South Africa and India. Michelle Williams M.
national. This deep sense of connection was consolidated by other forms of writing (and speaking), such as the poems of Tagore.
The intensity of this preoccupation produced a shared public world between India and South Africa. I should add some riders immediately, however. This public world – as is probably true for all internationalised publics, except those that are institutionalised as such – did not possess a consistency that is true of national publics. International publics like this one tend to be produced conjuncturally, through specific issues. The fact that the South Africa/India public produced through the Anglo-Boer War functioned coherently for a relatively long period is in large part due to Gandhi’s initiatives. Indeed, once he returned to India, South Africa tended to become less important a preoccupation in India (although it never became unimportant, especially after the introduction of apartheid). I should also add that the constituent elements of this public were not symmetrically integrated. South African Indians were far more continuously engaged with events in India, as Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie’s story (2004) of Manilal Gandhi’s editorship of Indian Opinion reveals.
I am not interested here in thinking through the wider nature of this public. Rather, I wish simply to examine its conjunctural interlocking during the war. I aim to focus on the idea of the ‘imperial subject’ – specifying its nature, practices and consequences – as the general organising principle of this public. In both countries, the ‘imperial subject’ determined the position and, in varying degrees, the self-definition of the colonised. The ‘imperial subject’ was a critical part of the political identity of the migrant Indians, given their small numbers, relatively uninfluential status and the escalating racist campaign that they faced. Indeed, even as late as 1913 Gandhi invoked loyalty to the ‘imperial subject’, although, after all his disappointments with the imperial authorities, he now visualised the Crown as a purely ideal entity. In India during the internally placid turn-of-the-century period, on the other hand, the idea of the ‘imperial subject’ remained, but its hold became progressively more tenuous. Within this constellation of trajectories of the ‘imperial subject’, the war was obviously experienced very differently and produced divergent effects. For South African Indians whose conditions were rapidly deteriorating owing to a slew of discriminatory legislation, the war was more than a matter of direct involvement in its battles; it was seen to hold the key to their future position in relation to other communities. For Indians ‘back home’, the event came in a discursive shape and hence could not have such serious, practical repercussions. But it did offer a powerful public preoccupation, crystallising an ambivalence towards the colonial authority that deepened scepticism of the Raj. In retrospect, it makes the advent of the Swadeshi movement in Bengal – the first mass movement against the British that was launched in 1905, three years after the war had ended – seem less surprising and sudden. Nevertheless, differences between these two nationalised spaces functioned with a sense of kinship, which came fundamentally from the fact of imperial domination and nationalist concern, with Gandhi a key link. This is an obvious, but enabling observation. Together with the recognition of the differences that mark the two historical worlds, it will allow us to explore the intricacies of ‘imperial subjecthood’ and the problematic configurations of nationalised communities within an internationalised world.
The Anglo-Boer War, Gandhi and the ‘imperial subject’
Studies of Gandhi as a nationalist generally regard his period of volunteer service for the British during the Anglo-Boer War as an illustration of his loyalist phase that preceded his scepticism of British authority and subsequent turn to nationalism. While one cannot fundamentally disagree with this reading of his career, it reduces the idea of loyalism to a simpleminded belief that existed in an asymmetrical relationship with the many instances of discrimination he experienced in South Africa.18 Gandhi’s loyalist phase is more valuable if it allows us to observe how the norm of the ‘imperial subject’ functioned in the political, social and cultural world of South African Indians. What explains its necessity, and what forms of empowerment does it allow and curtail? These questions become more significant if we take into account the fact that Gandhi’s loyalism had to make sense to his Indian followers, who did not always support his positions.19 It is also relevant to note that the African leadership of this time supported the British and played a critical military role in countering the Boer guerrillas (Warwick, 1983).20 Thus, I would like to begin my account with the experience of the Voluntary Ambulance Corps formed by the South African Indians, which gave visible proof of their loyalism by hard work. It also involved a substantial risk to their lives.
The work of the Ambulance Corps was a grind. After fairly rudimentary training, the volunteers had to work in rough terrain, sometimes without water. Frequently, they had to cover up to 100 miles in five days, usually with their stretchers and heavy baggage that included their water, food and firewood. Initially, the thousand-odd stretcher bearers had to sleep without tents. At times, they went beyond their brief to work at the front, with shells falling in very close proximity. The volunteers were divided into two groups. The first was drawn from indentured labourers, requisitioned from their masters by the army and the administration; they were paid 20 shillings per week, as against the 35 shillings paid to their white counterparts. The other group was the ‘leaders’, some 30 individuals drawn from professional classes and led by Gandhi, who volunteered their services free. The Indian traders declined active participation, but assisted with sizeable donations of money and rations. They even made a substantial contribution to the Durban Women’s Patriotic League, a leading support organisation for the war effort, many members of which had earlier participated in anti-Indian demonstrations. The generosity of the Indians was therefore astounding. Despite this, their initial offer in October 1899 to assist the war effort in any capacity was declined; it was only in December, at the time of British military reversals, that General Buller, the commander-in-chief, accepted.21
The Indian involvement in the war dramatised a conspicuous display of loyalty, as demonstrated by the unconditional nature of their offer, the acceptance of discriminatory pay, the unremunerated service of the ‘leaders’ and the risking of their lives. Gandhi unequivocally declared that ‘the English-speaking Indians came to the conclusion that they would offer their services … unconditionally and absolutely without payment, in any capacity … in order to show to the Colonists that they were worthy subjects of the Queen’ (Gandhi, 1960c:129). The Indians appear to have had a point to prove, an anxiety to soothe. Gandhi called the act of involvement a ‘privilege’ (Gandhi, 1960c:114), a word that holds more meaning than the immediate context of its use here suggests.
Taken together, these acts and statements define the peculiar double location of the ‘imperial subject’. On the one hand, it was based on the notion of separate nations, which it was the obligation of imperialism to develop. This was an international system that prompted Gandhi to express his trust in the empire as a ‘family of nations’ (cited in Gandhi, 1960c:viii). At the same time, ‘imperial subjecthood’ also allowed a placeless loyalty (bounded only by the empire) through which people located outside the originative space of their nation could claim a purchase on the land of their new habitation. And this was critical for the Indians, because the claims of the ‘imperial subject’ offered the only substantive ground for the Indians to residence in the new land that many were beginning to regard as their home. It must be remembered that Indians were migrants – consisting of indentured labourers, with a small number of traders and a handful of professionals – who in the 1890s were still newcomers to South Africa (Swan, 1985:1–9). They could not claim to belong to the land by virtue of prior occupation, like Africans; by the fact of settling on it and making it productive, like the Boers; or because they had mastered it, as the British had done. The vocabulary of independent nationalism was one that was not accessible to them. What they did possess was the claim to being an ‘imperial subject’: ‘It was the Indian’s proudest boast that they were British subjects. If they were not, they would not have had a footing in South Africa’, proclaimed Gandhi eloquently (1960c:136).
This purchase had become critical at a time when a rapid offensive was being mounted to remove the South African ground from under the Indians. The threat to Indians was already palpable from the early 1890s, but it reached a climax on Gandhi’s return from India in 1896. Ostensibly made to fetch Kasturba, his wife, Gandhi utilised the trip