818835

research-article2019
FER0010.1177/0141778918818835Feminist ReviewAnneeth Kaur Hundle

article

Feminist Review

postcolonial patriarchal
Issue 121, 37­–52
© 2019 The Author(s)
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DOI: 10.1177/0141778918818835
https://doi.org/10.1177/0141778918818835
www.feministreview.com

violence and transnational

feminist research in
contemporary Uganda

Anneeth Kaur Hundle

abstract

This article examines the development of a multidimensional, transnational feminist research approach from and within
Uganda in relation to a high-profile case of domestic violence and femicide of a middle-class, upper-caste Indian
migrant woman in Kampala in 1998. It explores indigenous Ugandan public and Ugandan Asian/Indian community
interpretations and the dynamics of cross-racial feminist mobilisation and protest that emerged in response to the
Joshi-Sharma domestic violence case. In doing so, it advocates for a transnational feminist research approach from
and within Uganda and the Global South that works against the grain of nationalist and nativist biases in existing
feminist scholarly trends. This approach lays bare power inequalities and internal tensions within and across racialised
African and Asian communities, and thus avoids the romanticisation of cross-racial feminist African-Asian solidarities.

keywords

African-Asian feminist organising; gender vioence; Global South; Indian communities; postcolonial patriarchal
nativism; transnational feminism; Uganda

This article examines a case of what is referred to publicly as ‘wife-murder’ in Uganda; or ‘violence against women’,
‘domestic violence’ and ‘femicide’ in scholarly, legal and activist feminist circles.1 The murder of an Indian woman

1 Isupplement the informal language of wife battering and abuse with both ‘domestic violence’ and ‘femicide’ as ‘categories of
analysis’ to describe the violence of the Joshi-Sharma case. Following Burrill, Roberts and Thornberry (2010, p. vii) in Domestic
Violence and the Law in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa, I use the term domestic violence to ‘indicate overwhelmingly controlling
and punitive behavior—whether physical, psychological, or emotional—directed by one member of a household toward another
as a means of establishing dominance. Such punitive actions very often take the form of gender-based violence, but not always.
“Domestic,” in this sense, indicates a realm of shared living space oriented around relationships within households’.
38    121  postcolonial patriarchal nativism, domestic violence

named Renu Joshi by her husband, Kooky Sharma, took place in the late 1990s in Kampala, Uganda. It was a spectacular,
visible urban event that became the subject of intense public discussions, especially in the context of new contestations
around nation, migration, race and citizenship after the 1972 expulsion of Asians (or Indians) from Uganda, and an
ongoing Ugandan (indigenous African-led) national women’s movement. I work to understand the interlocking factors
that contributed to Joshi’s vulnerability, and to other forms of intra-communal gender-based violence. I also
demonstrate that responses by Ugandan indigenous publics, women activists and Asian community leaders were
informed by the specificity of the Ugandan postcolonial context, new transnational migration and community-
building practices and local and international understandings of violence against women and feminist activism.
Joshi’s death would galvanise an important, if underestimated, moment of women’s cross-racial organising and
protest that expressed commonalities across African and Indian women’s experiences of patriarchal violence. Feminist
protest also asserted Indian women’s belonging and well-being in the nation in the context of ongoing anxiety
surrounding Asian national belonging and cultural difference. Significantly, and as I develop further in this article, I
suggest that transnational feminist scholars should avoid romanticising the aftermath of the event as a moment of
African–Asian cross-racial feminist collaboration and solidarity, as it also engendered dissension within and across
groups of women.

I also reflect on the work of developing a transnational feminist methodological approach that allowed me to analyse
the case and the responses to it. This approach: 1) makes use of an original feminist concept, ‘postcolonial patriarchal
nativism’, to understand historically sedimented layers of imperialism, colonialism and nationalism and their effects
on Indian women’s life chances in Uganda; 2) develops a relational approach to avoid ‘racial compartmentalisation’
and to make visible both ‘Asian’ and ‘indigenous Ugandan African’ communities; 3) involves studying intersectional or
interlacing forms of oppression for women (race, class, caste, religion, citizenship and migration status); and 4)
works past national, global and international feminist frameworks to make visible cross-racial feminist practices and
challenge nativist ideologies in Uganda. As I discuss further below, transnational feminist research approaches within
Ugandan and African Studies must strive not only to displace the circulation and hegemony of Western imperial,
liberal and global feminisms and disrupt binaries of ‘West’ and ‘Non-West’, ‘modernity’ and ‘tradition’ as they
circulate in feminist practice; they must also contend with their own possible nationalist or nativist biases in the
construction of feminist research questions and feminist research subjects. Building on Grewal and Kaplan (1994), I
emphasise the ‘uneven ways in which power and resistances unfold’ and ‘the scattered hegemonies’ that must be
dissected and pulled apart cautiously when conceptualising urban Uganda as a transnational site of feminist
consciousness building, organising, and theorising.

Finally, the analysis in this article emphasises the stakes involved in conducting transnational feminist research from
the vantage of Uganda and from the ‘Global South’. One recent critique of the deployment of transnational feminist
research is that its theories and methodologies have largely been developed in the US academy, or from the perspective
of the Global North, often unwittingly reifying the projects of US empire and US exceptionalism that they seek to
critique (see Fernandes, 2013). As a US-born, middle-class and mobile Punjabi Sikh feminist scholar with research
and teaching experiences in both US and African universities (I worked at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda,
from 2013 until 2015), I have often been concerned about the liberal, racial and class biases or privileges that could
taint or suffuse my transnational feminist research approach.

