The Search for a Cultural Identity:
A Personal View of South African "Indian" Theatre

Muthal Naidoo

As one of the smallest ethnic groups in South Africa, the so-called Indian community is the least known inside as well as outside the country. While individuals from this community who contributed to the anti-apartheid struggle are well-known, at least in some quarters, the rich and diverse cultural life of Indians in South Africa has not received much discussion. ¹

Because it is a tiny community, it is often seen from without to be a homogenous group. Outsiders are often unaware of the differences between religions, languages, customs, class, and political affiliations that exacerbate internal tensions within the community. Very conscious of their minority position in the country, Indians in South Africa have also been subject to a great deal of external pressure. In the apartheid era, they were required to live in segregated areas and attend segregated schools and were also subjected to threats of repatriation to India (although these threats never materialized). At the same time, the relative affluence of some of their members and their social position caught between the haves (mostly white) and the have-nots (mostly black) made them targets of African resentment. ² As a result, there are two [End Page 29] main modes of interaction within and beyond the community; on the one hand, the consolidation and assertion of an Indian identity and culture, and, on the other, the desire to cut across ethnic boundaries and form alliances with other population groups.

The first effort--the consolidation of an Indian identity and culture--is fraught with problems because of the diversity within the community itself. Each separate group seeks to preserve customs and traditions which it perceives to be unique to its own grouping. There are three main religious groupings--Hindus, Muslims, and Christians--and within each of these, there are splits along language, custom, and class lines. There are several language groups: Tamil, Telugu, Hindi, Gujerati, and Urdu among others. ³ Different religious and language groups tend to develop along separate communal lines. In addition, class and political groupings cut across these boundaries and create further divisions.

The second effort--the desire to extend oneself beyond the "Indian" community--creates bonds across language and religion within the community and further alliances are made outside the community, with whites or blacks on a social level, and with progressives or conservatives on a political level. Many "Indians" have tried to find identities which reach beyond the "Indian" community. Because Western culture has historically dominated education and leisure in South African cities, where most of the community lives, "Indians" have sought to emulate white norms, values, and customs at the expense of their inherited culture. Others have acknowledged the strong influence of the West on their socialization but do not deny their origins. Still others have asserted their right to be called African, while acknowledging their South Asian inheritance.

Though inherited cultural and religious affiliations have influenced the perception of "Indians," material conditions in South Africa have been the major factor in influencing cultural patterns. From their earliest arrival in the country, "Indians" were like all other groups incorporated into segregated social and economic structures and the culture of apartheid. Disenfranchised by virtue of race, "Indians" were effectively black, even though apartheid law and racist consciousness did not include Indians among black people. ⁴ As blacks, we have been subjected to a dominant ideology of [End Page 30] white supremacy and Western cultural superiority, and like other groups have had to adopt customs and behaviors of the dominant culture and have developed an ambivalence toward our origins. What some of us have preserved of our original traditions are those elements that are acceptable to the dominant group. These elements are generally superficial and are regarded as exotic and therefore non-threatening.

Apartheid culture gave us a sense of inferiority, disempowerment, and a concern for self-preservation at the expense of human rights. In other words, many "Indians," even after the official demise of apartheid, are still struggling with the status of victim. Those who repudiated the role of victim developed a fighting spirit which took them outside the community and into alliances across ethnic barriers. In the "Indian" community, therefore, the search for identity is an ongoing process and underlies all cultural, social, and political activities. Indic theatre (as distinct from "Indian" theatre, theatre in South Africa that derives in part from Indian practices) has, over the years, reflected a range of changing conscious assertions of identity as well as unconscious habits and desires on the part of the producers, performers, and audiences.

In my own attempt to reconcile the diversity of factors that influence my sense of identity and my personal and social interaction, I have rejected the term "Indian" for myself. I was born and raised in South Africa and my life has been influenced by material conditions here rather than those in India. I have a residual culture that originated in India but that is where my "Indianness" begins and ends. As a South African, I have chosen one of many positions adopted by South Africans of Indian origin. Some clearly regard themselves as Indian and have kept strong ties with the mother country. Others have repudiated Indian customs and have adopted Western values and traditions, preserving only those superficial aspects, such as clothes and food, which have gained the approval of the dominant culture. I fall somewhere between these two extremes. I am proud of my origins, but what I try to express in my work is my South African heritage, a mixture of Western, African, and Indian influences, and I hope that my artistic creativity reflects the uniqueness of my background as well as the complexity of South African reality.

