🇿🇦 The sarees of South Africa
No sarees of South Africa are on EveryPallu yet. The catalogue grows every day.
Indian South Africans are descended from people who left British India from 1860 onward, some as indentured workers on Natal's sugar estates, others as traders who paid their own way; most settled around Durban. This material describes a community, not a cloth: it names no saree, weave or dye. Dress surfaces once, in the note that Indian traders' clothing helped earn them the name Arab traders.
- The first 342 indentured workers came in 1860, on the Truro from Madras and the Belvedere from Calcutta.
- Roughly 200,000 Indians arrived as indentured workers over five decades, most for sugar estates.
- Indentured workers spoke Tamil, Telugu, Bhojpuri, Awadhi and Hindi; most were Hindu.
- Traders who paid their own fares came largely from Gujarat, among them Memons and Surtis.
- Indian traders' dress, and their Muslim faith, led some to call them Arab traders.
Sarees in South Africa
Indian South Africans are a community, not a textile, and this source treats them as people. Its subjects are South Africans descended from Indians who reached the country from 1860, chiefly around Durban: indentured workers bound to Natal's sugar estates and, later, coal mines and railways, alongside traders who paid their own passage. Among the indentured workers were Tamil, Telugu, Bhojpuri, Awadhi and Hindi speakers, mostly Hindu, with Muslim and Christian minorities. The traders came largely from Gujarat, among them Memons and Surtis, with Konkanis and Urdu speakers from Uttar Pradesh. One line touches dress: because of how they dressed, and because many were Muslim, these traders were sometimes taken for Arab traders. Beyond that, the source sets out no saree, no woven cloth, no dyeing.
The saree today
This material says nothing about any present-day textile trade, revival or fashion. It does trace the community's official standing: from 1961 Indians were recognised as a permanent part of the population, with a department of Indian affairs; an Indian house in Parliament came in 1983 and went in the negotiations that gave all South Africans the vote. Studies still note the pressure to justify belonging in a country where Indians are sometimes seen as a foreign presence.
The facts in this overview come from the Wikipedia article "Indian South Africans", written by its contributors and used under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence. EveryPallu rewrote the text in its own words, with AI assistance, and compares every page with the article to make sure no passage is copied. It may be reused under the same CC BY-SA 4.0 licence with a link back.
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