Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie
Biographic Data
| ID | 636877 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie |
| GIVEN NAMES | Uma |
| FAMILY NAME | Dhupelia-Mesthrie |
| SIGNATURE | DHUPELIA-MESTHRIE U |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of the Western Cape |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1094-8682 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 51 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
The Letters of Sushila Gandhi: From Press Worker to Managing Trustee of Phoenix Settlement in South Africa, 1927 to 1977
An epistolarium of over 80 letters written by a first-generation Gujarati migrant woman to South Africa provides the basis for the construction of her biography. The personal register of the letters written to family and friends allows her to shape this biography and for her voice to be heard though filtered through the process of translation and selection. The letters are read for expressions of labour performativity, the meaning of work and its…
Private stories and public life: Narrating the Indian South African present historically
Writing in the Twenty-First Century about Indian South Africans: Revisiting Agendas and Reflecting on Foundational Writings
South Africa to India: Narratives of a Century of Repatriation (1871–1975)
This article focuses on the repatriation of Indians from South Africa, first under indentured labour contracts, and then under modified schemes between 1914 and 1975 applicable to all Indians. While the historiography of Indian South Africans prioritises movement of Indians to South Africa, this article is about reverse movement to India. It analyses narratives of repatriation that emerge from official sources in India and South Africa such as st…
Going beyond Gandhi’s ‘inner circle’ of relationships: Satyagraha House, Hermann Kallenbach and Gandhi’s sons
The domestic dwelling known as The Kraal, inhabited briefly by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and his closest friend in South Africa, Hermann Kallenbach, in the early twentieth century, and remade a century later as a boutique guesthouse and museum named Satyagraha House, is the point of reference for a set of critical engagements with the work of heritage and historical narrative, questions of time and space, family legacies, photographs and letters…
Waiting on Cape Town in the apartheid era: Life histories of Indian waiters and barmen
Academic scholarship has neglected histories of waiters and barmen in South Africa, and the very small literature on the hotel industry neglects its work force. This article aims to address this omission by focussing on the life histories of five Indian men in Cape Town who worked during the apartheid era, a time of forced removals, job reservation and segregation in all aspects of life. The article especially links the racialized residential spa…
Controlling Transnational Asian Mobilities: A Comparison of Documentary Systems in Australia and South Africa, 1890s to 1940s
The Desirable and Undesirable in the life of the Chief Immigration Officer in Cape Town, Clarence Wilfred Cousins, 1905–1915
This article argues that while immigration exclusions of those considered undesirable were clearly set out by legislation, the subjectivity of the immigration officer was an important aspect of implementation. Drawing on the diaries and personal letters of the officer based at Cape Town, the article focuses on his emotions as he went about his daily life and moved between different intimate city spaces – home, church, docks and office. Bringing t…
Engaging with the Bureaucracy: Indian Immigration Agents and Interpreters in Cape Town, South Africa (1902–16)
As part of a global pattern of Asian exclusions, in the early twentieth century, the Cape Colony effectively excluded new Asian immigrants by requiring immigrants to pass a literacy test in a European language. A permit system, employing the technologies of photography and anthropometry, was developed to facilitate transnational travel for those already in the colony who were unable to comply with the literacy test. This article pieces together f…
Re-Locating Memories: Transnational and Local Narratives of Indian South Africans in Cape Town
This article plays on the word re-location to examine the memories of Indians in South Africa through oral histories about relocation as a result of the Group Areas Act, to memories of parents and grandparents relocating to South Africa from India as told to interviewers and to their own memories of journeys to India and back. The narratives of mobilities traverse time and national boundaries and are counter-posed by narratives of local mobilitie…
Betwixt the Oceans: The Chief Immigration Officer in Cape Town, Clarence Wilfred Cousins (1905-1915)
Drawing on the personal and official papers of an immigration officer, this article highlights his personality, social life, and the quotidian aspects of his work at the port. By placing the officer at the centre, instead of the usual tendency in South African historiography to focus on ethnic immigration histories, one secures broader insights into the administration of policy, such as the writing test (an exclusionary mechanism) and repatriatio…
Durban and Cape Town as Port Cities: Reconsidering Southern African Studies from the Indian Ocean
