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Chapter
Gandhi’s Printing Press: Indian Ocean Print Cultures and Cosmopolitanisms
Isabel Hofmeyr
Introduction
At low tide from the beach at Porbandar in Gujarat, one can just glimpse the tip of a shipwreck. Originally the SS Khedive, this vessel is the subject of a double legend. The first is that it carried Mohandas Gandhi on one of his voyages between Bombay and Durban; the second is that the ship sank with Gandhi’s printing press on board.7
This is not the only report of a phantom printing press associated with Gandhi. More than a century earlier another account had emerged, this time on the other side of the Indian Ocean, in Durban. Towards the end of 1896 Gandhi was headed for this port on his way back from Bombay. Angry white mobs awaited his arrival, claiming he was organising an ‘Asiatic Invasion’. Rumours circulated that Gandhi had a printing press and 30 compositors on board. According to the Natal media, the lynch mob intended first to attack Gandhi and then the printing press (Natal Witness, 11 January 1897).
In part, this phenomenon of the phantom printing press can be easily explained. In the Durban case, it had been well known for some years that Gandhi wished to acquire such a press in order to start a newspaper that could speak for the interests of Indian merchants in Natal (Pyarelal, 1986:63–65). The alarm that much of white Natal society felt at this idea expressed itself in the rumour of the imaginary press. White artisans were equally perturbed at the prospect of cheap compositors coming to undercut the market.
A few years later, in 1898, Gandhi did indeed play a part in purchasing a press that was to print his newspaper, Indian Opinion, which became pivotal in his satyagraha campaigns. When Gandhi returned to India in 1914, newspapers continued to be a key component of his non-cooperation movements. Gandhi, the newspaper and the printing press were closely associated, and hence the memory of his printing press persisting in legend is understandable. Indeed, Gandhi’s press has become something of a minor icon in his life story. A chapter of his autobiography discusses his printing press in South Africa (Gandhi, M., 1957:302–4), while the presses he used feature in exhibitions and museums (Satyagraha, n.d.).
Yet, pertinent as these explanations are, they do not clarify one important aspect of these stories: both are accounts of a printing press at sea. In the Durban case, the idea of a press coming across the waters from Bombay sparks alarm and aggression. In the Porbandar case, the press remains a symbol of Gandhi, but one that has been lost in the Indian Ocean. Both stories ask us to think about the printing press in the context of the Indian Ocean.
This chapter takes up this invitation by placing Gandhi’s printing press in the framework of an Indian Ocean public sphere as a way of exploring cosmopolitanism in the Indian Ocean region. As groundbreaking work by Mark Ravinder Frost (2002) and scholars such as T. N. Harper (2002), Sugata Bose (2005), Engseng Ho (2006) and Thomas Metcalfe (2007) indicates, the imperial port cities of the Indian Ocean sustained a distinctive public sphere that flourished from the 1880s until the First World War and supported various modes of cosmopolitanism.
The Indian Ocean was the site of several overlapping diasporas whose educated classes gathered in the ports around the ocean. As Frost (2002: 937) notes:
Entrepôts like Bombay, Madras, Calcutta, Rangoon and Singapore witnessed the emergence of a non-European, Western-educated professional class that serviced the requirements of expanding international commercial interests and the simultaneous growth of the imperial state.
These centres supported intelligentsias drawn from various Indian Ocean diasporas who ‘developed habits of intellectual sociability that become organized and systematic’. Sharing similar concerns for reform, these groups oversaw parallel campaigns for religious revival, social and educational improvement and constitutional change’ (Frost, 2002:937). Positioned as ‘nodal points in an imperial network of steamer routes, telegraph lines and railways’, these cities functioned as relay stations for ideas, texts, commodities and people (Frost, 2002:939).
