South Africa and India. Michelle Williams M.
in the Anglo-Boer War would be an important enterprise, my interest is confined to Bengal, and primarily to its middle-class public. In general, Bengal offered many instances in which international events crystallised and impelled nationalist concerns and mobilisation. A few years after the war, Japan’s victory over Russia electrified the Bengali middle class with the prospect of an emerging East and motivated various public events.41 But the Boer War offered no such inspirational value. Instead, it did two interconnected things. It strengthened existing ambivalences about the ‘imperial subject’ and, in so doing, thinned out imperial loyalism to the extent that it came close to losing its purchase altogether. Of course, this did not happen uniformly across the social spectrum.
It has been remarked that the Anglo-Boer War, especially ‘Black Week’, saw a sense of despair in Britain that was not matched even by the worst of the First World War experiences (Miller, 2005:692). Given this mood, it is not difficult to imagine the effect of the war on the British residents of India who exemplified the ‘imperial subject’.42 McLane (1977:24–25) has argued that the ‘doctrine of infallibility’ that was ultimately based on the simple military superiority of the British had by the late 19th century replaced the pedagogic legitimisation of the empire through the exemplar of the ‘imperial character’. Placed against this horizon of self-justification, the military reverses abroad produced a deep anxiety. The effects of this can be seen in two kinds of movements. The first was an irritable insistence on the limits to which the imperial cause could extract support from the settlers. The tea planters, for instance, strongly protested against the move to extract repeated donations for the imperial cause.43 Secondly, there were anxious attempts to elicit popular support for ‘imperial patriotism’. A long article in the London Times, reprinted in The Bengalee (2 February 1900), tried to show that the uitlanders of the Transvaal were as discriminated against as the Indians (while explaining away the racism of the Natal government as the handiwork of settlers), in an attempt to prove a commonality of interests. Imperial ‘patriotism’ suddenly came into vogue. It was probably for this reason that Anglo-Indian papers such as the Times of India and The Statesman prominently ran Gandhi’s comments, for his loyalties most closely approximated to what the empire needed at that dire time.
As I have shown, the success of loyalism among Indians was confined to the titled and orthodox. This was the consequence of an inherent problem in colonial policy. The government wished to demonstrate the hold of the ‘imperial subject’, but at the same time carefully regulate the participation of Indians in it. Thus, the Lord Bishop of Bombay, bidding farewell to the Lumsden Horse regiment, congratulated the princes on their loyalty, exclaiming: ‘We are all imperialists now.’ He then went on to define imperialism as based on the principles of ‘justice, equality, freedom of thought and speech, intellectual progress, pure religion’ and similar verities. He also took care to subtly disengage the princes from their co-imperialists by stating that these were the principles of the ‘modern Christian world’ (Times of India, 16 February 1900). Actually, the distinction that probably grated the most was the one made between the settler colonies of Australia and Canada, on the one hand, and India, on the other.44 This hierarchy became evident in the fact that the British studiously avoided taking Indian soldiers to the front – despite the advice of some ex-India hands45 and in spite of repeated criticisms from the Indian press that rightly spotted the long arm of racism at work. Whatever the colonial administration in India may have thought, non-whites were unwelcome to participate formally in the war. Warwick (1983:15–20) and others have shown that the participation of Africans was not acknowledged in the war because there was a formal consensus among the warring parties that they must not be involved. The Africans were, of course, (formally) ruled out because they had historically posed a military threat. This was not applicable to the Indians, who were regarded as peaceful, a recognition that Gandhi kept emphasising in his appeals to the authorities. There was, however, a more fundamental problem of racist legitimacy. British South African spokespersons were clear that the blacks had to be kept out, since they must not be encouraged to regard themselves as being necessary in any way to the government.46 The rationale of white political self-sufficiency goes a long way to explaining the bar on Indian military participation. It also explains the even more absurd refusal to deploy Maoris who were a part of the New Zealand contingent.
The visible inbuilt incoherences of the ‘imperial subject’ renewed and deepened the general alienation. It should be noted here that the press was regarded as unfriendly by the government. In 1891 a government survey discovered that 14 out of 19 newspapers could be regarded as hostile (Ray, 1979:94). This characterisation does not do justice to the ambiguity of this press: many of its constituents freely criticised the administration while remaining committed to the belief in the providential nature of British colonialism. Nevertheless, the survey defines the generally critical orientation of newspapers during the Anglo-Boer War. Here the significance of The Bengalee and its editor, Surendranath Bannerjee, needs to underlined. Surendranath, a leading light of the INC, led the turn to constitutional opposition to the British, which at one point resulted in a stint in jail; but he also firmly believed in the providentiality of British colonialism and the gradual progress it offered for transition to self-government. Important British officials regarded him as someone more amenable to negotiation than others. The editor of the Hitavadi, Kali Prasanna Kavybisharode, had a similar career. An INC worker, he was also jailed for five months for publishing a treasonable poem. Both became leading members of the Swadeshi movement.47 At this time, however, no agitation was in sight and these publicists were suspended in a state of semi-belonging to ‘imperial subjecthood’.
What is of interest here is not just the public ambivalence towards the government, but the fact that the precise balance of elements that constituted this ambivalence changed. The Boers themselves provoked ambiguity. Their surprising resistance was compounded by the romantic framing of their lives, dominant in Europe, and in their own self-perception as a people who lived a tough, bucolic life tied to the land. In Europe, this image hosted a series of debates that worked on the contrast between a ‘traditional peasant … with firm hierarchical values confronted with an aggressive, levelling capitalist civilisation’ (Kaarsholm, 1989:110). In India, on the other hand, the striking feature of the Boers was that, despite their ‘historical’ disadvantage, they had successfully challenged the apparently invincible British. This was compounded by the knowledge that the Boers did not have a regular army. For Indians, the Boers demonstrated the power a community could generate by a simple and strong desire for independence.
‘The Boers are determined to lay down their lives for their independence, which is dearer even than life’, exalted one newspaper, saying that their act was an even bolder one than what a madman48 would have done (Samiran, 1899). Attachment to the land itself seemed to explain the Boer successes, as the Hitavadi’s contrast between the British fighting in a foreign country and the Boers struggling for their independence and their families suggested (Hitavadi, 1899b). The power of this image needs to be measured by the sedimentation of heroic figures resisting foreign invaders that had been in circulation in literary works and theatre from the middle of the 19th century. However, these figures normally acted in the past against Muslims, ending their careers in tragic failure. This layer of sedimented effects was no doubt stimulated by the Boers, but it now also carried new messages, since Boer resistance was carried out in the present, and very successfully. Naturally, the Boers stimulated a great deal of exemplification and, correspondingly, a sense of the lack of a comparable desire for independence (no doubt heightened by the absence of any major political movement at the time) in the Indians themselves.
This is an economy of effect that, in normal circumstances, may have motivated actual deeds. But the unrelieved story of racist discrimination by the Boers that Gandhi’s newspaper articles publicised prevented them from emerging as an unequivocal source of inspiration. The Hitavadi (1899a) best summed up this ambivalence when it observed: ‘The oppression of the Indians in South Africa has led us to hate the Boers, still we feel constrained to praise their bravery with a thousand tongues.’ The word ‘bravery’ needs comment, since, more than anything else, it was the courage of the Boers that was insistently cited. For Indians, Boer heroism became a convenient way of summarising their impact, for it could simply celebrate a pure character trait and thereby