Durban, May 5: For years, the Indian diaspora in South Africa has been estranged from its mother country, about which it knew little. That wall is soon going to be broken.

A Centre for Indian Studies (CIS) is coming up in Johannesburg this year, which will help millions become familiar with the country where their roots lie.

“This is a major milestone in India-South Africa relations, and the CIS is scheduledto be inaugurated on September 16,” Navdeep Suri, consul-general of India in South Africa, told visiting Indian journalists recently.

The centre will be established in the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa’s commercial hub. It will focus on humanities, history, sociology, literature in English and Indian languages.

Suri said the centre would not only help forge South Africa’s cultural links “across the Indian Ocean”, it will also give India a window to the whole of Africa. The CIS will provide a socio-cultural platform for South Africans of Indian origin to connect to their mother country, he said.

The initiative, substantially funded by the Witwatersrand University, would invite some of the best faculty from India. “It will be a quantum leap in enhancing understanding of India in South Africa and vice-versa,” Suri said.

After last year’s highly successful literary-cum-cultural festival, called Shared History: Celebrating India in South Africa, the consul-general has decided to make it an annual affair. This year’s edition will be held in the run-up to the inauguration of the CIS.

Suri said the festival would start with a “writers’ interaction”, for which Ramchandra Guha, William Dalrymple, Kunal Basu, Nayantara Sehgal and Pawan Varma would be invited.

It is this notion of “shared history” that has been tugging at the umbilical cord of the Indian diaspora here.

It is palpable in places like Durban, whose 1.30 million people of Indian origin form the largest such group in any foreign city.

At Silverani’s, a quintessential Indian restaurant in Durban, the air is thick with a desi smell. A framed page from J.B. Brain’s historic work, Arrival of Natal’s Indians, hangs on a wall. It says that between 1860 and 1911, as many as 1,52,184 indentured labourers had arrived from India in the colony of Natal.

“Bunsee Singh, my grandfather, came here from Rajasthan in 1862 to work in the sugarcane fields and those were terrible, hard days, from when we have been pulling on,” said Sanjeev Singh, who runs an entertainment firm, Videovision, in Durban.

“Apart from bringing South Africa’s major anti-apartheid films to the screen, Videovision plans to build a high-tech film studio that will be a one-stop shop for producers, particularly from Bollywood,” Sanjeev said.

Recently, Hindi film Dhoom-II was shot in South Africa followed by Race.

Politically too, India and South Africa share a bond. “People of Indian origin overwhelmingly back the African National Congress as we are proud of both Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela,” said Logie Naidoo, deputy mayor of the Durban municipality.

Gandhi’s ashram at Phoenix near Durban, which has been rebuilt by the Mandela government after it had been torn down by rioters during the apartheid regime, stands as the most enduring symbol of cross-cultural solidarity.