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SOUTH AFRICA, November 26, 2020 (News 24): The first group of Indian indentured labourers arrived in South Africa in 1860. The majority settled in Natal because they were originally requested by local farmers. Like India, Natal was a British colony. Most of them were Hindus, although not exclusively so. South Africa’s Indian population currently stands at 1,286,930 (2.5% of the overall population). The Indian community can be culturally divided into four broad groups along linguistic lines: Tamil, Telugu, Hindi and Gujarati. They are divided along the following major religions: Hindu (41.3%), Muslim (24.6%) and Christian (24.4%). The interplay between Hinduism and Christianity in the predominantly Hindu Indian community, and in particular the contentious issue of conversion, has been the subject of great debate and intense research. In this two-part series, Professor Pratap Kumar, of South Africa’s University of KwaZulu-Natal, looks at patterns of conversion in the 20th century and the response of leaders in the Hindu community.
Not all Hindus may be economically better off. But there seems to be a sense inherent in the Indian society that those who became Christian through conversion were not only poor but also socially inferior. And this perhaps has to do with the remnants of caste consciousness that prevails even after its formal demise as a social unit. In addition to this, Christians feel that the majority Hindu community has hijacked the linguistic identity. The result is that they keep Christians of the same linguistic background on the periphery. For example, the Andhra Maha Sabha in South Africa is an organization of the Telugu-speaking community. Yet it is solely Hindu in its orientation, notwithstanding its linguistic signification. Likewise, the Tamil Federation of South Africa is Tamil only in name, and is Hindu inherently. All of this points to cultural alienation of one group, as Gerald Pillay writes. It offers ample opportunity to the alienated party to find social identity elsewhere, which is to affirm a Christian identity. For as long as this tendency to monopolize linguistic identity by the Hindu majority persists in the Indian community in South Africa, the issue of conversion will remain a thorny one both for the Hindu and the Christian communities.
Much more of this lengthy article at “source.”