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C H A P T E R 2 Domesticity and Cultural Intimacy At the end of June 1999, yet another grisly murder occurred when an Indian policeman gunned down his fiancée and then turned the gun on himself in downtown Durban. So-called love-murders have become more common as ownership of guns among Indians has skyrocketed in recent years. Under the headline “tV and the West Stand to Blame,” the weekly Post reported answers to the question, “has our culture and society gone horribly wrong?” The answers ranged from people calling for counseling for young families to those blaming the new global television landscape for glorifying violence. a man stated a widespread opinion: “Indian people have lost their sense of who they are. . . . The Indian family is no longer what it used to be.”1 The crisis of the coherence of “the Indian family” and its associated moral values is today the single most shared concern among Indians in South africa across class and linguistic backgrounds. a feeling of impending sociomoral disaster became widespread after apartheid among many communities in the country. This crisis and its associated dramas are played out in domestic and intimate settings: as proliferating witchcraft accusations within households in Soweto (ashforth 2005); as estrangement from the ancestors in Zululand (White 2011); as displacement of the authority of older men by the new generation of “com-tsotsis” in the 1980s in african townships (Bank 2011; Bozzoli 2004); and as worries about the proliferation of multigenerational female-headed households in Cape town (Lee 2009). This chapter explores how Indian concerns became uniquely centered on the particular construction of the Indian family and intimate life as a space of traditional patriarchy shattered by the emergence of new nuclear families and modern selves. From Kinship to Family The nineteenth-century system of indenture brought together extremely heterogeneous populations on plantations and colonial estates in Natal. Most arrived alone, some as groups of friends, and much fewer as mar- 60 • Chapter 2 ried couples. Some had married or cohabited on the ships across the Indian Ocean, probably to minimize sexual harassment by crew and other passengers. The sex ratio was extremely skewed, and the dearth of women on the sugar estates was a major worry among the colonial authorities in Natal, as elsewhere across the colonial world of indenture.2 Women were routinely accused of loose morals and adultery, and most of the conflicts, murders, and suicides on the sugar estates revolved around love, jealousy, and fraught sexual unions. One of the many unresolved issues was the validity and legal status of religious marriage ceremonies performed in India or after arrival in Natal. On the recommendation of the Coolie Commission, a string of laws emerged from the late 1870s onward that aimed at stabilizing proper families and legitimate unions.3 This was part of the larger colonial project of creating legibility through legal fiat but also an initiative heavily inflected by the quest for moral reform and codification of what in nineteenth-century Britain was seen as generally depraved and immoral South asian sexual practices: polygamy, child brides, and concubines.4 On the sugar estates, most of those whom Desai and Vahed call the new “moral families” were small and generally nuclear units.5 as Indians bought land and settled across Natal, they adopted extended family practices in an attempt to reinvent customs and norms from “back home” in “a new and creolized world” (Freund 1991, 420). The period from 1910 to the 1950s saw a certain “retraditionalization” of Indians. The enforced mixing and cross-community marriages from the era of indenture were papered over as a shameful chapter born out of material necessity. New syndicated identities arose that were mainly grouped along lines of language and class in homes, religious associations, and in a growing range of educational institutions that provided training in both english and Indian languages. By 1950, this new world was well established in three major segments: a Gujarati-speaking elite and landholding middle class dominated by Muslims; a substantial hindi/ Urdu-speaking segment mainly comprised of small farmers, artisans, and the working class; and the largest group, a telugu/tamil-speaking working-class and urban subproletariat. In her classic study Indian People in Natal from 1960, hilda Kuper described an ostensibly self-contained urban world. In a remarkably depoliticized tone, Kuper described customs, habits, and cultural dispositions among Indians, with due respect to the differences between the three main segments mentioned above. although peppered...

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