To Frost’s map we could of course add other ports, namely Mombasa, Zanzibar, Beira, Lourenco Marques (the modern Maputo) and Durban. Together, these cities constituted a network of textual exchange and circulation that built on, sustained and invented forms of cosmopolitan universalism across the Indian Ocean. Some of these universalisms were religious in character and, as Frost (2002:939) points out, were apparent in pan-Buddhist, pan-Islamic (and, one might add, pan-Hindu) movements. There were also traditions of transnational social organisation, like anarchism or socialism, that were anti-colonial in character. Beliefs in a colour-blind, rights-bearing imperial citizenship provided yet another template of universalism. Such diasporic universalisms have long been obscured, falling outside studies of empire, on the one hand, and studies of the nation, on the other. With the transnational turn in the humanities and social sciences, such networks are moving to the fore and are helping to revise understandings of colonial encounter not as the interaction of the local and the global, but rather as an encounter of different universalisms.
These distinctive public spheres of the South offer several analytical possibilities. In relation to studies of print culture, this zone of circulation opens up new maps for thinking about textual migration. Frost (2002:940) notes that in 1920 the number of books, pamphlets and newspapers that passed through the Colombo post office to and from other parts of the British Empire was equal to, if not greater than, the number of equivalent items passing between Colombo and Britain. The South–South traffic of books and newspapers matched the equivalent traffic on a North–South axis. What were these books and pamphlets? Where did they come from and where were they headed? What kinds of reading and writing publics did they convene on their oceanic circuits and what kinds of communities of belief did they bring into being? Put differently, what modes of cosmopolitanism did this circulation of print enable?
This chapter is a very modest initial attempt to draw this bigger picture. Drawing on existing work on the Indian Ocean public sphere, the chapter seeks to build on Frost’s model by asking what the analytical grammar of such an Indian Ocean cultural world might be. Put differently, how in methodological terms might one gain an analytical grasp on a field as diverse as the Indian Ocean? The chapter proposes that the printing presses be considered as a key element in that grammar. One way, then, to think about the Indian Ocean is as a series of interrelated printing presses spread around the port cities. The chapter looks at one such press by way of a methodological experiment. It asks what we might learn by examining the social relationships that developed around the press, the types of socialities it entailed, the ideas of printing and publishing that it generated, and the kinds of audiences it called into being. The personnel of the press were drawn from across the Indian Ocean and brought with them different ideas and ideals of printing and publishing.
Gandhi’s printing press: A biography
The International Printing Press (IPP) came into the world in considerable style on the evening of 29 November 1898. An opening ceremony attended by a crowd of nearly a hundred inaugurated the press at 113 Grey Street, next door to the Natal Indian Congress Hall. Proceedings got under way with the Congress organist playing God Save the Queen. Next followed speeches. The proprietor, Madanjit Viyavaharik, told the predominantly Indian audience that ‘[t]he press is not mine alone – it is yours also’. Gandhi then read letters of good wishes and the press was declared open. What the Natal press described as ‘a priest from Verulam [a settlement north of Durban]’ apostrophised the press with some Gujarati verses extolling the virtues of the printing arts and indicated that ‘they had to thank Queen Victoria for the freedom which enabled them to obtain the privileges and blessings accruing from printing’ (Pyarelal, 1980:193–94).
The IPP itself comprised two hand-operated presses: the first an Albion Press (the most widely used press in the British Empire), the second a platen jobber, as well as 1,000 lbs of English type, which had been acquired second hand in Durban. Hindi, Gujarati, Tamil, Urdu and Marathi type was ordered from India (Pyarelal, 1980:193). The press undertook general job printing. It printed the monthly magazine of the theosophical society and a short-lived newspaper called the Volunteer, as well as booklets and pamphlets (Pyarelal, 1986:434; Natal Archives Depot [NAD], CSO 1735, 1903/6053). From June 1903 the newspaper Indian Opinion was printed at 113 Grey Street.
