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Textual Circuits and Intimate Relations: A Community of Letters across the Indian Ocean

MEG SAMUELSON

So you cannot shake off your Archives habit!! You are regularly keeping carbon copies of your letters and perhaps filing my stuff! For some future archivist to unearth and publish and start theories of the intimate relations between South Africa and India!!

P. Kodanda Rao to M. K. Jeffreys, 23 August 1930¹

It is nearly a month since I left India. I wonder if the continuity of our correspondence has been broken. I hope not. I do not want to lose the prize if an enterprising “Daily Mail” starts a prize for the longest continuous correspondence between two persons other than of a business nature. Why not you suggest the idea to some South African paper. That beats cross word puzzles and chess!

P. Kodanda Rao to M. K. Jeffreys, 14 May 1931

An extraordinary epistolary exchange, criss-crossing the Indian Ocean in the late 1920s and early 1930s and animated by the circulation of literary texts forms the focus of this exploration into textual circuits and intimate relations in the late imperial world. My dramatis personae—Marie Kathleen Jeffreys, V. S. Srinivasa Sastri and P. Kodanda Rao—played remarkable roles in the theatres of empire, decolonisation and nation building during this charged era, while in the process briefly producing a community across the Indian Ocean. The prophetic comment made by Rao to Jeffreys in a letter of August 1930 dispatched from London, where he and Sastri were attending a round-table conference on Indian independence, invites the inquiry I undertake here; it shifts this epistolary exchange from the private domain to the public, authorising the trespass into the intimate and affective sphere that this study performs, and eliciting readings that approach the political via the personal.

Employed at the Archives in Cape Town, Jeffreys expended much of her life tracing the texture of her city in literary, sociological and historical accounts. I have argued elsewhere for the past and present significance of these writings that conceptualise the Cape as a creole crucible in an oceanic crossroads at the tip of Africa (see Distiller & Samuelson 2005; Samuelson 2007; 2011). Here I attend specifically to the circulation of letters—epistolary and literary—between Jeffreys and her Indian interlocutors, while pointing to their participation in the print media’s production of a public sphere drawing South Africa and South Asia into intimate connection. Much of my attention falls on the fraught negotiations of affect that Jeffreys, Sastri and Rao enacted through the textual circuits they established. Far from gratuitous, these grapplings with affect and the domain of the intimate underpin the wide-ranging work in which all three were—or were to become—engaged. Sastri, as the epitome of the Indian moderate, famous for his “cross-bench” mind, operated within a framework of imperial fraternity. Dispatched to South Africa as the first agent of colonial India, he was tasked with building bridges of understanding between white and Indian communities in South Africa, and between South Africa and India itself (see Mesthrie 1987; Samuelson 2007). As the Agency’s first incumbent, Sastri set the tone for its modus operandi, which Uma Mesthrie (1987, 309) explains as follows:

The Indian representatives were determined to influence white public opinion to accept the Indians within their midst. Based on the premise that ignorance bred misunderstanding and hostility, they undertook public lectures to educate white public opinion on Indian culture and civilization. They brought the elite of the Indian and white communities together at social gatherings. … They also cultivated the friendship of white liberals in parliament and in the government.

Sastri’s successes were eagerly reported on in the Indian print media, particularly in The Servant of India newsletter, the bi-monthly organ of the organisation he led, having succeeded his mentor, Gopāl Krishna Gokhale, who had himself undertaken a voyage to South Africa in 1912 as leader of the Indian National Congress. Sastri’s South African lectures, the newsletter enthused, “drew record audiences” across the country (29 Nov. 1928, 629). At the end of his tenure in South Africa, Sastri addressed the topic of friendship explicitly when lecturing to East African Asians en route back to India:

You will enrich your lives, enlarge your usefulness if you remember that private friendship running across the artificial boundaries of caste, politics and religion, are the very salt of life; conferring upon it that element of romance and poetry and divinity which alone distinguishes it from mere animal existence (East African Standard, June 1929).

Friendship is thus presented by Sastri as the poetry of life, recasting brute experience through the structures and sublimations of belles lettres and producing a shared category of “humankind” that cut across colonial divisions.

