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 Periodical article |
 Leiden University catalogue |
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| Title: | Cultural crossings from Africa to India: select travel narratives of Indian South Africans from Durban and Cape Town, 1940s to 1990s |
| Author: | Dhupelia-Mesthrie, Uma |
| Year: | 2012 |
| Periodical: | South African Historical Journal (ISSN 0258-2473) |
| Volume: | 64 |
| Issue: | 2 |
| Pages: | 295-312 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic terms: | South Africa India |
| Subjects: | culture contact South Africans Indians travel biography 1950-1999 |
| External link: | https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02582473.2012.661755 |
| Abstract: | This article explores cultural encounters via the movements of several Indian South Africans to India and back between the 1940s and 1990s, positioning travel accounts from autobiographies, biographies, and memoirs together with oral histories. A study of individual movements from South Africa to India provides new dimensions to a historiography which has prioritized immigration from India to South Africa and to travel literatures focused on movement from the metropole to the periphery. The narratives are read for what they reveal about identity and the impact of travel. The article argues that there are perceptible differences in masculine and feminine tellings with the latter paying more attention to the domestic and the personal. There is also a difference in the accounts of those who moved by choice and those who were forced into exile. The encounters with India vary from strong identification to isolation and discomfort. Travel sharpened an awareness of being from Africa in India, thereby providing a new definition of self. The narratives are suggestive of how Indians in India respond to the diaspora. Notes, ref., sum. [Journal abstract, edited] |
