South Africa and India. Michelle Williams M.
embedded sense of place, but it provides firm boundaries based on civilisation (and on political criteria that remove groups such as Malays and Chinese from the list of possible solidarities) that foreclose the limits within which a new world is to be made and remade in the work of habitation. This does not mean, however, that the nation was simply transportable and replicable, like other things in the newly internationalising world. The South African experience suggested a more complex movement, in which the nation of the colonised is internationalised even as it began to come into its own. What we have is something akin to a diasporic nationalism, something that was to grow and come into its own only towards the latter part of the 20th century. Having said this, it should also be added that this diasporic nationalism was very different from the clearly worked out pragmatic and affective system of distinctions between countries of habitation and of origin that marks it today. Gandhi’s version of diasporic nationalism in particular was indeterminate. As Dhupelia-Mesthrie (2004) shows us, Gandhi appears to have settled for a segmented version. He migrated back to India and yet left behind his son, friendships, solidarities and the foundational part of his institutional life, especially the Phoenix farm. And he kept contact, giving advice and providing interventions, even as he pitched his battle camp firmly in the world of a spatially determinate nation that provided a more successful site for meeting the need for equality and self-respect that he so deeply cherished.
This is a story of the ‘future’; but it also returns me to the Anglo-Boer War. I turn now to look at the way it shaped another configuration, one not dominated by a single figure and hence a much more internally contested space: the war in India.
The Anglo-Boer War in India
The Anglo-Boer War existed primarily as a discursive event in India, although not entirely so. The volume of coverage is surprising – indeed, astonishing. The main site of the enactment of the war was the news space of British dailies. Two elements stand out in the coverage. Firstly, the newspapers produced, through the multiple sources of the reports they carried, an internationally interlocking site. Reports were datelined from many places. In the absence of foreign correspondents, dailies carried news from international news agencies such as Reuters and reprinted articles and reports from other sources in Durban and Pretoria, but also from London and even the United States. Gandhi’s reports as a participant witness played a significant part in the exposure. All these sources enacted out the war as an international event, especially since reports on European responses to the war were given on a regular basis.
The second element of the war news space was its saturating effect. A wide range of newspapers across the country carried daily reports under front-page banner headlines, particularly during the three-month period from October 1899 to January 1900. This was preceded by intermittent, but fairly extensive coverage of the crises leading to the war. What added to the power of the coverage – and this is something that happens particularly with war reportage – was that it took on a serial form. The progress of the war became imbricated into the everyday lives of the people of a foreign land precisely because its outcome was not known. It was not a finished narrative, which intensified the implications of the war and the questions it raised. Besides its immediate consequences for India’s position in Asia and the stability of the Raj in India, there was also a muted, but recurringly enunciated possibility of the war becoming a European one (Hitavadi, 1899a). It is probably for all these reasons that the war moved outside newspapers into other discursive worlds. The most remarkable example of its spread was its circulation in women’s journals. Bharati ran an article with an admiring tone on Boer women combatants (Bhattacharya, 1973:159), while Antahpur did a piece on the Boers.35 Pro-Boer literature and anti-war books and pamphlets, such as W. T. Stead’s Shall I Slay My Brother Boer?, were circulated.36 As I have mentioned, the war even entered the verse of Rabindranath Tagore.
The war circulated in India on two levels. It did not remain confined to the discursive, but was transformed into the performative primarily through the campaign of the loyalists. The British settlers provided the lead through fund-raising activities; thus, Vinolia soap advertised itself to say that the purchase of each bar would contribute a halfpenny to the Vinolia war fund, apart from helping to improve the customer’s complexion (Times of India, 17 February 1900). These were supplemented by morale-boosting events, such as a film of some of the battles shown in Bombay or the hosting of carnivals to raise funds (Times of India, 15 February 1900). The efforts of the British settlers were ably supplemented by two other groups, the titled and the orthodox. Titled dignitaries held meetings in support of the British in places as far apart as Jullundur (Punjab) in the north-west, Delhi, and Murshidabad (Bengal) in the east. Some princes decided to raise subscriptions to send 800 combat horses, while the Maharaja of Kashmir vowed he would equip the whole British army with putties (The Bengalee, 2 February 1900). Their efforts were supplemented by the Darbhanga Raj of Bihar, which initiated a ‘Hindu Voluntary Fund’,37 while the Nawab of Murshidabad hosted prayers for the success of the British at the city masjid (The Bengalee, 3 February 1900). Indeed, hosting prayers for the British – by both Hindus and Muslims – became an established occurrence.38 The role of the Hindu orthodox press, led by the Bangabasi, which was the highest-selling paper in Bengal with a circulation of 26,000, is significant. While it had run a campaign against the colonial administration for introducing the Age of Consent Bill (which had raised the marriageable age of girls) in 1891, it expressed full-hearted loyalty to the British during the war and appealed for funds and prayers. This change of stance may have had local causes related to the political marginalisation of the orthodox by the professional middle-class politicians of a reformist orientation, who dominated the elected bodies and whose main organ was The Bengalee.
Possibly the most interesting and intriguing way in which information about the war circulated was through popular rumours. The Englishman reported with some asperity that the lower classes of the crowded Chandni Chowk market area in Delhi had started to celebrate the defeat of British forces (Hitavadi, 1899b). Meanwhile, in Calcutta, just after the December reverses suffered by British forces in South Africa, the uncertain course of the war had led to the introduction of betting on its outcome. The correspondent also reported that rumours were circulating in tramcars and carriages, some claiming that one Boer had the strength of five men, with others reporting that the British had 250 detectives to spy out anyone extolling Boer valour (Bangabasi, 1899). Even more intriguing was the experience of Edgar Thurston, who carried out an anthropometric survey in South India. Just after the war, in his encounter with a community he called the ‘Oddes’ and who had ‘Boyan’ as their title, Thurston found that they were very scared that they would be mistaken for Boers because of the similarity of their names. They feared transportation to replace the exterminated Boers. Indeed, through a long tour of Mysore province, he appears to have repeatedly encountered a fear that he had been deputed to recruit natives for South Africa (cited in McLane, 1977:35). These rumours, it may be speculated, may have had something to do with news that came back from indentured labourers in South Africa (Madras was the major port of shipment for them), in addition to nuggets of newspaper information that were probably transformed in the process of dissemination. What is significant in all these cases of popular rumours is the suspicion and hostility towards the British and a sense of identification – if not kinship – with the other side.
These instances of not fully and uniformly pro-Boer, but certainly anti-British, sentiment were probably an important reason why much thought was given by the administration to the control, dispersal and repatriation of the many Boer prisoners of war who served out their term of detention in India. While most of the relevant files (and, judging from the list, there were a number of them) are no longer available at the National Archives in Delhi, the few that still exist are significant. They demonstrate official concern to place the prisoners in several isolated camps throughout India, and included plans to sequester groups in the Princely States39 away from British-administered populations. It is also interesting that officials considered what they should do in case any Boer wanted to remain in India (it is intriguing to speculate if any actually did so) and came to a clear resolution that such Boers would be actively discouraged.40 On the whole, the administration appears to have successfully kept the Boer prisoners from exercising any kind of influence on the public debates that sprang up around the war.