My earliest recollections of theatrical performance are of plays in Tamil. I am from the Tamil/Telugu-speaking section of the community, and, because education in Indian vernaculars was left up to the different groups, I had very little knowledge of other vernacular cultures or the way in which they were taught. Tamil plays reflected Indian mythology and history and included plays about great heroes, Kavalan and Galaver, tragic stories, Nallatankal and Satyavan-Savitri, ⁵ and dramatizations from the great all-Indian epics, the Ramayana and Mahabharata. ⁶ The acting troupes were at first [End Page 31] all-male companies, as was the case in India as well. In vernacular schools, however, both girls and boys took part in plays. As a child, I took part in a production in Telugu of Shakuntala, the classic play by Kalidasa. ⁷ By the late 1940s and early 1950s women were performing in Tamil plays. In those years, the Indian films to which I was exposed were based on the same myths and history as the plays being produced. It is not clear to me, therefore, whether the performances that I saw were part of an old tradition or influenced by Indian films. Even today, there are those theatre workers who are strongly influenced by Indian cinema.

The segregation laws which prohibited the formation of mixed production or performance companies as well as mixed audiences also influenced the development of the vernacular theatre. ⁸ Only in the 1980s were mixed audiences and performing groups fully accepted. In the 1950s and 1960s, "Indians" therefore had no access to the productions of African or white companies. We had no theatre venues either. We were allowed to use the Durban City Hall where a number of plays, especially by N. C. Naidoo, were staged, but cinemas, schools, and community halls were the most often used venues. ⁹ Segregation, which pre-dates the formal introduction of apartheid by the Afrikaner Nationalist government in 1948, confined early "Indian" theatre ventures to relatively conventional theatre in relatively inflexible venues.

At first, vernacular theatre tended to reproduce received Indian traditions and formed part of the artistic expression of the community. Once the influence of Western education began to be felt along with increased state emphasis on separate development in the 1940s, community leaders became concerned to preserve and propagate Indian languages and cultural values. Vernacular drama was supported initially by vernacular schools at which some form of dramatic activity, including music and dance, was practiced; there were eisteddfods encouraging competition in music, drama, and dance. This avenue of development continues into the present and increasing cultural exchange programs with India give new strength to vernacular theatrical expression. [End Page 32]

The vernacular drama, in my opinion, was easy prey for assimilation into an apartheid culture. The local determination to preserve Indian traditions and culture tended, unwittingly or not, to support the apartheid ideology of distinct, unchanging, and timeless cultures. As a result, other forms and cultural practices that expressed the complexity of South African social, economic, and political reality were for a long time regarded as inauthentic.

In the 1950s, the political conflict in the country accelerated. On the one hand, the government tightened restrictions on inter-racial social, residential, and cultural contact. On the other, there was widespread resistance to apartheid in the form of defiance campaigns, the drawing up of the Freedom Charter, and protest marches and boycotts, organized by the African National Congress (ANC) and its affiliates in the South African Indian Congress (SAIC), the Coloured Peoples' Organization (CPO), and the (white leftist) Congress of Democrats (COD). This renewed political activity had an influence on theatre as well. The Brian Brooke Theatre Company, a white commercial enterprise, offered Athol Fugard a commercial run of his first play, No-Good Friday (1958). It also arranged for performances at the Bolton Hall in Durban of currently quite controversial plays, such as The Kimberley Train, a play about a "Coloured" woman passing for white. ¹⁰ Events like these, along with greater access to education in English, exposed "Indians" to Western theatre. This development continued into the 1960s when the Adam Leslie revues and variety shows, such as Adam's Apple, came to the M. L. Sultan Technical College Hall and were followed by Wait a Minim, which featured Hugh Tracey's selections of African music. ¹¹ Politically-aware white people became involved with "Indian" people, mainly in education, helping to shape the direction of Indic theatre in school, college, and adult education productions. These productions included Indian plays in English translation. The directors of these plays were friends of the community, including Pauline Morel who was principal of Dartnell Crescent Primary School, a prestigious primary school for girls, and Charlie Shields who taught at Sastri College and then later at the Springfield College of Education. ¹² Pauline Morel was particularly fascinated by the work of [End Page 33] Rabindranath Tagore and produced several of his plays. Among her productions were Sacrifice, Muktadhara, and Kalidasa's Shakuntala. ¹³ She had drawn together a group of theatre enthusiasts who formed her company of actors. They included Ansuyah Singh, Devi Bughwan (who performed in Krishna Shah's production of The King of the Dark Chamber and later became professor of drama at the University of Durban-Westville), A. N. Naidoo, and Hassan Mall. As a result of her influence, Ansuyah Singh was inspired to write Cobwebs in the Garden in emulation of Tagore. The play was based on the life of Akbar, one of the Moghul Emperors of India. Charlie Shields directed James Elroy Flecker's play Hassan at the Springfield College of Education.

