … kept to themselves” and “expected” charity. Also note the use of the impersonal: “It would be ages before they would be integrated.” This shows that caste practices permeate not only across religions, but also across oceans. The remark about Gandhi’s movement in India to call the untouchable caste “Harijan,” often translated as “children of god,” could be read as a veiled critique of this renaming; neither crossing the ocean nor a change of religion appears to have affected the deeply entrenched practice of caste.

The scene with the sweeper woman is one among a number of instances throughout the novel that show how “India” is grafted onto Africa. Unlike Pyamootoo’s Bénarès, where the Mauritian village evokes India only through its name and the Hindu rituals described are only part of the narrator’s imagined memory, Mustafa’s novel shows an array of Indian traditions and practices being observed in different places in East Africa. Passages describing celebration of festivals such as Dussera, Id, and Muharram are interspersed throughout. When we get to Mussavir’s friend, Latif’s wedding, the narrator takes us through each stage of the ceremony – from Mehndi, the adornment of the bride, to Rukhstana, or the bride’s welcome ceremony (she’s coming from India) and the final feast (139–44). Lines from a Punjabi wedding song are quoted in the transliterated original and in English translation. The preparation of various Indian delicacies for the feast are lavishly described, including the division of labor in the kitchen and the use of various spices. These passages of rich, thick description carve a space in the fictional narrative for an ethnographic illustration of how Indian communities extended their cultural spaces in East Africa.

In Bénares, as we have observed, the relationship between the Mauritian and Indian Benareses remains metaphorical: they are linked by analogy, and this nonrelational relation allows for other histories of loss to emerge in the gap between the two. By contrast, the portrayal of Indian cultural life in In the Shadow of Kirinyaga reveals a metonymic relationship to India. Mustafa’s ethnographic vignettes portray the diasporic spaces as an extension of Indian social and cultural geography, defined by religious heterogeneity, caste hierarchies, and gender structures. The descriptions of weddings, festivals, and culinary practices read as if they could be describing communities in Bombay or Karachi. However, it would be misleading to read the ethnographic vignettes as distinct from the fictional narrative, and as somehow more representative of the historical reality. Instead, the fictional narrative functions as a critical frame for the ethnographic passages, enabling Mustafa to critique the lifestyle of Indian communities who shut themselves in what she calls “watertight cultural compartments” (viii).

These ethnographic descriptions are often punctuated by narrative interruptions that ground them more concretely in the East African context. During the wedding feast, for instance, a sudden noise disrupts feast preparations and the pace of the description. The noise turns out to be Mama Wanjiro’s cries, after her husband Mwangi hit her for disobeying him. When others stop him, he explains in Swahili that he told her not to visit her sister, but she ignored him and went to see her anyway. This incident, first of all, perpetuates the stereotype of the dysfunctional African family and violent masculinity. But with two perfunctory remarks the text goes further to explain the conditions of Mwangi’s life that caused him to behave that way. First, the narrator draws on ethnographic knowledge, mentioning that “If they were in Kikuyuland, he’d have to kill two mbuzi to pacify her parents and clan for beating her” (154). Although brief, this reference to a Kikuyu ritual of sacrificing two bulls (mbuzi) amid an elaborate Indian-Muslim wedding works as a reminder that these events are taking place in East Africa. The text metonymically performs the coexistence of two widely different traditions within the same geographical and textual space. But more important, it points out that Mwangi too is displaced far from his homeland; as a migrant, he too is diasporic, and perhaps more diasporic than the Indians who have been able to practice their rituals and culture despite being far from India: Mwangi’s distance from Kikuyuland makes it unnecessary for him to follow the ritual. The second remark is made by Shaira’s brother Zaffer, who opines that “poor Mwangi was perhaps overtired, having worked like a horse these last few days, and Mama Wanjiro had provoked him at the wrong time” (154). Zaffer’s observation puts the events, including the wedding, into their proper socioeconomic context, where the colonial racial order subjects African men and women to relentless labor while the Indian community comfortably revels in celebration. Unlike Kenyatta’s Kikuyu community in Facing Mount Kenya, which he presents as organically integrated and self-sufficient in isolation, the motley group of Indian immigrants in Mustafa’s East Africa are shown to be heavily dependent on African labor, who are also displaced from their homes and community in the wake of British colonization of East Africa.

