Prof. Rajendra Chetty

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https://hdl.handle.net/10566/7625
Rajendra Chetty is a post-colonial scholar in South Africa. He is Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of the Western Cape. He received his PhD in English Education from the University of South Africa, a MA in South African literature from the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal, an MBA from the University of Cape Town and Honours degrees in Education and Languages.

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    The Ambivalence of Indianness in Ahmed Essop’s The Hajji and Other Stories
    (2021) Chetty, Rajendra
    This article explores the ambivalence of Indianness in Ahmed Essop’s debut collection of short stories, The Hajji and Other Stories, 1978, against the contested discourse of the nation. The article is underpinned by Bhabha’s theory of nation and narration, specifically the authenticity and context of cultural location and representation. The image of cultural authority, like that of the Hajji, is ambivalent because it is caught in the act of trying to compose a powerful and religious figure, but stuck in the performativity of typical South African racial, class and religious prejudice. Essop’s ambivalent narration evokes the margins of the South African space, the Indian minority; it is also a celebratory or self-marginalisation space. The ambivalence of the characters resonates across the collection—the insincerity of the Fordsburg community towards Moses and the two sisters; the deceitful Hajji Musa, the hypocrisy of Molvi Haroon seeking refuge with the perpetrator of blasphemy against the Prophet, Dr Kamal’s pretence of having virtues and the charade of the yogi. In essence, the characters display virtues of Indianness and Muslim/Hindu piety that they do not actually possess.
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    Doctoral supervision and COVID-19: Autoethnographies from four faculty across three continents
    (2021) Stevens, Dannelle; Chetty, Rajendra; Jones, Tamara Bertrand; Yallew, Addisalem; Butler-Henderson, Kerryn
    Doctoral students represent the fresh and creative intellectuals needed to address the many social, economic, political, health care, and education disparities that have been highlighted by the 2020 pandemic. Our work as doctoral student supervisors could not be more central nor vital than it was at the beginning of, during, and following the pandemic. Written during the pandemic of 2020, the purpose of this paper was to describe how four faculty from three continents navigated their relationships with doctoral students in the research and dissertation phase of their doctoral programs. Using a common set of prompts, four faculty members each wrote an autoethnography of our experience as doctoral student supervisors. Even though our basic advising philosophies and contexts were quite different, we learned about the possibility and power of resilience, empathy, and mentoring online. Our findings imply that new online practices could be closely examined and retained after the pandemic to expand the reach, depth and impact of doctoral education.
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    Humiliated consciousness in Ronnie Govender’s The Lahnee’s pleasure and Ben Okri’s In Arcadia
    (Routledge, 2021) Rajendra, Chetty; Curr, Matthew
    Ronnie Govender entitled both his major play (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1977) and his later novel (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2008) The Lahnee’s Pleasure, articulating that life was, and still is, a pleasure ground for a privileged minority in South Africa. Over a period of three decades, spanning both the periods before and after apartheid, his assessment of political conditions in the country of his birth remains as valid. Lao, in Ben Okri’s In Arcadia, reveals how much of life in Europe today remains a “fairground for the favoured” (London: Head of Zeus, 2014, 108) and how little pampered and privileged people such as Jim, the director of the film project in this novel, see or comprehend of what is so often a secret ordeal for a person of colour. Okri writes of conditions and perceptions in contemporary Britain, while Govender writes of South Africa up to the present time; yet despite the many differences in their social contexts, their delineation of conditions that surround a person of colour living in British or South African society shows that interracial equality and brotherhood are still distant ideals in both countries. Both writers, however, do hold out a measured degree of hope in their depiction of Wordsworthian figures of humble labour: Mothie in Govender’s novel and the train driver in Okri’s.