In addition to educators, the curriculum also influenced Indic theatre. As education was Eurocentric, we were exposed to Western literature and began to develop an interest in Shakespeare, as well as T. S. Eliot, J. M. Barrie, Terence Rattigan, and other British playwrights. Under the guidance of English teachers, schools began to produce these plays which were prescribed for study. Sastri College, a reputed high school for boys, became well known for its productions of Shakespeare under the direction of a Mr. Warriner and Charlie Shields.

This trend was reinforced when the Speech and Drama Department at Natal University in Durban opened its doors to blacks and a number of people, including Devi Bughwan, Guru Pillay, Gowrie Pather, and myself, studied Speech and Drama. ¹⁴ Our exposure to Western drama now included, amongst other works, classical Greek drama, as well as plays by Jean Anouilh, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Federico Lorca, in keeping with the standard Speech and Drama menu of the day. The 1950s marked a departure from the earlier theatrical ventures. Indic theatre was moving in several directions. We now had productions in English as well as in the vernacular, and drew on international as well as Indian repertoires. Through the influence of Western education and white educators, "Indian" theatre workers were also beginning to take an interest in Western drama. (I remember a production that toured the community called The Money Box, which was a translation into the vernacular of a Molière play, L'Avare.)

These trends--vernacular theatre, Indian plays translated into English, Western plays translated into the vernacular, and performances of the works of European playwrights--continued into the 1960s. The next step was to be the development of an indigenous drama. Some of us tried to get together at the beginning of the 1960s to develop theatre companies which would explore all the different avenues along which theatre was developing. These were tenuous efforts, but they all came together after our involvement with Union Artists and Krishna Shah. In 1962 Union Artists, which [End Page 34] had promoted shows like King Kong, brought Krishna Shah out to South Africa to repeat his successful off-Broadway production of King of the Dark Chamber by Tagore. ¹⁵ A company, which was formed in South Africa with two Indian stars Surya Kumari and Bashkar in the leading roles, toured the country with the play. In 1963, Shah returned to South Africa to conduct a six-week workshop at which he encouraged the development of original work. At the workshop, which was held at the old St. Aidan's Hall, he gave crash courses in directing, acting, and playwriting. At the end of six weeks, Ronnie Govender had written Beyond Cavalry, Benny Bunsee had written a farce, and Benjy Persadh had written a social drama. These three plays made up a triple bill Trio against Trains (we had to contend with passing trains as St. Aidan's Hall was right next to the railway line).

The group that had been involved in the workshop decided to form a theatre company: Durban Academy of Theatre Arts (DATA). The company included, amongst many others, Ronnie Govender, Welcome Msomi, Devi Bughwan, Pauline Morel, Fatima Meer, and me. ¹⁶ The company began immediately to look for plays to perform. The first play that it staged was Sheridan's The School for Scandal, and then it produced Cobwebs in the Garden. DATA was also involved in working with Union Artists in helping to promote productions sponsored by them in Durban. The venue that was used for these performances was the hall at the M. L. Sultan Technical College. It was here that the première of Sponono, written by Alan Paton and directed by Krishna Shah, took place. ¹⁷ This attempt to promote theatre in Durban ended when the Government banned the performance of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. ¹⁸ The controversy surrounding this production brought attention to the fact that plays were being presented to multi-racial audiences and thereafter there was stricter enforcement of the segregation laws and DATA was adversely affected.

