‘We do not discriminate against African women, but they have a different lifestyle. They come home late, hang out with men, that is not acceptable by the Indian community and therefore they should sometimes be controlled and taught to understand our Indian ways. But we don’t racially discriminate against them,’ a Bengaluru landlord told me when I asked about racial discrimination against African tenants. He said it without any irony.
African women in Bengaluru are routinely stared at, judged, and incessantly ‘managed’, yet there is no vocabulary for the outright denial of voice and agency they experience. As Bengaluru’s IT industry expanded, it drew international migrants, including African men and women, who came in search of affordable education in fields such as nursing, pharmacy, engineering, and the social sciences. Their arrival created a market for traders from Africa supplying the food, spices, and cosmetics that a migrant community needs. In fact, many students became small entrepreneurs themselves.
Women make up a significant share of this migrant population. Most come as students, but a substantial number of women also come on short-term visas as seasonal traders, hairstylists, nurses, and small business owners. However, what they often find is that the arduous pre-migration uncertainties do not end upon arrival. In fact, the post-migration journey generates its own precarity and risks.
It is important to recognise that African women are ‘strangers’ arriving from outside India’s social fabric defined by caste, hierarchies of colour, and language. As a result, they face a compounding of racial, gendered, and linguistic discrimination that Indian public discourse fails to challenge.
It is equally important to acknowledge that, due to a lack of economic opportunities back home, many African women overstay their visas, driven by the aspiration to work and educate themselves. Their presence, which is then construed as ‘illicit’, deepens the uncertainty they experience and exacerbates the contempt they face from the police, landlords, and the public at large. And yet they stay, build their lives, and live with hope. They carve out a life of self-making within the very structures that constrain them.
A caste and race problem
The discrimination faced by African women as they navigate Indian cities is deeply embedded in social hierarchies that precede their arrival. In India, colour as a social marker is intertwined with caste, where darker skin carries moral suspicion and assumptions about caste. Moreover, when an African woman arrives in India, she is not only judged through a caste lens; she also steps into the long colonial memory of white supremacy, where lighter skin and Eurocentric beauty ideals become markers of racial superiority.
African women thus become victims of a postcolonial fixation with whiteness as well. This obsession is evident everywhere, in Bollywood, matrimonial advertisements, and the million-dollar skin-lightening industry, but it also originates deep within the Indian household.
While an African woman is positioned within India’s logic of colourism, she is assigned no place within Indian hierarchies. A dark-skinned Indian woman may be treated with contempt, but she still resides within the Indian social structure. She has a caste, a community, a familiar language, and a region to which she belongs. An African woman, however, has none of these. Her Blackness is perceived not only as a ‘deficit’ within the Indian social hierarchy, but as something entirely unrecognisable: foreign and unplaceable. Therefore, she is openly met with disdain because there is little to no social cost for those who engage in such bigotry.
Whether they are students or working women, African women are bound together by a shared experience of objectification, one in which their Blackness is simply not understood. A Cameroonian businesswoman put it plainly: ‘We look very different from you all. Our differences are noted, mocked, and rebuked. We are called “kallu” and “kaaliya”; our hair is touched and played with.’
Make no mistake: Blackness is deemed un-Brahminical and unattractive, yet the Black body becomes a curious paradox — hypersexualised, yet alienated; treated as both sexually ‘available’ and out of place. A Nigerian woman told me that she was picked up by the police late one night on her way back from a club; her clothes were deemed ‘problematic’, and she was mistaken for a sex worker. She was held for hours and released only after producing every document she had, down to her university ID.
When she asked why she had been detained, an officer told her casually: ‘You Nigerian Black women are ruining our culture. Tell your Nigerian friends not to stand on the street late at night or walk around in those slutty clothes, and then maybe we will not mistake you for a sex worker.‘ In a single breath, he hypersexualises and alienates her.
Silence and staying invisible
‘When I got the nurse job, I was delighted. I could finally pay rent and not return empty-handed to my country. I wore an elegant attire, a kaftan that is very common in my country. But when I entered the hospital, all my colleagues stared at me. I was finally told by the administrative head not to wear such clothes. I stopped wearing them. Another time, I got some cooked food in my lunchbox. I was told by someone I considered a work friend that my food is very stinky. I stopped bringing home-cooked food to work after that. I do not fight, argue, overstep, or attempt to overhear. I keep my head down and maintain my dignity,’ a Congolese nurse told me.
