Once we were heathens
The colonial Europeans had little comprehension of, or patience for, the Indian religious tamasas, ritual festivals of indenture days. They saw heathen, ungodly, lewdness, dangerous tumult and disorder, and all the more evidence of the Indians’ “bad cha
IN THE late 1960s, my father and I were driving back from Ottawa. We had been to visit his friends, the Ramjivans. On the way to our Kismet Arcade flat, we passed the Durban Drive-in.
By now I was enthralled with the movies. Double features at the Shah Jehan, matinees at the Raj, I took them all in. Seeing the images on the huge screen bounce off the trees, I begged my father to stop. And so there we were. Parked on the pavement.
Through a gap in the fence, we could see the silhouettes of actors. We could not hear them. Inside were white people, in white cars, eating white popcorn. The only “non-whites” were waiters scurrying about, hanging trays of toasted sandwiches on car windows, whose occupants did not even give them a flicker of acknowledgement.
But I watched with awe and wonder. I knew not to ask to get closer, to demand that we drive our Rambler Rogue into the drive-in. You see, I knew our place. On Sundays, we would go and watch white kids play on the trampoline at North Beach and go-karts at Blue Lagoon.
Only once did my father try and breach the divide. Durban City versus Highlands Park. The non-white stand was full. So my father snuck into the white section, his skin of lighter hue than many of the sun-tanned Europeans. He left me behind the pillar. I was traumatised. He held me close and promised never to abandon me. Ever.
Almost a half century later, the Durban Drive-in will come alive this weekend. The annual Diwali Festival will attract tens of thousands.
The struggle for Diwali unfolded more than 100 years before, in the interstices of Indian indenture. A system that took away your name and past by assigning you a number. To whites in Natal, Hindu migrants were “heathens” and when you married, under religion, was written this very word. You were a beast of burden, a cog in a labouring machine. Sugar barons who demanded that an indentured woman spend her wedding night with them. Overseers who simply raped women on the sugar fields as if having their lunch. Witness this testimony:
“I [Sasamah] am the wife of Chengadoo of Rydal Vale Estate, Duffs Road. I am employed on the estate as field labourer. Three Mondays ago the overseer asked me to lie with him.
“I refused. He asked me several times after this to lie with him. I declined to do so on all occasions. On Monday week last in the afternoon I was put to work alone apart from other women close to a cane field. I refused to work alone.
“He said that I must work where he says. I was doing my work. He left me and came back a few minutes after and said that he would have connection with me. With that he carried me into a large cane field. I cried out for help but there were no one working near to hear my cry.
“He carried me and threw me on my back in the field. He lifted up my cloth and got between my legs. Before committing the act he stuffed cloth in my mouth and had connexion with me. I felt he passed semen into me. Before leaving me he said if I told anyone he would cut my throat.”
Brutality
In this context of casual everyday brutality, the story of Ram and Sita, as returning from exile becomes a powerful story. One day, the indentured too would return to their families and villages. For now though, they built defences against a system that denied them their humanity, their past and their future.
At a time when slave-like conditions gave people a feeling of what John Berger called “undefeated despair”, the bare and rudimentary Diwali enactments sparked optimism that all would be well. How more powerful a story to grip the imagination and give people hope than the story of Ram and Sita?
Juan Mascaro’s words are apposite: “We find in the Gita that there is going to be a great battle for the rule of a Kingdom; and how can we doubt that this is the Kingdom of Heaven, the kingdom of the soul? Are we going to allow the forces of light in us or the forces of darkness to win? And yet, how easy not to fight, and to find reasons to withdraw from the battle!”
Deep in the plantations, the indentured fought back. Central to this were cultural and religious traditions reworked and rethought for the circumstances in which they found themselves.
Conviction in a time of confusion. Conviction at a time of consternation. Conviction at time of crisis.
Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, from the West Indies, captures this sense of belief movingly: “I was polluting the afternoon with doubt and with the patronage of admiration. I misread the event through a visual echo of History – the cane fields, indenture, the evocation of vanished armies, temples and trumpeting elephants – when all around me there was quite the opposite – a delight of conviction, not loss.”
Hinduism was kept alive by the building of temples. Babu Talwantsing and Chundoo Sing, both of whom came as indentured workers, founded the Gopallal Hindu Temple in Verulam in 1888. One of the financiers of the Umgeni Road Temple, originally built in 1885, was a woman, Amrotham Pillay, who came as an indentured migrant in 1889. Temples were a powerful source of comfort for many, as it was here that communal worship was experienced, birth, marriage and death ceremonies observed, and festivals celebrated. These were the very first incubators of community in an environment of incredible hostility.
Diwali was only celebrated officially in Durban for the first time in 1910. Until then, the only official religious break was Muharram. When Hindus asked for Diwali, it was scorned, with the colonial authorities saying, how many “coolie Christmases” do you want to have.
In 1908 came divine intervention. Swami Shankeranand arrived. To this man, we owe a huge debt and a comprehensive biography of Swamijee awaits its historian.
When you walk into the Durban Drive-in, spare a thought for those who fought so hard to keep the spirit of Hinduism alive. A Hinduism full of a desire for justice and an inner force of hope. Spare a thought for the present Kali Yuga and how those old stories from the Gita can help us fire a new movement of conviction and principle.