Print, Text and Book Cultures in South Africa. Andrew van der Vlies
2006, 20). Her point of departure is provided by Jacques Derrida’s “trope of friendship as the most comprehensive philosophical signifier for all those invisible affective gestures that refuse alignment along the secure axes of filiation to seek expression outside, if not against, possessive communities of belonging” (Gandhi 2006, 10). Derrida’s project is to think beyond the Aristotelian legacy that casts friendship as an affective relation between men and which underpins the rhetoric of democracy (see Derrida 1997, viii). For our three actors in the imperial theatre, fraternity is a multiply loaded sign. The liberally conceived empire, the imagined nation and the sought-after democracy to come: all depend upon and evoke the notion of fraternity. The challenge Derrida (1997, 306) issues is of thinking both friendship and democracy outside and beyond its limitations. Both Derrida and Gandhi turn to Epicurus as a beacon for redirecting such affect into friendship-as-hospitality: this is a friendship “construed very differently, as philoxenia, or a love for guests, strangers, and foreigners. And in sharp contrast to Aristotle, this ethic of fidelity to strange friends is predicated upon a principled distaste for the racial exclusivity of the polis” (Gandhi 2006, 29).
Navigating the Indian Ocean through the figure and practice of friendship, Jeffreys, Rao and Sastri snare themselves upon fraternity and possessive love, while tacking toward a non-exclusive, non-androcentric community open to difference within and without. Finding in letters the models from which to begin casting such community, they experience it simultaneously crumbling under the weight of the idealised constructions of love and desire encoded in belles lettres. Yet their traffic in texts nonetheless succeeds in producing new imaginings of self and nation under the signs of intimacy and hospitality.
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Their story begins one evening in November 1928, when Jeffreys attends in Cape Town a lecture by Sastri to which she has been enticed by her love of belles lettres. As she would later recall,
I had specialized in modern languages at the university, and English was my greatest love. It was, therefore, with intense caginess that I went to hear this man, who according to all accounts, spoke more beautifully than anyone had ever heard before. I felt this could not possibly be true: I was mistaken. … Never before or since have I heard such eloquence, such beauty of diction, such choice of words. It was bewildering, looking at his dark face, beneath a simply folded muslin turban, to realize that he had received all his education in India (Jeffreys n.d.a).
Enraptured by Sastri’s eloquence, Jeffreys is set adrift from her previous anchors of Anglophilia and white superiority, and “bewildered” by what she perceives as the contradictory signs of “beauty of diction” and Sastri’s “dark face”. Leaving the lecture in a state of overwhelming emotion, she immediately addressed to Sastri a letter that would end up being published by M. K. Gandhi in Young India, where, framed by Gandhi’s editorial foreword, it was presented as “evidence of the way in which Sjt. Sastri has stolen into the hearts of many South Africans”. “The work of silent conversation will be a far greater help to our people in South Africa than any amount of official concession”, he proceeds to elaborate: “The conversation makes even these possible” (Gandhi 1929).
Gandhi took up editorship of Young India following his “apprenticeship as a journalist” with Indian Opinion in South Africa (Dhupelia-Mesthrie 2003). Similarly to Indian Opinion, it functioned in part “as a clearinghouse, gathering messages from different parts of the world and presenting them to the reader who can see all the destinations from which they have come”, in the process carving out “particular pathways of circulation” (Hofmeyr 2008, 17). As he explains in his autobiography, M. K. Gandhi used Young India and its vernacular sister publication Navajivan to “educat[e] the reading public in Satyagraha”; the two journals, he concludes, “enabled me freely to ventilate my views” (Gandhi 2007, 426). Re-presented for a reading public out of which Gandhi was forging “India” by “ventilating [his] views” in print across the nation-under-construction and the world beyond, Jeffreys’ letter enthused that Sastri’s lecture had opened up to her the vistas of a heritage long shrouded from her regard: “You have opened for us the magic casements of the East, and every lover of good things among us will find the distant peaks calling, calling, calling, as they are calling me, with … an insistence which must be obeyed.”2
In this letter, Jeffreys lays her claim on an East personified as hailing her to open up her bounded Western self, allowing her to recognise, in the form of now-acknowledged South Asian ancestry, an otherness “buried beneath” a surface “whiteness”:
[The] message you brought belongs to me, it is a heritage buried beneath two hundred years of white blood and Western civilisation. For I, too, have been of the East, and have something of the East in me. Two hundred years ago white men brought as slave to this country a girl of Jaffnapatnam. Now her children are of the dominant race, with white skin, golden-brown hair, and rosy cheeks.
As one of these descendents absorbed into the “dominant race”, Jeffreys is able to claim her ancestral filiations after immersion in Sastri’s belles lettres, which in turn enters her into new affiliations that cut across the categories constructing this dominance.
Sastri, in turn, responded graciously to this communiqué, and on his next visit to Cape Town invited Jeffreys to dine with him and Rao at the Mount Nelson Hotel. His appointment diary, housed in the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in New Delhi, and the correspondence lodged in the Jeffreys Collection in the Western Cape Archives and Records Service in Cape Town, reveals the warmth with which he responded to Jeffreys, while she was effusive in her adorations. (The only record of Rao’s experience of Jeffreys is to be found in his letters, which are detailed, frank and as voluminous as hers; together they thrashed out notions of transcultural connection that would later profoundly inform Rao’s political and personal life.)3 However, as the weight of Jeffreys’ affection for Sastri grew, he became increasingly uneasy. While Jeffreys was charting a course through the complexities Derrida points to in the discourse and practice of friendship, fluctuating between fraternal and filial positions, on the one hand, and, on the other, an overwhelming passion that Sastri began to apprehend, with marked discomfiture, as physical desire, he began to retreat from the demands he imagined were encoded therein. By the time the trio were reunited in 1932, their community had floundered upon these rocks. The impact that their communion had was nonetheless far-reaching, while the role played in it by print media, the circulation of letters and the trans-oceanic traffic in texts is suggestive.
The subject of Sastri’s lecture in November 1928 was the legend Śakuntalā, and its literary travels and translations across the centuries and seas.4 The speech itself does not appear to have been recorded, although a report in Indian Opinion on the same lecture delivered in Johannesburg (19 Oct. 1929) reveals that in it Sastri articulated a liberal-humanist understanding of literature as a medium in and through which to forge new communities, welding the divisions and fractures of the colonial state. His political mission of ameliorating the conditions of South African Indians and of establishing white sympathy for India(ns) was well served by the literary lectures he delivered across South Africa during his tenure as Indian agent: “all high literature”, he maintained, held much in common, and shared a “common appeal” (Indian Opinion, 19 Oct. 1929). The implication of such a statement is the commonality of humankind, yet this apparently global community encompasses only those who are practitioners of “high literature”. Saul Bellow’s disparaging question “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?” (Bellow 1988) is of course evocative of the limits encasing the discourse of Sastri the moderate statesman along with that of the liberal-humanist appreciation of letters that inform this community. As her own sense of location developed, Jeffreys would come to harangue Sastri, albeit gently, for his abjection of the “native” in his strategic South African interventions.
Jeffreys’ second epistle, dated 28 November 1928, highlights the ways in which this lecture established for her a sense of common ground, restoring what she had previously experienced as a fractured world literature:
Goethe’s poem on the Sakuntala I knew and loved many years ago. And before you quoted from the charming English translation I stood there in the aisle, trying to fit together the lovely phrases, which were