Beyond Barbarians III
“Oh! You look Indian, so you must be from India?”
A personal reflection of a South African Indian living abroad
"Hi, I’m Timika, and I’m from South Africa."
It’s become my default tagline, my pre-emptive strike against the inevitable guessing game: “Where in India are you from?” Or worse, the unsolicited attempts at Hindi followed by puzzled stares when I admit, “Sorry, I don’t understand.”
Being born and raised in South Africa, race was never a constant drumbeat in my head. I knew I looked different. I knew my accent didn’t quite match what people expected when they saw my skin. But I also grew up in a post-apartheid bubble, surrounded by a community where diversity was celebrated, or at the very least, tolerated with the occasional eyebrow-raising comment from my grandparents.
Legally, I am “Indian.” On paper, that’s my box. But the truth is, I’ve never been to India. My great-grandfather was from there, apparently. The story ends there. No Bollywood backstory, no ancestral village with cows and mango trees. Just me, an Indian South African who grew up practising Hinduism, until I didn’t, and who never really thought much about what being “Indian” was supposed to mean.
That is, until I moved to the United Kingdom.
Suddenly, my heritage became a dinner party conversation starter. Or stopper. I found myself trapped in history lectures about colonialism and apartheid, usually ones I didn’t plan on giving, just to justify my existence. “Yes, I look Indian. No, I’m not from Gujarat. No, I don’t speak Punjabi. Yes, I’m South African. Yes, I know that’s confusing.”
It’s a strange thing, being a diaspora kid. You carry the weight of a homeland that was never yours, wearing a cultural badge that feels half-fitted. You’re constantly having to explain, sometimes defend, the intersection where your identity exists. Somewhere between “not Indian enough” and “not South African enough,” yet fully both.
So, when people ask me the big question - what are you? - I smile and offer the best compromise I’ve come up with: “I’m of Indian heritage and South African nationality.”
But to be born in one place, carry the heritage of another, and live abroad as something entirely in-between, that is the quiet complexity of diasporic identity. As a South African of Indian descent, I’ve often found myself negotiating layers of belonging: legally classified as Indian, culturally shaped by South Africa, and now seen through the unfamiliar lens of the UK. These overlapping identities don’t always align neatly. The discomfort of being asked where I’m “really from,” the blank stares when I admit I don’t speak Hindi, and the need to justify my history at dinner tables, these are more than awkward encounters. They are small windows into the larger experience of diaspora.
This exploration isn’t about finding a singular answer to who we are. It’s about tracing the threads, colonial histories, forced migrations, hybrid cultures, and racial assumptions that shape the lives of Indian communities across the globe.