Mwangi’s condition evokes Kenya’s colonial history that is otherwise only marginal to the novel’s plot. In the early decades of the twentieth century, Europeans colonists had begun settling in increasing numbers in the Kenyan highlands, which the commissioner of the Protectorate had deemed suited to be developed as a “white man’s colony.” The Land Ordinance of 1915 gave the governor unrestricted power to “grant, lease or otherwise alienate in His Majesty’s behalf any Crown Lands for any purpose and on any terms as he may think fit.”⁸⁹ The colonial expropriation affected the Kikuyu community the most, who, being predominantly agriculturists, had “for centuries relied upon territorial expansion into surrounding frontiers to alleviate population pressures or to defuse internal civil struggles.”⁹⁰ The increasing European control over land was also accompanied by several regulations on the Kikuyu that raised their taxes, controlled their movement, and restricted their agricultural practice forcing them into wage economy.⁹¹ Under the Crowns Ordinance, they were subject to eviction even from their “reserves” and were forced to work on European farms or for Indian families and businesses as domestic workers, often traveling far from their own homes and families.

Mama Wanjiro’s cry, thus, constitutes an anarchival moment in the narrative, as it disrupts the novel’s archival momentum of documenting cultural practices of Indians in Africa and calls upon this history of expropriation, displacement, and exploitation. The disruption reveals the Indian diasporic lives to be entangled with African displacement and migrancy, thus, blurring the line between indigeneity and diaspora. Recognizing African migrancy in this way undermines the racialized construction of indigeneity in nationalist terms, without absolving Indian settlers who depended on African labor. It surfaces the traumatic effects of colonization on the African community as a fundamental part of the narrative about the Indian diaspora. It allows us to locate the hidden trauma not in the Indian community’s collective separation from their homeland but rather in the displacement of Africans from their homes and the exploitation of their labor as the material condition for cultural continuity for the diasporic Indians.

However, the text’s expression of sympathy toward Africans fails to question the structural inequalities that enable their exploitation. In fact, the novel reproduces racist stereotypes of Africans in ways that unmistakably recall clichéd caricatures listed in Binyawanga Wainana’s iconic essay “How to Write about Africa,” such as the “Loyal Servant [who] always behaves like a seven-year-old.”⁹² All African characters in the novel work as servants in the Indian households, are loyal, and behave like children. The infantilization of African characters throughout the novel reveals a lapse of imagination, despite its attempts to show them in a sympathetic light. This is symptomatic of the insularity between Indian and African communities, a grafting of “India” in Africa that seals itself off from its local context. Like the scene with the Dalit sweeper woman, who is allowed to come only as far as the threshold of the house, the social interactions of African characters are restricted to the margins of the families they work for.

While the limitations of Afro–Indian interactions in these examples reveal deep-rooted racial prejudices and racialized socioeconomic structures at play, central to the novel’s critique of communal isolationism is the experience of its female characters, specifically Shaira who is portrayed with a more complex personality and interiority. Mussavir often observes Shaira’s interaction with her mother and surmises that “she was no child of thirteen” (65). Throughout the novel, while African characters appear childlike, the narrative insists that Shaira is mature beyond her age, both physically as well as mentally. She gets engaged to Mussavir even though she is only thirteen and still in school. The possibility of her marriage to Mussavir imposes on her the necessity to practice “purdah” at an early age, restricting her freedom to interact with others and forcing her “to appear shy, modest, and reserved and keep in the background” before anyone other than her immediate family (116). While “outsiders” such as Dalits and Africans are kept away from Indian domestic spaces, Indian women are expected to keep themselves within its confines in order to maintain religious, caste, or racial purity against “impure” others. Shaira is forced into that role at a relatively early age, a custom followed by certain Indian Muslim families. The novel in fact opens with Mussavir’s outrage at his mother’s suggestion that he marry a thirteen-year-old girl, nine years younger than him. His mother responds by saying, “Traditions and customs have not changed, my son” (1). This statement is noteworthy given that the novel goes on to show not only what some of those customs are through detailed descriptions of rituals performed in diasporic spaces but also the work that goes into keeping traditions intact across time and space: a process that often depends on subordination of women as bearers of tradition.