One response to the possible epistemological biases of postcolonial/transnational feminist scholars positioned in the
Global North with access to the South is to engage more attentively with the multilingual intellectual genealogies,
histories and practices of ‘feminism’ in the postcolonial world. Recently, a reinvigorated discussion of the importance
of ‘theory from the South’ and the ‘Global South’ (Prashad, 2014; Comaroff and Comaroff, 2016 [2012]; Menon, 2017)
builds on earlier postcolonial criticism by centring concepts and ideas from the postcolonial world, or by more
forthrightly engaging with anti-imperialist and anti-racist collaborations within and across the South. These concepts
and practices serve to construct ‘other universals’, or epistemological and theoretical frameworks that serve projects
of emancipation. Marrying this body of scholarship with works with explicitly transnational feminist goals (Mani, 1990;
 Anneeth Kaur Hundle    121  39

Alexander and Mohanty, 1997; Nagar and Lock Swarr, 2010), I develop my transnational feminist approach both within
and from Uganda and the Global South, considering the kinds of cross-racial feminist practices that emerge in a
historically and socially complex urban African site. In doing so, I attend to the original concepts and practices that
emerge from locally situated contexts to transform our understandings of supposedly universal feminist problems.
Uganda, then, becomes a site of transnational feminist knowledge production that influences what constitutes
feminist knowledge, activism and praxis in the Global North and in the US academy. I signal the importance of gender
and feminist analysis through the study of a multiracial, ‘transnational Africa’—interrogating what has been defined
through Cold War-era area studies and methodological nationalism as ‘African Studies’ and its appropriately
indigenous or ‘native’ African subjects of research. Ultimately, writing about Renu Joshi, and her tragic demise, also
becomes a project of writing about East African society’s racially and culturally plural nature.

being ‘Asian’ in Uganda: historical and contemporary analyses

Contemporary urban Uganda includes: ethnically diverse indigenous communities and migrants and refugees from
neighbouring countries; mixed-race people with deep histories in the region and the Swahili Coast; diverse communities
of people of South Asian descent; and other White Anglo-European expatriate communities. There are two core groups
of people of South Asian descent: first, there are the postcolonial descendants of the ‘imperial diaspora’ of East
African Asians (elites and expatriates who are primarily resident in Uganda); secondly, there is the more recent, post-
1990s migration of South Asians (mostly from India and Pakistan) to East Africa—both immigrants and expatriates.
The postcolonial Ugandan state racialises both communities (who are diverse in terms of ethnicity, religion, class,
caste, etc.) as a homogenous ‘Asian business community’.

Postcolonial state projects of nation-building, racialisation and Asian exclusion have helped to reinforce a nativist
‘African indigenous’/‘Asian immigrant’ binary that builds on the legacy of colonial state formation and the
institutionalisation of racial hierarchies in British East Africa. Early Indian migrants and settlers arrived in East Africa
from British India. The British empire compelled them to work as traders, indentured labourers, civil servants, agro-
business entrepreneurs and soldiers in the colonial infrastructure and political economy (Mangat, 1969; Tinker, 1974).
Thus, they were part of an ‘imperial diaspora’ in the Indian Ocean region and were both subjected to and benefitted from
colonial capitalist accumulation and Anglo-European racial hierarchies in the colonies. They straddled both settler and
colonial subject positions: for example, they were restricted to living in urban areas where the colonial state offered
them access to partial rights but, with few exceptions, they had no access to ownership of land or ‘ethnic homelands’ in
the way that African indigenous communities did (Mamdani, 1996).

In the context of anti-colonial movements for independence from the British empire, indigenous nationalist leaders
and the urban citizenry increasingly targeted Indians, or ‘Asians’, as a racially and economically privileged urban
class. At the time of independence in 1962, some Asians chose to become Ugandan national citizens, while others
converted their British Protected Person legal status to British citizenship (Humphrey and Ward, 1974). Throughout the
1960s, and in anticipation of national independence, some Ugandan Asians began leaving the colony as Africanisation,
Black economic empowerment and indigenous nativist practices began to inform anti-colonial, nation-state-building
projects. In 1972, then President Idi Amin declared an ‘Economic War’ and expelled the minority Asian population such
that they became stateless refugees, resettled in Western refugee-accepting nations or even ‘re-patriated’ back to
India if they were Indian citizens. The expulsion established national citizenship on the basis of Black African nativist
criteria, such that nation and race became mutually exclusive, and people of South Asian descent were excluded from
the national polity (Taylor, 2008).

By 1994, many elite and privileged third- and fourth-generation Ugandan Asian families had returned to Uganda,
having been officially invited by President Yoweri Museveni and the National Resistance Movement (NRM)
government to repossess their nationalised properties. These ‘family firms’ re-established their businesses and
helped to reconstruct the economic infrastructure of the nation after many years of political instability and
40    121  postcolonial patriarchal nativism, domestic violence

conflict. While the Museveni regime inaugurated a new constitution and reformed citizenship laws such that
formerly expelled Ugandan Asians could reclaim national citizenship, I argue that the criteria for inclusion is
largely guided by an ‘economic investor’ ideology for racialised Asians. An indigenous/immigrant citizenship binary
is reinforced such that racialised Asians are perpetually excluded minorities, gendered male and exceptionally
included via economic development or historical criteria only. A notion of a ‘multiracial’ or ‘non-racial’, yet plural
and diverse, Uganda is expressed in limited terms.

In the context of long-term research in Kampala (from 2003 to 2015), I increasingly observed vigorous
community-building efforts by ‘newcomer’ migrants from India and Pakistan (in this analysis, I focus on
migrants from India such as Joshi and Sharma—discussed further below). New migrant traders and entrepreneurs
had established small businesses in the city and settled long-term with female marital partners. This more
recent compulsion to migrate and settle in East Africa is driven by global trends: neo-liberal economic
globalisation in both India and East African countries, as well as increasing limits on Global South to North
migration for migrants from South Asia and Africa. Significantly, this new wave of migrants has no historical link
to East Africa and does not possess an ‘East African Asian’ identity. Yet, even new migrants labour to establish
secure livelihoods in the context of social and political precarity and postcolonial racialised exclusion for
racialised Asians in Uganda. Migrants continue to be racialised as ‘Asian’ or ‘Indian’ by the legal infrastructure
of the Ugandan postcolonial state. In conjunction with these state-based racial projects, Ugandan Asian
returnees and new Indian community elites, via their respective community organisations, work to establish a
homogeneous notion of the ‘Asian community’ based on a distinctive Indian national essence and cultural traits
in order to shore up their sense of political security in the nation.

Three important conceptual and epistemological issues arose as I mapped out the sedimented political histories of
Indian or Asian colonial migration and settlement, postcolonial exclusion and expulsion, return migration and new
‘South–South’ migration in transnational, urban Uganda. First, the legacy of heteropatriarchal nation-state-building
projects, the 1972 Asian expulsion and indigenous nativist ideologies in East Africa have significant ramifications for
knowledge production itself. African Studies scholarship often reproduces the colonial racial segmentation of society
by making invisible or actively ignoring the ongoing multiracial nature of East African societies. In general, colonial
historians have noted that it is difficult to write about ‘quasi-settler’ or ‘non-native’ colonial subject populations,
although emerging and exciting scholarship on ‘racial thought’ and racial distinction in East Africa is beginning to
take this project seriously (Glassman, 2011; Taylor, 2016). My earliest experiences of discussing this research in the US
academy were challenging, since I felt obliged to frame my research as a project about ‘South Asian diasporas’ rather
than about ‘transnational Africa’. Unintentional biases often cast people of South Asian descent outside of Africa,
reifying nativist and nationalist tendencies.

Second, existing scholarship often reproduces the colonial racial category of ‘Asian’ and essentialises and
assumes ‘race’ and ‘racial distinction’ to be objective, actually existing natural facts. Instead, I paid attention
to racialisation and racial projects fostered by scholars, by the Ugandan state and by people on the ground to
explore dialogic processes of identity, race and community-making. In the process, it became clear that the
invented notion of an ‘Asian community’ was already riven by class, migration, ethnic, religious and caste
differences; and that racial distinction was connected to ideas of phenotypical difference, ideologies of Indian
cultural essence and gendered difference.

A third conceptual problem was integrating gender and feminist analysis into the existing field of scholarship on
‘Asians’ in Uganda. As I examined scholarly sources that debated the contested nature of nation, race and class,
especially prior to and after the 1972 expulsion of Asians, the study of men and women as gendered beings embedded
in gendered social relations and practices seemed to be foreclosed or already assumed. In addition, contemporary
state citizenship projects that defined people of South Asian descent, both past and present, as an elite business
community or as economic investors concealed the gendered heterogeneity of local communities. These state
 Anneeth Kaur Hundle    121  41

projects, alongside scholarly ones, sidelined the significance of Indian women as symbolic and material cornerstones
of Asian racial, cultural and community difference.

As a result of these three problems, I develop the feminist concept of ‘postcolonial patriarchal nativism’ to emphasise
the effects of ongoing postcolonial nation- and state-building, the 1972 Asian expulsion and the broader academy in
marginalising the study of both minority racialised and gendered difference in transnational Uganda. The key material
effect of this structure of postcolonial patriarchal nativism is the governance of Indian migrant women’s lives by the
family, or domestic realm, and by patriarchal community institutions. Furthermore, building on a large body of
scholarship on gender and nationalism in South Asia and its diasporas, Indian women in Uganda are critical to the
constitution and preservation of Indian ‘essence’ or ‘culture’ and, thereby, the making of : 1) racial and community
boundaries, including the preservation of a normative, elite Asian community (which represents itself to the Ugandan
state and publics); and 2) the possibility of minority citizenship claims that are recognised by the state. Building on
Partha Chatterjee (1993) and his analysis of the gendered nature of Indian anti-colonialism, Indian men in Uganda
constitute ‘the outer face’ of the racialised ‘Asian community’ (and their respective religious and ethnic communities).
Indian women become the ‘spiritual inner essence’ of these communities. Since both ‘African’ and ‘Asian’ communities
are racialised by the institutional and legal framework of the postcolonial state, Indian migrant women are even more
symbolically displaced from indigenous Ugandan urban and rural communities. I describe this as a form of ‘nested
oppression’ or ‘racialised doubling manoeuvre’ that further isolates Indian women and constitutes the structure of
‘postcolonial patriarchal nativism’. This structure is the first component of the transnational feminist methodological
approach that I eventually developed to understand intra-community-based gender violence and local forms of
knowledge about gender violence.

Historically, the status of Indian women played an important role in debates about the possibilities and limits of Asian
inclusion in Uganda (see Hundle, 2013). Political debates about Ugandan Asians’ ambivalent insider/outsider status
in the nation entailed ideas of Indians rigidly adhering to parochial communal norms, being self-segregating and
racist against Africans by nature and refusing to integrate with indigenous Ugandans. These citizenship debates were
not only racialised but also gendered and sexualised. Indian women’s perceived inaccessibility to African men (and
Indian men’s sexual access to African women) resulted in accusations of Indians’ failed integration into the nation
(integration here interpreted as intermarriage). The failure to integrate via intermarriage was one symbolic component
of Idi Amin’s Economic War and decision to expel the Asian minority in 1972.

In Uganda today, I argue that the racial and cultural (and in many cases religious and caste-based) preservation of
the ‘Asian community’ has relied on the presence of Indian women in the nation to solidify elite norms and community
and cultural boundaries. This framework of Indian woman as symbolic ‘Indian cultural essence’ continues to rest on
ideals of Indian women’s respectability, honour, domesticity and dutifulness and expectations for their racial,
communal and religious endogamous reproduction—all within a context of fraught tensions over the status of the
racialised community’s right to belong in the nation. Below, I reveal that Renu Joshi’s death significantly ruptured ‘the
postcolonial order of things’ by exposing structures of postcolonial patriarchal nativism and the tensions surrounding
the Asian community’s status in the nation.

the Joshi-Sharma case: media circulations and interpretations

While Renu Joshi’s death took place in the late 1990s, I write about it in a more pointed fashion almost twenty years
later (and fifteen years after my first encounter with it) because the story of her death still circulates in urban
Uganda today, especially alongside increasing state authoritarian attacks on women and LGBT communities and the
ongoing violent murders of indigenous Ugandan women.2 In fact, I did not learn about Renu Joshi’s story until 2003,

2 For a recent analysis of these issues, see the article I wrote in 2015 for The Los Angeles Review of Books (Hundle, 2015).
42    121  postcolonial patriarchal nativism, domestic violence

when I was a young 20-year-old woman working on a feminist ethnographic research project on domestic violence in
Asian communities in Uganda.3 Many of the women I collaborated with on this project had been directly involved in
the case several years prior, and they recounted the details of the story in the context of their life histories and
ruminations on gendered relations and gender violence in their communities. The majority of these women, both
Indian and African, were elite or middle class; Ugandan Asian women, specifically, were community leaders and
active in voluntary work with local organisations.