Accompanying Sastri to South Africa was his loyal personal secretary, Rao. In later years, during Sastri’s old age and after his death, Rao and Jeffreys each produced a pivotal set of writings that, I contend, were rendered possible by their brief but intense triangular epistolary community and the textual circuits it established. Jeffreys proceeded to publish (in Drum magazine and elsewhere) a number of studies on the creole composition of the Cape that highlighted the genealogical, cultural and political implications for the South African national community of the importation of slaves from South and South-east Asia to the Cape in the seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries. These articles deflated myths of white racial purity and superiority, and grappled with the intimate relations and oceanic currents that produced the South African polity. Under the pseudonym of “Hamsi”, a name given her by Sastri, Jeffreys also published poems in the South African print media that traced what she declared to be her “threefold heritage” at the tip of Africa and the cusp of Atlantic and Indian Ocean trade routes. Before publication in the Cape Town dailies and later in two volumes (Hamsi 1931; 1934), these poems, with their threads of affect knotting into a trans-oceanic network, themselves travelled across the space they sought imaginatively to bridge. Many were folded into the weighty missives Jeffreys would dispatch in time for each “India mail”; enough to fill a volume were smuggled on board the SS Karoa to comprise Sastri’s “ship mail” on his return journey to India in 1929. As “Hamsi”, too, she wrote articles on current South African affairs for The Servant of India newsletter.

Rao’s two-year stint in South Africa, followed by his “continuous correspondence” with Jeffreys, had an equally profound impact on his later intellectual trajectory. Taking up the reigns of editor of The Servant of India newsletter from S. G. Vaze soon after his return from South Africa, he later went on to pen numerous pamphlets and books on the segregation of Indians in South Africa, on efforts to stem the flow of Indians to South Africa, on the need for Indian unity in India, and on the mutual imbrications of East and West. Whereas he, Sastri and Jeffreys had discoursed extensively on the possibilities and practicalities of his finding contentment with an Indian or non-Indian wife, he married (happily, by all available evidence) a white American woman, Mary Campbell, whom he had met in Hawai’i while attending a conference on racism. They named their home in Bangalore “Aloha”, the welcome to foreigners doubly encoded in the appellation. Among the books Rao produced—and dedicated to his wife—was a collection of sketches titled Foreign Friends of India. Mary Campbell Rao was undoubtedly a major influence on Rao’s enquiries; I would venture, however, that the community of letters he shared with Jeffreys and Sastri was a central catalyst.

Focusing on these rather minor, yet sporadically pivotal actors in the imperial theatre and on their making of a community, however transitory, that cut across colonial paradigms and that would in turn lead to various articulations of national and transnational communities, I follow recent scholarship that shifts attention from discursive and print flows between “centre” and “periphery” towards “south-south” connections (see Boehmer 2002), and that seeks to locate South Africa in the Indian Ocean world (see Hofmeyr 2007). The value of tracing the “south/south traffic of books and newspapers” is pointed to by Isabel Hofmeyr (2008, 10–11), who asks scholars to consider the “kinds of reading and writing publics” they “convene[d] on their oceanic circuits” in order to “arrive at an understanding of book history that is truly transnational and not simply imperial”. Andrew van der Vlies (2004, 5) similarly notes that there has “hitherto been relatively little consideration of the role of traffic in texts across national borders in the formation of postcolonial ‘national’ literary and cultural identities”. Presenting a reading and writing public comprising three figures avidly trafficking in texts across the Indian Ocean, this essay aims to illustrate the gains such explorations may offer in reconceptualising South African national formations and the mutual imbrications of India and South Africa.

The second strand of scholarship drawn on in this essay is that which engages affective communities athwart empire. Leela Gandhi’s (2006, 14) attention to “‘friendship’ as the lost trope in anticolonial thought” is particularly suggestive in its search for “a noncommunitarian understanding of community” (Gandhi 2006, 20). Her point of departure is provided by Jacques Derrida’s “trope of friendship as the most comprehensive philosophical signifier for all those invisible affective gestures that refuse alignment along the secure axes of filiation to seek expression outside, if not against, possessive communities of belonging” (Gandhi 2006, 10). Derrida’s project is to think beyond the Aristotelian legacy that casts friendship as an affective relation between men and which underpins the rhetoric of democracy (see Derrida 1997, viii). For our three actors in the imperial theatre, fraternity is a multiply loaded sign. The liberally conceived empire, the imagined nation and the sought-after democracy to come: all depend upon and evoke the notion of fraternity. The challenge Derrida (1997, 306) issues is of thinking both friendship and democracy outside and beyond its limitations. Both Derrida and Gandhi turn to Epicurus as a beacon for redirecting such affect into friendship-as-hospitality: this is a friendship “construed very differently, as philoxenia, or a love for guests, strangers, and foreigners. And in sharp contrast to Aristotle, this ethic of fidelity to strange friends is predicated upon a principled distaste for the racial exclusivity of the polis” (Gandhi 2006, 29).

