Professor Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie

Department of Historical Studies

Contact details: umesthrie@uwc.ac.za

Professor Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie is an Emeritus Professor and previously Senior Professor in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of the Western Cape. She received her PhD from the University of Natal in 1987. She has taught and worked at three South African universities and as a Visiting Research Fellow at Yale University. Her research interests have been in the area of biography, forced removals, land restitution, Cape Flats histories, immigration histories, surveillance histories and India-South Africa connected histories. She received a B1 NRF Rating in 2018. 

Prof Dhupelia-Mesthrie received the Western Cape Provincial Government award for cultural achievement for her book From Cane Fields to Freedom (Kwela Books, 2000) and a special commendation from the Noma Book Awards (Africa’s Premier Book Award). In 2005 her book Gandhi’s Prisoner? The Life of Manilal Gandhi (Cape Town, Kwela Books, 2004 and New Delhi, Permanent Black, 2005) won the Via Africa, Best Non-Fiction Award as well as the UWC Arts Faculty Research Award. She served as member of the Ministerial History and Archaeology Panel in 2000 and as a member of the Ministerial History Committee, South African History Project between 2001 and 2004. Her teaching included courses on Themes in South African History, Memory and the South African City, and Land Dispossession and Land Restitution, Political Biography, and the National Liberation Struggle in South Africa. Her new book, Gandhi’s African Legacy: Phoenix Settlement (1904 to 2024). A History Through Letters, is forthcoming in 2024.

Relevant publications:

• Dhupelia-Mesthrie, U. (2023). The Letters of Sushila Gandhi: From Press Worker to Managing Trustee of Phoenix Settlement in South Africa, 1927 to 1977. Indian Journal of Gender Studies, 30(1), 11-32.
• Dhupelia-Mesthrie, U. (2021). South Africa to India: Narratives of a Century of Repatriation (1871–1975). Matatu, 52(1), 70-100.
  
• Dhupelia-Mesthrie, U. (2021). An Accidental Historian. in Brij V. Lal (ed), Girmitiyas: The Making of Their Memory-Keepers from the Indian Indentured Diaspora. New Delhi: Primus. 136-166. 
• Dhupelia-Mesthrie, U. (2021). Writing in the Twenty-First Century about Indian South Africans: Revisiting Agendas and Reflecting on Foundational Writings: Journal of Natal and Zulu History, 34(1), 166-177.
• Dhupelia-Mesthrie, U. (2020). Waiting on Cape Town in the apartheid era: Life histories of Indian waiters and barmen. Social History, 45(4), 522-547.
• Dhupelia-Mesthrie, U. and Weintroub, J. (2020). Going beyond Gandhi’s ‘inner circle’ of relationships: Satyagraha House, Hermann Kallenbach and Gandhi’s sons. Critical African Studies, 12(2), 140-170.
• Dhupelia-Mesthrie, U. (2020). Prologue: Archives, Paper Regimes and Mobility in N. Bose (ed.), South Asian Migrations in Global History: Labour, Law, and Wayward Lives. London: Bloomsbury. 1-7.
• Dhupelia-Mesthrie, U., & Allen, M. (2019).  Controlling Transnational Asian Mobilities: A Comparison of Documentary Systems in Australia and South Africa. in Rob Heynen and Emily van der Meulen  (eds), Making Surveillance States: Transnational Histories, Toronto: University of Toronto Press 133-62. 
• Dhupelia-Mesthrie, U. (2019.) Introduction: Transnational and Comparative Immigration Histories: From Flows and Connections to Differences, Journal of Natal and Zulu History, (33) 1: 87-91. (Book Forum Convenor: Jeremy Marten, 2018, Empire and Asian Migration: Sovereignty, Immigration Restriction and Protest in the British Settler Colonies, 1888-1907 Crawley: UWA Publishing.)
• Dhupelia-Mesthrie, U. (2018). The Desirable and undesirable in the life of the Chief Immigration Officer in Cape Town, Clarence Wilfred Cousins, 1905–1915. Itinerario, 42(1), 50-66.
• Dhupelia-Mesthrie, U. (2017). Re-locating memories: transnational and local narratives of Indian South Africans in Cape Town. Journal of Asian and African Studies, 52(8), 1065-1079.
• Dhupelia-Mesthrie, U. (2017). Engaging with the Bureaucracy: Indian Immigration Agents and Interpreters in Cape Town, South Africa (1902–16). South Asian Studies, 33(2), 180-198.
• Hofmeyr, I., Dhupelia-Mesthrie, U. and Kaarsholm, P. (2016). Durban and Cape Town as Port Cities: Reconsidering Southern African Studies from the Indian Ocean. Journal of Southern African Studies, 42(3),375-387.
• Dhupelia-Mesthrie, U. (2014). False fathers and false sons: Immigration officials in Cape Town, documents and verifying minor sons from India in the first half of the Twentieth Century. Kronos, 40(1), 99-132.
• Dhupelia-Mesthrie, U. (2012). Cultural crossings from Africa to India: select travel narratives of Indian South Africans from Durban and Cape Town, 1940s to 1990s. South African Historical Journal, 64(2), 295-312.
• Dhupelia-Mesthrie, U. (2011). The form, the permit and the photograph: An archive of mobility between South Africa and India. Journal of Asian and African Studies, 46(6), 650-662.