South Africa and India. Michelle Williams M.
reporting developments in South Africa via India. A report in the edition of 26 September 1910 reads: ‘Mr G. A. Natesan writes in the Indian Review: A cable from South Africa brings the news that the British Indians in the Transvaal are taking a vow of passive resistance as a protest against the recent Asiatic Amendment Bill.’ In part, this cutting validates local struggles by demonstrating international interest in the event.Yet such cuttings illustrate a mode of simultaneous reading as if the event were taking place in India and South Africa at the same time and as if the reader could inhabit both spaces.
Other instances of such South Africa–India reading strategies were common. Under the heading ‘The National Congress and Indians in South Africa’, the 12 December 1903 edition noted that an important meeting was to he held at ‘Tata Mansions, Waudby Road’. The meeting was in fact to take place in Bombay, but it is taken for granted that every reader knew where Waudby Road was. Similarly, in terms of time, readers are expected to have the ability to imagine interlocking time schemes across the Indian Ocean. One report on 19 November 1903 reads: ‘By the time this issue of “Indian Opinion” reaches India, preparations for the meeting of the national assembly will have very far advanced.’
Another way of creating circuits of significance was through Indian Ocean travel writing. The most visible version of this genre was the travelogue of moving between Bombay and Durban, and stopping at each of the intermediate ports. The form was generally reserved for political celebrities whose progress from port to port was reported in extensive details. In the case of G. K. Gokhale, the Indian National Congress notable who visited South Africa in 1912, the newspaper hyped up his visit by reporting his elaborate farewell in Bombay and then his reception in Mombasa, Zanzibar and Beira, as well as his progress through South Africa.8 It is as if the person were invented through travel, becoming more ‘real’ and visible with each successive newspaper report.
In addition to producing a newspaper, the IPP produced a series of small booklets, many of them reruns of material in the paper. In all, about ten such titles were produced (Hofmeyr, 2008).
Some of these explored Indian Ocean themes. One pertinent example is a retelling of the Hindu epic Ramayana by J. L. P. Erasmus, a Boer commandant who had been captured by the British during the Anglo-Boer War. Along with 9,000 others, he was sent as a prisoner of war to India. He was held in various locations in northern India and was finally released in Amritsar. Before returning to South Africa, Erasmus befriended a lawyer and through him learned a lot about Indian religion and history. On his return home, he must have linked up with Gandhi or Henry Polak (probably through the legal world, since Erasmus was also a lawyer).9 Erasmus’s lectures on the Ramayana given to the Transvaal Philosophical Society were printed in the newspaper and then brought out in book form. The book remained an Indian Opinion stalwart and was still being advertised in the 1930s. The genesis of the book requires one to think about unusual cosmopolitan links and axes in the Indian Ocean.
Indian Opinion ran advertisements for its own books and for some that it imported from India and Britain. It advocated the idea that to buy a book was to enter a political and philanthropic contract, very often with an Indian Ocean component. In 1914 C. F. A. Andrews, a Christian priest and Gandhi’s right-hand man, published his lectures on Tagore. Indian Opinion urged readers to buy the book and reminded them that proceeds would go to Santiniketan, the school of Rabindranath Tagore, the Indian poet (1 April 1914). The first biography of Gandhi by Joseph Doke appeared in 1909. Readers were encouraged to buy the book, since any profits would be devoted to the cause of passive resistance (22 May 1909). Buying a book hence constituted an act of ethical solidarity often across the Indian Ocean.
Gandhi’s view of books was an unusual one. For him, books were not commodities, they should not be copyrighted, they were certainly transnational, and stood somewhere between a newspaper and a book. In other words, they defied what we today regard as key characteristics of a book – it is copyrighted; it is produced in a national space; it is distinct from a newspaper, magazine or pamphlet; and it is a commodity bought by the reader.
Today these booklets are very difficult to track down, having made their way into surprisingly few libraries. They conform closely to Meredith McGill’s analysis of such under-the-radar texts. McGill (2003) examines the pre-Civil War era in the United States (the 1830s and 1840s) and directs her attention to this unindexed world of uncopyrighted newspapers and periodicals; book-magazines (books masquerading as magazines to elude postal charges); and what were then legitimate reprints at a time when international copyright law was not in place and many saw reprinting as a triumph of American democracy over British publishing monopolies:
Texts that circulate without authors’ names attached frequently remain unindexed and untraceable, as do authored texts that are published without their authors’ knowledge or consent. Unauthorized reprinting escapes the enumerative strategies of bibliographers and collectors who remain tied to authorial intention and the principle of scarcity as grounds of value. The mass-cultural circulation of high-cultural texts confounds our critical taxonomies even as the transnational status of reprinted texts makes it difficult for us to assimilate them into national literary narratives (McGill, 2003:2–3).
Gandhi’s printing policies certainly conformed to these principles, but extended them even further by seeking to move beyond the marketplace entirely. Gandhi pursued an avowedly utopian cosmopolitan idea of printing, publishing and reading that took shape in the Indian Ocean. For him, the production and consumption of books should not be separated, but should form part of a continuous ethical community in which printers, authors and readers become comrades.
These ideas have not survived the forces of the capitalist market that Gandhi so abhorred. Like the legend of his printing press on the SS Khedive, his textual experiments have disappeared into the archive of lost Indian Ocean utopias. They are nonetheless worth salvaging, not least for the new light they can throw on print culture and cosmopolitanism.
The IPP was avowedly cosmopolitan in its personnel, methods of working, textual products and their envisaged audiences. It supported a form of textual circulation and modes of reading that straddled the Indian Ocean and helped bring into being the universalisms and cosmopolitanisms uniting different groups across the sea. Commenting on the wide range of people who visited Phoenix, Prabhudas Gandhi (1957:58) notes: ‘our jungle school had the atmosphere of an international university.’ His observation reminds us of the remarkable cosmopolitanism of Phoenix, which the press had helped to create. The comment also underlines that like all cosmopolitan projects, this one had boundaries. Prabhudas imagines himself on the Gujarati frontier marked by what he saw as ‘the jungle’ and its African inhabitants. Like the Zulu women erased from Gandhi’s account of the press, however, Africans were never to be numbered among the fraternity of Gandhi’s cosmopolitanism.
2
Chapter
Steamship Empire: Asian, African and British Sailors in the Merchant Marine c. 1880–1945
Jonathan Hyslop
In late 1942 a young Bengali man called Syed Ali from Kalijuri in the Sylhet district decided to go to sea. In Calcutta, he found work in the engine room on the British merchant marine steamship SS McLeith, which was sailing for Cape Town (Choudhury, 1995:94). It was a dangerous time to sail the southern Indian Ocean. The Japanese navy had launched a significant submarine offensive against Allied shipping in the seas north-east of the Natal coast and German submarines were also occasionally striking off South Africa. The bodies of dead sailors were washing up on the Durban beachfront (Keane, 1995). But with war raging in nearby Burma, staying at home could not have been a very attractive option either. From the beginning of the voyage Syed Ali was bullied by the serang (boatswain or supervisor) of the stokehold, a man called Attik, from Ishkapur. In Cape Town, the ship docked for a short stay and the crew were given shore leave. To escape his persecutor, Syed Ali deliberately overstayed his leave and the ship sailed without him. The port police directed the young man to a seamen’s boarding house and he was told by an official that he should remain there. There were several other Sylhetis in the boarding house, and one of them, a serang from Dinapur, turned out to be a friend of Syed Ali’s