In what follows, I present a narrative of Renu Joshi’s battering and eventual death at the hands of her husband, Kooky
Sharma. The murder took place on the night of 24 December 1998, and it played out in media coverage of criminal trial
proceedings and public commentary in print media and radio for several years afterwards. It was widely publicised and
debated in English-language urban print media and radio shows in Kampala in the late 1990s, early 2000s and most
recently in 2012.4 Other sources of the case are based on my interviews with women and activists, alongside urban
rumour and gossip, which is historically and currently a crucial source of information in Uganda.5 I weave together
research methods that include urban ethnography, interviews, archival research and media analysis to offer a
narrative of the event, a brief analysis of its discussion in print media and a discussion of the factors that contributed
to Joshi’s death. Offering a coherent narrative of the event of Joshi’s death is important in the context of the
spectacular visual representation of Joshi in newspaper articles after her murder.

Renu Joshi, an upper-caste, middle-class, Punjabi Hindu housewife, aged 35, was murdered around 4 am on Christmas
Eve. Her husband, Sharma, aged 39, had gone to work earlier that day (he was a local businessman and the owner of
Sharma Supermarket in Old Kampala, an area of Kampala in which many upwardly mobile Indian migrant entrepreneurs,
traders and their families reside).6 Sharma and his wife lived with their two small children; Sharma’s brother Davinder
Kumar, aged 29; and two other dependents, two male Indian ‘houseboys’ or domestic servants named Raju Kamaru
and Babu Rajukumar (Musigeren, 1998). They resided in a former Ugandan Asian home that was divided into two
apartments, with Ugandan neighbours on the other side of a partition wall. According to news reports, the neighbour,
Mrs Twine, heard a woman’s cries and shouts in the early morning of Christmas Eve, as well as the cries of children
shouting for their mother. According to transcripts of court proceedings, the next morning the neighbours noticed a
mattress in a shared hallway that was covering a window to the Sharma residence.7

Early in the morning, Sharma called local community leaders and a doctor to report that Joshi was ill. He suggested
that she had taken medicine for malaria or sleeping pills the night before and had passed away during the night.8 Her

3 See Hundle (2004). This research analysed the Joshi-Sharma case, among others, while protecting the confidentiality and anonym-

ity of the women with whom I collaborated. Using existing contacts in East Africa and linking with established women’s organisations
such as the International Women’s Organization (IWO) and Indian Women’s Association (IWA), I developed a network of contacts
comprised of Ugandan Asian and new migrant women. I used an open-ended interviewing technique that relied on developing rela-
tionships with women. I provided recommendations for including Asian/Indian women in domestic violence prevention work by work-
ing closely with Raising Voices, an organisation that offers award-winning domestic violence prevention tools and training for local
communities in Uganda. See the work of Raising Voices at http://raisingvoices.org/ [last accessed 6 December 2018].
4 In 2012, the perpetrator in the case, Sharma, was released from prison following a presidential pardon, which elicited more public

discussion on the case, as well as conversations about the political and economic alliances between the NRM regime and what is
constructed by the state and Ugandan publics as ‘the Asian community’ in Uganda.
5 See Taylor (2008) for an in-depth discussion about the press and rumour, or ‘Radio Katwe’, in urban Uganda. In Luganda, some

urban Ugandans informally used the phrase ‘okola kukee’ to refer to wife-beating (‘kukee’ refers to Kooky Sharma, the perpetrator).
6 Discussions with community members also suggested that Sharma was well-connected to elite businessmen and that his place of

business was a front for other illegal activities.

7 Kooky Sharma and Anor v Uganda (2000) Criminal Appeal No. 44 of 2000.
8 I have read two accounts of this story: one that says Joshi took sleeping pills, and another that says she took malarial medicines,

which caused her death.

 Anneeth Kaur Hundle    121  43

body was discovered, dressed in a long nightgown, under the bedcovers. News reports would later reveal that Sharma
had attempted to rush the Hindu cremation ceremony of Joshi’s body so that the bruises on her body would not be
discovered. In fact, he had summoned another prominent businessman and patron to bribe the local police in order to
prevent his arrest; it also became clear that the patron and others had helped summon a doctor from within the
community to falsify a medical report to state that Joshi had passed away from hypertension due to sleeping pills, in
order to rush the cremation (Weddi, 1997a, 1997c). Despite Sharma and others’ attempts to bribe local police and
falsify medical documentation, Hindu community leaders who arrived at the home discovered extensive bruises and
markings from electrical shocks on Joshi’s body. They blocked the cremation, and local residents cried foul as more
police arrived on the scene. Raju Kamaru, one of the houseboys and witnesses of the murder, was also found bruised,
beaten and unconscious in the home and was taken to hospital.

Sharma’s brother, Davinder Kumar, was also implicated as a perpetrator of violence. Both Sharma and Kumar were
arrested and detained, and by 30 December, six days after Joshi’s death, they had both been charged with murder
(Ochieng, 1997). In the meantime, Asian community leaders had organised an out-of-country Kenyan Asian
pathologist to carry out a proper (second) postmortem of Joshi’s body. The police commander, perhaps out of his
suspicions of a ‘community cover-up’, suggested that there was no need for a foreign-born pathologist, and a
doctor from Makerere University was summoned to carry out an official postmortem on Joshi’s body in the city
mortuary (Weddi, 1997b). It was eventually determined that Joshi had been beaten and shocked with electrical
wires, which led to her death.

As information about the case circulated among Ugandan Asian and Indian community leaders, women in the Indian
Women’s Association (IWA) mobilised to prevent men in their community from bribing authorities or helping Sharma
and his brother leave town. They immediately approached prominent Ugandan women’s rights activists, including then
Member of Parliament Winnie Byanyima. Byanyima and other Ugandan feminist activists engaged the media and
journalists, attended the official postmortem of Joshi’s body with Indian women as witnesses and executed strategies
to make sure that Sharma and Kumar would not be acquitted from the case by bribery or other means (Weddi and
Kamali, 1997). The women coordinated with other multiracial women’s organisations such as the International
Women’s Organization (IWO), Ugandan Women’s Efforts to Save Orphans (UWESO) and the newly formed Asian Women’s
Support Group; local NGOs and community-based organisations (CBOs) that worked on violence against women issues
in indigenous Ugandan communities such as Hope Against Rape, Ugandan Association of Women Lawyers (FIDA-
Uganda) and Action for Development (ACFODE); and professors and graduate students at the Department of Women
and Gender Studies at Makerere University.9 Together, activists, academics and community leaders attended Joshi’s
cremation and funeral, which they used as an opportunity to give speeches and create awareness about domestic
violence in all communities. For instance, they suggested that early reporting to authorities might have saved Joshi’s
life (Byanyima, 1998). Next, the group of multiracial women attended the court proceedings where Sharma and his
brother were charged and jailed on murder charges. Finally, women attended and observed the ongoing criminal court
trial proceedings in large groups together, participating in powerful ‘silent demonstrations’ (Luganda, 1998; Weddi
and Kamali, 1998).

