Sublime

The marriage ruling led to two years of a massive satyagraha campaign. After thousands of arrests, strikes, police crackdowns, and even some deaths, the government and the protesters reached a compromise: the Indian Relief Act of 1914, which restored some rights.

I believed, in those years, that to be a good Indian girl meant to live entirely without sexual desire; that my longing itself, let alone any action to fulfill it, made me bad, wrong, and un-Indian. My entire understanding of my culture was that transmitted by my parents, who in turn passed on what they had been taught, at a level they considered a

I know that India is too easy an answer. I could describe my parents' series of migrations, including Fiji, but I would have to go back another generation to match up a landscape with my phenotype: skin tone, hair, features. My extended family lives in nine countries at this writing; am I not in some way from all of these places? Within India, too,

The Pegging Act of 1943, passed in a hysteria over supposed Indian "penetration" into the white areas of Durban, temporarily halted all property sales from one race to another. The Asiatic Land Tenure Act of 1946 strengthened it and made it permanent. Dubbed by Indians "the Ghetto Act," the 1946 legislation allowed the governmen

Of the dozens of laws aimed at Indians decorating the legal gazettes of the South African colonies, perhaps the most urgently debated and carefully crafted were the ones on immigration. Although Ganda's uncles had entered South Africa freely, by the time he made his own journey in 1905, the net had tightened.