Across the Kala Pani by Shevlyn Mottai

Across the Kala Pani, a novel by Shevlyn Mottai, recently published by Penguin Random House South Africa, was one of those that fell into my lap as part of a current “accidental theme”. Funny how that happens in our reading journeys, isn’t it? Where we subconsciously stumble into phases of thematic alignment during which one book after another would explore or at least mention a certain topic. Almost like the universe is hinting at our ignorance of a subject and proceeds to nudge us onto a path of enlightenment. Or something.

One of my latest accidental reading themes revolves around South Africa’s history of indentured labour, kicked off by Joanne Joseph’s Children of Sugarcane and continued in Across the Kala Pani, which takes the reader even deeper into every aspect of the atrocities that characterised the indentured labour perpetrated by the British in their various colonies. The voices of Josephs and Mottai, both descendants of indentured Indians in the then Colony of Natal, brought this tragic but essential history to life for me.

Mottai’s great-great-grandfather left India in 1909 with his one-year-old daughter and a woman who was not his wife. Across the Kala Pani is partly a hypothesis of who this woman – who would become her great-great-grandmother – was or might have been.

The author’s quest and extensive research to discover more about what motivated Indians in the early 1990s to come to South Africa inspired her to write a fictional account based on the travails of her great-great-grandfather, Sappani Mottai. She says that, while she was writing, the novel took on a life of its own through the voices of four indentured women whose courage and mutual support carried them through the almost unthinkable hardships they suffered. Their trauma was two-sided – both as wives and females victimised by patriarchal cultural structures and as casualties of the brutality of the British indentured labour system during the late 1880s and early 1900s.

Mottai’s characters are broadly developed and colourful, each with an exciting arc loaded with intrigue. The women board a ship in Madras in 1909 to cross the Kala Pani (the black water) to a ‘better’ life in Natal. The cast includes Lutchmee, a young widow who escapes her vengeful mother-in-law and self-immolation on her husband’s funeral pyre; Vottie, from the Brahmin caste, an educated girl whose husband abuses her savagely; heavily pregnant Chinmah, who is married off to an older man to repay a family debt; and finally shy and single Jyothi.

Their story of friendship and mutual support is a testament to the incredible power and resilience of a band of women who stick together in times of intense hardship; in this case, experienced both in their homeland and in the so-called “promised paradise where caste doesn’t matter, food is plentiful, and liberty will be theirs after just five years”. Mottai describes the reality of life on the plantations in vivid, brutal detail: the hunger, the harsh working and living conditions, the lashings, the deaths, and the incredible cruelty and greed of the plantation owners.

Mottai drew from her ancestors’ history to highlight some of the epic stories of these immigrants – the brave, the bold, the kind, the weak, the cruel and the cowardly – that are woven into the fabric of South African culture today.