While I was with DATA, I was teaching at the M. L. Sultan Technical College and had produced, with students from the college, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, by Molière. When that play had completed its run, the cast decided to join DATA and we began to work on a revue which we called Christmas Nuts. It consisted of songs and dances and many skits sending up various conventions and institutions in the "Indian" community. It was not well received by the few people who saw it. It was regarded as vulgar because of the lampooning of traditions and a skit which included a strip tease. [End Page 35]

This controversy indirectly led to a split in DATA ranks. Ronnie Govender, the students from M. L. Sultan Technical College, and I left DATA to form a new theatre company to work on modern plays and original indigenous work. We called ourselves the Shah Theatre Academy, in honor of Krishna Shah. Though we adopted distinct roles--Ronnie was the playwright, I was the director, and everyone else acted--we all aspired to expertise in the various aspects of theatre and knew that we could develop our talents as we chose. Our actors included Mohammed Alli, who had been a student at the M. L. Sultan College, Kessie Govender, Guru Pillay, Babs Pillay, and Benjy Francis, all of whom were later to make significant contributions to Indic theatre. ¹⁹

While we were waiting for Ronnie to write his play, Nineboy, the rest of the group was involved in acting workshops over the weekends and rehearsals for plays during the week. Between January 1964 and June 1965, we produced Arthur Miller's All My Sons, Clifford Odets's Golden Boy, an evening of poems, mime, and original one-act plays, and Molière's School for Wives (in an Indian setting), and took part in a National Drama Festival in Orlando in Soweto with a performance of J. M. Synge's Riders to the Sea, in which Welcome Msomi played the role of the son.

When I returned to Durban in July 1976, after an extended stay in the United States first on a Fulbright Scholarship and then as a lecturer at Washington University, I found that the Indic theatre had moved beyond the rudimentary stage it had been in when I left in 1965. A corps of theatre workers had been built up through hard work and perseverance in national drama festivals in the late 1960s and early 1970s, in the work of the Black Consciousness theatre workers, Guru Pillay, Maynard Peters, Benjy Francis, and the Shah Theatre Academy, then run by Ronnie Govender. Kessie Govender had established his own group and invited me to accompany his group of actors who were on tour with Stablexpense, a play which was enjoying great success in Durban. For the next year or two I watched as Kessie's company put on several plays at the Stable, a theatre which Kessie opened in Queen Street, in the center of the "Indian" business district. Among his productions were Working Class Hero and Kagoos. Thereafter, I worked once again with the Shah Theatre Academy. While Ronnie was revising and expanding The Lahnee's Pleasure, the Shah Theatre Academy put on three one-act plays called Three for Tea, which included Ronnie's Beyond Cavalry, and two farces written by me, Have Tea and Go and Black Magic. ²⁰ At this time the company [End Page 36] included Mohammed Alli, Babs Pillay, Essop Khan, and Manu Padayachee. Then The Lahnee's Pleasure was produced and the company went on tour with the production.

In addition to the work of these dedicated, part-time theatre workers, a new development was emerging in the universities. The Drama Department at the University of Durban-Westville (at that time a predominantly "Indian" institution) was training people in theatre. Saira Essa and Ketan Lakhani, from that department, established speech and drama centers for children and promoted productions of indigenous plays from the Market Theatre and some plays by local playwrights as well. Saira Essa's establishment was called the Upstairs Theatre and Lakhani's Communikon. ²¹

At the end of 1981, after having acted in a Chip of Glass Ruby, one of the Six Feet of the Country films based on the short stories of Nadine Gordimer, I produced my first full-length play, Of No Account at the Communikon Theatre. ²² In this play, I reacted against what I saw in the works of other black playwrights: namely an appeal to authority without showing a will to create their own reality. The character of Stanley Twala in Of No Account is a man who, though he has not yet taken control of his situation, is not a victim and exhibits an independent spirit.

