Sex, Food and Diasporic Desires of the South African Indian

• In Event: 30420 - Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 6: Race, Place Making, and Culture

Abstract

The Indian subcontinent has an extremely varied and convoluted history around food. Across the world, food was and is still used as a socio-econo-religious marker, but in the subcontinent, it has gone one step further as it has also been used for caste differentiation and as a weapon of oppression. Yet, food has also brought communities together, particularly in times of distress. Many such videos are circulating from Gaza where people are cooking food received in aid in large quantities in one pot. While this may not be about kinship and happiness, it is about shared pain, sorrow and uncertainty. On a micro scale, the same pot becomes a unifier in the Indian family, with the one-pot meal feeding several family members. The pot or the Kunda was one of the few things many of the indentured workers -some of them the poorest of the poor - and passengers from India took with them when they crossed over the Kalapani. Today, descendants of those indentured workers and passenger Indians still have strong memories and associations with the Kunda. Yet, who is left out of this equation? Who is allowed at the table within the family? Does the new, reimagined Indian dining table include queer people? This paper looks at a complex journey by comparing two films - “Kunda” and “When the Rainbow is Bittersweet- Being queer and Indian in Durban”. The first is an intimate conversation around the cooking pot and its associations and dissociations, and the second about the intimate/familial/social politics around being a part of the LGBTQI+ community, in both cases while navigating the South African Indian identity. This paper aims to explore the intersections as well as the fractures within the monolithic Indian identity, and the different voices that emanate from the Indian in South Africa.

Author

• Kathryn Pillay, University of KwaZulu-Natal