Because of women’s mobilisations, and despite two key witnesses in the case (the two Indian houseboys) having
disappeared due to their being bribed or bullied into leaving the country, Sharma and his brother were charged,
prosecuted, pronounced guilty and jailed for the murder (Tumwine and Kamali, 1998; Weddi, 1998). Women’s groups
lobbied the court when Kumar applied for bail several months later; they feared that he would leave the country (New
Vision, 1998). While Sharma was initially given the death penalty for his crimes, his sentence was reduced and he was
to languish long-term in Luzira, a notoriously harsh prison on the outskirts of Kampala. Sharma and Kumar would lose

9 Makerere University professors Joy Kwesiga, Florence Bainanga and Ruth Mukama were actively involved in this case. Alongside
Byanyima, Jackie Asiimwe-Mwesigye was another important women’s rights activist who organised in response to Joshi’s murder.
44    121  postcolonial patriarchal nativism, domestic violence

their appeal in 2002, although Kumar was later released. In 2012, Sharma was given a pardon by President Yoweri
Museveni and set free, which, in the context of increasing heteropatriarchal backlash by the state, unleashed more
furor among women’s rights and anti-government activists (New Vision, 2012).

Importantly, while Ugandan media has publicised other reports of violence against migrant Indian women, the Joshi-
Sharma case has received the most media attention by far.10 The public nature of the case was related to the political
strategy of Ugandan (indigenous) women activists who sought to engage the media as much as possible to ensure that
the accused perpetrators were brought to justice. But this was also partly due to the excessive attention to the brutal
details of the case, including the publication of photographs of the victim’s body—pictures that were taken at one of
several necessary postmortems.11 The spectacular nature of Joshi’s death was also likely linked to her middle-class
and upper-caste Hindu status.

For the larger Ugandan (indigenous) public, the media coverage and publication of photos of her body, including
their economy of circulation, seemed to render visible a woman who represented a traditionally ‘closed’ or
inaccessible community. The entire case (and the reporting of its attempted cover-up) seemed to provide an
intimate glimpse of features of the ‘Asian community’. In their published op-eds and commentary, the views of the
Ugandan (indigenous) readership often trafficked in homogenising representations of the Asian community as
‘secretive’, ‘above the law’, ‘closed’, ‘inaccessible’ or having special connections and access to the President. They
often reproduced stereotypes of victimised Indian women and patriarchal, repressive and heterosexist Indian
culture. They also rightly criticised the attempts of wealthy and powerful Asian individuals involved in the cover-up
of the case to bribe police, bully and threaten witnesses and seek protection from powerful businessmen. For
example, one opinion editorial titled ‘Asian women in danger’ (1997) discussed the need to ‘protect’ Indian women
from wealthy community elites. It blamed the ‘Asian community’ as a whole, noting that:

the death of Joshi points to a blind spot in the application of the law in the country. There is a whole class of people who are not
closely scrutinized by the law—expatriates and the Asian community. Somehow the assumption is that these people’s lives are
governed by their own ‘peculiar culture’ … these people have made crime and atrocity a private affair. (ibid.)

Thus, the notion of ‘Indian culture’ came to symbolise the racialised and invented Asian community at large. Moreover,
explanations for Joshi’s death mirrored what scholar Uma Narayan (2006) has described as ‘death by culture’
explanations for dowry deaths in India: Joshi’s death was exceptionalised as a uniquely Indian patriarchal and cultural
phenomenon, despite the high rates of domestic violence among indigenous Ugandan communities. Moreover, if
Indian women had historically been interpreted by Ugandan political leaders as inaccessible to African men, thus
providing a rationale to cast the Indian minority outside of the nation, the case seemed to reveal the extreme danger
that could befall Indian women who had become the ‘communal property’ of Indian men.

10 My sources include English-language daily newspapers The Monitor and the New Vision in Kampala from 1986 onwards (from the

start of the Museveni-led NRM regime to recent years). I accessed these sources at the Centre for Basic Research in Kampala, and
I supplemented these sources with online articles published since 2009. In total, I have collected about forty-five articles related
to the Joshi-Sharma case. Media analysis is supplemented by interviews carried out with activists, scholars and community leaders
in 2003. The next stage of this research will, ideally, explore the public circulation and discussion of this case and others like it in
the Luganda language newspaper press. I will also update interviews based on the 2012 presidential pardon of Sharma and in the
context of ongoing domestic violence rates among Ugandan indigenous and Asian/Indian migrant women. A comparative study of
gender-based violence across indigenous Ugandan and Indian migrant communities will help to further examine commonalities
and differences in experiences of heteropatriarchal violence across racialised groups.
11 Pictures of Joshi’s body were published several times in: ‘Corpse shocks city: Asian community blocks cremation, electric shocks

suspected’, Sunday Vision (Weddi, 1997a); ‘It is time to say no’, New Vision: Women’s Vision (Kamugasa and Mugenzi, 1998); and
‘Asian women join hands to end domestic violence’, New Vision (Mugere, 1998).
 Anneeth Kaur Hundle    121  45