When the play was nominated for a Critics Circle Award in Durban, I decided to quit teaching and try my hand at working full-time in theatre. I formed the Work-in-Progress Theatre Company (WIP) with the cast of the play and took the production to the Laager at the Market Theatre where it was a dismal failure. Nevertheless, I had embarked upon a road in search of an identity that would carry me beyond the confines of the Indian Community. WIP was a non-racial company and the plays that we performed examined interaction between blacks and whites. In 1982, I worked for a little while with the Upstairs Company which produced my second play We 3 Kings but I left the Upstairs Theatre at the end of the run. ²³ We 3 Kings traces the rise from the gutter of three vagrants who become candidates for the segregated Indian elections with the aid of a man called Whiteley. It uses the medium of farce to criticize the absurdity of the so-called tricameral parliament which was designed to give "Indian" and "Coloured" politicians sway over their own communities without any real power [End Page 37] vis-à-vis the apartheid state. Since these elections were largely boycotted in the 1980s, candidates were elected with a tiny fraction of community support and were generally regarded as sell-outs and opportunists.

After We 3 Kings, I wrote Coming Home which was produced at the Hermit Theatre in Hermitage Street. The cast included Madoda Ncayiyana, Etienne Essery, and Pippa Dyer. The play, a WIP production, was nominated for a Critics Circle Award and Ncayiyana for best newcomer. Ncayiyana played the role of S'hlobo, a black man with a vision of the future and the willingness and ability to make it a reality. Thereafter, WIP toured with We 3 Kings with a cast that included Babs Pillay, Mohammed Alli, Essop Khan, Etienne Essery, and Nasreen Moosa. ²⁴

At the beginning of 1983, I put on Outside-In, a play about a mixed marriage with Essop Khan and Pippa Dyer, which was revived in 1985 on the Grahamstown Festival Fringe in a production by Michael Stainbank with William Abdul as director. In April 1983, WIP revived Three for Tea. This time all the plays were written by me; they included the two earlier farces and a new play, It's Mine, about a woman who decides to raise her yet unborn child without the aid of its father whom she refuses to marry. The plays were directed by Babs Pillay, Mohammed Alli, and Essop Khan. While this production was running at The Hermit, another play, Masks, which I wrote at the request of Suria Naidoo of the Drama Department at the University of Durban-Westville and which she directed, was playing at the Asoka Theatre. In addition, the revue Masterplan, which I had written at the request of the United Democratic Front (UDF) was featured at UDF meetings at which information about the new tricameral system was being disseminated. This revue was banned in September 1983.

Of all the plays I have written, the play that most overtly represents the search for identity is Masks. The play takes place in the mind of a woman who is of "Indian" and "Coloured" parentage and all the characters who appear on stage are various manifestations of her split personality. Her psychosis is born out of racism and it is only when she can acknowledge all elements of her heritage and accept them as valid within herself that she becomes a whole human being again. ²⁵

WIP continued to be involved in working with the UDF, and I wrote three more revues, Chicken Licken, which took the place of Masterplan, Allan's Coon Carnival for the "Coloured" community's attempts to conscientize people about the tricameral system and, with a group from Lamontville, The Freedom Train, which was an attempt to depict the struggle for liberation focusing on the history of The Freedom Charter (1955), and [End Page 38] fusing relevant events from the lives of Nelson Mandela and Albert Luthuli, the ANC President, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts. ²⁶

When WIP disbanded at the end of 1983 because of a lack of funds, I left Durban to make a new beginning in the Transvaal (now Gauteng). ²⁷ Since leaving Durban I wrote a play at the request of the Detainees Parents Support Committee Johannesburg. The play, Nobody's Hero, together with Ikhayalethu (lit. "our house," formerly Coming Home), was performed at the Laager at the Market in September 1987. Nobody's Hero deals with a detainee in solitary confinement whom we find dead at the beginning of the play and whose soul goes through a kind of purgatory in the cell. He is a man who has been through the Soweto Uprising of 1976 and is in detention again in the mid-1980s. From 1989, when I became a lecturer at Giyani College of Education, a newly established institution in Gazankulu, a former Bantustan, I have focused on helping my students explore the potential for drama inherent in their experience, that is, through African ritual, customs, dance, and music. ²⁸ My goal here in the Northern Province is to enable students, who are preparing to become teachers, to create their own plays, rather than rely heavily on ready-made or imported scripts which often have little relevance to their lives.

In my search over the years, I have moved completely away from Indic theatre per se. If one were to regard my work as Indic simply because I am of Indian origin, then the notion of Indic theatre would have to be redefined. Still, I realize that many South Africans like myself, who not only reject the notion of fixed culture but also the notion of fixed identity, are caught in the contradiction between our non-racial aspirations and the pressure to acknowledge if not assert an ethnic affiliation because race is still a major factor in our thinking in South Africa.

