Print, Text and Book Cultures in South Africa. Andrew van der Vlies
is nearly a month since I left India. I wonder if the continuity of our correspondence has been broken. I hope not. I do not want to lose the prize if an enterprising “Daily Mail” starts a prize for the longest continuous correspondence between two persons other than of a business nature. Why not you suggest the idea to some South African paper. That beats cross word puzzles and chess!
P. Kodanda Rao to M. K. Jeffreys, 14 May 1931
An extraordinary epistolary exchange, criss-crossing the Indian Ocean in the late 1920s and early 1930s and animated by the circulation of literary texts forms the focus of this exploration into textual circuits and intimate relations in the late imperial world. My dramatis personae—Marie Kathleen Jeffreys, V. S. Srinivasa Sastri and P. Kodanda Rao—played remarkable roles in the theatres of empire, decolonisation and nation building during this charged era, while in the process briefly producing a community across the Indian Ocean. The prophetic comment made by Rao to Jeffreys in a letter of August 1930 dispatched from London, where he and Sastri were attending a round-table conference on Indian independence, invites the inquiry I undertake here; it shifts this epistolary exchange from the private domain to the public, authorising the trespass into the intimate and affective sphere that this study performs, and eliciting readings that approach the political via the personal.
Employed at the Archives in Cape Town, Jeffreys expended much of her life tracing the texture of her city in literary, sociological and historical accounts. I have argued elsewhere for the past and present significance of these writings that conceptualise the Cape as a creole crucible in an oceanic crossroads at the tip of Africa (see Distiller & Samuelson 2005; Samuelson 2007; 2011). Here I attend specifically to the circulation of letters—epistolary and literary—between Jeffreys and her Indian interlocutors, while pointing to their participation in the print media’s production of a public sphere drawing South Africa and South Asia into intimate connection. Much of my attention falls on the fraught negotiations of affect that Jeffreys, Sastri and Rao enacted through the textual circuits they established. Far from gratuitous, these grapplings with affect and the domain of the intimate underpin the wide-ranging work in which all three were—or were to become—engaged. Sastri, as the epitome of the Indian moderate, famous for his “cross-bench” mind, operated within a framework of imperial fraternity. Dispatched to South Africa as the first agent of colonial India, he was tasked with building bridges of understanding between white and Indian communities in South Africa, and between South Africa and India itself (see Mesthrie 1987; Samuelson 2007). As the Agency’s first incumbent, Sastri set the tone for its modus operandi, which Uma Mesthrie (1987, 309) explains as follows:
The Indian representatives were determined to influence white public opinion to accept the Indians within their midst. Based on the premise that ignorance bred misunderstanding and hostility, they undertook public lectures to educate white public opinion on Indian culture and civilization. They brought the elite of the Indian and white communities together at social gatherings. … They also cultivated the friendship of white liberals in parliament and in the government.
Sastri’s successes were eagerly reported on in the Indian print media, particularly in The Servant of India newsletter, the bi-monthly organ of the organisation he led, having succeeded his mentor, Gopāl Krishna Gokhale, who had himself undertaken a voyage to South Africa in 1912 as leader of the Indian National Congress. Sastri’s South African lectures, the newsletter enthused, “drew record audiences” across the country (29 Nov. 1928, 629). At the end of his tenure in South Africa, Sastri addressed the topic of friendship explicitly when lecturing to East African Asians en route back to India:
You will enrich your lives, enlarge your usefulness if you remember that private friendship running across the artificial boundaries of caste, politics and religion, are the very salt of life; conferring upon it that element of romance and poetry and divinity which alone distinguishes it from mere animal existence (East African Standard, June 1929).
Friendship is thus presented by Sastri as the poetry of life, recasting brute experience through the structures and sublimations of belles lettres and producing a shared category of “humankind” that cut across colonial divisions.
Accompanying Sastri to South Africa was his loyal personal secretary, Rao. In later years, during Sastri’s old age and after his death, Rao and Jeffreys each produced a pivotal set of writings that, I contend, were rendered possible by their brief but intense triangular epistolary community and the textual circuits it established. Jeffreys proceeded to publish (in Drum magazine and elsewhere) a number of studies on the creole composition of the Cape that highlighted the genealogical, cultural and political implications for the South African national community of the importation of slaves from South and South-east Asia to the Cape in the seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries. These articles deflated myths of white racial purity and superiority, and grappled with the intimate relations and oceanic currents that produced the South African polity. Under the pseudonym of “Hamsi”, a name given her by Sastri, Jeffreys also published poems in the South African print media that traced what she declared to be her “threefold heritage” at the tip of Africa and the cusp of Atlantic and Indian Ocean trade routes. Before publication in the Cape Town dailies and later in two volumes (Hamsi 1931; 1934), these poems, with their threads of affect knotting into a trans-oceanic network, themselves travelled across the space they sought imaginatively to bridge. Many were folded into the weighty missives Jeffreys would dispatch in time for each “India mail”; enough to fill a volume were smuggled on board the SS Karoa to comprise Sastri’s “ship mail” on his return journey to India in 1929. As “Hamsi”, too, she wrote articles on current South African affairs for The Servant of India newsletter.
Rao’s two-year stint in South Africa, followed by his “continuous correspondence” with Jeffreys, had an equally profound impact on his later intellectual trajectory. Taking up the reigns of editor of The Servant of India newsletter from S. G. Vaze soon after his return from South Africa, he later went on to pen numerous pamphlets and books on the segregation of Indians in South Africa, on efforts to stem the flow of Indians to South Africa, on the need for Indian unity in India, and on the mutual imbrications of East and West. Whereas he, Sastri and Jeffreys had discoursed extensively on the possibilities and practicalities of his finding contentment with an Indian or non-Indian wife, he married (happily, by all available evidence) a white American woman, Mary Campbell, whom he had met in Hawai’i while attending a conference on racism. They named their home in Bangalore “Aloha”, the welcome to foreigners doubly encoded in the appellation. Among the books Rao produced—and dedicated to his wife—was a collection of sketches titled Foreign Friends of India. Mary Campbell Rao was undoubtedly a major influence on Rao’s enquiries; I would venture, however, that the community of letters he shared with Jeffreys and Sastri was a central catalyst.
Focusing on these rather minor, yet sporadically pivotal actors in the imperial theatre and on their making of a community, however transitory, that cut across colonial paradigms and that would in turn lead to various articulations of national and transnational communities, I follow recent scholarship that shifts attention from discursive and print flows between “centre” and “periphery” towards “south-south” connections (see Boehmer 2002), and that seeks to locate South Africa in the Indian Ocean world (see Hofmeyr 2007). The value of tracing the “south/south traffic of books and newspapers” is pointed to by Isabel Hofmeyr (2008, 10–11), who asks scholars to consider the “kinds of reading and writing publics” they “convene[d] on their oceanic circuits” in order to “arrive at an understanding of book history that is truly transnational and not simply imperial”. Andrew van der Vlies (2004, 5) similarly notes that there has “hitherto been relatively little consideration of the role of traffic in texts across national borders in the formation of postcolonial ‘national’ literary and cultural identities”. Presenting a reading and writing public comprising three figures avidly trafficking in texts across the Indian Ocean, this essay aims to illustrate the gains such explorations may offer in reconceptualising South African national formations and the mutual imbrications of India and South Africa.
The second strand of scholarship drawn on in this essay is that which engages affective communities athwart empire. Leela Gandhi’s (2006, 14) attention to “‘friendship’ as