This article considers issues relating to religion and culture among Indian Muslims in Natal which imported 152 184 indentured workers from British India between 1860 and 191 1. Migrants began the process of reconstituting their societies in a context where they were heterogeneous in terms of language, religion and caste, and where the dominant white elite believed in the superiority of its culture and civilization in relation to the heathen other. This story has been largely neglected, partly because historians spend too much time in the …