Muthal Naidoo has a Ph.D from Indiana University and has taught at Washington University in St. Louis and at the Giyani College of Education in South Africa's Northern Province, where she is now vice-rector. She is a director and playwright and is currently on the advisory board of the soon-to-be-reorganized Performing Arts Council of the Transvaal.

Notes

An earlier, unannotated version of this essay was published as #1 in the Indic Theatre Monograph Series, University of Durban-Westville in 1993. Reprinted with permission of the author. Annotated by Loren Kruger.

1. Anti-apartheid activists include the Mahatma Gandhi who, during his stay in South Africa from 1893 to 1914, organized passive resistance campaigns against segregation and established an ashram; Yusuf Dadoo, leader of the South African Indian Congress during its most militant period of the Defiance Campaign in the 1950s, and Fatima Meer, also involved in the Defiance Campaign, a founding member of the Federation of South African Women and author of a biography of Nelson Mandela.

2. The most famous expression of this resentment were the anti-Indian riots of 1949, in which a relatively minor incident--an Indian store-owner retaliated against an African child who was allegedly caught stealing--provoked arson attacks on Indian homes and individuals, mostly in the mixed neighborhood of Cato Manor, near Durban. Although the attacks were committed by predominantly Zulu crowds, the ammunition was apparently provided by white merchants aggrieved by what they saw as Indian encroachment. The riot gave the government the excuse to dismantle Cato Manor and to force Indians and Zulus alike to live in segregated townships further away from Durban.

3. Although religious and linguistic divisions do not always correspond to each other, Tamil, Telugu, and Hindi speakers are largely descendants of indentured laborers brought out by the British in the 1860s to cut sugar cane in Natal and come from families that have historically followed Hindu religious practices, while Gujerati and Urdu speakers tend to be Moslem and include in their ancestor many so-called "passenger Indians" who came to South Africa on their own accord in search of small trading opportunities, until the British Colonial Government passed laws ca.1902 to restrict immigration by "Asians" (including, initially, Eastern Jews as well as Indians and Chinese). Most "Indians" are therefore fourth or fifth generation South Africans.

4. The rise of the Black Consciousness movement among black students in the late 1960s and 1970s encouraged students and their respective communities to argue that "black" was not a matter of "pigment" but of "attitude," and therefore that "black" should include all those people who resisted the government's designation of "non-white." See Stephen Bantu Biko, I Write What I Like (New York: Harper and Row, 1978), 48. In addition to Africans such as Biko and Barney Pityana, this movement included "Indians" such as Srini and Sam Moodley and Saths Cooper, who were active in resistance theatre groups as well as anti-apartheid politics.

5. A folk ballad about the misfortunes and misery caused to a lonely woman and her children by her elder brother's wife, Nallatankal Katai was first printed as a chapbook in Madras in 1904. It was com-posed as a drama by Ca.Cu.Cankaralinka Kavisayar and staged from 1932 onwards. See Lexicon of Tamil Literature, ed. Kamil Zvelebil (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994). Satyavan-Savitri refers to the mythic story in the Mahabharata about the devotion of Savitri, daughter of the king of Madra, whose firm resolve saves her husband, Satyavan, from Yama, the god of the dead who has come to take him. See The Hindu World: An Encyclopedic Survey of Hinduism, ed. Benjamin Walker (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1968).

6. The Mahabharata and the Ramayana are the major epics of Hindu culture and together provide an important source of knowledge of Hindu life and thought as they evolved between 400 BCE and 200 CE. The Mahabharata ("Great Epic of the Bharatha Dynasty") relates the struggle for supremacy between two related royal families. It is thought to be broadly based on events that took place between 1400 and 1000 BCE, but also includes romance subplots as well as the single most important text of Hindu dharma (conduct), the Bhagavadgita ("Song of the Lord"). The Ramayana ("Romance of Rama") was composed ca.300 BCE by the poet Valmiki, who appears as a sage in the poem. It follows the fortunes and misfortunes of the prince, Rama, and his wife, Sita, his struggle to regain his kingdom, and hers to prove her chastity. Both epics have appeared in several written and oral vernacular forms and continue to be popular all over South and South-East Asia. See The New Encyclopedia Britannica. Micropedia Ready Reference, 15th ed., s.v. Mahabharata and Ramayana.