In my first analysis of this case, carried out in 2003, I used interviews and urban ethnography to understand the
interlocking structural factors that accounted for what Joshi and other victims and survivors of domestic violence
experienced. Over time, I found that these factors included: 1) the aforementioned insecurity of racialised ‘Asian’
communities in the context of the 1972 expulsion and postcolonial patriarchal nativism; 2) racialised elite
‘Asian community’ respectability politics, which are connected to a fear/shame complex of the negative ‘internal’
dynamics of the community being revealed to the ‘outside gaze’ of indigenous Ugandans; 3) the dependent nature of
Indian migrant women’s citizenship status and their lack of substantive citizenship rights; 4) the gendered precarity
and structural violence entailed in new South–South migration from India to Uganda; 5) the relative isolation of
Indian women in patrilocal marriage systems, including married migrant women’s lack of access to kinship networks
and other forms of support; 6) the patriarchal community policing of migrant women, including their mobility and
interactions with indigenous Ugandans and Ugandan men in particular—which is linked to anti-Black/African racisms
and cultural and caste-based ideologies of honour, purity and pollution; 7) the patriarchal nature of state and legal
institutions in Uganda and endemic patronage networks between Ugandan and Indian political and business elites; 8)
the lack of holistic internal reform efforts in Ugandan Asian/Indian migrant communities to address heteropatriarchal
masculinity; and 9) the limitations of existing patriarchal reform efforts (especially transformational reform,
reintegration and justice efforts) among Ugandan women’s activists and in the larger Ugandan women’s movement. In
exploring these factors, I worked to develop an intersectional and relational approach that recognised the multiple,
overlapping oppressions working at many different scales in migrant Indian women’s lives. Significantly, these
intersectional and relational approaches became crucial components of the transnational feminist methodology I
was developing. Below, I delve further into the kinds of feminist consciousness and practices that emerged or did not
emerge in relation to Joshi’s death.

cross-racial feminist organising: commonalities and tensions

The extreme brutality of the violence that led to Joshi’s death resulted in shock and disbelief in the nation. It also led
to two radically different interpretations of her death: one that framed it as a universal problem that cut across
indigenous and non-native Indian communities, and the other that framed it as an exceptional problem. Elite Ugandan
Asian women initially approached women’s rights activist Winnie Byanyima for help once they were alerted to the
exchange of money among community patriarchs that would allow Sharma to escape. Byanyima, along with other
Ugandan (indigenous African) women mentioned above, were public servants in the government or worked in NGOs and
international organisations. They helped educate and organise elite and middle-class Ugandan Asian/Indian women
about domestic violence such that Joshi’s death became a moment of feminist consciousness-raising among them.

In their rhetoric, Byanyima and other Ugandan women’s rights activists and academics established cross-racial
and community solidarities in relation to gender-based violence. The violence that Joshi had experienced was an
issue that existed universally across communities, regardless of race or cultural origins. For instance, they sought
substantive women’s citizenship rights for Joshi based on international human rights frameworks. They suggested
that even if Indian migrant women were not protected by Ugandan constitutional law because of their legal status,
they should be protected from gender-based violence under human rights law, and that all residents of Uganda, no
matter their citizenship status, were subject to Ugandan criminal laws (New Vision, 1997; Byanyima, 1998). Thus,
their political claims for justice for Joshi’s murder were universal and appealed for all women, regardless of race,
ethnicity and national origin, to be able to live free from violence—here, they utilised both inclusive multiracial
and non-racial ideologies in their discussion of Ugandan women’s lives. Finally, their assertions for justice for Joshi
overlapped with the larger Ugandan (indigenous)-led women’s movement and political demands on the state to
reform customary laws that continued to govern African women; namely the controversy over a tabled parliamentary
bill called the Domestic Relations Bill, or DRB.12 For Ugandan (indigenous) women activists, the Joshi-Sharma case

12 See von Struensee (2004) for more information on the proposed DRB.
46    121  postcolonial patriarchal nativism, domestic violence

intersected with broader discussions about the prevalence of gender-based violence in Uganda in general and the
need to reform constitutional laws to protect women from customary laws (or ‘culture’) and patriarchal communal
violence (Kamugasa and Mugenzi, 1998). Significantly, these political strategies were in concert with international
and global feminist perspectives on violence against women that locate the source of gender-based violence in
‘cultural institutions’.

Elite Ugandan Asian women responded to the case in several ways. Two Ugandan Asian-Gujarati women became
activist-leaders, encouraging others to do so as well. They worked closely with Byanyima, supporting her efforts to
draw public attention to the case. One of them persuaded her husband to take photos of Joshi’s body at one of the
postmortems as evidence of her abuse (she presented these same photos to me during one of our meetings). Both
women expressed their concerns and dismay about Joshi’s death and the handling of the case in a local Hindi radio
programme called Ap Ki Pasand; as one of them described, ‘we were disgusted, especially when Sharma kept trying to
say [in Hindi] that she [Joshi] was a very bad woman’ (ibid.). Before organising the radio programme, they held a
closed meeting with fellow Ugandan Asian women and established an informal group called the Asian Women’s Support
Group and a mobile-phone hotline number for any woman of (South) Asian descent who was experiencing domestic
problems and needed support from other women. Finally, all women, including some European expatriate women,
provided moral support to each other in the process of returning to the court house during Sharma’s booking and trial,
despite intimidation and threats.

Feminist organising was not without its tensions. A daughter of one of the expatriate housewives in Kampala at that
time told me that the initial Asian Women’s Support meeting became extremely heated and some women did not
support any organising efforts, community sensitisation or attracting visibility to the case.13 Some elites were
concerned about the participation of Ugandan (indigenous) NGOs, academics and activists in domestic affairs
dealing with Indian women—especially if the media publicised these cases and brought ‘undue attention’ or shame to
the reputation of ‘the Asian community’. Thus, while some women worked closely with Ugandan women activists, they
were challenged by women and men from their own communities who became gatekeepers and prevented mobilisation.

Some Ugandan Asian women chose to distance themselves from the case, and they declined to participate in the
silent demonstrations at Sharma’s trial although they were privately following and discussing the news. A few women
mentioned to me that they did this because they had received counsel from their husbands or others to avoid
involvement in the affairs of other families. They feared retribution for their actions, and they mentioned that ‘one
could never be too careful’. Thus, domestic patriarchies were linked to broader societal mistrust and racialised
insecurity in the post-Asian expulsion environment. These structures encouraged women to privilege racial and
community loyalty and dissuaded them from participating in overt feminist political practices—even though they
might have been empathetic to Joshi’s plight or even expressed an internal critique of intra-community-based
patriarchy to me. Many of them, for instance, expressed shame when they mentioned that Joshi had appeared at the
local mandhirs and gurudwaras (Hindu and Sikh religious temples) and asked for help but religious leaders and
others had failed her.