This special issue arose out of a workshop titled ‘Durban and Cape Town as Indian Ocean Port \nCities: Reconsidering Southern African Studies from the Indian Ocean’, held at the University of the Western Cape in September 2014. The volume is located at the intersection of southern African studies and Indian Ocean studies, and explores this exchange as a site for enriching southern African transnational historiographies
Split-Households: Indian Wives, Cape Town Husbands and Immigration Laws, 1900s to 1940s
This study of gendered migration from the Indian subcontinent to Cape Town focuses on women who did travel and those who did not. It identifies the split-household as being the dominant household formation in the first half of the twentieth century, a matter of preference of Indian male migrants. Some women also displayed resistance to leaving India. Women nonetheless suffered long periods of separation from husbands; sometimes they were abandone…
Speaking about building Rylands (1960s to 1980s): A Cape Flats history
This article draws on oral histories of Rylands, a former Indian group area on the Cape Flats. It shifts focus from narratives of dispossession to narratives of the making of a relocation site. The Cape Flats has generally been represented as a place of poverty, crime and hopelessness and existing on the “fringe” of the city. This article seeks to complicate our understandings and imaginings of the Cape Flats by focusing on Rylands. In its focus …
Cultural Crossings from Africa to India: Select Travel Narratives of Indian South Africans from Durban and Cape Town, 1940s to 1990s
This article focuses on cultural encounters by Indian South Africans from Durban and Cape Town, uniquely 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 prioritised immigration from India to South Africa and to travel literatures focused on movement from the metropole to the peri…
Gujarati Shoemakers in Twentieth-Century Cape Town: Family, Gender, Caste and Community
Noting the Natal and Witwatersrand-centredness of the historiography of Indian South Africans, and this historiography's neglect of caste amongst Gujarati Hindus where caste mattered, this study focuses on the Gujarati shoemaker caste in Cape Town. Through narratives of those engaged in making, repairing or selling shoes, the article seeks to understand caste as occupation and explores how caste organisation facilitated economic and social mobili…
The Form, the Permit and the Photograph: An Archive of Mobility between South Africa and India
Inspired by recent scholarship that calls for a more critical engagement with archives and knowledge production, this article plots the biography of an archive in Cape Town. Unravelling the layers of paperwork, it locates the origins of the archive in a repressive state project of excluding Indian immigrants and controlling those within the borders of the Cape Colony. The paper trail reveals documents of identity and the state's attempts to verif…
The Passenger Indian as Worker: Indian Immigrants in Cape Town in the Early Twentieth Century
The article argues that the term passenger Indian has contributed to a divisive understanding of migration from the Indian subcontinent to South Africa. It has led to the stereotype of the wealthy Gujarati trader and it excludes much. By focusing on Indian migrants in Cape Town, the argument is made that the term must be redefined to include workers who came from not only Gujarat but also from Maharashtra and the Punjab and that those marginalise…
The Limits to Visibility: Indian Women in the Transvaal, 1870s to 1930s
This article argues that it is important to include women in a discussion of Indian migration to the Transvaal. The historiography provides a very limited insight into the experiences of women and this is because the focus has been mainly on political struggles. Women secure a place in history only through their participation in passive resistance struggles. The article argues that although they are credited with participating in the Gandhi-led S…
South Africa/India: Re-Imagining the Disciplines
The Place of India in South African History: Academic Scholarship, Past, Present and Future
In 1971 Robert E. Gregory wrote a book titled India and East Africa deftly covering some 555 pages even though his narrative took him only up to 1939.1 Though the title of my survey is as far-reaching as his, I do not have the luxury of Gregory's space so I shall not even attempt a Gregory. In a foreword to a brochure published by the Indian High Commission in South Africa titled India-South Africa ; Strategic Partnership in a Changing World the …
Indians in South Africa
A Blast from the Past’: The Teaching of South African History at an Apartheid University, 1960s–1980s
(2000). ‘A Blast from the Past’:The Teaching of South African History at an Apartheid University, 1960s–1980s. South African Historical Journal: Vol. 42, No. 1, pp. 49-68
From Cane Fields to Freedom: A Chronicle of Indian South African Life
The Passenger Indian as Worker: Indian Immigrants in Cape Town in the Early Twentieth Century
The article argues that the term passenger Indian has contributed to a divisive understanding of migration from the Indian subcontinent to South Africa. It has led to the stereotype of the wealthy Gujarati trader and it excludes much. By focusing on Indian migrants in Cape Town, the argument is made that the term must be redefined to include workers who came from not only Gujarat but also from Maharashtra and the Punjab and that those marginalise…