7. Kalidasa was a classical Sanskrit dramatist active from the late 4th century to the early 5th century CE. His most famous work, Shakuntala, uses gesture language and symbols to enact the love between King Dushyanta and Shakuntala, the mistress of a hermitage.

8. Until the 1950s, small informal mixed groups affiliated with liberal organizations such as Dorkay House or non-racial political groupings such as the Communist Party (banned in 1950) managed to perform in makeshift venues to mixed audiences, although racist custom, if not the law, excluded most of these groups from commercial theatres. In 1965 an amendment to the Group Areas Act banned all mixed audiences. Although some clandestine activity continued, most theatre activity in the 1970s, with the exception of the Space (1972-79) and the Market Theatres (1976-), were segregated.

9. N. C. Naidoo produced classical Indian plays in the 1940s and 1950s. These were performed in the vernacular to predominantly Indian audiences.

10. The Kimberley Train by Lewis Sowden was first performed at the Library Theatre in Johannesburg in 1958. Although it ends with the break-up of the relationship between white John Powers and his fiancée Elaine, revealed as Coloured, it also implies that Elaine will still pass for white, aided by the underground organization known as the Kimberley train.

11. Adam Leslie satirized South Africa's political foibles in a career that spanned the 1940s to the 1970s; see Mervyn McMurty, "Adam Leslie and his Contribution to Satire in Intimate Revue in South African Theatre," South African Theatre Journal 9 (1995): 3-27. Wait a Minim was organized by Leon Gluckman who also directed King Kong in 1959. Hugh Tracey was an ethno-musicologist famous for his commitment to African traditional music, sometimes at the expense of hybrid urban (and no less African) music he considered inauthentic. His son Andrew continues the tradition at Rhodes University.

12. Pauline Morel produced English translations of Indian drama by modern authors, such as Tagore, and classical poets, such as Kalidasa, with casts drawn from her circle of friends in the Indian community as well as the teaching staff at Dartnell Crescent School. She was active in the 1950s and 1960s. While at Sastri College, an Indian high school for boys, Charlie Shields produced several plays by Shakespeare. At Springfield Training College, he produced plays in English on Eastern themes, such as James Elroy Flecker's Hassan.

13. The great Bengali poet, internationalist, and prolific author Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) won the Nobel Prize in 1913. Sacrifice (1890, Bengali title, Visarjan), an all time success on the Bengali stage, is a five-act play about the royal priest Raghupati's fury at the king's prohibition of animal sacrifice in the temple, which he sees as a usurpation of his priestly authority. Muktadhara (1922, translated title, Free Current), a play from Tagore's symbolist period, depicts revolt against social, political, and industrial injustice and suggests the dangers of a nationalism that sacrifices humanity to the machine. See Encyclopaedia of Indian Literature, ed. Mohan Lal (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1992) and Comparative Indian Literature, ed. K. M. George (Madras: Macmillan, 1984). For Shakuntala, see note 7.

14. Guru Pillay, one of the group who studied drama at the University of Natal, came from a family involved in the vernacular theatre and was one of the founding members of the Shah Theatre Academy.

15. Krishna Shah was an Indian-born director working primarily in New York. His influence on Indic theatre in South Africa is documented in Dennis Schauffer's monograph, Under the Shadow of the Shah (Durban: University of Durban-Westville, 1994). Union Artists had, since the 1950s, produced and sponsored musicals and musical evenings with mostly black casts, such as King Kong (1959) and Gibson Kente's Sikalo (1966). Although managed mostly by liberal white men, the organization did ensure that black musicians and other performers received regular remuneration for their work.

16. For Fatima Meer, see note 1. Ronnie Govender went on to write and direct The Lahnee's Pleasure (1972), discussed below, as well as dramatized stories of "Indian" life in Durban and environs, such as On the Edge (1991) and 1949 (1996). The latter includes a story about an African trying in vain to protect his landlord during the riot. Welcome Msomi, an ethnic Zulu, created Umabatha, a Zulu variation on the story of Macbeth, and choreographed the singing and dancing for President Mandela's inauguration in May 1994.

