The history of Indian indentured labour in South Africa has been extensively documented as a history of colonial migration, labour exploitation, and racial discrimination. Yet less attention has been given to how subsequent generations of South African Indians transmit, experience, and visually negotiate the afterlives of indenture. This study examines contemporary South African Indian visual culture through Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory, focusing on how inherited histories of indenture are mediated through photography, painting, mixed media, installation, digital imagery and other visual practices. Postmemory is particularly useful for examining experiences that precede an artist’s lifetime but continue to shape identity through family narratives, images, cultural practices and affective histories. Hirsch argues that traumatic experiences can be transmitted across generations through stories, images and behaviours, producing relationships to the past that can resemble lived memory. This framework enables the study to consider how displacement, poverty, racialisation, cultural dislocation and violence associated with colonialism and apartheid may persist as intergenerational conditions rather than isolated historical events. The research addresses two gaps. First, although scholarship has examined Indian indenture and South African Indian identity, it has paid limited attention to postmemory as a framework for interpreting South African Indian visual culture. Second, South African Indian artistic practices remain insufficiently integrated into dominant narratives of the national art canon, despite their sustained engagement with race, identity, politics, and historical memory. The study argues that visual art can reveal how past experiences continue to shape present-day experiences of marginalisation, abuse, and socioeconomic precarity. Recent scholarship on indentured vulnerability similarly demonstrates how the afterlife of indentureship continues to shape representations of South African Indians. The study therefore positions postmemory as both an analytical and decolonial framework through which South African Indian artists can be recognised as producers of historical knowledge, contributing to a more inclusive and representative South African art canon.