Veda Vaidyanathan

Almost a year ago, I travelled to Tiloniya, a village in Ajmer district in Rajasthan, to observe and interview ‘solar mama’s in training’. Master trainers like Leela pictured above, trained rural women from India, Africa and beyond for over 6 months to fabricate, install and maintain household solar electrification systems. This unique model is community owned and managed, provides financial self-sufficiency and is empowering.

According to the interviewees, the experience of having picked up a tangible skill, having access to solar equipment after returning to their villages and ‘bringing light’ to unelectrified homes helped break through generations of oppression and offset biases they faced due to their gender and other social norms. This model, homegrown in this rural Indian village, has been introduced in 36 countries in Africa and has already trained over 560 ‘Solar Mamas’.

While I am writing about this in greater detail in my book-to-be, for another paper examining multiple facets of New Delhi’s development cooperation with countries in Africa, I include this case study. Arguing how grassroots organizations in India that find innovative, low-cost technological solutions to developmental challenges, can help governments and multilateral agencies craft inclusive, sustainable policies.

The broader aims of this paper were threefold. First, to understand the major actors, instruments, themes, and mechanisms that make up India’s Development cooperation towards countries in Africa, and how this ushers in a new dimension of ‘South–South cooperation’.

Second, the paper explored the role of grassroots organizations that have found localized solutions in India that then export their learnings to other geographies and how they craft a unique role for themselves in India’s broader development cooperation framework.

Third, this paper argued that the uneven, fragmented Indian experience of designing development assistance programmes provides an important non-western perspective that can help decision makers craft policies for an era beyond aid.

Published by UNU-WIDER, the working paper titled ‘India’s development cooperation in Africa: The case of ‘Solar Mamas’ who bring light’ is available here.

Youlendree (Len) Appasamy, a South African Indian writer, collage artist and zine-maker is part of the Kutti Collective, a grouping of LGBTQ+ multi-disciplinary artists of South Asian descent, who are working towards increasing the representation of ‘desi’ South Africans in the country’s art world.

Len and I discuss the role of art in deepening relationships between people across these geographies, how Indian-origin artists bring an amalgamation of history, politics, nostalgia and a sense of displacement to their work and how art can even be used to rupture the boundaries of citizenship and nationality. 

In this particular case, the collective uses various forms of art as a medium to document the history of indenture from the perspective of Indian passengers. These young artists, many of whom are descendants of those who undertook the journey, talk of how their Indian South African families, have tried to trace their roots in India. They wonder how in contemporary India, indentured and passenger Indian communities in South Africa are spoken of, and thought about. 

Their art, informed by and grounded in their ‘Indian-ness’, tells a story of a chapter in Indian history from a unique vantage point. It also seeks to repair some of the injuries of colonialism and sets them off on a journey to explore parts of their identity, curious about family that have been lost during the journey across the ocean. 

The collective does important work to shift conversations about what a diasporic Indian identity means in a deeper historical sense, in a more embedded way.

This article was published in The Hindu on 22 October 2021, titled ‘Desi in Durban: Indian-origin artists are claiming a space in South Africa’s art scene’. Click here to read.