17. Sponono opened in December 1962 to moderate success. Shah took the production to New York the following year but the play, which deals with the relationship between Sponono, a repentant but unredeemed juvenile delinquent, and his paternalistic if well-meaning probation officer, did not find favor with American audiences.

18. This production, which originated in the Witwatersrand University Great Hall in Johannesburg in 1963, was banned on the grounds of "moral lassitude" for its frank treatment of an unhappy marriage rather than for any political threat it might have posed.

19. Mohammed Alli was one of the early members of the Shah Theatre Academy and acted in plays by Kessie and Ronnie Govender. He went on to act in several films and, more recently, has teamed up with Essop Khan, to bring touring productions of contemporary farces and revues to Indian neighborhoods in KwaZulu/Natal and Gauteng. Kessie Govender's plays include Working Class Hero (1979), about conflict between an African and "Indians," and Kagoos (1988). More recently, he has been working in theatre for education, writing, and producing plays like God Made Mosquitos Too (1994) about gay people in South Africa. Benjy Francis directed the première of We Shall Sing for the Fatherland by Zakes Mda for the Federated Union of Black Artists in Johannesburg (1979) and founded the Dhlomo Theatre in honor of South Africa's first major black playwright, Herbert Dhlomo, where he directed The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, by the exiled Kenyan writer, Ngugi wa Th'iongo, among other plays. He is currently director of the Afrika Cultural Centre.

20. The Lahnee's Pleasure was first presented as a one-act play at Orient Hall Durban in July 1972, as part of a theatre festival to launch the South African Black Theatre Union. Other plays at this festival included Encounter, a politically provocative play about the Kenyan Mau-Mau resistance, by the Ugandan-Indian playwright Kuldip Sondhi (produced by the University of Natal--Black Section--and directed by Sam Moodley) and Requiem for Brother X, by the African-American playwright William Wellington Mackey (produced by Theatre Council of Natal [TECON] and directed by Srini Moodley). The two-act version of The Lahnee's Pleasure opened in 1977 and went on national tour, playing at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg.

21. Saira Essa founded Upstairs Theatre as a teaching as well as performance venue in the early 1980s and produced The Biko Inquest (1985, based on the legal transcripts and a play text by Norman Fenton and John Blair); Don't Stop the Revolution (1987), among others. She later went on to become a talk-show host for M-NET, South Africa's cable channel. Ketan Lakhani opened the Communikon in the late 1970s, after studying drama at the University of Durban-Westville. More recently, he has been active as a television actor.

22. The series was directed by Lynton Stephenson with funds from ZDF (German television). A Chip of Glass Ruby deals with the trials of an "Indian" family forced to leave their home to make way for white development.

23. We 3 Kings was subsequently published in the Asoka Theatre series at the University of Durban-Westville.

24. Etienne Essery worked with WIP in the 1980s, acting in We 3 Kings and in Ikhayalethu. More recently, he has turned his hand to writing plays. Nasreen Moosa worked with the Upstairs Theatre before joining WIP in the mid-1980s.

25. Most plays about the aspirations and identity crises of Coloured people focus, like Sowden's Kimberley Train and Basil Warner's Try for White (1959), on individuals aspiring to white identity; Naidoo's play is unusual in that it deals with someone caught between "Indian" and "Coloured" communities. Even after the demise of official apartheid, the theme of Coloured identity continues to capture attention, as Cheaper than Roses (1996) a recent play on the topic by another "Indian" South African, Ismael Mahomed. The play deals with a Coloured woman who was helped by a social worker to pass for white in the apartheid era and now, when white skin is no longer an object of desire, feels alienated from her family.

26. In addition to productions at The Hermit and revues for the UDF, WIP also embarked on a theatre-in-education program. We put together a dramatization of The Return of the Native (based on Thomas Hardy's novel, a set text for the schools that year), which toured the schools in Durban and Pietermaritzburg.

27. Upon arriving in the Transvaal, now Gauteng, in 1984, I taught at schools in Laudium, Pretoria and Bryanston, Johannesburg from 1985-1988. I then worked briefly at Funda Centre in Soweto for an NGO called TELIP (Teachers' English Language Improvement Project), before moving onto Giyani in October 1988.

28. Giyani was formerly the capital of the Bantustan Gazankulu. The area is now part of the Northern Province.

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