The press could do work in a range of languages: Gujarati, Tamil, Hindi, Urdu, Hebrew, Marathi, Sanscrit, Zulu and Dutch, according to an advertisement on the newspaper’s cover on the11 June 1903. Its personnel were multilingual and drawn from across the Indian Ocean and beyond. The foreman, a Mr Oliver from Mauritius, oversaw a staff of typesetters and machinemen. The English compositors included a French-speaking Mauritian; a man from St Helena; and, in the parlance of the day, a ‘Cape coloured’, Mr Mannering. The Gujarati typesetters were Kababhai and Virji Damodar, with Virji doing Hindi as well. Moothoo, a colonial-born Indian, undertook the Tamil composing, while Raju Govindswamy (‘Mr Sam’, as he was known) was in charge of machines and binding (Pyarelal, 1986:434). Also colonial-born, Govindswamy had started his career as a ‘kitchenboy’ in Umkomaas, then moved on to being a messenger on the railways, before becoming an assistant in a printer’s firm at 30 shillings per month, where he was recruited by Madanjit (Meer, 1969:56–57). By Natal standards, wages were generous and ranged from £8 to £18 per month in an industry whose average wage was £12 (Downes, 1952:80).
The move to Phoenix
Like many small printing establishments in Durban, the IPP struggled to break even. The launch of Indian Opinion exacerbated this financial strain. Madanjit Viyavaharik was nominally the proprietor of the paper, but the enterprise was kept afloat by Gandhi’s money and the editorial skills of M. H. Nazar, the newspaper’s first editor.Worried about the press, Gandhi sent Alfred West, whom he had met through vegetarian circles in Johannesburg, to investigate. West reported deep financial chaos. Madanjit, who had been wanting to return to India for some time, ceded the press to Gandhi to settle the debts he had accrued and duly left. In early October 1904 Gandhi caught the overnight train down to Durban to sort out the affairs of the press, and on the journey famously read Ruskin’s Unto this Last, which inspired him to take the radical departure of setting up his first ashram, Phoenix, 14 miles north of Durban. The press was laboriously moved by oxwagon to Phoenix and reassembled in a corrugated-iron shed built from donated material. Those who joined Phoenix were to earn £3 a month and be entitled to an acre of land. If the press made a profit (which it never did), it would be shared among the settlers, as they called themselves. Two press employees, one of whom was Sam Govindswamy, retained their original salaries (Pyarelal, 1986:435–37).
Directing operations mainly from Johannesburg, Gandhi soon instituted major changes in the press, seeking to fashion it into a utopian instrument that would stand beyond the market and the state. He first stopped all jobbing printing, seeing this as a distraction from the real work of producing the newspaper, and then in 1912 decided to dispense with advertisements, except those promoting socially useful objects (Bhattacharya, 1965:118).
The changing letterheads of the press reflect these shifts. An early letterhead from March 1904, when the IPP still operated from Durban, presents the press as a commercial operation (‘artistic and general printers’) undertaking jobbing printing of various kinds (wedding cards, visiting cards, ball programmes, etc.) in a range of languages (NAD, CSO 1758, 1904/2954) . By 1907 the letterhead had lost some of its commercial flair (NAD, CSO 1848, 8564/1907). Thereafter, the press’s sole function was to print Indian Opinion (NAD, II 1/180 I 1058/1911). Another barometer of these shifts comes from the memoir of Prabhudas Gandhi (1957:46) who spent part of his childhood at Phoenix. He describes these years of mounting asceticism as a period when there was ‘no more fun and frolic’.
As several historians have demonstrated, the newspaper Indian Opinion became central to the success of Gandhi’s campaigns. The paper kept people informed, spurred them on and provided the world with information as to what was going on (Mesthrie, 1987:99–126). Equally pivotal was the press itself, which became central to Phoenix and operated as an embodiment of its utopian ideals. At its height, and before satyagraha imprisonments took their toll, Phoenix was home to about 40 people and everyone – adults and children alike – was involved in at least some aspect of the printing process. Typesetting was mandatory for all, some proving more adept than others, with Gandhi describing himself as a dunce (Gandhi, M., 1957:304). All men assisted with operating the press, which sometimes ran on oil engines and at other times was operated by hand. Everyone folded the newspapers, put them in wrappers and pasted on addresses (Gandhi, P., 1957:45; Dhupelia-Mesthrie, 2004:74).
