Authenticity and Representation in South African Indian Cinema

Authenticity and Representation in South African Indian Cinema

South African filmmakers of Indian ancestry are tapping into family values— but whose?

By Youlendree Appasamy・June 26, 2020・15 minutes

South African Indian cinema is “taking off in leaps and bounds”, according to the headlines in local newspapers. But, looking beyond the headlines, how have titles like Keeping up with the Kandasamys (KuwtK), Broken Promises, and Kings of Mulberry Street (KoMS) crafted narratives about South Africans of Indian ancestry, and what elements have led to this heightened visibility in the South Africa film industry?

All three films have paved the way for other filmmakers to make interesting stories woven into the lived experiences of South Africans of Indian ancestry by highlighting the diversity within the South African Indian community and showing other South Africans what happens in our minority community. South Africans of Indian ancestry are multi-dimensional, and as much as these three films which have garnered mainstream success by commercial measures, there’s something that feels off about representation for representation’s sake. These films may tick the checkboxes for escapism and authenticity—but for whom?

Broken Promises—which has now blossomed into a four-film franchise—was released in 2004 and allowed us a look into the trials and tribulations of Chatsworth newlyweds Natasha and Ruben. As the trailer shows, the film is a wacky collage of family drama and comedic moments spliced together by lo-fi editing and post-production flourishes. It was made on a shoestring budget by Kumaran Naidu and features now archetypal South African Indian figures in the family comedy-drama set-up: weak men, mothers-in-law who inspire the spice used in Durban curries, a drunk uncle who’s knee-deep in Castle Lager, and tech-obsessed children.

But in the mid-2000s, these archetypes weren’t as fully formed as they are now. The Keeping up with the Kandasamys films, also a franchise, provide a re-reading of Romeo and Juliet set in Chatsworth, South Africa. Perhaps if not for Broken Promises and it’s wildfire popularity, Keeping up with the Kandasamys would not have been made, and certainly without the resources it enjoyed. When the first Broken Promises film was released, it was a straight-to-DVD affair. Forty thousand copies were sold legally, with countless more pirated sales flooding Indian suburbs from Laudium to Phoenix. In 2017, Keeping up with the Kandasamys was released in mainstream cinema theatres, and the archetypes created in the Broken Promises franchise found resonance with South African audiences on a larger scale. The film made over R16-million in its first year of release.

Sallywood rules

In 2018, the South African Cultural Observatory (SACO), a think-tank about South Africa’s creative industries, released a document called The Establishment of the Film Sector as a Catalyst for Economic Growth in South Africa: Toward a Sallywood Framework. The document outlined the industry’s aspirations which included more audience-driven content and more films that reflect uniquely South African stories. The document also described barriers to young filmmakers’ entry into the industry, such as language, access to film education, and the cost of both watching and making films in the country. Keeping up with the Kandasamys came up regularly in the document as an example of a well-executed “audience-driven film” and an “authentically South African story.”

“In 2017, the highest-grossing and best-performing movie produced in South Africa was Keeping up with the Kandasamys […] At its close, it had raked in well over R16 million in box office revenue,” the report states. This success was not entirely forecasted film critics and SACO alike.

Judy Naidoo, director of Kings of Mulberry Street, noted in Citypress that finally, the South African film industry is taking non-mainstream films (and audiences) seriously.

“The industry has woken up to the fact that there is an Indian market that is hungry for content. They are also aware that they can make money. I do think, however, that even though a lot of films might get made, it still depends on the quality of the film,” she said.

Naidoo’s point directly speaks to some of the questions the Sallywood report raises, namely: what does a post-apartheid film industry look like? Who makes the films, and for whom?

“Can distributors and buyers not predict which films will sell? Are they still banking on Leon Schuster-like comedies to perform well rather than the likes of the South African Indian Kandasamys?” asks the document.

Kumaran Naidu, director of the Broken Promises franchise, found breaking into the industry tough. It was through audiences’ hunger for representational storylines that depicted the South African Indian community as it, supposedly, actually is, that his films saw screenings in Ster Kinekor Theatres.

“After completing his first feature, he was eager to have his work exhibited in the public realm. But, mainstream cinema houses were wary of a first-time local filmmaker and what they referred to as the poor quality of his film,” says Subeshini Moodley in her analysis of the film. As noted earlier, it was through DVD piracy that the film circulated, and its popularity couldn’t be denied by mainstream theatres.

Representation in the public realm of a minority race, religion, culture, community in South Africa has been proven as a profitable deal. However, the representation of marginalised peoples and communities is not the only thing driving South Africans to the cinema.

According to the Sallywood report, what South African audiences want is escapism, optimistic representation, and, of course, authentic South African tales. Keeping up with the Kandasamys director, Jayan Moodley, felt that her film was about escapism, yet still paying homage to Chatsworth, the area the film was set in.

“It was really important to me that South Africans could go into a cinema, escape for 90-minutes, have a good laugh, be able to reflect, be able to watch a different community to understand that we have different melting pots of culture and diversity—and just have a good time,” she said in a press interview about the first film.

History matters

“The more historical films focus on the indenture of Indians in South Africa and the hardships they endured (e.g. White Gold) or the political awakening and contribution of Mohandas K. Gandhi (e.g. The Making of the Mahatma). These films depict the notion of belonging in two ways: the longing for a return to the homeland of India and a longing for immersion into a South African society,” notes Moodley, explaining the historical genres of South African Indian cinema.