Navigating the Indian Ocean through the figure and practice of friendship, Jeffreys, Rao and Sastri snare themselves upon fraternity and possessive love, while tacking toward a non-exclusive, non-androcentric community open to difference within and without. Finding in letters the models from which to begin casting such community, they experience it simultaneously crumbling under the weight of the idealised constructions of love and desire encoded in belles lettres. Yet their traffic in texts nonetheless succeeds in producing new imaginings of self and nation under the signs of intimacy and hospitality.

* * *

Their story begins one evening in November 1928, when Jeffreys attends in Cape Town a lecture by Sastri to which she has been enticed by her love of belles lettres. As she would later recall,

I had specialized in modern languages at the university, and English was my greatest love. It was, therefore, with intense caginess that I went to hear this man, who according to all accounts, spoke more beautifully than anyone had ever heard before. I felt this could not possibly be true: I was mistaken. … Never before or since have I heard such eloquence, such beauty of diction, such choice of words. It was bewildering, looking at his dark face, beneath a simply folded muslin turban, to realize that he had received all his education in India (Jeffreys n.d.a).

Enraptured by Sastri’s eloquence, Jeffreys is set adrift from her previous anchors of Anglophilia and white superiority, and “bewildered” by what she perceives as the contradictory signs of “beauty of diction” and Sastri’s “dark face”. Leaving the lecture in a state of overwhelming emotion, she immediately addressed to Sastri a letter that would end up being published by M. K. Gandhi in Young India, where, framed by Gandhi’s editorial foreword, it was presented as “evidence of the way in which Sjt. Sastri has stolen into the hearts of many South Africans”. “The work of silent conversation will be a far greater help to our people in South Africa than any amount of official concession”, he proceeds to elaborate: “The conversation makes even these possible” (Gandhi 1929).

Gandhi took up editorship of Young India following his “apprenticeship as a journalist” with Indian Opinion in South Africa (Dhupelia-Mesthrie 2003). Similarly to Indian Opinion, it functioned in part “as a clearinghouse, gathering messages from different parts of the world and presenting them to the reader who can see all the destinations from which they have come”, in the process carving out “particular pathways of circulation” (Hofmeyr 2008, 17). As he explains in his autobiography, M. K. Gandhi used Young India and its vernacular sister publication Navajivan to “educat[e] the reading public in Satyagraha”; the two journals, he concludes, “enabled me freely to ventilate my views” (Gandhi 2007, 426). Re-presented for a reading public out of which Gandhi was forging “India” by “ventilating [his] views” in print across the nation-under-construction and the world beyond, Jeffreys’ letter enthused that Sastri’s lecture had opened up to her the vistas of a heritage long shrouded from her regard: “You have opened for us the magic casements of the East, and every lover of good things among us will find the distant peaks calling, calling, calling, as they are calling me, with … an insistence which must be obeyed.”²

In this letter, Jeffreys lays her claim on an East personified as hailing her to open up her bounded Western self, allowing her to recognise, in the form of now-acknowledged South Asian ancestry, an otherness “buried beneath” a surface “whiteness”:

[The] message you brought belongs to me, it is a heritage buried beneath two hundred years of white blood and Western civilisation. For I, too, have been of the East, and have something of the East in me. Two hundred years ago white men brought as slave to this country a girl of Jaffnapatnam. Now her children are of the dominant race, with white skin, golden-brown hair, and rosy cheeks.

As one of these descendents absorbed into the “dominant race”, Jeffreys is able to claim her ancestral filiations after immersion in Sastri’s belles lettres, which in turn enters her into new affiliations that cut across the categories constructing this dominance.

Sastri, in turn, responded graciously to this communiqué, and on his next visit to Cape Town invited Jeffreys to dine with him and Rao at the Mount Nelson Hotel. His appointment diary, housed in the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in New Delhi, and the correspondence lodged in the Jeffreys Collection in the Western Cape Archives and Records Service in Cape Town, reveals the warmth with which he responded to Jeffreys, while she was effusive in her adorations. (The only record of Rao’s experience of Jeffreys is to be found in his letters, which are detailed, frank and as voluminous as hers; together they thrashed out notions of transcultural connection that would later profoundly inform Rao’s political and personal life.)³ However, as the weight of Jeffreys’ affection for Sastri grew, he became increasingly uneasy. While Jeffreys was charting a course through the complexities Derrida points to in the discourse and practice of friendship, fluctuating between fraternal and filial positions, on the one hand, and, on the other, an overwhelming passion that Sastri began to apprehend, with marked discomfiture, as physical desire, he began to retreat from the demands he imagined were encoded therein. By the time the trio were reunited in 1932, their community had floundered upon these rocks. The impact that their communion had was nonetheless far-reaching, while the role played in it by print media, the circulation of letters and the trans-oceanic traffic in texts is suggestive.