The press was also a leveller, with everyone undertaking physical labour whatever their caste or religious background: in the words of Prabhudas Gandhi (1957:55), ‘Germans, English, Africans, Chinese, Parsis, Muslims, Jews and Hindus’ laboured together on the press.
Among the settlers at Phoenix were several of Gandhi’s relatives, as well as his immediate family. The core functions of the press were family run. Chagganlal, a nephew, ran the accounts and the Gujerati section; Maganlal, another nephew, oversaw composing and did other skilled jobs. However, this was not a family business in the normal sense. As Prabhudas Gandhi (1957:18) noted in his memoir: ‘In Gandhi’s ashram the place of blood ties was taken by common ideology and a common devotion to duty.’ Or as Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph (2006) have indicated, Gandhi’s ashrams were modern institutions in which entry and exit were by choice rather than lineage.
The press also became central to Gandhi’s educational philosophy. Part of Phoenix’s work involved running an informal boarding school for children from both the settlement and beyond. Prabhudas Gandhi attended this school and has left a description of his routine. After an early start, students attended school from 9 to 11 a.m., after which they spent half an hour digging in the fields. When students complained and asked whether this digging couldn’t happen early in the morning, Gandhi replied: ‘You must get into the habit of working in the fields in the heat of the sun. Today you are studying here, but if the struggle starts and you have to go to jail, who will then let you rest in the shade?’ At 11.30 a.m. the students bathed, had lunch and worked on their own while the adults were busy in the press. At 3 p.m. the children went to the press and received vocational training or assisted with press work. At 5 p.m. the children returned to work in the fields till sunset (Gandhi, P., 1957:114–15).
Gandhi saw Phoenix as a training ground for satyagrahis and for prison. There was hence a rigorous labour regime, of which the press formed a part. Working a hand-operated iron press is noisy and involves long hours. It is physically demanding and those who did it on a full-time basis often developed back and kidney problems from the constant strain of pulling the bar of the press (Rummonds, 2004:598). Typesetters too developed aching fingers and felons (painful, pus-producing infections at the ends of their fingers) (Rummonds, 2004:265). Since most settlers at Phoenix never worked full-time at the press, they probably avoided these ailments. They were nonetheless subject to the labour disciplines of the printshop, which increasingly became part of the project of training for satyagraha.
The press, then, was a fulcrum of social relationships in Phoenix, which was at times known as the IPP settlement. When the manager of the press, Alfred West, married in July 1908, the wedding was reported in Indian Opinion as though the bride were marrying into the company (4 July 1908).
The idea that everyone worked equally on the press was probably something of an illusion. A core of people were devoted to the running of the press, two of whom earned commercial salaries. Also, it is clear from some accounts that the press, like all concerns in Natal, relied on cheap African labour. Millie Polak (1931:53–54) reports:
The printing-press, at this time, had no mechanical means at its disposal, for the oil-engine had broken down, and at first animal power was utilized, two donkeys being used to turn the handle of the machine. But Mr. Gandhi, ever a believer in man doing his own work, soon altered this, and four hefty Zulu girls were procured for a few hours on printing day. These took the work in turns, two at a time, while the other two rested; but every male able-bodied settler, Mr. Gandhi included, took his turn at the handle, and thus the copies of the paper were ‘ground out’.
In his autobiography, Gandhi notes his preference for a hand-operated press, which he regarded as more uplifting. He writes: ‘There came a time when we deliberately gave up the use of the engine and worked with hand-power only. Those were, to my mind, the days of the highest moral uplift for Phoenix’ (Gandhi, M., 1957:303–4).
There is, of course, an irony when this claim is set against Millie Polak’s description indicating that the hardest physical labour was done by four Zulu women. On the face of it, Phoenix stood beyond the wage economy, since in theory settlers did not receive salaries, only a £3 grant. However, as we have seen, two members of the press did receive commercially linked salaries and so the press at least was not entirely extricated from the relations of the market. One does not know what the Zulu women were paid, if anything. Their absence from Gandhi’s account points to the extent to which his press was a South African one that relied, if only in small part, on cheap African labour.