Moodley’s point highlights a central animating tension in Keeping up with the Kandasamys, Kings of Mulberry Street, and Broken Promises. These films are about marriage, nostalgia, and—most importantly—family. And this family is not one that exists in a fictive homeland, but one that’s firmly located in South Africa, and has been for generations.

South Africans of South Asian origin, flattened to the apartheid category of (South African) Indians, are a minority community in South Africa. We came via ship, mostly. In 1684, the first group of South Asians was displaced, through enslavement, to what is now known as Cape Town. The second wave of South Asian immigration was via the British colonial system of indentured labour, which started in the 1860s in South Africa. South Africans of South Asian ancestry were classified as non-white during apartheid, and although some were active in the anti-apartheid struggle, like Saths Cooper or Fatima Meer, it often came at the price of community cohesion. The insular and segregated nature of the community then, is, unfortunately, still the overriding characteristic today.

Descendants of indentured labourers are involved in the making of these films and have been at the forefront of South African Indian filmmaking. In Kings of Mulberry Street, the long, wide pans of the sugarcane fields that populate KwaZulu-Natal’s North Coast provide a subtle reminder to an informed audience that those plantations were the genesis of family life for so many South African Indian families.

While in Keeping up with the Kandasamys and Broken Promises the films’ historical setting is vaguely post-apartheid, Kings of Mulberry Street is a family comedy-drama set in the early 1980s—the violent dying days of apartheid and the Group Areas Act. The movie evokes this period through old Bollywood films popular in the 80s, and gives the audiences glimpses of the broader South African situation through journalist Dev Singh, the father of one of the film’s protagonists.

Due to the family drama-comedy genre, one could write these films off as apolitical—pieces of escapist fluff. But, looking at them as important cultural artefacts, they reflect a Durban-centric South African Indian experience.

Keeping up with the Kandasamys opening sequence exemplifies this:

“Durban, ah beautiful isn’t it? Like one paradise this place is man! But you think this is the real Durban?

[pans over the port, yachts and surfers]

Let me take you to the real deal.

[cut to Chatsworth, an Indian township area where South African Indian communities were forcibly relocated to during apartheid]

You see, may years ago, the government took us, all the Indian people, and put us in one place. They named it Chatsworth, after some place in England. Hmm, what a bloody cheek. But never mind they did like that, we struggled, struggled and stayed.”

Similarly, in Kings of Mulberry Street, the wide shots panning over the sugarcane fields on KwaZulu-Natal’s North Coast establish the film as one that is self-aware of history, of indentured labour and the colonial violence that led to the creation South African Indian settlements.

Systemic exclusions mirrored

Whenever we use the word ‘authentic’ we often have a built-in sense of what constitutes the term and tend do so in ways that mirror the social norms of a community. Culture is mutually constituted, and the community constituting it—in this case, South African Indians—has been called out time and time again for anti-blackness against Black African people, anti-queer attitudes, colourism and classism.

Naidu, who often seeks to represent the particularity of South African Indian experiences through film, has been accused of homophobia in the latest iteration of Broken Promises.

Naufal Khan, of the popular blog Indian Spice, noted how the filmmaker used queerness, or deviation from heteronormativity, as joke fodder. The same violence against the LGBT+ community can be seen in Mervin’s character in Keeping up with the Kandasamy’s.

“What Kumaran Naidu & Fadeen Mia [producer] failed to see was that the movie has the eyes and ears of audience members. They should have created positive storylines rather than feed more hatred and prejudice against LGBT+ people. Laughing at jokes that are made at the expense of a marginalized group creates a dangerous precedent. It’s about creating a safe environment for the queer desi,” says Khan in their review of the film.

The presence/absence of whiteness is also telling of how apartheid racial categorisation and attendant anti-blackness constitutes a large part of how South African Indian communities see ourselves and our relation to other South Africans.

When Black people appear in the majority of these films, their role is reduced to assistant characters; ones who are silent in the frame. All three films are set within intimate or domestic spaces, and there, the filmmakers tell us, racial heterogeneity rules, and that’s how insular South African Indian communities would like it to stay.

Intertwined with what these films tell us about race, they also address class, linguistic, and religious differences with more nuance by showing the viewer the diversity encapsulated in the apartheid creation, ‘South African Indian’.

For example, through the dichotomy of laanie (rich person) and charou (derogatory slang for a person of Indian origin), Naidoo creates a framework of class for the Chetty and the Singh families in Kings of Mulberry Street.

Naidoo deftly uses the Singh’s moving-in montage at the beginning of the film to signal class differences. The Chettys cook outside on an open fire whereas the Singhs have cutting edge appliances, like a toaster. What food the two families eat is also an important class signifier, with the Singhs aligning with European cuisine, and the Chettys, Durban Indian cuisine (think tin-fish samoosas and lamb chops chutney).

In many ways, these three films represent huge gains made in a tough industry especially, as SACO noted, for Black and Brown filmmakers trying to speak from their perspective. However, these films, in seeking to capture an “authentic” minority lifestyle and making it profitable, have ended up pandering to mainstream commercial measures. With films that have a strong niche audience in South Africa’s market, the danger is that a specific set of marketable ideas will be mined—ironically, losing the ‘authenticity’ the South African film industry is striving for. ❖

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