What is the historical trajectory of the Indian South African community in a post-apartheid context? How have Indian South Africans managed to navigate the complex politics of difference in a rapidly changing society? What sense have they made of the struggles and hardships of their ancestors in light of their own challenges in post-apartheid South Africa? What should Indian South Africans rightly call themselves? Is there even such a thing as a South African Indian identity? Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed's book, A History of the Present: A Biography of Indian South Africans, 1994–2019, strives to answer all of the above questions, and much more.

As a literary genre, a biography is understood to be a true story of the life of a single person. To endeavour to produce a biography of a group of people as such, is a daunting task but nonetheless one which the authors have ambitiously set for themselves. Accordingly, the book entails a deep-dive into the real lives, histories and stories of the Indian South African community. While this work cannot be called a biography in the strict sense of the word, what emerges is a thoughtful portrait of the Indian South African community after the formal end of apartheid in South Africa. In spite of the sweeping subject matter, the authors manage to compress it all into 14 content-rich chapters.

The authors bring to life a portrait of a community straining under numerous pressures, and as they say, ‘caught between longing – what was lost in the multiple moves across the kala pani, from the plantations to the cities, the forced uprooting and settlement in racially bounded townships during the apartheid era and the jump into the post-apartheid moment – and belonging and their quest through the long twentieth century for citizenship, for dignity, for a place to call home’ (19). Many troubling dilemmas of the Indian South African post-apartheid experience, such as equity, affirmative action, access to education, and the need for belonging, are frankly addressed, and with an impressive depth and breadth to the critical insights expressed therein.

The value of this book lies in its readability and imaginative writing. The complicated racialised politics of the country are presented to the reader in an accessible style which will ensure the popular appeal of the book to a wide range of audiences. The book layers historical context among and between many colourful and detailed stories about the experiences of Indian South Africans. Key historical flashpoints – from the 1949 ‘riots’ between Indians and black Africans to the ‘Guptagate’ scandals – are inserted into the narrative in a skilful oscillation between past and present in a way that helps to explain the totality of the journey of Indian South Africans. Accordingly, the authors acknowledge that, ‘it is a tricky exercise to write a story that is, at once, necessary and out of date, while guarding against losing the spine of one's narrative, the contemporary history of Indian South Africans’ (15). Nonetheless, they have managed to do so.

This book connects with the other pioneering work of the authors, Inside Indian Indenture: 1860–1914. The aforementioned book is a compelling work of immense dimensions about indentured labour in South Africa, which will serve as a reference for the historiography of Indian South Africans for years and generations to come. Through the scholarship of these authors, it is possible to see that a robust body of work about the experiences of Indian South Africans is now being forged.