South African women of Indian descent form a category of South African writers until recently almost completely absent both in South African literary criticism and critical consideration within the field of South African English Studies. Until the publication of Devarakshanam Govinden's Sister Outsiders: The Representation of Identity and Difference in Selected Writings by South African Indian Women (2008), South African Indian women's writing fell between the literary cracks of black South African writing, and ‘Indian’ writing, with both areas of study dominated by the analysis of men's writing. Training a critical lens on the writing of women of Indian descent in South Africa, Govinden (2008, 2) argues that such writers’ pervasive concerns are ‘those of colonial and neo-colonial domination (and in South Africa, rampant racial oppression), dispossession and cultural fragmentation, finding and defining “home”, crises of identity, and living with differences’. Attentive to the critical ‘disappearance’ of Indian women's literary production in South Africa, Govinden (2008, 3) seeks to draw attention to ‘a neglected corpus of writing in South African literary criticism’. As Govinden (2–3) cogently argues:

Departing from Govinden's premise that Indian women's subjectivity, as portrayed in their fiction, provides a singular lens through which to examine significant moments in the construct of the nation, this chapter examines South African Indian girlhood and female subjectivity during the apartheid era as portrayed in Farida Karodia's Daughters of the Twilight (1986) and Agnes Sam's short story, ‘Jesus is Indian’ (1989). Particular attention is paid to the ways in which contact with coloniality and the apartheid system positions the young protagonists of both texts in a liminal space between their ‘Indianness’ and colonial culture, and examines the ways in which the girls negotiate their identities within the racial tumult of the apartheid years.