South Africa offers a unique political, religious and cultural diversity, including a complex body of language and literature in many languages. Indian literature in English (including writers of Indian origins born or living abroad) has been well studied. In contrast, literature produced in Indian languages in the diaspora does not appear on the radar of many literary scholars. Yet PS Joshi (1949: 612), whose work is discussed below, had argued seventy years ago in a survey on South African Indian writing that their ‘abundant Indian literature’required an ‘exhaustive investigation’. Similarly, in his study on Urdu as an African language, Nile Green (2012: 174) suggests that the Gujarati corpus in East Africa is still ‘waiting to be discovered’.

Building on Usha Desai’s (1997, 2000) work on South African Gujarati language and literature, this chapter aims to produce a critical inventory of South African Gujarati literature and commentary on the genres created in South Africa from 1920 onwards. The chapter first traces the early history of Gujarati migrants from Gujarat to South Africa. Secondly, it examines how Gandhi’s protest writing in South Africa metamorphosed into an annual writing tradition and gradually receded after the 1990s. Thirdly, it engages with Gujarati literary history by emphasising contributions made by South African Gujaratis to Gujarati literature. Finally, it questions why such an active literary culture has not been adequately acknowledged in the mainstream histories of Gujarati. Hence, this chapter cautions against the erasure of a once vibrant literary culture within South Africa. This chapter focuses on themes of cultural identities, transnational places and local spaces to characterise the literature produced by South African writers in Gujarati poems, short stories and essays.