South Africa and India. Michelle Williams M.
groups in India. As Datta (2007:39) indicates, the war crystallised ‘an ambivalence towards colonial authority that deepened skepticism of the Raj’ and served to weaken ideas of imperial loyalism. Datta explores the idea that imperial subjecthood provided a discourse to claim rights within the British Empire (from one place to another), but was fundamentally flawed owing to the structured inequalities of the empire. The contradictions of this idea were powerfully revealed in the Anglo-Boer War and its aftermath in both India and South Africa.
Indian Ocean studies
Under the influence of Braudelianism and world systems theory, Indian Ocean historiography accelerated from the 1980s, producing a rich vein of work on the historical unities, commonalities and discontinuities of this early modern maritime world. In an excellent account of this scholarship, Markus Vink (2007) sets out these themes: monsoon and trade winds, port cities, littorals (Pearson, 1998; 2003; 2006), ships and seafarers (Gupta, 2004), religion and trade (Risso, 1995), long-distance commerce (Chaudhuri, 1985; Gupta, 2004; Prakash, 2004) and the Portuguese presence (Subrahmanyam, 1997b; Pearson, 1998).
One strand in this skein has become important to current debates on transnationalism, i.e. the notion that the early modern Indian Ocean world offers an instance of transregional trade without the state.2 Discussing how the Hadrami diaspora engaged with the Indian Ocean region, Engseng Ho (2006:xxi) notes:
Their enterprises overseas were not backed by [a] … mobile, armed state. The Portuguese, Dutch, and English in the Indian Ocean were strange new traders who brought their states with them. They created militarized trading-post empires in the Indian Ocean ... and were wont to do business at the point of a gun. Hadramis and other non-Europeans – such as Gujaratis, Bohras, Chettiars, Buginese, and Malays – did not. Rather than elbow their way in, they comported themselves to local arrangements wherever they went.
T. N. Harper (2002:158) puts the point succinctly: ‘The globalization of European imperialism was an extension of the nation state. The globalism [of diasporas] was not.’ This precedent of transoceanic trading systems uncoupled from a militarised state has proved productive in terms of rethinking the nation state today. Three prominent writers on the Indian Ocean – Amitav Ghosh (1992; 2008), Abdulrazak Gurnah (1994; 2005) and Engseng Ho (2004; 2006) – explore these old trading diasporas of the Indian Ocean world as a way of relativising the nation state. For Ghosh, the cosmopolitanism of the older diasporic networks offers a counterpoint to the narrowness of the modern nation state system. For Gurnah, the nation state is subsumed into the transnational networks above it and the loyalties of family and lineage below it. For Ho, the nation state is overshadowed by more epic entanglements as the universalistic ambitions of old diasporas and new empires encounter one another.
While the initial impetus in Indian Ocean historiography was towards early modern patterns of trade and diaspora, more recently there has been a growing emphasis on 19th- and 20th-century histories (Ewald, 2000; Vergès, 2003; Bose, 2005; Metcalf, 2007). One productive strand in this scholarship has been around the notion of Indian Ocean public spheres emerging from the 1880s to the First World War. As Mark Ravinder Frost’s work (2002; 2004; 2010) has demonstrated, these public spheres were rooted in the port cities of the ocean and grew out of the intellectual and religious activities of the cross-cutting diasporas that gathered in these entrepôts. Dedicated to projects of reform, these intelligentsias pursued a variety of universalisms (pan-Islam, pan-Buddhism, theosophy, imperial citizenship, Hindu reformism), which they formulated by sharing ideas via circulating periodicals and intellectuals (Arya Samaj missionaries, Sufis, pilgrims and scholars). Utilising the growing communication channels of empire, these networks operated most visibly in the extensive periodical press produced in these ‘information ports’ (Cole, 2002:344) and circulated actively between them. These journals quoted avidly from one another, enacting a quoting circle around the ocean (Hofmeyr, 2008).