Gandhi was to leave South Africa in 1914. The press continued at Phoenix under the guidance of his son, Manilal, who edited Indian Opinion until his death in 1956. The presses were preserved in a museum at Phoenix, but have not survived intact. During internecine fighting in the early 1980s in Natal, Phoenix was looted and burned. The story of Manilal and the press has been masterfully told by Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie (2004) and need not detain us here. Instead, let us ask what we might learn from the biography of the press between 1898 and 1914.
The IPP and Indian Ocean cosmopolitanism
The IPP had two clear chapters in its early life, one in Grey Street in Durban and the other out at Phoenix; one apparently as a commercial operation, the other as anti-commercial – two commonsense categories that we take for granted. Yet to use such stark oppositions is to miss the uniqueness of the early IPP, as well as the ways in which Gandhi built on that legacy.
One way to grasp this uniqueness is to compare and contrast the IPP with similar printing establishments of the time in Durban. By the turn of the century the city was home to 14 presses, all of them white-owned, except for the IPP. The IPP was located in Grey Street; the Indian Opinion office was in Mercury Lane. Grey Street fell into what had emerged informally as the Indian area, while Mercury Lane was located in the ‘white’ foreshore of the city, although there was some porousness between these areas. This flexibility was, however, rapidly disappearing as the Natal colonial state started to implement ever-more rigorous forms of municipal segregation (Swanson, 1983).
With regard to the print shops in the ‘white’ area, these would generally have been staffed by white men, except for very menial positions, which would have been occupied by Indians and/or Africans. The white printers were united by strong bonds of solidarity. Most printers had done apprenticeships in Britain, parts of the empire or Natal, and belonged to the well-organised and vocal South African Typographical Union (Downes, 1952). These workplace networks promoted a marked sense of racial protectionism and white labourism. These networks spread into other areas. One key institution of colonial Natal society was the volunteer military regiment, which supplemented the small imperial standing army and promoted a widespread ethic of militarised masculinity, as Rob Morrell (2001) has demonstrated. At times, men who worked together signed up for these regiments, as did a group of typographers, who joined the Frontier Light Horse in 1879 in the lead-up to the Anglo-Zulu war (Downes, 1952:16). In the ‘Asiatic Invasion’ crisis of 1896, this cross between the volunteer regiment and the workplace became apparent: lynch mobs were organised into divisions according to their professions, such as railwaymen, carpenters and joiners, store assistants, plasterers and bricklayers, saddlers, and tailors – and, of course, printers (Natal Witness, 15 January 1897).
The establishment at 113 Grey Street was somewhat different. Firstly, the staff members were diverse, being drawn, as we have seen, from Mauritius, St Helena, Gujarat, South India, Durban and parts of southern Africa. One employee was a member of the South African Typographical Union and had had to seek permission to work for an Indian (Downes, 1952:99). The other workers were not unionised.
Another distinctive feature of the press was its use of different languages. For commercial printing, this would have involved typesetting in a range of different languages and scripts. As Indian Opinion got going, the work of translation became central to the print-shop activities. The newspaper first appeared in four languages – English, Gujarati, Hindi and Tamil – although the latter two were subsequently dropped. Even working with two languages, the process of translation formed part of the labour processes of the press. Some pieces were written in Gujarati, but others were translations from English. In theory, what should have happened was that the Gujarati compositor would translate articles from English and then set them in Gujarati. However, the reality was that compositors were not always fluent in English. The long-suffering Nazar had to summarise the gist of the article for them in Gujarati so that they could then typeset it. Type in Indian languages was always in short supply and the compositor at one point enjoined Nazar to avoid words with the Gujarati letter ‘a’, since stocks of this character were particularly low (Bhana & Hunt, 1989:112).
