Representations of South African Indian women in Farida Karodia's Daughters of the twilight and Shamim Sarif's The world unseen.

Abstract

In this article I examine the representations of South African Indian women in Farida Karodia's Daughters of the Twilight and Shamim Sarif's the world unseen. My contention is that each author chooses a different mode of representation and that certain features of these representations suggest both the different relationship each author has with South Africa and the differences in the times of production of the novels. Thus while both novels are set in the 1950s, Karodia, whose site of enunciation is the 'interregnum' in the 1980s, imagines the agency of her women quite differently from Sarif, who writes from a 'post-anti-apartheid' site of enunciation in the late 1990s. I analyse and compare the relationships between characters (men and women; women and women) and look at the cultural and political significance of mixed-race figures, concentrating on uncovering the mechanisms of power and their effects. I read these against a politico-historical context of the setting and that of the times and places of production.