The published photos of Joshi’s deceased body by the press seemed to be the greatest affront to community elites.
They observed that it was disrespectful to violate Indian women’s privacy, which I further interpret as violating norms
surrounding the integrity, honour and virtue of the body of the Indian woman, and by extension the integrity of the
‘Asian community’ in Uganda as a whole. Thus, Indian women’s abstracted bodily respectability symbolised interlinked
and integral notions of Indian cultural essence and racialised community distinction in Uganda. Some women felt that
the case drew ‘undue’ attention to immoral forms of corruption and violence within their racialised community. The

13 Jackie
Asiimwe-Mwesigye, interview in Kampala, May 2010. These activists and community leaders continue to informally col-
laborate when any new cases of violence against women emerge.
 Anneeth Kaur Hundle    121  47

possibility that a negative image of the ‘Asian community’ was being reinforced publicly was especially troubling to
these community leaders.

During our interviews, other women observed that there was no general problem of domestic violence in their
communities, but that Joshi’s murder was a tragic aberration or an exceptional event. Here they maintained that
Sharma must have been pathological or ‘half-insane’ and likened the case to a ‘crime of passion’. They asserted that
the case did not represent the ‘Asian community’ at large, nor did it represent the way that women were treated,
particularly the Ugandan Asian population in Kampala. Men and women were concerned about public representations
and interpretations of the case because of their emphasis on Indian women as victims of stereotyped violent,
heterosexist and patriarchal Indian men. A section of elite women suggested that violence against women was a
problem only among ‘uneducated’ and ‘illiterate’ migrant-trader-entrepreneurs in the ‘Asian community’. These
comments pointed to class divisions among communities as elite Ugandan Asians sought to portray themselves as
Westernised, liberal moderns and more educated than ‘backwards’ recent arrivals from India who treated women
poorly. Overall, many women sought to downplay the structural dynamics that led to Joshi’s death in order to maintain
respectability politics and shore up elite community norms, echoing what Anannya Bhattacharjee (1992) has described
as ‘the habit of ex-nomination’ among the Indian immigrant bourgeoisie in the United States. In doing so, they sought
to preserve essentialist and racialised ‘Asian’ cultural and community tropes by disassociating from the case and the
structural issue of violence against women in general.

Although some new culturally sensitive workshops and activities within women’s organisations and critical
conversations among youth are beginning to emerge in Uganda, incidents of violence against Indian women are
still primarily handled domestically or informally by community leaders. What is significant is that elite women’s
support networks emerge sporadically or are activated when a survivor who has already experienced domestic
violence seeks out local authorities or local Ugandan (indigenous) gender-based violence organisations for
protection and to file a formal legal complaint—or, as in the case of Joshi, when it is already too late to save a
woman’s life. In fact, patriarchal community structures, including internally segregated religious communities
and elite community leaders, often fail women survivors, particularly when leaders advise women to return to
their families and endure domestic abuse.

Ultimately, Joshi’s death provoked important internal, cross-community and societal conversations that centred the
lives of Indian women and their well-being within broader discussions about Asian belonging and the role of ‘the Asian
community’ in the nation. For a nation that has never officially and publicly dealt with the event of the 1972 Asian
expulsion and ongoing tensions around Asian presence and migration in and to Uganda, the conversations that Joshi’s
death elicited were critical on many planes of political debate, including the often vexed and controversial topic of
cross-racial African–Asian relationships in general. Joshi’s death, followed by Sharma’s trial and conviction, suggests
that we should also consider the emergence and nature of cross-racial feminist mobilisation. For the first time since
the 1972 Asian expulsion, women came together across historically racially segregated communities to form a new
urban community, which—although rather elite in its class dimension and at times paternalistic in its approach—
established a vision for all women to live free from violence. Ugandan activists of both African and Indian descent
used the figure of the migrant Indian woman, embodied by Joshi’s life, to represent the plight of all women living with
domestic violence. Their rhetoric was informed by universal feminist sensibilities as well as liberal multiracial and
non-racial ideologies of belonging in the nation.

Yet, the responses to the case also revealed the internal frictions among Ugandan Asian elite women, as well as the
tensions between African and Asian women in their feminist practices and strategies for engagement
with heteropatriarchal and state power. Despite renewed interest in the hidden histories and genealogies of
‘Afro–Asian’ solidarities within and between nations in the Global South, critical scholars have cautioned against
the romanticisation of cross-racial and/or feminist affinities by pointing to the power relations and hierarchies
within and between groups in different locations of the South—and even the occlusion of these power differentials
48    121  postcolonial patriarchal nativism, domestic violence

within scholarly writing practices (see Burton, 2012; Roy, 2016). In Uganda, for instance, we might consider that
feminist practice is often characterised by a lack of reciprocity on the part of Asian women—indeed, elite Ugandan
Asian and other Indian women are not typically engaged in Ugandan (indigenous) women’s activist struggles
against violence or even other proletarian ‘bread and butter’ social movement struggles. Their reciprocity is
generally limited to benevolent voluntary work within existing organisations or charitable monetary contributions,
limiting their feminist contributions to liberal elite practices associated with expatriates. These practices maintain
hierarchical and patronising relationships with urban indigenous Ugandan women, and they prevent elite Asian
women from developing cross-racial and cross-class intimacies with Ugandan indigenous women on their terms.
Complicating the terms of cross-racial feminist engagement by recognising ongoing stratifications and hierarchies
amidst the professed liberal gender equality between racialised groups has been another critical component of my
transnational feminist research.

transnational feminist research from Uganda and the Global South

The previous discussion on the politics of critically representing African–Asian connections in the Global South,
including the kind of cross-racial feminist mobilisation we saw in the context of the Joshi-Sharma case, obliges us to
return to a critical question at stake in this article. Despite the prominence of the Joshi-Sharma case in the news
media, in the public sphere and in the collective memory of Ugandans (of varied racial and ethnic backgrounds), why
has existing feminist scholarship produced from Uganda and by Ugandan/Uganda studies scholars refrained from
analysing cases of violence against women in Ugandan Asian and Indian migrant communities? What explains this
absence of cross-racial feminist analysis? In an earlier analysis (Hundle, 2013), I argued that this was connected to
the histories of the anti-colonial nationalist/decolonisation period in Uganda, including practices and ideologies of
anti-Asianism (and Asian sources of elitism and anti-Blackness), nativism and the 1972 Asian expulsion itself, which
forced most Ugandan Asian women to flee and migrate from the nation, inevitably stultifying pre-Asian expulsion
community organising and existing forms of elite cross-racial feminist practice (see Tripp, 2001). Since the mid-1990s
and the advent of racialised Asian community rebuilding efforts, however, I am increasingly convinced that part of the
answer also lies in scholars’ lack of adoption of transnational feminist approaches and analyses in their research.