The subject of Sastri’s lecture in November 1928 was the legend Śakuntalā, and its literary travels and translations across the centuries and seas.⁴ The speech itself does not appear to have been recorded, although a report in Indian Opinion on the same lecture delivered in Johannesburg (19 Oct. 1929) reveals that in it Sastri articulated a liberal-humanist understanding of literature as a medium in and through which to forge new communities, welding the divisions and fractures of the colonial state. His political mission of ameliorating the conditions of South African Indians and of establishing white sympathy for India(ns) was well served by the literary lectures he delivered across South Africa during his tenure as Indian agent: “all high literature”, he maintained, held much in common, and shared a “common appeal” (Indian Opinion, 19 Oct. 1929). The implication of such a statement is the commonality of humankind, yet this apparently global community encompasses only those who are practitioners of “high literature”. Saul Bellow’s disparaging question “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?” (Bellow 1988) is of course evocative of the limits encasing the discourse of Sastri the moderate statesman along with that of the liberal-humanist appreciation of letters that inform this community. As her own sense of location developed, Jeffreys would come to harangue Sastri, albeit gently, for his abjection of the “native” in his strategic South African interventions.

Jeffreys’ second epistle, dated 28 November 1928, highlights the ways in which this lecture established for her a sense of common ground, restoring what she had previously experienced as a fractured world literature:

Goethe’s poem on the Sakuntala I knew and loved many years ago. And before you quoted from the charming English translation I stood there in the aisle, trying to fit together the lovely phrases, which were lying in my mind in scattered fragments. I cannot tell you of the double joy of linking the old sweetness with a new and lovelier song.

Jeffreys recognises Sastri’s act of gathering together the pieces of a text fragmented across divided national and linguistic communities as one in which the construction of a global community of letters—the identification and assemblage of a shared textual culture—is tied to the project of bridging cultural and political differences. This was indeed the task that Sastri assigned himself as agent, whereas for Jeffreys the resonance between a fractured universal textual culture and her own sense of having been cast off from her South Asian ancestry is acute. Thus, resonant imagery appears in her letter book a year later: “I am a tiny chip that was taken off the base of a beautiful vase”, she tells Sastri; “I only want to be joined on again where I belong.”

Jeffreys (n.d.a) writes later that Sastri’s gift to her was “pride and acceptance in [her] twofold heritage”, which enabled her to reconstruct her own fractured history, and, in later years, was partially extended into a “threefold heritage” (Jeffreys n.d.b) as she increasingly drew “Africa” into the weave of subjectivity she was producing (see Samuelson 2007; 2011). In the process, she opened up the bounds of Sastri’s discourse that was founded on the appreciation of belles lettres. Following her immersion in this community of letters, in other words, she is able to begin melding her African, Asian and European fragments into a new self—one that holds together, albeit in a state of tension, the oceanic currents and continental anchor that comprise her location. The letters travelling back and forth between Cape Town and India enable Jeffreys’ reconception of her spatial placing, while letters (those she wrote, those she received and those she typed for others) see her finding herself in another ideological space to that which she had previously occupied. Typing confidential missives for C. F. Andrews, the Christian missionary who became Gandhi’s confidant, and who is drawn into Jeffreys’ “Indian circle”, she informs Sastri:

I enter into the anxieties and the hopes of the Agent and his Staff, I find myself moved to tenderness and to exasperation at the actions of Gandhi; and I find myself at length, in very defiance of my practical instincts, saying: I cannot any longer deny that he may be right. I become in fact with growing knowledge his defender, that was so short a time ago his detractor. Yet, the more I realise the righteousness of his action the more I tremble for those who love him, and also for those whom he loves.

Repositioned into intimate relations athwart the divisions of empire by (being) the medium of type print, Jeffreys’ reorientation had begun more than two years previously when, after meeting Sastri, she had launched on an intense reading programme on India. By November 1929 she reports having devoured “about 30 really good books on India”, concluding: “I am developing tremendous respect for Ghandi [sic], whom I referred to in tones of the deepest contempt and detestation only last year. It is, with me, a time of growth”. Each subsequent letter reports on a book completed or in progress, from accounts by retired Raj administrators to “racy and entertaining” tales. Initially dependent on a North–South axis feeding studies of India into the Cape Town library system, Jeffreys’ “continuous correspondence” with Rao enabled her increasingly to bypass the North and establish an alternative South–South axis of textual circulation.