In her study of gendered communal boundaries among South Asian communities in Tanzania, Richa Nagar notes that, in both colonial and postcolonial periods, control of women’s bodies “served as an essential tool for sustaining and reinforcing the race and class-based gulfs between Asians and Africans, and the caste, religious, and class boundaries among the various Asian communities.”⁹³ Indian Ocean historians have further observed the gendered nature of migration during the colonial period. Single men from the subcontinent who migrated to East Africa often went back to look for brides.⁹⁴ While men migrated for work and economic opportunities, women migrated as their wives, to look after their husband’s household, raise their children, and notably, “to reproduce the culture of their classes, castes, and regions in Tanganyika.”⁹⁵ Matrimonial alliances were means to create links for families on either side of the ocean, which not only helped preserve family customs, but also maintained a system of “racially bound circuit of credit and supply from exporters, wholesalers, and petty shopkeepers, all of whom were Indian.”⁹⁶

The marriage plot in Mustafa’s novel shows how the practice of diasporic endogamy meant to ensure communal exclusion and maintain social hierarchy depends on the displacement of women though arranged marriages. While the anticipation of Shaira and Mussavir’s marriage drives the central plot, other marriages also take place during the course of the novel, notably the marriage of Mussavir’s friend Latif with Jamila who is brought from India and Mussavir’s sister Hibba’s forced marriage in India. Both of these marriages involve displacement of women across the Indian Ocean, in order to enable the families to follow their tradition and maintain kinship networks. On her trip to India with her parents, young Hibba is married against her will to a much older man. Falling ill after her travels, Hibba is so disturbed by the arrangement that she dies of her sickness within a month of her wedding. We get her own voice in the form of a short excerpt of a letter she writes to Shaira before her death. In the letter, she tells Shaira she is not willing to settle in a place where “life was so different from East Africa”:

Gender, class, and privilege work against Hibba as she hopelessly attempts to fight the role imposed on her by her family. Her letter also reveals that despite the attempts to reproduce the cultures and traditions of their communities, the recreated spaces of “India” in East Africa remain fundamentally different from the geographic India. Hibba suffers as her body gives in to illness, while the patriarchy represented here by the “adamant” father insists on the permanence of customs and traditions across time and space. Hibba’s death reveals the dark underside to the various colorful ceremonies and festivities that the novel represents as an important part of the Indian culture in East Africa.

Ultimately, through Hibba’s tragedy and Shaira and Mussavir’s ill-fated romance, the novel exposes the impact of insular patriarchal practices typical of Indian diasporic communities. After Mussavir’s ordeals in the Abyssinian war, he secretly marries a Somali nurse, Halima. This interracial marriage alienates Mussavir from his own family as well as the Kenyan-Indian community, as they are unwilling to accept his African bride. Shaira’s brothers force her to end her engagement with Mussavir, forbidding her from writing to him. In defiance of this, Shaira briefly considers running off to join him as his second wife, since this would be allowed in Islam. The conflict between Shaira’s aspirations and the expectations of her family shows how the boundaries of religion, caste, and race-based privilege are maintained through “the regulation of the mobility and sexualities of upper- and middle-class women by their communities.”⁹⁷ Unlike Mussavir who can rebel against his family’s wishes, Shaira does not have the option to follow her desires. At this point in her monologue, Shaira realizes that she remains chained by her family despite her ancestral ties to a “warrior tribe” in India:

This passage reveals a fissure between Shaira’s imagined connection to India – that is, her belief that she is a descendant of the “warrior tribe” – and the reality of her confinement and powerlessness. The “law” she refers to is the law of communal insularity, which Mussavir has broken by marrying a woman of Somali origin. Alienated from her own origins, Shaira instead finds a kindred figure in Odera, who returns after being released from prison by the time Shaira writes her letter to Mussavir at the very end of the novel. She ends the letter by comparing herself to Odera: “Odera, the cheerful one, has come back from prison and looks frail and ill, but he is lucky to be free. I am envious of him” (234). With this gesture, Shaira brings herself closer to Odera, while she distances herself from her Rajputani ancestry. The irony implicit in the postscript to the letter establishes a kinship between Shaira and Odera, drawing attention to the intersectional nature of their confinement. Although Odera is out of prison, he is still held captive by the racial structure of the colonial society where he is forced to carry a kipande, and he has to serve Indian families and live far from his own home for a living. In the same way, while Shaira enjoys the privileges of belonging to a middle-class Indian family, she is bound by her family’s patriarchal system that maintains its enclosure through sexual control.