The IPP shop floor drew together different traditions of printing that workers brought with them from different regions of the Indian Ocean. It is difficult to know exactly what these traditions were, but in the case of India we can hazard some speculations thanks to the rich research on 19th- and early 20th-century printing history (Shaw, 1977a; 1977b; Ghosh, 2006; Pinto, 2007; Stark, 2004; 2007). This work demonstrates the diverse forms of printing and publishing that arose from regionally specific configurations of factors such as existing scribal and manuscript traditions; the presence of state-, mission- and European-owned printing; and, in the second half of the 19th century, a significant rise of indigenous printer-publishers. This latter category varied enormously. At the top end, as Ulrike Stark (2004:254) demonstrates, the Nawal Kishore Press in Lucknow was a substantial operation with 350 hand presses, a ‘considerable number’ of steam presses and 900 employees. At the bottom end, as Anindita Ghosh (2006) demonstrates, the small presses of Batalla huddled together in narrow lanes in the north of Calcutta producing a steady stream of popular almanacs, pamphlets and images. While any generalisation is difficult, Stark (2007:2) notes that Indian printer-publishers assumed complex roles of ‘entrepreneur, publicist, literary patron, philanthropist, disseminator of knowledge and educator’. This formulation usefully reminds us that the line between commercial and non-commercial is not inevitable or automatic, and some Indian firms straddled this divide, functioning as commercial concerns deeply committed to projects of social reform. The IPP was not dissimilar. While a commercial operation, it was equally pledged to social reform through both Indian Opinion and its links to the Natal Indian Congress.
The move to Phoenix did not represent a complete break with these traditions. Gandhi certainly sloughed off the more obviously commercial operations of the press, possibly because of his experience at the hands of the lynch mob arranged, as we have seen, into artisanal units, including one comprising printers. This printers’ platoon made visible the links of capitalism and militarism, and might have provided an early intimation of this theme, which was to become so important in Gandhi’s thinking.
While he toned down the commercial aspects, he played up the idea of the press as a mode of social reform, using the IPP as a theatre to display a new utopian and cosmopolitan world where everyone, at least on the face of it, dirtied their hands by operating the press, a task in India generally reserved for the lower castes. As different nationalities, religions and races worked side by side, the press enacted a modernist idea of the family business tied together not by lineage, but by common ideas. The press was central to Gandhi’s satyagraha campaigns. Not only did it produce Indian Opinion, but its labour routines formed part of the programme of disciplining and preparing satyagrahis. The press was also important in Gandhi’s educational experiments.
In the context of Durban, the IPP at Phoenix was not the only press of its kind. Outside Durban there were three Christian presses, which were likewise more ideological than market driven. These were the mission presses of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions at Adams College, the Trappist-run presses at Mariannhill and John Dube’s press at Ohlange Institute. Gandhi had visited the two latter presses, which are often cited as possible models for Phoenix (Swan, 1985:59; Mesthrie, 1987:110). Like the press at Phoenix, these other ones were located outside the city and tended to be anti-urban and anti-industrial.
While all of these presses sought to operate beyond the constraints of the market, Gandhi’s press aimed to move beyond the state as well. While he was in South Africa, Gandhi appeared to pay little attention to copyright, a position he refined in India through his reiterated rejections of copyright law as a form of private property that prevented the free circulation of ideas (Bhattacharya, 1965:113). At least in Natal, mission presses generally observed copyright legislation studiously. For Gandhi, then, texts were meant to circulate as widely and as freely as possible, moving beyond the market and the state, and bringing into being a new type of reader in that utopian and necessarily cosmopolitan space.
But what were the nature and boundary of this utopian space and what was its ideal reader? The first point to note is that Gandhi’s ideal reader was someone who took his/her task seriously to the point of seeing himself/herself as a distant collaborator in the press and the newspaper. At the height of Gandhi’s satyagraha campaign in India, the newspapers Young India and Harijan sold in tens of thousands and started to make a profit. Some advisors urged Gandhi to lower the price of the papers. He refused, feeling that the cover price represented a form of commitment from the reader, who had a responsibility and a role to play in the production of the newspaper. In Gandhi’s words, readers should be ‘as much interested in the upkeep of the papers as the managers and the editors are’ (quoted in Bhattacharya, 1965:107).
