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The presence of Sidis, Indians of African descent, in India today is concentrated in the states of Gujarat and Karnataka. In this essay, we focus on the Sidis of Gujarat, and their oral narratives,...

The Sidis are Indians of African descent. Sidi communities reside in different regions of India, mostly in Gujarat, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Goa and Maharashtra. My films and research focus on the Sidi community of Gujarat. The Sidi oral history community delineates its genealogy to the Abyssinian Sufi saint Bava Gor, whose shrine is in Gujarat. My family and I were deeply connected with the healing spiritual legacy of Sidi saint Bava Gor from the 1950s; however, my filmic journey to Sidis began in 1990s. In this article, I examine the social and economic concerns of the Sidi community, as well as some of the issues confronting me as a film maker as I attempted to represent Sidis on film.

This article analyzes the contemporary experience of Sidis—Indians of African descent in India, focusing on some contemporary Sidi communities of Gujarat. With a brief history of the African presence in India, the article emphasizes contemporary dilemmas and struggles confronted by Sidis as a minority community in postindependent India.

In this essay, I discuss issues of identity within the context of social and economic circumstances of the Sidi1 community in Mumbai. I argue that the Sidis who work as caretakers of shrines in Mumbai are accorded dignity and status from the community of devotees who are often from the Muslim, Hindu and Parsi Zoroastrian communities. Those Sidis who are dispersed in different parts of the city and who work as domestics in the homes of middle class Muslim or Hindu families, on the other hand, merge into the nameless toiling masses of the city of Mumbai. Most of these Sidis work in low-income jobs and live in one or two room shanty dwellings. Part of my enquiry also raises the question of home and belonging for the Sidi community. Where do Sidis locate home and how do they construct belonging in India? Finally, I conclude my essay by examining a very different Sidi presence in Mumbai, that of the descendants of the royal family of the Sidis of Janjira (an island off the coast of Mumbai) who live in the upper middle class area of Mumbai. I discuss how the descendants of the Sidis of Janjira construct identity in terms of class and privilege.