In her preface to In the Shadow of Kirinyaga, Mustafa writes that her goal is to explore “how and why [East African Asians] lived in watertight cultural compartments which often left them ignorant of or indifferent towards what was going on around them” (viii). The novel, nonetheless, reveals that their diasporic cultural lives were anything but insular. The comparison between Shaira’s sense of confinement and Odera’s servitude suggests that the two routes of displacement I have explored in my reading are interlinked – one that displaces African characters from their homes and land to serve Indian families and the second that displaces Indian women across the ocean as instruments of social and cultural reproduction. Racial subordination and sexual control work in tandem for maintaining communal boundaries among the diasporic Indian community. The extension of India in East Africa, as a racialized diasporic coherence, is as reliant upon uprooted and displaced Black labor as it is on the displacement and confinement of women as agents of cultural reproduction. Insofar as diasporic consciousness constitutes a trauma of separation from a homeland, such trauma for East African Indians does not just reside within the community; rather it is intercommunal, deeply racialized, and gendered.

A Diasporic Unconscious

Bénarès and In the Shadow of Kirinyaga are formally and stylistically very different texts. But each in its own way interrogates Indian diasporic formations reliant on historical or imaginative connections to a distant homeland. They reimagine their relationship to place by surfacing local histories of dispossession hidden beneath the readily available narratives of translocal attachment through cultural reproduction and extension. The figurations of “India” in diasporic Mauritius or East Africa appear as signifiers not of a lost origin but of unresolved histories of racial and gendered violence sustained in an ongoing loss in the present. The abandoned sugar mill in Bénarès functions as a testament to the Afro-Mauritian past – the intertwined histories of slavery and indenture and the post-industrial decline of the village after the mill’s closing. Mustafa’s novel, likewise, illuminates the racial and sexual anxieties underlying the extension of the Indian cultural geography in East African spaces. The sense of abandonment in Bénarès and racial and gendered violence in In the Shadow of Kirinyaga emerge as a diasporic unconscious where the intertwined histories of Afro-Asian migrations with an underlying racial politics continue to haunt the practice of diaspora in the Indian Ocean.

This diasporic unconscious must be understood in the context of the formation of the nation-states across the Indian Ocean region, which allowed diasporic communities to be defined in relation to national identities, and thus, “the condition of living in diaspora necessitated crafting a local identity framed against a nation of ‘others’ and cast in terms of a nation of ‘origin.’”⁹⁸ This meant that national and diasporic belonging consolidated along the colonial racialization of African and Asian identities, such that the “jagged hyphen” of Afro-Asia – the notions of “brown over black,” for instance – became integral to the process of decolonization in both India and Eastern Africa.⁹⁹ In East Africa, the figuration of the nation as African and of Africanness as indigenous meant that Indianness was racialized as extranational and diasporic. In parallel but distinct ways, the dominance of Indo-Mauritian cultural attachments to India subordinated the histories of Afro-Mauritian subjects and their attachments to Africa within the Mauritian nationalist imaginary. Studies of Indian diasporic narratives from East Africa often recognize Indian diasporic identity as cosmopolitan, hybrid, or “translocal” by emphasizing their multilocal mobility and extraterritorial forms of belonging.¹⁰⁰ Likewise, studies of hybridity in Mauritian narratives have underscored the fact that hybrid identities made discernible among Indo-Mauritians – thanks to their extranational cultural and linguistic representations – are often denied to Afro-descendant Creole subjects because of a relative lack of enduring ties to the African continent.¹⁰¹ Thus the construction of East African Indian and Indo-Mauritian identities as hybrid, cosmopolitan, or diasporic, despite the disavowal of racial or geographical origins, is indeed linked to “colonial racialization in an Indian Ocean frame” that depends on “the figurations of Africanness as ‘territorialized,’” or, in case of Afro-Mauritians, as lacking pre-colonial roots.¹⁰² In contrast to Black Atlantic literature, Black mobility in the Indian Ocean is erased under the sign of indigeneity, meanwhile Indian diasporic desire for an elsewhere functions as a racializing device, locating an Indian diasporic identity as distinct from African or Afro-Mauritian identity.

Following anarchival strains in texts like Bénarès and In the Shadow of Kirinyaga, as I have done in this chapter, challenges the notion of extranational belonging as the locus of Indian migrancy in the Indian Ocean. Read in this way, these texts reveal Black histories of circulation as entangled and interdependent with Indian diasporic insinuation of transnational ties. Anarchival drift in Afro-Asian fictions locates African migrancy within the South Asian diasporic imaginary, raising the possibility of reading these texts also as African diasporic narratives.¹⁰³ The final chapter of this book turns more explicitly to the experiences of an African diaspora through a novel that conjures the afterlives of slavery among the displaced Chagossians in Mauritius.