Her account maps the grammar of survival for a Black woman in India. She is often asked to abandon her ethnic clothes, give up her food, and accept submission and invisibility. A common strategy I observed many Black women adopting was to keep their heads down and remain unseen.
Survival, here, does not mean speaking up; it means staying out of trouble. It is the quiet acceptance of having your clothes laughed at, your language treated as foreign, your hair remarked upon, and your food disparaged, while choosing not to answer back. And yet, despite all of this, these women persevere, finding new pathways and strategies to survive in a foreign country.
For a Black migrant woman, invisibility becomes the safest route to making a ‘dignified’ life. Silence works as a strategy for survival because resistance, or any open expression of one’s thoughts and way of life, risks making her visible, and visibility can come at a cost. Gendered expectations and everyday sexism compound this, preventing women workers, such as kitchen owners and small business owners, from taking an assertive stand, especially when their visa status is precarious. That calculation weighs heaviest on women in informal work, who lack the networks and organised leadership that might otherwise defend their rights.
Small acts of self-making
Countless African students find themselves in colleges with poor teaching, as unaccredited colleges mushroom in the suburbs of Bengaluru. In the absence of an engaging university life, with no family close by, compounded by the weight of the Indian gaze and the sexual stereotypes attached to their presence, African women often decide to stay indoors. Constant boredom, then, becomes an essential price of transnational migration for them. As Heidegger (2001) suggests, the boredom born of lost opportunity, cultural isolation, immobility, and humiliation is not the same as the boredom of leisure and luxury.
Yet African women do not simply submit to it. They turn this boredom into time and space for themselves, retreating into their homes to cook, catch up with family, watch their favourite shows, and braid one another’s hair in small salons. Cooking, especially, carries particular significance. Unable to find their food in Indian restaurants, women make food from back home, turning food into an everyday space of comfort, a way of keeping in touch with home, and affirming who they are.
Sharing these meals with friends becomes a quasi-event in itself, where everyday, mundane activities acquire the texture of daily life. Such sociality has no particular objective. Women meet, talk, gossip, and pass time together. To me, this is not merely a suppression of their mobility, but a strategy of survival amid immobility. This is what survival looks like from the inside: from within the home, where small acts of self-making shape a Black woman’s life when no one is watching.
Where Indian feminism has to go next
Indian feminism has been having an evolving conversation about the intersectionality of caste, class, gender, and colour. However, ‘race’ as a social structure has largely been absent from Indian social and political discourse. Discourse on race is still considered as belonging to another world entirely. But it is necessary in India, just as much as it is necessary in countries with a long, documented history of violent racism. India has not only witnessed brutal cases of racism against the ‘foreign body’, but also against its own citizens, who are treated with disdain and disrespect because of their perceived racial difference.
When both an Indian citizen and an African migrant woman are marked by the same logic of discrimination, it tells us that the problem is not foreign. Race and racism are deeply entrenched in India, but we do not like to name or confront such racism. Therefore, identifying ‘race’ and ‘racism’ within feminist analysis in India — not only in academic and intellectual circles, but also in everyday life — would not mean importing a foreign vocabulary. Instead, it would mean turning the Indian feminist lens towards a problem it already recognises and extending this lens to race as well.
References
- An, F. & Bramble, T. (2018). Silence as a Survival Strategy: Will the Silent Be Worse Off? A Study of Chinese Migrant Workers in Guangdong. International Journal of Human Resource Management, 29(5), 915-940.
- Heidegger, M. (2001). The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude. Indiana University Press.
- Jayawardene, M. S. (2016). Racialized Casteism: Exposing the Relationship between Race, Caste, and Colorism through the Experiences of Africana People in India and Sri Lanka. Springer.
- Ngai, P. (2005). Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace. Duke University Press.
- Parameswaran, R. & Cardoza, K. (2012). Melanin on the Margins: Advertising and the Cultural Politics of Fair/Light/White Beauty in India. Journalism & Communication Monographs, 14(3), 213-274.
About the author(s)
Dr Shambhavi Bhushan is a scholar and policy practitioner working at the intersection of migration, mobility, race, and gender. She holds a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Florida, where her doctoral research examined the lived experiences of African migrants in urban India through the lenses of race and gendered mobility. She currently works as a Migration and Mobility Expert Consultant with the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA). Over nine years, her work has spanned academic research, policy practice, grassroots engagement, and corporate research, including experience with the Institute for Human Development (IHD), Rajiv Gandhi Mahila Vikas Pariyojana (RGMVP), and Gartner.
