Kanjikeerai, a marker of acculturating identity

KANJIKEERAI is a staple meal in the homes of many descendants of Indian indentured workers living in South Africa.

- SELVAN NAIDOO

A delicious meal blending a cacophony of flavours from pungent to sweet, sour, bitter and salty, it is further embellished with a crumble-like tactile texture of crispy-fried dried fish.

Made with the waterlily type Itebe herb, which is popular among the AmaZulu culture in KwaZulu-Natal, kanjikeerai is a marker of acculturated identity.

The food culture of the system of indenture makes for interesting reading. It is an area of focus that marks a lacuna in the historiography of indenture.

Professor Ashutosh Kumar of Banaras University fills this gap with a seminal study called “Feeding the girmitya: food and drink on indentured ships to the sugar colonies”.

Kumar's paper gives phenomenal insight into the food of the indentured passengers on the sea voyages during the 18th and 19th centuries, drawing on archival records of food rations found in the ship logs as well as oral testimonies of girmitiyas' autobiographies by Baba Ramchandra and Totaram Sanadhya from Fiji, and Munshi Rahman Khan from Surinam.

Kumar notes that "by the 1880s, many labourers travelling on the colonial ships had begun to complain to officials about the foods they were issued on board.

For instance, some of these emigrants demanded rice, while others insisted that chapatis be provided to satiate their hunger during the long sea voyage.

The colonial office investigated this debate over starch and sustenance. Such dietary negotiations positioned the labour ship as a unique space within Indian colonial society; yielding to individual tastes and regional identities, this new space was free from the caste rules that typically governed dining practices in the subcontinent".

In his biography titled Jiwan Prakash, Khan, an indentured labourer in Surinam, maintained that it was not possible to maintain the caste hierarchy of eating under the indenture system.