COLOUR, CLASS AND COMMUNITY - the Natal Indian Congress, 1971-1994

375pp., illus., paperback, Johannesburg, 2021

"This is the complex story of how the Natal Indian Congress negotiated a political Indian identity within a field of black consciousness, non-racialism, and the black African imperatives of the African National Congress. An exemplary work that is indispensable for understanding a fragile political landscape." Dilip M Menon, Mellon Chair in Indian Studies and Director Centre for Indian Studies in Africa, University of Witwatersrand

"Meticulously researched and intelligently argued, this book is a significant contribution to the literature on the multifaceted intersections of class, race, and identity in South Africa and beyond, and speaks to urgent contemporary concerns." Parvathi Raman, Founding Chair and Research Associate, Centre for Migration and Diaspora Studies, SOAS, University of London.

Ashwin Desai is Professor of Sociology at the University of Johannesburg. He is the author of We are the Poors: Community struggles in post-apartheid South Africa (2002) and co-author with Goolam Vahed of Inside Indian Indenture: A South African story, 1860-1914 (2010) and A History of the Present: A biography of Indian South Africans, 1994–2019 (2019).

Goolam Vahed is Professor in the Department of History at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Some of his recent books include Chota Motala: A biography of political activism in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands (2018); Schooling Muslims in Natal: State, identity and the Orient Islamic Educational Institute (2015); and Crossing Space and Time in the Indian Ocean: Early Indian traders in Natal – a biographical study (2015).