SHARED HISTORIES - A PIECE OF INDIA IN SOUTH AFRICABy confluence | October 30th, 2011 | Category: Essays & Reflections |
Writers generally receive invitations to literary festivals with gratitude and joy. Escaping such a solitary craft, sharing its tribulations and delights with other writers and, best of all, being given the chance to engage with readers is a rare opportunity not to be missed. Besides, many festivals now take place in far-flung and unusual places - Hay being the best example, their organizers seeming to take particular pleasure in making participants and attendees travel over hill and vale before they get to sample the real pleasures on offer.
And so it was that, when an invitation to attend the Shared Histories festival in South Africa popped up among my emails, I had to stop myself from leaping for joy. The fact that I had never even been to South Africa before was icing on an already very lush cake. For all the time in what I now think of as ‘my travelling years’, South Africa had been out-of-bounds because of apartheid. Even its produce - notably, excellent wines and Cape fruits - had been firmly shunned for years, thanks to vigorous reminders by Britain’s left-leaning media. When the ANC’s freedom fighters finally achieved their hard-won victory, the world collectively crossed its fingers and prayed for things to go well but post-apartheid reports remained mixed. Who had not exulted in those TV images, beamed across the world, of a grey-haired, smiling Nelson Mandela becoming President of a new-born rainbow nation? But when things went wrong, post-apartheid - like the reported rapid and frightening rise in violent crime - those inevitable voices of doom crowed. Finally, however, here was a golden opportunity to explore for myself this legendarily beautiful nation that had once been the world’s outcast. Not that I, coming from a country where the caste system and untouchability is still an awful reality, ever felt morally entitled to outrage but was it not incumbent on me as a writer to at least try and understand?
I found myself in very eclectic artistic company. Now in its fifth year, the Shared Histories festival is much more than a literary festival, taking not merely writers but also dancers, musicians, theatre productions and India’s multifarious range of soft-skills such as yoga and ayurveda, even regional cuisines, all of which, when put together, form a rich and satisfying brew that offers up a complete Indian experience. This year, South African Indophiles were treated to Shubha Mudgal and Astaad Deboo and a masterful performance of ‘Dance Like a Man’ by Lilette Dubey and her drama troupe. I was among five Indian writers who were to be in conversation with five South African writers and was pleased to see how many bases had been covered with the line-up that had been assembled, my cohorts being playwright Mahesh Dattani, poet Jeet Thayil, journalist and author Namita Devidayal and senior editor M.J. Akbar who has also written many fine books on subjects as diverse as Nehru and Islam.
We gathered in Johannesburg and were, appropriately, first taken by our charming and erudite festival organizer, Sanjoy Roy, on a whistle-stop tour around the city. Well, whistle-stop it would have been, had our first stop not been the Apartheid Museum - an evocative and moving experience that no self-respecting writer would find it in their heart to rush through. Even entry to the museum is thought-provoking, ticket buyers being arbitrarily issued permits that render them ‘White’ or ‘Non-White’ (Nie-Blankes’ in Afrikaans), thereby deciding which entrance gate they are allowed to pass through. As I had been assigned a pass designating me ‘Non-White’, one of the first exhibits I had to file past was a life-sized photograph of one of the Reclassification Panels that heard depositions from people looking for (not to put too fine a point on it) essentially a less raw deal in life by climbing up the colour hierarchy: ‘white’ at the top, ‘black’ at the very bottom, with all other categories like ‘Indian’, ‘Malay’ and ‘coloured’ ranging somewhere in-between. Finding myself looking up at four white men, all wearing uniformly severe expressions on their faces, I, for all my education and empowerment, felt a sudden frisson of genuine fear. It was a stark reminder of what it must have been like to be poor and black in such terrifying time.
The museum meticulously charts and unfolds a layered history of what was surely one of humankind’s lowest moments. But what could seem an unexplainable subject was presented with a surprising lack of morbidity and sentimentality, in itself very touching. By the time we were halfway through the museum, looking at a clutch of nooses on the ceiling of the exhibit that dealt with the painful subject of deaths in custody, I found myself having to hold back my first wave of tears. A special area dedicated to Nelson Mandela brought succour and I gazed with relief upon that familiar lined face with twinkling eyes, managing to remind myself that the human spirit is not just indefatigable but also deeply magnanimous and forgiving.
It was with something of that spirit that five Indian authors met their five South African counterparts the next day at the literary part of the festival, titled ‘Words on Water’. The venue was Sci-Bono in the old city centre: a 60s style concrete Arts Centre reminiscent of the South Bank Centre in London which hasn’t stopped thriving and pulsing with life since its make-over and revival. Sadly, however, quite unlike its London counterpart, Johannesburg’s Sci-Bono swiftly grew defunct, post-apartheid, when businesses and banks fled the area, fearing a rise in crime. Now apparently featuring only the occasional poorly-attended event, the graffiti-covered urban park across the car-park had a handful of black youngsters playing a desultory game of basketball while a small bric-a-brac market nearby spewed African music from a stall selling second-hand goods.
I was glad to be there, though, doing whatever we could to help enrich Johannesburg’s flagging inner-city life, and our conversations were engaging and absorbing, covering a range of subjects from slavery to post-colonial feminism, text-based theatre, historiographies and the functioning of democracy in multi-ethnic countries like India and South Africa. Dilip Menon, Chair of the newly instituted Mellon Chair of Indian Studies at Witswatersrand University, was the man in charge of ‘Words on Water’. He seemingly spoke from the heart when he mentioned his sheer joy at being given such a task to perform, later quoting from one of India’s medieval poets, Madiki Singanna: ‘Stronger, even, than the bond that comes from having the same mother are the bonds we make by sharing words.’
Words being my currency, I felt blessed being able to form such bonds with writers from a country so fascinating. Having been born into a generation that missed the headiness of India’s freedom struggle, I found myself mesmerized by the experiences of contemporaries for whom liberty was a far more nascent and fragile thing, never to be taken for granted. More sobering were subsequent visits to Soweto and an Indian ghetto in Cape Town where people still live in the concrete boxes that had been built by the National Party in the 90s to keep non-whites segregated and well out of their way. Academics and professionals are now priced out of attractive residential areas by new businesses and foreign buyers, and the legacy of apartheid is palpable as one drives around expensive areas that seem totally white-dominated. Tantalising glimpses of sprawling estates and elegant colonial style houses are only just visible behind forbidding electronic gates and fortress-like walls all sprouting coils of electrified barbed wire. I had to tell myself to appreciate the honesty of a Cape Town University professor I met - a woman about my age, also of Indian descent - who confessed a disenchantment with the ANC so deep she was actually contemplating voting for the New National Party in the next election.
‘Complex’ is the word that kept popping up in my descriptions of South Africa on my return home. Yes, beautiful and wild and unspoilt too. But - as one of the conversations at ‘Shared Histories’ reminded - it is in our rush to forget our histories that we condemn ourselves to repeat them. Would that South Africa cherishes its writers and story-tellers, those talented artistes I met so fleetingly and so beneficially. They are the custodians of a cruel history that cannot be wished away but it is in the telling and sharing of their stories that the country’s remaining problems will be cured and healed and gradually worked away.
Jaishree Misra has written seven novels published by Penguin and Harper Collins. She recently moved from Britain to India where she is helping to develop a residential community for adults with learning disabilities.