In this spirit, he frequently enjoined readers to be conscientious and dedicated. They should read and reread articles, act on them, and recruit new readers. He urged readers of Indian Opinion to keep a scrapbook into which they could paste important articles that could then be reread. When the Gujarati section of Indian Opinion ran a biography series, the newspaper wrote:
We hope that readers of this journal will read [these] lives and follow them in practice … We have suggested earlier that each one of our subscribers should maintain a file on Indian Opinion. We remind [readers again] on this occasion (quoted in Bhattacharya, 1965:20).
At other times he urged readers to copy out sections of newspapers and pass them on to friends or to read the paper to non-literate colleagues (Bhattacharya, 1965:140–41).
In his textual practice, Gandhi aimed to establish, in his own words, ‘an intimate and clean bond between the editor and the readers’ (quoted in Bhattacharya, 1965:75). Towards this end, he refined his famed spare prose style by, as he phrased it, writing with ‘not one word more than necessary’ (quoted in Bhattacharya, 1965:79). This mode of composition constituted a form of spiritual discipline, as Gandhi explained:
The reader can have no idea of the restraint I have to exercise from week to week in the choice of topics on my vocabulary. It is a training for me. It enables me to peep into myself and make discoveries of my weakness. Often my vanity dictates a smart expression or my anger a harsh adjective. It is a terrible ordeal but a fine exercise to remove these weeds (quoted in Bhattacharya, 1965:80).
This almost puritanical plain style became the rhetorical means through which he could invent the idea of speaking directly to the reader. His concern for the reader also stretched to the physical appearance of texts. Gandhi liked neat handwriting and clean printing: ‘good printing can create a valuable spiritual state in the reader’ (quoted in Bhattacharya, 1965:103).
The importance of the reader was reiterated in Hind Swaraj, the book in which Gandhi enunciated his core political philosophy. The preface to the English translation appeared in Indian Opinion on 2 April 1910. This document explained that the book takes the form of a dialogue between an editor and readers that, in Gandhi’s words in the preface, ‘took place between several friends, mostly readers of Indian Opinion and myself’.
Since Hind Swaraj sets out Gandhi’s key ideas, the reader of Indian Opinion is an extremely significant figure. Much of the book enunciates a proto-nationalist vision of ‘India’ that is brought into being by readers in South Africa. Such a reader must be able to move effortlessly between South Africa and India and must understand that ‘India’ is an idea that emerges in part in South Africa. Such a reader must be able to operate within the Indian Ocean and understand the relationships emerging across it. Indeed, one way of reading Indian Opinion is as a site for experimenting with genres that bring such an Indian Ocean reader into being. Let us look at three quick examples of genres of circulation that take on this work: the cutting, the Indian Ocean travelogue and the booklet.
Like many newspapers of the time that could not afford foreign correspondents, Indian Opinion included excerpts from other newspapers. Often, these were from papers across the Indian Ocean in places like Beira, Zanzibar, Mombasa, Nairobi, Bombay, Madras and Rangoon. These papers in turn excerpted material from Indian Opinion and one another. Together, this form of textual practice constituted a quoting circle that enacted an Indian Ocean textual circuit.
Another use of the cutting in Indian Opinion pertained to reporting developments in South Africa via India. A report in the edition of 26 September 1910 reads: ‘Mr G. A. Natesan writes in the Indian Review: A cable from South Africa brings the news that the British Indians in the Transvaal are taking a vow of passive resistance as a protest against the recent Asiatic Amendment Bill.’ In part, this cutting validates local struggles by demonstrating international interest in the event.Yet such cuttings illustrate a mode of simultaneous reading as if the event were taking place in India and South Africa at the same time and as if the reader could inhabit both spaces.