Writing from Mombasa in March 1929, Rao queried whether Jeffreys had read “Miss Mayo’s book”, urging her, “If you can get a copy”, to “please read ‘Unhappy India’ by Lajpat Rai”. Published in 1927, Katherine Mayo’s Mother India, which cast a jaundiced Western eye on Indian intimate relations, was an international sensation at the time: not only does The Servant of India newsletter host numerous rebuttals penned within India, but it also includes furious responses from the author of the regular feature “Our South African Letter”. Mother India, Jeffreys surmises, was not only informing North–South relations, but was equally shaping those between Indians and white South Africans.⁵ Thus, she bemoans to Sastri: “My mother has been reading her or someone kindred & warning me about you & your people!” As the South Africa correspondent of The Servant of India points out:

South Africa was never overflowing with sympathy for, and understanding of, India and Miss Mayo’s book has not tended to improve the situation. Her book seems to have a great vogue in this country. A number of its reviews and notes have appeared in all kinds of papers (5 April 1928, 193).

Whereas books on India by the likes of Mayo were widely available in South African libraries (to judge from the list of titles Jeffreys was able to access), the radical Laipat Rai’s rebuttal of Mayo was certainly not. Rao eagerly supplemented the holdings of the Cape Town city libraries with a regular book parcel from India. Early in their correspondence he asks: “Did you read Sister Nivedita (Miss Margaret Noble), her book, ‘Web of Indian Life’? Please do? Published by Longmans, I believe.” Evidently unable to source a copy in South Africa, Jeffreys has one dispatched to her by Rao. In exchange, Rao exacted from Jeffreys a stream of news cuttings and reports that saw him increasingly exceeding the limits of the public that the Agency was attempting to foster; the extent to which his catholic reading habits—far from limited to belles lettres —enabled him to open up to a far more inclusive South–South community is notable. Rather than simply focusing on Indian South African affairs, he was requesting, among other titles, proceedings of the 1929 Bantu-European Conference in Cape Town, and receiving copies of Eddie Roux’s communist newsletter Umsebenzi (with Jeffreys anticipating on each instalment that it must surely be banned or Roux imprisoned before the next). At the same time, Jeffreys kept him abreast of the South African reception of Indian affairs, which grew increasingly avid following Sastri’s visit.

After subscribing to The Servant of India, Jeffreys was increasingly able to manage her own reading programme, drawing into her orbit the texts circulating in its advertising pages. In May 1930 she ordered “a life of Gokhale”, followed later that year by Andrews’ biography, Mahatma Gandhi: His Own Story. Through these narratives of individual lives, cut across by affect and produced out of intimate relations (for instance, that between Andrews and Gandhi), she continued to orient herself politically. In the pages of The Servant of India, too, she would have seen reflected across the Indian Ocean the face of the increasingly troubled South African polity. In the years I surveyed (1927–32), South Africa features regularly in the newsletter. The South African Settlement of 1927 is heatedly discussed, while the physical movement of the first Indian agent across the ocean is mirrored in coverage of his speeches, from Sastri’s address in Poona before his departure (10 March 1927) to his lecture on the “Indian problem in South Africa”, presented on arrival in Pretoria (28 July 1927). During his tenure as agent, the newsletter carried fortnightly stories tracing his every move, applauding each success and printing for Indian audiences the speeches with which he was attempting to counter the anti-Indian sentiment of white South Africa. The Servant of India explicitly envisages and evokes a trans-oceanic public when it urges the “speedy withdrawal of the objectionable section” of the South African Liquor Bill that would compromise Indian employment in the hospitality industry “before an agitation on both sides of the Indian Ocean thickens and kills with the frost of recrimination and denunciation the tender sapling of friendship that is being nursed between the two nations” (24 Nov. 1927, 513).

Literary texts joined the news media, political pamphlets, biographies and philosophical treatises circulating across the Indian Ocean and performed a similar function in shaping relations, altering attitudes and interpellating subjects into new communities.⁶ Rao’s precious copy of Rabindranath Tagore’s Chitra was dispatched across the Indian Ocean by mail boat, in return for which Jeffreys entrusted her treasured Hans Christian Andersen to the high seas, while Rudyard Kipling’s Kim sounded the terms of this reading and writing public in a number of unspoken ways. Print—and these literary texts in particular—profoundly mediated the making and maintaining of this community.