The Place of India in South African History: Academic Scholarship, Past, Present and Future
In 1971 Robert E. Gregory wrote a book titled India and East Africa deftly covering some 555 pages even though his narrative took him only up to 1939.1 Though the title of my survey is as far-reaching as his, I do not have the luxury of Gregory's space so I shall not even attempt a Gregory. In a foreword to a brochure published by the Indian High Commission in South Africa titled India-South Africa ; Strategic Partnership in a Changing World the …
Durban and Cape Town as Port Cities: Reconsidering Southern African Studies from the Indian Ocean
This special issue arose out of a workshop titled ‘Durban and Cape Town as Indian Ocean Port \nCities: Reconsidering Southern African Studies from the Indian Ocean’, held at the University of the Western Cape in September 2014. The volume is located at the intersection of southern African studies and Indian Ocean studies, and explores this exchange as a site for enriching southern African transnational historiographies
The Form, the Permit and the Photograph: An Archive of Mobility between South Africa and India
Inspired by recent scholarship that calls for a more critical engagement with archives and knowledge production, this article plots the biography of an archive in Cape Town. Unravelling the layers of paperwork, it locates the origins of the archive in a repressive state project of excluding Indian immigrants and controlling those within the borders of the Cape Colony. The paper trail reveals documents of identity and the state's attempts to verif…
Speaking about building Rylands (1960s to 1980s): A Cape Flats history
This article draws on oral histories of Rylands, a former Indian group area on the Cape Flats. It shifts focus from narratives of dispossession to narratives of the making of a relocation site. The Cape Flats has generally been represented as a place of poverty, crime and hopelessness and existing on the “fringe” of the city. This article seeks to complicate our understandings and imaginings of the Cape Flats by focusing on Rylands. In its focus …
Cultural Crossings from Africa to India: Select Travel Narratives of Indian South Africans from Durban and Cape Town, 1940s to 1990s
This article focuses on cultural encounters by Indian South Africans from Durban and Cape Town, uniquely 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 prioritised immigration from India to South Africa and to travel literatures focused on movement from the metropole to the peri…
South Africa/India: Re-Imagining the Disciplines
Betwixt the Oceans: The Chief Immigration Officer in Cape Town, Clarence Wilfred Cousins (1905-1915)
Drawing on the personal and official papers of an immigration officer, this article highlights his personality, social life, and the quotidian aspects of his work at the port. By placing the officer at the centre, instead of the usual tendency in South African historiography to focus on ethnic immigration histories, one secures broader insights into the administration of policy, such as the writing test (an exclusionary mechanism) and repatriatio…
Gujarati Shoemakers in Twentieth-Century Cape Town: Family, Gender, Caste and Community
Noting the Natal and Witwatersrand-centredness of the historiography of Indian South Africans, and this historiography's neglect of caste amongst Gujarati Hindus where caste mattered, this study focuses on the Gujarati shoemaker caste in Cape Town. Through narratives of those engaged in making, repairing or selling shoes, the article seeks to understand caste as occupation and explores how caste organisation facilitated economic and social mobili…
Waiting on Cape Town in the apartheid era: Life histories of Indian waiters and barmen
Academic scholarship has neglected histories of waiters and barmen in South Africa, and the very small literature on the hotel industry neglects its work force. This article aims to address this omission by focussing on the life histories of five Indian men in Cape Town who worked during the apartheid era, a time of forced removals, job reservation and segregation in all aspects of life. The article especially links the racialized residential spa…
The Desirable and Undesirable in the life of the Chief Immigration Officer in Cape Town, Clarence Wilfred Cousins, 1905–1915
This article argues that while immigration exclusions of those considered undesirable were clearly set out by legislation, the subjectivity of the immigration officer was an important aspect of implementation. Drawing on the diaries and personal letters of the officer based at Cape Town, the article focuses on his emotions as he went about his daily life and moved between different intimate city spaces – home, church, docks and office. Bringing t…
Re-Locating Memories: Transnational and Local Narratives of Indian South Africans in Cape Town
This article plays on the word re-location to examine the memories of Indians in South Africa through oral histories about relocation as a result of the Group Areas Act, to memories of parents and grandparents relocating to South Africa from India as told to interviewers and to their own memories of journeys to India and back. The narratives of mobilities traverse time and national boundaries and are counter-posed by narratives of local mobilitie…
