Print, Text and Book Cultures in South Africa. Andrew van der Vlies
Kipling does, found in Jeffreys a highly appreciative reader. (If Andersen seems out of place in such textual company, his resonance for Jeffreys becomes clearer when she writes to Sastri in 1930, declaring of their relationship: “A fairy-tale it is, come to life.”)
I am equally intrigued by the texts that did not circulate in this triangular exchange—particularly E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India—as I am in those that did. Given Jeffreys’ extensive reading programme on India and given A Passage to India’s shared interest with Kim in the politics of colonial friendship, it is striking to me that Jeffreys did not draw on it as a text through which to shape her epistolary community. Had she engaged this novel, she might have encountered insurmountable challenges in its pages. Whereas transcultural friendship was what initially drew Forster to India, the possibility of friendship is in his novel treated as a vexed question, rather than assumed as it is in Kipling’s “Little friend of all the world”. Were Jeffreys to have grappled with her desire to encounter the “real” India through interpellation by a plot that sees Adela’s quest culminate in “a study of the profound fragility of colonial intimacy” (Suleri 1992, 147), her own self-constructions and her constructions of India and Indians might have been too painfully troubled.
In contrast to A Passage to India, Kim offers Jeffreys imaginative entry into the never-never land of community within empire. Declaring her “tender love for Kim and his Lama”, she models her relationship with Sastri on this literary mould. Addressing herself to him from the outset as his chela (disciple), she adopts Kim as framework for the relationship, inserting herself into the fraternal and filial structures of Kipling’s colonial world as the devoted disciple of the wise guru. Kim’s chameleon quality must have been equally attractive to Jeffreys. His sartorial shape-shifting is reflected in the range of signatures she employs for her different interlocutors and audiences (one of which being “Kim”) and contrasts with the fixed image of white femininity she might have encountered in the mirror held out by Forster’s novel. In contradistinction to Kim, which issues the promise of identification to a reader such as Jeffreys, allowing her to escape her gendered position by projecting herself into the utopian fraternities of Kipling’s world, A Passage to India draws attention to white women as problem in the colonial context, as the wedge dividing the kind of nascent community into which Jeffreys was trying to imagine herself.
“Forster, the eloquent enemy of the Raj,” observes Judith Plotz (1992, 111), “shares with Kipling, its ardent exponent, a concern with friendship across the bounds of race, religion, and nationality”, while famously deferring it to beyond the reach of empire. To the bounds of colonial difference (race, in particular) must be added the equally pertinent one of gender, which Jeffreys had perforce to negotiate in her engagement with two Indian men. The “not yet” to transcultural friendship in the colonial world that Forster’s novel issues resonates with the “not yet” addressed to women desiring admittance into the fraternity of friendship (Forster 1961, 317; Derrida 1997, 238, 281). As Derrida (1997, viii) finds, “the figure of the friend, so regularly coming back on stage with the features of the brother … seems spontaneously to belong to a familial, fraternalist and thus androcentric configuration of politics”.
Such conceptions of friendship within empire underpin Victoria’s Proclamation of 1858, and are reiterated in Sastri’s acceptance speech on receiving the Freedom of the City of London in 1921: “On the highest authority the British Empire has been declared to be without distinction of any kind. Neither race nor colour nor religion are to divide man from man so long as they are subjects of this empire” (Sastri 1945b, 128). The Indian liberal discourse that Sastri epitomised was itself honed through textual traffic. As Abha Saxena (1986, xv) notes, Indian liberalism “derived its inspirations from the writings of English liberals of the nineteenth century like Mill, Bentham, Macaulay and Morley etc”. Late in life, Sastri (1945a, 4) identified his intellectual mentors to be T. H. Huxley, J. S. Mill and Herbert Spencer. More or less contemporaneous with the young Sastri’s reading of Spencer and Mill in India would have been that of a governess on a South African farm, who would become South Africa’s most celebrated writer and feminist: Olive Schreiner, who shared with Jeffreys a vexed relation to the women’s suffrage movement in South Africa, which sought to arrive at the deferred “not yet” by admitting only white women to the political community.7
Gender strongly informs Jeffreys’ sense of community, and both sunders and supports her connection to India. On the one hand, she draws the kinds of analogies familiar in Western feminist movements of the time: “as men behave towards women … so Europeans behave to colour …. Not forever can they do this to us”, she declares to Sastri in a letter of February 1930. Yet, on the other hand, she is keenly aware of the ways in which white women’s liberation is established at the expense of racial liberation, and is outspokenly bitter about the Women’s Enfranchisement Act, which in turn disenfranchised Africans in the Cape: “What a way to get the vote. It makes me sick”, she exclaims in a later dispatch, and writes an article on the subject titled “Women’s franchise and the native in South Africa” for The Servant of India newsletter (published in June 1930). First drawing an equation between “native” and “woman”, and then noting the opposition of the two terms in the South African context, Jeffreys’ discourse threatens to erase the figure of “native woman”. Yet, embedded in a web of textual circuits cutting across the colonial world, she is also able—in ways similar to the strategies of many anti-colonial nationalists of the time—to draw trenchant comparisons between women in India and women in South Africa. Indeed, her interest in women’s enfranchisement in South Africa appears to have been sparked by “the interesting pamphlets about the All India Women’s Conference” sent by Rao in February 1930. “It comes at a fitting moment”, she responds in March 1930: “Our Women’s Suffrage Bill is in the melting pot.”
Jeffreys’ understanding of the ways in which her gendered identity was deployed within the racialisation of the South African polity is also evident when she reports herself
interested to hear that they have a study circle here of persons of all creeds & colours, but only for men. … I wish they included my sex, but evidently they feel that women might prove a complication! … I do covet the privileges of being a man.
Given the context of this observation, a letter to Sastri in October 1929 that focuses on restrictions pertaining to women and anticipates an imagined future typified by “intermarriage”, Jeffreys is clearly alluding to the ways in which white women have been produced as racial boundary markers: as symbols rather than discussants in the “race question”. It is from such constructions of her subject position that she flees, although never quite successfully, by inserting herself into the fraternal configurations of what Edward Said (1994, 136) has described as Kipling’s “overwhelmingly male novel”.
Kipling, however, ultimately proves of limited value in Jeffreys’ reimagining of community. If his characters charmed her childhood, they could not help her in assimilating the knowledge that her ancestry included two slaves shipped from South Asia; nor would Kipling, with his antipathy towards Eurasians, have enabled her later pioneering efforts within the pages of Drum magazine to represent the apartheid nation as a miscege-nation. In such efforts, Tagore proved infinitely more useful, while at the same time offering Jeffreys the analytic tools with which to grapple with the implications of gender in the community she was trying to construct and inhabit.
Whereas Kipling’s physical and textual movements amongst India, South Africa and England carved out the triangulated structure Jeffreys was attempting to inhabit, Tagore increasingly offered an alternative configuration onto which she could plot herself, enabling her to reconceive this world beyond imperial rule. After all, if Kipling’s jingoistic verses spurred on the imperial mission, Tagore’s songs would be used as the national anthems of both independent India and Bangladesh. Feted in England, while still deeply identified—and identifying—with India, Tagore poetically presented the Indian ocean as casting asunder the intimately related continents of Africa and South Asia in “Africa” (1938): “The angry sea/snatched you from the breast of Mother Asia/Africa” (Tagore 1993, 102).8
Both writers are, of course, Nobel laureates: