South Africa and India. Michelle Williams M.
as if it were foreshadowing the contemporary moment of our modernity, the war was notable, among other things, for actively involving people from five continents and for provoking debates in separate political circles, many of them located in countries that had no direct stake in its outcome. It was also international in the simple sense of providing a serious spectacle that was closely covered by newspapers of different countries. The course of the war was sensational. The British – the world imperial power, for whom the Boers seemed no match – surprisingly faced a series of reversals at the outset, a trend that culminated in the ‘Black Week’ of December 1899, when British forces were defeated in three important battles. They recovered, but after having defeated the Boer conventional armies by June 1901 they found the guerrilla tactics of the Boer commandos too difficult to handle by conventional means. British frustration inspired their deployment of catastrophic technologies of violence that included scorched earth policies and the use of concentration camps for Boer children and women, as well as African families.
In small or large measure, the Anglo-Boer War changed lives and histories in different parts of the world. Debates occurred among European socialists on the nature and implications of capitalist colonial transformation of pre-capitalist systems. What effect did colonialism have on capitalism? Was it ‘progressive’? (Kaarsholm, 1988). More immediate quarrels were enacted in countries that participated in the war. Troops were sent from New Zealand, Canada, Australia, India and, of course, Britain, while a small international contingent of volunteers from Europe joined the Boers out of solidarity with their cause.15 This sharpened political lines in countries that sent the troops. In Canada and Britain, for instance, it produced a gigantic wave of patriotism. In Britain, the volunteer movement mobilised participation in the war among the middle and working classes (Miller, 2005). On the other hand, many socialists and liberals supported the other side. Bertrand Russell, who later became a leading pacifist, recalled that he had supported the Boers (1991:136–38), while Keir Hardie, the Scottish socialist and co-founder of the Labour Party, sympathised with the ‘unpolluted’, ‘pastoral’ Boer world (Kaarsholm, 1988:49). Dissident Christian sects such as the Quakers, together with some socialists, however, mounted brave pacifist campaigns. We know, for instance, the strangely evocative story of Martin Butler, an artisan, pedlar, worker and newspaper editor operating in rural New Brunswick in Canada. A man with Catholic and socialist sympathies, he became convinced of the evils of imperialism after Canada had dispatched its troops and launched a newspaper to pursue his pacifist campaign, at considerable personal cost (Stiles, 2004). In India, British brutality inspired the angry poetry of Rabindranath Tagore that presaged, with uncanny prescience, the apocalyptic conflicts that nationalism promised in the new century.16
Indeed, there is sufficient material to write a global history of the Anglo-Boer War. However, my intention is comparatively limited – and somewhat different. I wish to look at the histories of South Africa and India and the ways in which these were shaped by the war. This is not a history formed by encounters of travellers that can then be explained by the framework of civilisational encounters. As a regional unit within the international, South Africa/India acquires its coherence and interconnectedness from being a part of the same empire. This is compounded by an inter-imbrication of large populations that is the consequence of the migration of large numbers of people who inhabit an international polity where population is increasingly equated with political power and cultural threat. Indian migrants occupied ambiguous political and social positions in South Africa and occasioned new initiatives in the war. In India, meanwhile, smaller numbers of politically dominant temporary migrants, i.e. the British residents, provided more immediate intensity to the war effort. At the same time, the South Africa/ India region was differentiated by the fact that while South Africa was a settler colony, India was directly colonised. An interweaving thread to stitch together my narrative is provided by the career of the barrister Mohandas Gandhi – later to become the Mahatma – who worked for and with people in both contexts. He vigorously linked the war to the general conditions of the South African Indian migrant indentured labourers and traders, and campaigned for them in an India that, for its own reasons, was concerned with the outcome of the war.
Instead of a global history, I wish to write an interlocking history of the South Africa/India region. What I call interlocking history is in many ways an extension of the conception of connected histories that Sanjay Subrahmanyam has formulated. Like Subrahmanyam, my interest in comparative history is subordinate to a concern with the history of interlinkages between different spatial entities. Subrahmanyam appears to define connected histories in two ways. The first is in terms of an explanation of circulation and spread, which he charts out through the dissemination of millenarian beliefs in the long duration of the ‘Early Modern’ period that spans the period from the 15th to the 17th centuries (Subrahmanyam, 1997a:748). The second focusses on a history of encounters between two cultures/civilisations to work out the ‘dialectical’ relationship between them. This involves a comparison of mentalities and an elaboration of the complexity of the transactions (Subrahmanyam, 2005:11–12).
Interlocking history builds on Subrahmanyam’s insights to make two distinctions. The first concerns the nature of the event. Although the Anglo-Boer War has been seen in terms of the circulation model, i.e. in terms of ‘effects’ and ‘feedbacks’ from contexts other than South Africa (the premise of histories of the war that I have cited above), the contours of the event itself pose a somewhat different challenge, that of conceptualising it as happening in several locations. The key point here is of the simultaneity – or, rather, near simultaneity – of the event and its extensions. The possibility of an event affecting a place outside that of its origin almost immediately, is of course, conceivable only from the late 19th century, after the introduction of the telegraph in the 1870s, which allowed the rapid transmission of information to newspapers, backed up by the ever-increasing familiarity of other spaces owing to the rapid development of transport technology.17 The near simultaneity of transmission does away with the fundamental distinction between the originative space of the event and the space of its impact. The Anglo-Boer War became an international event not only because it disseminated itself, but also because the rapidity of its dissemination allowed ‘outsiders’ to participate in its unfolding; those outside South Africa responded to the war by using it to make sense of their lives. Obviously, the event does not produce a uniform habitation, for it works on and with separate configurations that possess different political, social and cultural elements. Some of these features may be common, some commensurable and some may or may not make sense in the context of the other. But the event interlocks these configurations, making them address each other, and in doing so changes the internal configuration of each ‘national’ space.
The specific supra-regional canvas of interlocking history allows us to attend to a paradoxical double movement of our modernity. What we have in our modernity is the parallel formation of national and international orders of social life. The rise of the national accounts for the idea of defined and bounded contexts: national histories define their embeddedness in the nation by placing boundaries around the context in which events are then located. Often overlooked in the privileging of the nation is the obvious fact that it develops with a sense of inhabiting the world of the international. Indeed, without the latter, there cannot exist a sense of the nation and the particularity of belonging that it signifies and enacts. It is true, of course, that a sense of hierarchy is maintained between the two, by which the nation acquires its privilege. But it is equally relevant to note that the international possesses its own sense of importance that allows the national to map out its needs, ambitions and particularities. This is especially true of the imperial world, where the international is critical to understanding the overdeterminations that shape the world of the colonial masters and which, in turn, hold out important consequences for the way the national condition is thought.
The general contour of this double movement may be understood through newspapers. While dominantly ‘national’ in their coverage, newspapers sometimes privilege international events over it. During the Anglo-Boer War, the balance of political reportage often shifted in favour of the international. Both colonial and Indian newspapers in English gave exhaustive daily accounts of the war, especially during the early months of surprising Boer successes. Anxieties about the outcome of the war, the experience of soldiers and debates about it saw the war become as significant as domestic events within the hierarchy of news space. The space