Split-Households: Indian Wives, Cape Town Husbands and Immigration Laws, 1900s to 1940s
This study of gendered migration from the Indian subcontinent to Cape Town focuses on women who did travel and those who did not. It identifies the split-household as being the dominant household formation in the first half of the twentieth century, a matter of preference of Indian male migrants. Some women also displayed resistance to leaving India. Women nonetheless suffered long periods of separation from husbands; sometimes they were abandone…
A Blast from the Past’: The Teaching of South African History at an Apartheid University, 1960s–1980s
(2000). ‘A Blast from the Past’:The Teaching of South African History at an Apartheid University, 1960s–1980s. South African Historical Journal: Vol. 42, No. 1, pp. 49-68
From Cane Fields to Freedom: A Chronicle of Indian South African Life
Indians in South Africa
The Limits to Visibility: Indian Women in the Transvaal, 1870s to 1930s
This article argues that it is important to include women in a discussion of Indian migration to the Transvaal. The historiography provides a very limited insight into the experiences of women and this is because the focus has been mainly on political struggles. Women secure a place in history only through their participation in passive resistance struggles. The article argues that although they are credited with participating in the Gandhi-led S…
South Africa/India: Re-Imagining the Disciplines
The Place of India in South African History: Academic Scholarship, Past, Present and Future
In 1971 Robert E. Gregory wrote a book titled India and East Africa deftly covering some 555 pages even though his narrative took him only up to 1939.1 Though the title of my survey is as far-reaching as his, I do not have the luxury of Gregory's space so I shall not even attempt a Gregory. In a foreword to a brochure published by the Indian High Commission in South Africa titled India-South Africa ; Strategic Partnership in a Changing World the …
The Passenger Indian as Worker: Indian Immigrants in Cape Town in the Early Twentieth Century
The article argues that the term passenger Indian has contributed to a divisive understanding of migration from the Indian subcontinent to South Africa. It has led to the stereotype of the wealthy Gujarati trader and it excludes much. By focusing on Indian migrants in Cape Town, the argument is made that the term must be redefined to include workers who came from not only Gujarat but also from Maharashtra and the Punjab and that those marginalise…
The Form, the Permit and the Photograph: An Archive of Mobility between South Africa and India
Inspired by recent scholarship that calls for a more critical engagement with archives and knowledge production, this article plots the biography of an archive in Cape Town. Unravelling the layers of paperwork, it locates the origins of the archive in a repressive state project of excluding Indian immigrants and controlling those within the borders of the Cape Colony. The paper trail reveals documents of identity and the state's attempts to verif…
Cultural Crossings from Africa to India: Select Travel Narratives of Indian South Africans from Durban and Cape Town, 1940s to 1990s
This article focuses on cultural encounters by Indian South Africans from Durban and Cape Town, uniquely 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 prioritised immigration from India to South Africa and to travel literatures focused on movement from the metropole to the peri…
Gujarati Shoemakers in Twentieth-Century Cape Town: Family, Gender, Caste and Community
Noting the Natal and Witwatersrand-centredness of the historiography of Indian South Africans, and this historiography's neglect of caste amongst Gujarati Hindus where caste mattered, this study focuses on the Gujarati shoemaker caste in Cape Town. Through narratives of those engaged in making, repairing or selling shoes, the article seeks to understand caste as occupation and explores how caste organisation facilitated economic and social mobili…
Split-Households: Indian Wives, Cape Town Husbands and Immigration Laws, 1900s to 1940s
This study of gendered migration from the Indian subcontinent to Cape Town focuses on women who did travel and those who did not. It identifies the split-household as being the dominant household formation in the first half of the twentieth century, a matter of preference of Indian male migrants. Some women also displayed resistance to leaving India. Women nonetheless suffered long periods of separation from husbands; sometimes they were abandone…
Speaking about building Rylands (1960s to 1980s): A Cape Flats history
This article draws on oral histories of Rylands, a former Indian group area on the Cape Flats. It shifts focus from narratives of dispossession to narratives of the making of a relocation site. The Cape Flats has generally been represented as a place of poverty, crime and hopelessness and existing on the “fringe” of the city. This article seeks to complicate our understandings and imaginings of the Cape Flats by focusing on Rylands. In its focus …
Betwixt the Oceans: The Chief Immigration Officer in Cape Town, Clarence Wilfred Cousins (1905-1915)
Drawing on the personal and official papers of an immigration officer, this article highlights his personality, social life, and the quotidian aspects of his work at the port. By placing the officer at the centre, instead of the usual tendency in South African historiography to focus on ethnic immigration histories, one secures broader insights into the administration of policy, such as the writing test (an exclusionary mechanism) and repatriatio…
Durban and Cape Town as Port Cities: Reconsidering Southern African Studies from the Indian Ocean
This special issue arose out of a workshop titled ‘Durban and Cape Town as Indian Ocean Port \nCities: Reconsidering Southern African Studies from the Indian Ocean’, held at the University of the Western Cape in September 2014. The volume is located at the intersection of southern African studies and Indian Ocean studies, and explores this exchange as a site for enriching southern African transnational historiographies
Engaging with the Bureaucracy: Indian Immigration Agents and Interpreters in Cape Town, South Africa (1902–16)
As part of a global pattern of Asian exclusions, in the early twentieth century, the Cape Colony effectively excluded new Asian immigrants by requiring immigrants to pass a literacy test in a European language. A permit system, employing the technologies of photography and anthropometry, was developed to facilitate transnational travel for those already in the colony who were unable to comply with the literacy test. This article pieces together f…
Re-Locating Memories: Transnational and Local Narratives of Indian South Africans in Cape Town
This article plays on the word re-location to examine the memories of Indians in South Africa through oral histories about relocation as a result of the Group Areas Act, to memories of parents and grandparents relocating to South Africa from India as told to interviewers and to their own memories of journeys to India and back. The narratives of mobilities traverse time and national boundaries and are counter-posed by narratives of local mobilitie…
The Desirable and Undesirable in the life of the Chief Immigration Officer in Cape Town, Clarence Wilfred Cousins, 1905–1915
This article argues that while immigration exclusions of those considered undesirable were clearly set out by legislation, the subjectivity of the immigration officer was an important aspect of implementation. Drawing on the diaries and personal letters of the officer based at Cape Town, the article focuses on his emotions as he went about his daily life and moved between different intimate city spaces – home, church, docks and office. Bringing t…
Controlling Transnational Asian Mobilities: A Comparison of Documentary Systems in Australia and South Africa, 1890s to 1940s
Going beyond Gandhi’s ‘inner circle’ of relationships: Satyagraha House, Hermann Kallenbach and Gandhi’s sons
The domestic dwelling known as The Kraal, inhabited briefly by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and his closest friend in South Africa, Hermann Kallenbach, in the early twentieth century, and remade a century later as a boutique guesthouse and museum named Satyagraha House, is the point of reference for a set of critical engagements with the work of heritage and historical narrative, questions of time and space, family legacies, photographs and letters…
Waiting on Cape Town in the apartheid era: Life histories of Indian waiters and barmen
Academic scholarship has neglected histories of waiters and barmen in South Africa, and the very small literature on the hotel industry neglects its work force. This article aims to address this omission by focussing on the life histories of five Indian men in Cape Town who worked during the apartheid era, a time of forced removals, job reservation and segregation in all aspects of life. The article especially links the racialized residential spa…
Writing in the Twenty-First Century about Indian South Africans: Revisiting Agendas and Reflecting on Foundational Writings
South Africa to India: Narratives of a Century of Repatriation (1871–1975)
This article focuses on the repatriation of Indians from South Africa, first under indentured labour contracts, and then under modified schemes between 1914 and 1975 applicable to all Indians. While the historiography of Indian South Africans prioritises movement of Indians to South Africa, this article is about reverse movement to India. It analyses narratives of repatriation that emerge from official sources in India and South Africa such as st…
Private stories and public life: Narrating the Indian South African present historically
The Letters of Sushila Gandhi: From Press Worker to Managing Trustee of Phoenix Settlement in South Africa, 1927 to 1977
An epistolarium of over 80 letters written by a first-generation Gujarati migrant woman to South Africa provides the basis for the construction of her biography. The personal register of the letters written to family and friends allows her to shape this biography and for her voice to be heard though filtered through the process of translation and selection. The letters are read for expressions of labour performativity, the meaning of work and its…
Sociology (21 works) · History (20 works) · South African History and Culture (19 works) · Gender Studies (16 works) · Political science (14 works) · History (13 works) · African history and culture studies (12 works) · Gender Studies (12 works) · Cape (11 works) · Geography (11 works)