Like Jawaharlal Nehru, Jeffreys counted Kim and The Jungle Book among her childhood treasures and made persistent reference to them, writing of Kim in a letter to Rao that it seemed “to have been in my blood, part of my being, as long as I can recall”. This novel, argues Ashis Nandy (1998, 44–45), “was for Kipling a once-in-a-lifetime break with his painfully-constituted imperial self … baring his latent awareness” of his “biculturality”. Kim spoke to Jeffreys’ newfound sense of identity, which cracked open the closed community of whiteness she had previously inhabited. Finally, Tagore’s Gora, which takes up Kim’s production of a hybrid colonial subject without foreclosing its possibilities as Kipling does, found in Jeffreys a highly appreciative reader. (If Andersen seems out of place in such textual company, his resonance for Jeffreys becomes clearer when she writes to Sastri in 1930, declaring of their relationship: “A fairy-tale it is, come to life.”)

I am equally intrigued by the texts that did not circulate in this triangular exchange—particularly E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India—as I am in those that did. Given Jeffreys’ extensive reading programme on India and given A Passage to India’s shared interest with Kim in the politics of colonial friendship, it is striking to me that Jeffreys did not draw on it as a text through which to shape her epistolary community. Had she engaged this novel, she might have encountered insurmountable challenges in its pages. Whereas transcultural friendship was what initially drew Forster to India, the possibility of friendship is in his novel treated as a vexed question, rather than assumed as it is in Kipling’s “Little friend of all the world”. Were Jeffreys to have grappled with her desire to encounter the “real” India through interpellation by a plot that sees Adela’s quest culminate in “a study of the profound fragility of colonial intimacy” (Suleri 1992, 147), her own self-constructions and her constructions of India and Indians might have been too painfully troubled.

In contrast to A Passage to India, Kim offers Jeffreys imaginative entry into the never-never land of community within empire. Declaring her “tender love for Kim and his Lama”, she models her relationship with Sastri on this literary mould. Addressing herself to him from the outset as his chela (disciple), she adopts Kim as framework for the relationship, inserting herself into the fraternal and filial structures of Kipling’s colonial world as the devoted disciple of the wise guru. Kim’s chameleon quality must have been equally attractive to Jeffreys. His sartorial shape-shifting is reflected in the range of signatures she employs for her different interlocutors and audiences (one of which being “Kim”) and contrasts with the fixed image of white femininity she might have encountered in the mirror held out by Forster’s novel. In contradistinction to Kim, which issues the promise of identification to a reader such as Jeffreys, allowing her to escape her gendered position by projecting herself into the utopian fraternities of Kipling’s world, A Passage to India draws attention to white women as problem in the colonial context, as the wedge dividing the kind of nascent community into which Jeffreys was trying to imagine herself.

“Forster, the eloquent enemy of the Raj,” observes Judith Plotz (1992, 111), “shares with Kipling, its ardent exponent, a concern with friendship across the bounds of race, religion, and nationality”, while famously deferring it to beyond the reach of empire. To the bounds of colonial difference (race, in particular) must be added the equally pertinent one of gender, which Jeffreys had perforce to negotiate in her engagement with two Indian men. The “not yet” to transcultural friendship in the colonial world that Forster’s novel issues resonates with the “not yet” addressed to women desiring admittance into the fraternity of friendship (Forster 1961, 317; Derrida 1997, 238, 281). As Derrida (1997, viii) finds, “the figure of the friend, so regularly coming back on stage with the features of the brother … seems spontaneously to belong to a familial, fraternalist and thus androcentric configuration of politics”.

Such conceptions of friendship within empire underpin Victoria’s Proclamation of 1858, and are reiterated in Sastri’s acceptance speech on receiving the Freedom of the City of London in 1921: “On the highest authority the British Empire has been declared to be without distinction of any kind. Neither race nor colour nor religion are to divide man from man so long as they are subjects of this empire” (Sastri 1945b, 128). The Indian liberal discourse that Sastri epitomised was itself honed through textual traffic. As Abha Saxena (1986, xv) notes, Indian liberalism “derived its inspirations from the writings of English liberals of the nineteenth century like Mill, Bentham, Macaulay and Morley etc”. Late in life, Sastri (1945a, 4) identified his intellectual mentors to be T. H. Huxley, J. S. Mill and Herbert Spencer. More or less contemporaneous with the young Sastri’s reading of Spencer and Mill in India would have been that of a governess on a South African farm, who would become South Africa’s most celebrated writer and feminist: Olive Schreiner, who shared with Jeffreys a vexed relation to the women’s suffrage movement in South Africa, which sought to arrive at the deferred “not yet” by admitting only white women to the political community.⁷

