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C H A P T E R 3 Charous and Ravans A STORY OF MUTUAL NONRECOGNITION The relationship between indians and africans in South africa, and in particular in the province of KwaZulu-Natal, is a strange story of mutual nonrecognition. it is neither misrecognition nor lack of presence but nonrecognition, by which i mean a willed incomprehension derived from a lack of desire, intimacy, and respect. in hegelian terms, i propose that indians and Zulus in this colonial province never constituted their identities through actually “seeing” each other, by deciphering each other’s gaze, or by “desiring the desire of the other.” Despite 150 years of “apprehensive coexistence,” these communities never developed regular forms of conviviality or commensality, not to mention intermarriage. to put it starkly, the relations between Zulus and indians have historically been mediated through white power, gaze, and presence, despite the starkly anti-indian sentiments that to this day pervade the white population of the province. This relative invisibility and nonrecognition of other dominated groups, except through (hostile) colonial mediations and their apportioning of patronage and punishment, is intrinsic to most forms of colonialism but particularly striking in this case. in a brief section on hegel in Black Skin, White Masks, fanon presents a surprisingly conciliatory version of the dialectic of recognition: “at the foundation of hegelian dialectic, there is an absolute reciprocity which must be emphasized. . . . it is in the degree to which i go beyond my own immediate being that i apprehend the other . . . as more than a natural reality.” only by an active act of recognition can one restore to the other “human reality in-itself-for-itself” (1967, 217–18). Such active acts were not only absent in Natal but they seemed to be blocked by the very structure of colonial rule. Both africans and indians were locked in intense battles of recognition with the colonial master in distinct ways, but neither could recognize each other directly, only as categorical strangers. to the african, the indian was a form of impostor, an undeserving accomplice of colonial rule, a man of color trying to assert his place in a land that was not his own. to indians, the Zulus were of 98 • Chapter 3 the land but incomprehensible, an unnerving gaze and presence that framed and also disturbed their constant struggle to be recognized by the colonial masters as belonging to the land that they lived on. In both cases, it was only the white gaze, whether paternalistic or antagonistic, that was able to accord to each group a sense of recognition, however incomplete. Among Indians, a commonly used term for Africans is ravans, referring to the black demon king of the South, Ravana, who kidnapped Lord Ram’s wife Sita in the epic Ramayana. Ravana is big, fearsome, and proud, and belongs to another world: his kingdom in the South. The term captures the sense of the african world as alien, distant, threatening , violent, and peopled by strong and violent sexual predators who are consumed by uncontrolled bodily drives. it is a world that appears unrefined in terms of food, rituals, and custom—a world often described as intertwined with an awesome but dangerous african nature.1 While derived from european forms of exoticism and primitivism, indian views of africans seem devoid of the attraction toward nature and the innocence of the primitive that was at the heart of the white colonial paternalist relationship with african culture and customs. Wealthier indians have engaged in a certain paternalistic care for their african employees, but most indians see the african worlds as unfathomable, a form of dark matter where the dialectic of recognition stops as it reflects nothing; the gaze is simply absorbed and disappears. africans represent a compelling and omnipresent gaze, an uncanny shadow, a constant reminder of the precariousness of an existence literally at the edge of the bush. The identity of africans and nature literally merged when areas of bush or dense vegetation along the slopes at the edge of the township were described to me as uncanny places where criminals lurk and where informal settlements of africans were likely to appear. Such ideas resonate strikingly well with widespread hostility and nonrecognition of indians among many Zulus. here, indians were often referred to as parasites and thieves, as people who pretended to be white but did not deserve the respect given to whites, as aliens, and as gluttonous, unmanly cowards who did not even deserve to be properly looked at or...

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