Gravity

Kampala, Uganda —  A city shaped by movement, return, and the architectures people inherit long after departure.

Indians evade me in Kampala’s art scene. Most say they don’t know any, but some DJ friends connect me with one who plays Bollywood events. “I’m not sure I can help you, I mostly do this as a hobby” he says. Out on the streets and in restaurants is a similar vacuum to a community that I thought would be much easier to find. On the internet I find a radio show commemorating fifty years since Ugandan Asians came to the UK. The station is not Ugandan, but British.

I visit the High Commission of India as a last resort. I arrive in the morning during hours designated for acquiring diplomatic documents. The line is long in the first room I enter, and people are focused on materials for travel or work. Sensing this is the wrong place for my questions, I move across the courtyard. Someone sitting at a desk in the corner leads me to an office, where a woman gives me the names of Indian Association members as well as musicians who perform at High Commission events.

Sifting through the numbers, I get in touch with Shobha, a musician who connects me with KK, one of her bandmates. I message KK and he quickly invites me to have lunch with him. He stays in a condominium building just north of Kampala’s CBD. It seems many Indians live in this building. I see a few as I enter the parking lot, already many more than I have seen in the streets.

Inside his apartment, the marble floors and smell of familiar spices evoke memories of my family’s subcontinental history.

The kitchen, where familiar smells and habits return without asking permission.

KK excitedly shows me his collection of Indian flutes. He gives me one large one, one that he says no one has been able to play. It must have come from India; nowhere else in Africa have I found bamboo like this. I put the flute to my lips, and KK gleefully exclaims as my breath echoes through its cylindrical chamber. We sit to talk as cricket plays on television in the background.

KK tells me he initially left India for South Africa. After a few years, his mother requested that her sons be together in a foreign continent, so he joined his brother in Uganda. He has been here since the 1990s. As I ask about music and mixed culture he tells me he doesn’t know of much. He sometimes plays music with Africans but not regularly.

“You know when people get here they just want to be settled before they pursue art or any form of expression.” South Asians generally come to Uganda on their way somewhere else. They often try for a US visa, which is apparently easier to obtain with a Ugandan work permit than just South Asian documents. “I also thought I would leave when I first came here, but now I am comfortable.” His son went to study and then work in Canada.

“What about the people who have been here for many generations?” I ask

“There are basically none of them here. Of forty thousand expelled, maybe two or three hundred returned. I don’t know so many. If your father was kicked out of a country you wouldn’t want to go back.”

I’ve been told all over about the lack of Indian mixing, yet the absence of anyone on the fringe still surprises me. Decades after Indians resumed immigration to Uganda, a silent wall remains, upheld by a dense conservative center. Somehow my own movement ignores it. Perhaps I’ve escaped its gravitational pull.

“When you first called me I thought you played western music and played jazz or something,” KK tells me. “You’re the first person I’ve met playing Indian music who’s interested in mixing with African music. Musicians come from India for functions but they stay within the community.”

After some time a neighbor arrives. KK introduces him as a very good doctor, and tells him about my journey. KK is quite bewildered by how I’ve ended up here. “How is it that you’ve stopped worrying about money and status at such a young age?” he asks. “Your questions are also very unique. I have never thought about why we haven’t mixed music.”

I don’t have an answer. These questions feel natural.

“He’s half yogi. He doesn’t need much to live,” the neighbor says—an explanation that seems to satisfy everyone in the room. There is an Indian model for my spirit.

KK (center), his wife beside him, with friends and neighbors who stopped by during the afternoon.

As we continue to converse, the neighbor says he runs a group that does some exercises and meditation on Sunday mornings. It is a group called HSS, he says, that is responsible for making strong and capable young men.

“You should come by tomorrow morning and speak to them if you’re able. They’ll find your way of being inspirational.”

I’m not sure what HSS is.

“You know RSS? RSS is in India, and HSS is outside, but we have the same values.”

I’m non-committal, unsure I want to be associated with such a group. The RSS has been responsible for much of the Hindu nationalist rhetoric taking hold of India. My supposed yogic way of life seems to conflict with the actions of these groups. Others in the room do not seem to see the same contradiction.

More neighbors show. They find my mode of travel bold, perhaps overconfident. They ask if I’ve experienced any violence or issues on the road in Uganda.

Nothing.

“You’re probably safer because you don’t really look Indian. Don’t take offense, but you look more Arabic. Indians are often targeted.”

“Because people think they’re rich?” I ask.

“Not really, more a memory of mistreatment from someone who looks Indian.”

Has my appearance kept me safe? My demeanor? A yogic spirit? Everyone marvels at my embodiment of an Indian yogic life, yet attributes my movements to distance from a classical Indian appearance.

Riding With Sahil is an ongoing series within  Archives in Motion, with earlier entries including Aterere and Indigenous Music.

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About the author: Sahil Desai is a writer, sound researcher, and musician tracing South Asian diasporic music across the African continent. Traveling by motorbike, he documents encounters with musicians, archives, and forms of cultural life that often sit outside official histories. His work attends to sound as a site of memory, circulation, and unfinished connection.

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Archives in Motion: An initiative of BlindianProject — a living archive documenting Black × South Asian histories, encounters, and cultural exchange.