Gender strongly informs Jeffreys’ sense of community, and both sunders and supports her connection to India. On the one hand, she draws the kinds of analogies familiar in Western feminist movements of the time: “as men behave towards women … so Europeans behave to colour …. Not forever can they do this to us”, she declares to Sastri in a letter of February 1930. Yet, on the other hand, she is keenly aware of the ways in which white women’s liberation is established at the expense of racial liberation, and is outspokenly bitter about the Women’s Enfranchisement Act, which in turn disenfranchised Africans in the Cape: “What a way to get the vote. It makes me sick”, she exclaims in a later dispatch, and writes an article on the subject titled “Women’s franchise and the native in South Africa” for The Servant of India newsletter (published in June 1930). First drawing an equation between “native” and “woman”, and then noting the opposition of the two terms in the South African context, Jeffreys’ discourse threatens to erase the figure of “native woman”. Yet, embedded in a web of textual circuits cutting across the colonial world, she is also able—in ways similar to the strategies of many anti-colonial nationalists of the time—to draw trenchant comparisons between women in India and women in South Africa. Indeed, her interest in women’s enfranchisement in South Africa appears to have been sparked by “the interesting pamphlets about the All India Women’s Conference” sent by Rao in February 1930. “It comes at a fitting moment”, she responds in March 1930: “Our Women’s Suffrage Bill is in the melting pot.”

Jeffreys’ understanding of the ways in which her gendered identity was deployed within the racialisation of the South African polity is also evident when she reports herself

interested to hear that they have a study circle here of persons of all creeds & colours, but only for men. … I wish they included my sex, but evidently they feel that women might prove a complication! … I do covet the privileges of being a man.

Given the context of this observation, a letter to Sastri in October 1929 that focuses on restrictions pertaining to women and anticipates an imagined future typified by “intermarriage”, Jeffreys is clearly alluding to the ways in which white women have been produced as racial boundary markers: as symbols rather than discussants in the “race question”. It is from such constructions of her subject position that she flees, although never quite successfully, by inserting herself into the fraternal configurations of what Edward Said (1994, 136) has described as Kipling’s “overwhelmingly male novel”.

Kipling, however, ultimately proves of limited value in Jeffreys’ reimagining of community. If his characters charmed her childhood, they could not help her in assimilating the knowledge that her ancestry included two slaves shipped from South Asia; nor would Kipling, with his antipathy towards Eurasians, have enabled her later pioneering efforts within the pages of Drum magazine to represent the apartheid nation as a miscege-nation. In such efforts, Tagore proved infinitely more useful, while at the same time offering Jeffreys the analytic tools with which to grapple with the implications of gender in the community she was trying to construct and inhabit.

Whereas Kipling’s physical and textual movements amongst India, South Africa and England carved out the triangulated structure Jeffreys was attempting to inhabit, Tagore increasingly offered an alternative configuration onto which she could plot herself, enabling her to reconceive this world beyond imperial rule. After all, if Kipling’s jingoistic verses spurred on the imperial mission, Tagore’s songs would be used as the national anthems of both independent India and Bangladesh. Feted in England, while still deeply identified—and identifying—with India, Tagore poetically presented the Indian ocean as casting asunder the intimately related continents of Africa and South Asia in “Africa” (1938): “The angry sea/snatched you from the breast of Mother Asia/Africa” (Tagore 1993, 102).⁸

Both writers are, of course, Nobel laureates: Kipling was honoured by the judging committee in 1907 for his “virility of ideas”, whereas Tagore was applauded in 1913 for his ability to make “his poetic thought … a part of the literature of the West” (Nobel, 2012a, 2012b). Tagore’s intertextual dialogue with Kipling, moreover, marks literature as an international arena in which filial relations and (dis)affiliations are performed. Like Kim, Tagore’s Gora journeys across India on the Grand Trunk Road; he too is the orphaned offspring of Irish parents. However, unlike Kim, Gora remains utterly committed to India, even as the revelation of his parenthood forces him to redefine his relation to what is unambiguously identified as his motherland. Whereas Kim’s loyalties ultimately fall firmly on the side of empire (see Said 1994, 148), with an attendant narrowing of his world, Gora’s worldview widens as the novel concludes (see Nandy 1998, 46). At the conclusion of his story, Gora steps out of the partisan India he has championed, opting instead for an India cut across and infused by various currents and flows. Thus, while the journey in Kim is from a championing of syncretism to a retreat into purity, in Gora this trajectory is reversed.

