ABSTRACT
The South African of Indian ancestry has traversed an extraordinary transformation through 160 years of journeying towards establishing a sense of nationhood and citizenship in the country. The visual representation of Indianness has far-reaching and complex positions that challenge the notion of the rainbow nation as advocated by former president Nelson Mandela. This chapter engages the politicisation of Indian identity as experienced against the giants of colonialism and apartheid and through the lens of a post-democratic South Africa. Since indenture, the South African Indian was represented through visual forms that were sometimes out of the realm of their control, thereby resulting in a visual record that reflected the social engineering experiments in South Africa. This chapter explores a series of photographs that is used to develop a thematic discussion on how photographs of Indians became more than just a memoir of cultural knowledge and understanding. The images become inscribed with tangible and intangible dimensions that are integral to the current characterisation of Indians in contemporary South Africa. The chapter thematically moves from a sense of alienhood to success and subsequent integration against the backdrop of the search for a place called home and a complex political agenda.