By necessity, I turned to both Ugandan/African and Indian postcolonial feminist scholarship on gender, nationalism
and patriarchal violence to analyse the Joshi-Sharma case, working against the grain of area studies and national
boundaries by integrating and synthesising segmented bodies of scholarship. While African feminisms have helped to
theorise the relationships among European empire, colonialism, nationalism and gender-based violence (see
especially Mama, 1997), Ugandan gender and feminist scholarship includes the study of colonial and postcolonial
gender ideologies (Musisi, 2001; Kyomuhendo and McIntosh, 2006), gender, violence, war and militarisation
(Tibatemwa-Ekirikubinza, 1998; Decker, 2014); and the study of women’s movements, formal political participation
and legislative reform (Tamale, 2000; Tripp, 2000; Tripp and Kwesiga, 2002); and the study of the possibilities and
limitations of liberal human and women’s rights frameworks (Oloka-Onyango and Tamale, 1995; Tamale, 2001). In
terms of Ugandan gender-based activism, global feminist frameworks emanating from international institutions
continue to dominate the public sphere. In the Joshi-Sharma case, for example, global feminist frameworks that
upheld liberal claims for Indian women’s right to live free from violence were important for establishing protections for
women governed by male-dominant institutions. Yet, global feminist perspectives also universalised the experience
of all women without attending to the specificities of Uganda’s unique postcolonial and multiracial contexts. This
sidelined the situated context of Indian women’s domestic struggles in relation to Ugandan women’s domestic
struggles. ‘Indian culture’, like ‘African culture’, was at times problematically reified and politically mobilised to both
defend patriarchal custom and gender-based violence, as well as to provide evidence for Indian women’s oppression.
Finally, global feminist frameworks tended to elevate ‘formal’ women’s movements and individual activist personalities
that were already legible and institutionalised within the state. Instead, the Joshi-Sharma case revealed the rather
informal and spontaneous nature of internal community reform efforts, feminist consciousness-raising and cross-
racial feminist activist practices.
 Anneeth Kaur Hundle    121  49

In the end, developing a transnational feminist framework from and within Uganda required confronting many
kinds of constrictions and discomforts. These disquiets included navigating the tragedy of Joshi’s death and
its impact on many communities, the process of fieldwork and its distressing racial and communal politics, the
numerous biases and occlusions embedded within scholarly trends and the painful and reactionary nationalist
ideologies that circulated both within the US and Ugandan university. Alongside the challenges of racially
compartmentalised scholarship on ‘Asians’ discussed above, I often felt constrained by the accepted
boundaries of Ugandan feminist scholarship. Although this scholarship is patently critical of heteropatriarchal
nationalisms, it is constituted by methodological nationalisms and postcolonial patriarchal nativism such
that it limits its subjects of study to indigenous Ugandan women and excludes Indian women. In doing so, it
avoids the possibilities of analysing women’s experiences of heteropatriarchal violence relationally, thereby
reproducing nativist nationalist tendencies. In addition, unlike in South Africa, intersectional feminist
frameworks for understanding multiple race-, class-, gender-, religious-, community- and caste-based
oppressions may exist in East Africa, but they have yet to be more fully incorporated into feminist research
methodologies and scholarly analyses.14

This transnational feminist framework led me to confront more staunchly the circulating material realities and
normalised ideologies of heteropatriarchal and nativist nationalisms in Uganda. It enabled me to conjoin the rich
insights of existing Ugandan and Indian postcolonial feminisms, develop intersectional and relational analyses within
and across groups of Ugandan African and Indian women, construct new feminist concepts such as ‘postcolonial
patriarchal nativism’, and engage critically with universalising global and international feminist frameworks. I
approached Uganda as a transnational site within the Global South: a place from which to think transnationally about
cross-racial feminist harmonies and frictions. Finally, the urgency of African–Asian feminist mobilisation that
emerged in the aftermath of Renu Joshi’s death—despite its unevenness, classed nature and internal tensions—urges
us to consider how theorising feminism from the Global South sheds light on new universals of feminist practice, ones
that challenge us to see feminism in new ways, even from locations in the North. It is from this unsentimental site of
theorisation and practice that we can move past romantic and aspirational projects of Afro–Asian solidarities. We can
then begin the difficult work of transforming a moment of cross-racial feminism to a larger and more inclusive
movement of cross-racial feminism in East Africa.

acknowledgements
I would like to thank Renu Joshi’s family and her children; the IWO, the IWA, FIDA-Uganda, Raising Voices and other
domestic violence organisations in Kampala; colleagues at MISR and scholar-activists at Makerere University; and all
other women with whom I collaborated, for their boundless time, energy and resources in support of my research and
scholarship. I would especially like to thank Mrs Jayjay Madhvani, Mrs Jayshree Kanani and Ms Farah Benis for their
activism, bravery and camaraderie. A luta continua.

funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit
sectors. Follow-up research for this essay was supported by the Africa Initiative Grant from the Center for
Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan from 2007 to 2010 and the Wenner-Gren Foundation
Dissertation Fieldwork Grant and National Science Foundation SBE Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant from
2008 to 2010.

14 SeeMarks (1994) for an example of an intersectional study of race, class and gender in South Africa. For a recent discussion
of the significance of intersectionality and its potential dilution of meaning and relationship to class struggles in South Africa,
see Piiroinen (2016). In the East African context, Richa Nagar’s (1998, 2000) research on Indian women in Tanzania makes use of
intersectional frameworks to understand the importance of different kinds of gendered symbolic purity and the making of Asian
community boundaries.
50    121  postcolonial patriarchal nativism, domestic violence

author biography
Anneeth Kaur Hundle is Dhan Kaur Sahota Presidential Chair of Sikh Studies and Assistant Professor of Anthropology
at the University of California, Irvine. She received her doctorate in sociocultural anthropology at the University of
Michigan, Ann Arbor and is currently a visiting professor at the Center for African Studies at the University of California,
Berkeley. Prior to her current position, she was an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at University of California,
Merced and a Research Associate at Makerere Institute of Social Research at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda.
She can be reached at ahundle@uci.edu.

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