Tagore, moreover, renders intimate relations central to the plot of Gora (first published in Bengali in 1909 and in English translation in 1924). Questions about which community one belongs to, with whom one may fraternise, whom one may love and so on lie at the core of its philosophical enquiry and narrative structure, which unfolds through the prism of romance and the domestic novel, engaging in the production of romantic love, the authorisation of the realm of the heart in political life (see Tagore n.d., 53, 57) and the feminisation of a hitherto masculine national culture (Tagore n.d., 83, 274) (no ‘virility of ideas’ here!). Ultimately, and antithetically to both Kim and A Passage to India (published in the year in which the English translation of Gora was issued), gender difference and love between men and women are presented in Gora as the solution to the narrative crisis and the surest means by which to surmount communal and racial barriers.

In October 1930 Jeffreys informed Sastri that she could barely tear herself away from Tagore’s novel in order to pen her letter:

I might as well say I have met those people; known them intimately for years. And the inter-relation of social prejudice and the action of the characters is so clean that, foreign as many of the ideas are to the occidental mode of life, we at once feel with each character, understand his predicament, and acquiesce in the naturalness of his behaviour. I do not know when I have so much enjoyed a book or felt so unbearably aggravated by the vagaries of the people in it, or loved them with such affectionate understanding.

This enthusiastic response reveals the reader inserting herself into a community in the act of reading, as Jeffreys identifies keenly with the novel’s eponymous hero, whose personal journey sees him travelling away from a dogmatic quest for a pure and untouched India and towards an acknowledgement of his own alterity and a celebration of the fissured—and thus infinitely richer—texture of the India he finally discovers. The India towards which Tagore wrote was one open to the oceanic currents that had previously formed and composed it; elsewhere, in his pamphlet Greater India, first published in 1921, he bemoans that which “has caused us to stop all voyaging on the high seas,—whether of water or of wisdom. We belonged to the universal but have relegated ourselves to the pariah” (Tagore 2003, 26). Like Forster, moreover, Tagore was energised by the problem of colonial friendship: “All of the trouble that we see now-a-days is caused by this failure of East and West to come together. Bound to be near each other, and yet unable to be friends, is an intolerable situation between man and man, and hurtful withal” (Tagore 2003, 87). Here Tagore articulates one of Rao’s abiding concerns; writing from Lake Victoria en route to India in May 1929, Rao posed to Jeffreys the question: “Where does the East end and the West begin?”

In contrast to Kipling and Forster, the anti-phallocentric friendship towards which Tagore’s and Rao’s writings strove created spaces in which to imagine community anew. Yet, by reinserting the gendered body into his fictions of friendship, Tagore required of Jeffreys that she recast the affect she had thus far modelled on the fraternal. Toward this end, she returned to Chitra (adapted, like Śakuntalā, from the Mahābhārata, and first published in 1914), urging Sastri in a letter of October 1930: “Do read Chitra again, see how she found fulfilment and comradeship.” In the play Jeffreys read a dozen times, Chitra, a woman raised as a son, exhorts the gods to make her “superbly beautiful” for a year (Tagore 1962, 156) in order to secure the heart of the avowed celibate, Arjuna. Having achieved her aim, she shuns her “borrowed beauty”, finding that her “body has become [her] own rival” (Tagore 1962, 162, 163). Yet she fears that, should she stand true in her unwomanly guise, Arjuna will reject her. Unveiling into her masculine attire, however, she is embraced as he declares, in the play’s closing line, “Beloved, my life is full” (Tagore 1962, 173).

Jeffreys drafted a spate of letters to both Sastri and Rao in which she tries to explicate her reading of Chitra. In them, she articulates the ways in which she is drawing on the play to imagine her community of letters and her position in it. It is unclear which letters were dispatched on the mail boat and which instead found their way into the waste-paper bin; what can be ascertained is that no other text excited such enthusiasm and anxiety as Chitra did, for nowhere else in the letter books is there such a proliferation of drafts and deletions. One entry, addressed to Rao in September 1929, reveals the source of this confusion when Jeffreys confesses: “On reading over my letter about Chitra, I perceive I have written not of Chitra but of myself.” While offering Jeffreys a self-reflective surface, Chitra moreover provided the stage on which she and Rao thrashed out perceived differences between East and West regarding both the aesthetics and ethics of love.