Print, Text and Book Cultures in South Africa. Andrew van der Vlies
recognises Sastri’s act of gathering together the pieces of a text fragmented across divided national and linguistic communities as one in which the construction of a global community of letters—the identification and assemblage of a shared textual culture—is tied to the project of bridging cultural and political differences. This was indeed the task that Sastri assigned himself as agent, whereas for Jeffreys the resonance between a fractured universal textual culture and her own sense of having been cast off from her South Asian ancestry is acute. Thus, resonant imagery appears in her letter book a year later: “I am a tiny chip that was taken off the base of a beautiful vase”, she tells Sastri; “I only want to be joined on again where I belong.”
Jeffreys (n.d.a) writes later that Sastri’s gift to her was “pride and acceptance in [her] twofold heritage”, which enabled her to reconstruct her own fractured history, and, in later years, was partially extended into a “threefold heritage” (Jeffreys n.d.b) as she increasingly drew “Africa” into the weave of subjectivity she was producing (see Samuelson 2007; 2011). In the process, she opened up the bounds of Sastri’s discourse that was founded on the appreciation of belles lettres. Following her immersion in this community of letters, in other words, she is able to begin melding her African, Asian and European fragments into a new self—one that holds together, albeit in a state of tension, the oceanic currents and continental anchor that comprise her location. The letters travelling back and forth between Cape Town and India enable Jeffreys’ reconception of her spatial placing, while letters (those she wrote, those she received and those she typed for others) see her finding herself in another ideological space to that which she had previously occupied. Typing confidential missives for C. F. Andrews, the Christian missionary who became Gandhi’s confidant, and who is drawn into Jeffreys’ “Indian circle”, she informs Sastri:
I enter into the anxieties and the hopes of the Agent and his Staff, I find myself moved to tenderness and to exasperation at the actions of Gandhi; and I find myself at length, in very defiance of my practical instincts, saying: I cannot any longer deny that he may be right. I become in fact with growing knowledge his defender, that was so short a time ago his detractor. Yet, the more I realise the righteousness of his action the more I tremble for those who love him, and also for those whom he loves.
Repositioned into intimate relations athwart the divisions of empire by (being) the medium of type print, Jeffreys’ reorientation had begun more than two years previously when, after meeting Sastri, she had launched on an intense reading programme on India. By November 1929 she reports having devoured “about 30 really good books on India”, concluding: “I am developing tremendous respect for Ghandi [sic], whom I referred to in tones of the deepest contempt and detestation only last year. It is, with me, a time of growth”. Each subsequent letter reports on a book completed or in progress, from accounts by retired Raj administrators to “racy and entertaining” tales. Initially dependent on a North–South axis feeding studies of India into the Cape Town library system, Jeffreys’ “continuous correspondence” with Rao enabled her increasingly to bypass the North and establish an alternative South–South axis of textual circulation.
Writing from Mombasa in March 1929, Rao queried whether Jeffreys had read “Miss Mayo’s book”, urging her, “If you can get a copy”, to “please read ‘Unhappy India’ by Lajpat Rai”. Published in 1927, Katherine Mayo’s Mother India, which cast a jaundiced Western eye on Indian intimate relations, was an international sensation at the time: not only does The Servant of India newsletter host numerous rebuttals penned within India, but it also includes furious responses from the author of the regular feature “Our South African Letter”. Mother India, Jeffreys surmises, was not only informing North–South relations, but was equally shaping those between Indians and white South Africans.5 Thus, she bemoans to Sastri: “My mother has been reading her or someone kindred & warning me about you & your people!” As the South Africa correspondent of The Servant of India points out:
South Africa was never overflowing with sympathy for, and understanding of, India and Miss Mayo’s book has not tended to improve the situation. Her book seems to have a great vogue in this country. A number of its reviews and notes have appeared in all kinds of papers (5 April 1928, 193).
Whereas books on India by the likes of Mayo were widely available in South African libraries (to judge from the list of titles Jeffreys was able to access), the radical Laipat Rai’s rebuttal of Mayo was certainly not. Rao eagerly supplemented the holdings of the Cape Town city libraries with a regular book parcel from India. Early in their correspondence he asks: “Did you read Sister Nivedita (Miss Margaret Noble), her book, ‘Web of Indian Life’? Please do? Published by Longmans, I believe.” Evidently unable to source a copy in South Africa, Jeffreys has one dispatched to her by Rao. In exchange, Rao exacted from Jeffreys a stream of news cuttings and reports that saw him increasingly exceeding the limits of the public that the Agency was attempting to foster; the extent to which his catholic reading habits—far from limited to belles lettres —enabled him to open up to a far more inclusive South–South community is notable. Rather than simply focusing on Indian South African affairs, he was requesting, among other titles, proceedings of the 1929 Bantu-European Conference in Cape Town, and receiving copies of Eddie Roux’s communist newsletter Umsebenzi (with Jeffreys anticipating on each instalment that it must surely be banned or Roux imprisoned before the next). At the same time, Jeffreys kept him abreast of the South African reception of Indian affairs, which grew increasingly avid following Sastri’s visit.
After subscribing to The Servant of India, Jeffreys was increasingly able to manage her own reading programme, drawing into her orbit the texts circulating in its advertising pages. In May 1930 she ordered “a life of Gokhale”, followed later that year by Andrews’ biography, Mahatma Gandhi: His Own Story. Through these narratives of individual lives, cut across by affect and produced out of intimate relations (for instance, that between Andrews and Gandhi), she continued to orient herself politically. In the pages of The Servant of India, too, she would have seen reflected across the Indian Ocean the face of the increasingly troubled South African polity. In the years I surveyed (1927–32), South Africa features regularly in the newsletter. The South African Settlement of 1927 is heatedly discussed, while the physical movement of the first Indian agent across the ocean is mirrored in coverage of his speeches, from Sastri’s address in Poona before his departure (10 March 1927) to his lecture on the “Indian problem in South Africa”, presented on arrival in Pretoria (28 July 1927). During his tenure as agent, the newsletter carried fortnightly stories tracing his every move, applauding each success and printing for Indian audiences the speeches with which he was attempting to counter the anti-Indian sentiment of white South Africa. The Servant of India explicitly envisages and evokes a trans-oceanic public when it urges the “speedy withdrawal of the objectionable section” of the South African Liquor Bill that would compromise Indian employment in the hospitality industry “before an agitation on both sides of the Indian Ocean thickens and kills with the frost of recrimination and denunciation the tender sapling of friendship that is being nursed between the two nations” (24 Nov. 1927, 513).
Literary texts joined the news media, political pamphlets, biographies and philosophical treatises circulating across the Indian Ocean and performed a similar function in shaping relations, altering attitudes and interpellating subjects into new communities.6 Rao’s precious copy of Rabindranath Tagore’s Chitra was dispatched across the Indian Ocean by mail boat, in return for which Jeffreys entrusted her treasured Hans Christian Andersen to the high seas, while Rudyard Kipling’s Kim sounded the terms of this reading and writing public in a number of unspoken ways. Print—and these literary texts in particular—profoundly mediated the making and maintaining of this community.
Like Jawaharlal Nehru, Jeffreys counted Kim and The Jungle Book among her childhood treasures and made persistent reference to them, writing of Kim in a letter to Rao that it seemed “to have been in my blood, part of my being, as long as I can recall”. This novel, argues Ashis Nandy (1998, 44–45), “was for Kipling a once-in-a-lifetime break with his painfully-constituted imperial self … baring his latent awareness” of his “biculturality”. Kim spoke to Jeffreys’ newfound sense of identity, which cracked open the closed