These periodicals constitute an experimental site in which ideas of nationalism and diasporic discourses could be explored in relation to one another. An apt example is the extensive field of diasporic ideas of Indianness apparent in terms such as ‘overseas Indian’, ‘colonial-born Indian’, ‘Indians abroad’ and ‘Greater India’. The complexity of each of these terms is apparent from a quick glance at the idea of ‘Greater India’. As Susan Bayly (2004) demonstrates, this idea was first articulated in the 1920s by French-influenced Bengali scholars and focussed on the ancient cultural diffusion of Hinduism and Buddhism from India into East and South-East Asia. This idea of India as an early and benign coloniser appealed to a range of constituencies: Indian Indologists seeking to claim an active role for India; Hindu supremacists wanting evidence of ancient Vedic glories; anti-colonialists like Subhas Chandra Bose and his Indian National Army and Ghadarists like Taraknath Das, who saw their military activities as armed wings of Greater India; and, finally, those interested in the Indian indentured diaspora, or what was known as the ‘new’ Greater India, as opposed to the ancient. Greater India could provide an idea of nationhood that stretched diasporically across time and space and importantly could be both anti-colonial and colonising at the same time.
This idea of Indian Ocean public spheres is a useful one for considering the interactions between South Africa and India. Some of the chapters in the first section of this book develop this idea by exploring connections between southern Africa and India, and exchanges in the Indian Ocean more generally. Together, these chapters explore a range of lateral linkages within the Indian Ocean and enrich our picture of both Indian Ocean public spheres and the historiographies of interactions between southern Africa and India.
Isabel Hofmeyr’s chapter in this volume focusses on cosmopolitanism in the Indian Ocean through the lens of Gandhi’s printing press and textual migration. Hofmeyr explores the idea that the port cities of the Indian Ocean ‘constituted a network of textual exchange and circulation that built on, sustained and invented forms of cosmopolitan universalism across the Indian Ocean’. She suggests that the circulation of print across the Indian Ocean interpolated with cosmopolitanism in unexplored and interesting ways. The chapter looks at the connection between textual migration and an emerging cosmopolitanism by exploring the social relationships that developed around Gandhi’s printing press.
Keeping the Indian Ocean as their focal point, Pamila Gupta examines the itinerant movement of Goans in the Indian Ocean (and beyond) in the 20th century and Jonathan Hyslop explores the Indian Ocean lascars in the age of steam. Using a life history approach, Gupta examines three distinct periods of Goan migration in the Indian Ocean: the 1920s (a period of migration from Portuguese India to Mozambique); the 1950s and 1960s as the decolonisation of Goa started to bite; and then the post-1975 movement (mainly to Portugal) as Goans left Mozambique after its independence, with a small number remaining. These movements demonstrate not only Indian Ocean links but also faultlines. Goans generally found themselves precariously poised in the Portuguese empire: in Goa they found themselves as colonised Portuguese subjects, while in Mozambique they became a type of coloniser defined as superior to Africans, but below white Portuguese. As itinerants, Goan migrants unsettle supposedly clear boundaries of race within empire and render provisional ideas of high colonial rule and its stark categories of ruling. Decolonisation also begins to look different if viewed through a Goan lens: rather than being one discrete event, decolonisation comprises an ensemble of processes, one of which is further migration.
Gupta’s chapter demonstrates the interwoven relationship of empire and diaspora, a theme taken up by Jonathan Hyslop. He examines Indian Ocean seafarers in the age of steam navigation, tracing the interactions of British sailors and African and Asian seamen (lascars) in an imperial communication system. Moving away from the existing focus of examining lascars in British ports, the chapter explores the lateral linkages between port cities in the Indian Ocean. As steam replaced sail, labour relations on ships became increasingly industrialised and racialised. Enfranchised British workers used their unions to win better wages and working conditions for themselves. Captains and shipowners in turn increasingly turned to African and Asian seamen, who were seen as more tractable. While the lateral linkages across the sea opened up new routes of communication, the increasing racialisation of the workforce added new faultlines to the Indian Ocean world.
Shifting to an investigation of Gandhi’s satyagraha3 legacies in the South African political arena, Goolam