Scholar Activist, UJ’s Professor Ashwin Desai, wins the Established Researcher Award

His academic colleagues regard him as a highly renowned and well-respected scholar-activist and social scientist who has worked relentlessly to tell the story of the marginalised and the oppressed.

These awards, recognising research excellence in the social sciences and humanities, were introduced for the first time in 2016 by the then HSRC CEO, who said at the time: “The social sciences and humanities, alongside all other knowledge forms we have developed, are central to who we are as human beings. Alongside mathematics and what we have come to call the hard sciences, they provide us with our civilizational compasses.”

On Professor Desai’s prolific publishing history, the Dean said this scholar had produced 80 monographs, three edited books and more than 100 accredited publications. He had also published numerous newspaper articles. She added: “He is frequently on TV as a social commentator. His work is well cited, and he has high global impact. His famous book, We are the Poors – has been celebrated internationally for its sharp and analytical framing and is prescribed in many countries.”

Another of Desai’s carefully researched books deals with Mahatma Gandhi, the Indian lawyer, anti-colonial nationalist and political ethicist, renowned for his non-violence campaigns for India’s independence from British rule, who spent time in South Africa. Said Professor Naidoo: “His book, The South African Gandhi forced a rethinking of Gandhi’s South African years and sparked global debate.”

Professor Desai, working with contemporary biographies and unexamined archives, has upturned and revised thinking about crucial elements of the everyday experience of life in South Africa.

Professor Naidoo continued: “Through the innovative use of group biography, he grapples with how identity is formed, not just by imposition from above, but by impulses from below.

“We see this in his award-winning book, Wentworth: the Beautiful Game and the Making of Place which he published in 2019.” According to a SAGE-published book review, the story is set in Wentworth, a coloured township located in the south-east of Durban, and the passion of its people for soccer. [available via: Book review: Ashwin Desai, Wentworth: The Beautiful Game and the Making of Place – Shawn Forde, 2021 (sagepub.com)]

“Apart from his scholarship, Professor Desai has been an activist involved in social movements. He is a sought-after scholar and intellectual activist regularly invited to interpret current events, offer critique and provide insight into grassroots sentiments. He brings to light marginalised voices, and, in this way, his public scholarship has stretched beyond the academy. We are very proud of his achievements.”

Professor Desai said the best thing about working in the Sociology Department was the freedom afforded to researchers to pursue the topics they cared about. “You go off and do the research then come back to the department like some old-time anthropologist – to share your views, to interact, to get some of your theories debunked. For me, that has been the highlight — this critical collegiality that has emerged spontaneously in the Sociology Department, but also in the broader Humanities faculty.”

He grew up in the Casbah (Grey Street in inner-city Durban) which was a concrete jungle many stories high. “I was always at the bottom – as one woman told me, one of those young boys who held up corners – hanging out with people. Every day, I’d see thousands of people come into the centre of Durban, into the old Indian quarter. Even then, I had a fascination with the everyday. What did these people do? Who were they? They would get back on those buses and leave and on Sunday, the Casbah was empty. On Monday, they all came back.

“My childhood fascination now finds its resonance in the telling of stories. It is in getting people to talk that you begin to understand why they are making the decisions they are. It is how you make sense of the big narratives – how people receive these messages, how they react against structures, how they change, and how they succumb. This is at the heart of social science.”

As he received the award, Professor Desai fondly remembered his mother and her desire to make him smart. “It was 1975, matric year… my mother dressed me up to go to Chatsworth High School, telling me I would be head prefect.” His mother’s face dropped when she heard he’d been made bell boy, ringing him awake with the bell he brought home, promising that she would make him a genius, shoving a copy of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night into his hand with an instruction to rote-learn the entire play.

He did, and as a result, he failed English, “…because I didn’t know about the beauty of love or the cross-dressing of Malvolio.” Despite that, Professor Desai was one of the first black students to be admitted into Rhodes University.

“This award, for me, is magnificent and beautiful. My mother is dead,” he said, adding, nonetheless, the importance of honouring parents by telling their stories, and how necessary it is to keep memories going.

Professor Heidi van Rooyen (left, below), the Group Executive at the HSRC’s Impact Centre, congratulated Professor Desai for winning this category, saying: “Halala halala Professors Ashwin Desai, Saleem Badat (Free State University) and Malose Langa (University of the Witwatersrand). We take a bow to your scholarship, committed to the rigorous pursuit of knowledge and truth, academic freedom, intellectual autonomy, and advancing knowledge in and through the arts, humanities and social sciences.

“We acknowledge your contributions as social commentators and activists who focus on oppression and resistance, uncover hidden and contested histories utilising the lens of everyday life to tell these stories.

“We see the meticulous and careful way you throw a spotlight on social structures, policies, and actions that sustain inequalities and injustice in society; the way in which your work talks to how these are reproduced. We see how you dig into and try and unearth strategies to address these. We take heart in your work that seeks to eradicate poverty and violence, which shows how these undermine social cohesion and social justice,” Professor van Rooyen said.

She added that the Established Researchers category “gave us the impression of top-class athletes at the top of their game, oozing class and style at their skill and accomplished ways.”

Charmain Naidoo is a contract writer for Universities South Africa.