South African Indian Fiction: Transformations in Ahmed Essop’s Political Ethos

Ahmed Essop’s texts represent the aesthetics of complicity and resistance in apartheid and postapartheid South African Indian literature. His earlier narratives attempt to redeem the diaspora within a nation by building a sense of national belonging through locating a moral foundation of a nation alongside black South Africans. In his later fiction, however, Essop breaks with past representations of interracial solidarity with the majority black population and instead highlights the failures of multicultural democracy in postapartheid South Africa. The diasporic subject is perceived as continuing to disrupt the march of the nation toward democracy due to his/her race and religious affiliations. Essop’s stories provide the base for the construction and representation of national identity for diasporic Indians and a collective South African history, a history ravaged by the trauma of apartheid, but one that also paradoxically awaits excavation, reexamination, and rewriting in order for a truly egalitarian polity to emerge.