As Natural As Daylight uses Govender’s garden to think through these dynamics in the present. The garden functions as archive (a sensory memory-technology), as position (rootedness forged through care and cultivation rather than blood or myth), and as question (what “South African” means when an imagined India persists and present-tense belonging remains contested). The exhibition proposes the garden as method and metaphor: reading Govender not to reconstruct Cato Manor, but to show how plants—named, tended, exchanged—compose a theory of belonging for a South Africa wrestling with racialised histories, uneven recognition, and plural futures, where being remains accountable to becoming.

Thinking of identity as both being and becoming, it is anchored in shared memories—indenture, neighbourhood ritual, language traces, food—yet continually remade by location, law, and media. In the post-1994 public sphere, Indian identities span a continuum: from defensive essentialisms that strategically claim “Indianness” to counter-essentialist, hybrid positions foregrounding South Africanness and coalition—each shaped by power, representation, and translation.

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