Abstract
While it has long been seen as a minority corpus in South African literature, South African Indian writing is gaining momentum for its unique stance and reflections of current culture. Contemporary South African fiction allows for a reading of the post-transition, conceptualised through its ambiguities, layered temporalities and paradoxes. This study provides a reading of the post-transition through the varied perspectives captured in contemporary South African Indian novels. The post-transition has been represented as an ambivalent period, in that it portrays complex and progressive movement towards cultural entanglement and national unity, yet at the same time placing these notions under critical pressure through its exposure of the lacunae and flaws in South Africa’s ‘rainbow nation’. Read together and against one another, the novels provide an interesting reading of complex identities, agency and newness, while simultaneously drawing on the bleak realities of the present, marked by a general sense of disaffection post-1994. This project considers Zinaid Meeran’s Saracen at the Gates (2009), Shaida Kazie Ali’s Lessons in Husbandry (2012), Imraan Coovadia’s High Low In-between (2009) and Shubnum Khan’s Onion Tears (2011), for their contributions to the South African Indian literary canon and the critical readings they allow of the post-transition.
M.A. (English)