Other instances of such South Africa–India reading strategies were common. Under the heading ‘The National Congress and Indians in South Africa’, the 12 December 1903 edition noted that an important meeting was to he held at ‘Tata Mansions, Waudby Road’. The meeting was in fact to take place in Bombay, but it is taken for granted that every reader knew where Waudby Road was. Similarly, in terms of time, readers are expected to have the ability to imagine interlocking time schemes across the Indian Ocean. One report on 19 November 1903 reads: ‘By the time this issue of “Indian Opinion” reaches India, preparations for the meeting of the national assembly will have very far advanced.’
Another way of creating circuits of significance was through Indian Ocean travel writing. The most visible version of this genre was the travelogue of moving between Bombay and Durban, and stopping at each of the intermediate ports. The form was generally reserved for political celebrities whose progress from port to port was reported in extensive details. In the case of G. K. Gokhale, the Indian National Congress notable who visited South Africa in 1912, the newspaper hyped up his visit by reporting his elaborate farewell in Bombay and then his reception in Mombasa, Zanzibar and Beira, as well as his progress through South Africa.8 It is as if the person were invented through travel, becoming more ‘real’ and visible with each successive newspaper report.
In addition to producing a newspaper, the IPP produced a series of small booklets, many of them reruns of material in the paper. In all, about ten such titles were produced (Hofmeyr, 2008).
Some of these explored Indian Ocean themes. One pertinent example is a retelling of the Hindu epic Ramayana by J. L. P. Erasmus, a Boer commandant who had been captured by the British during the Anglo-Boer War. Along with 9,000 others, he was sent as a prisoner of war to India. He was held in various locations in northern India and was finally released in Amritsar. Before returning to South Africa, Erasmus befriended a lawyer and through him learned a lot about Indian religion and history. On his return home, he must have linked up with Gandhi or Henry Polak (probably through the legal world, since Erasmus was also a lawyer).9 Erasmus’s lectures on the Ramayana given to the Transvaal Philosophical Society were printed in the newspaper and then brought out in book form. The book remained an Indian Opinion stalwart and was still being advertised in the 1930s. The genesis of the book requires one to think about unusual cosmopolitan links and axes in the Indian Ocean.
Indian Opinion ran advertisements for its own books and for some that it imported from India and Britain. It advocated the idea that to buy a book was to enter a political and philanthropic contract, very often with an Indian Ocean component. In 1914 C. F. A. Andrews, a Christian priest and Gandhi’s right-hand man, published his lectures on Tagore. Indian Opinion urged readers to buy the book and reminded them that proceeds would go to Santiniketan, the school of Rabindranath Tagore, the Indian poet (1 April 1914). The first biography of Gandhi by Joseph Doke appeared in 1909. Readers were encouraged to buy the book, since any profits would be devoted to the cause of passive resistance (22 May 1909). Buying a book hence constituted an act of ethical solidarity often across the Indian Ocean.
Gandhi’s view of books was an unusual one. For him, books were not commodities, they should not be copyrighted, they were certainly transnational, and stood somewhere between a newspaper and a book. In other words, they defied what we today regard as key characteristics of a book – it is copyrighted; it is produced in a national space; it is distinct from a newspaper, magazine or pamphlet; and it is a commodity bought by the reader.
Today these booklets are very difficult to track down, having made their way into surprisingly few libraries. They conform closely to Meredith McGill’s analysis of such under-the-radar texts. McGill (2003) examines the pre-Civil War era in the United States (the 1830s and 1840s) and directs her attention to this unindexed world of uncopyrighted newspapers and periodicals; book-magazines (books masquerading as magazines to elude postal charges); and what were then legitimate reprints at a time when international copyright law was not in place and many saw reprinting as a triumph of American democracy over British publishing monopolies:
Texts that circulate without authors’ names attached frequently remain unindexed and untraceable, as do authored texts that are published without their authors’ knowledge or consent. Unauthorized reprinting escapes the enumerative strategies of bibliographers and collectors who remain tied to authorial intention and the principle of scarcity as grounds of value. The mass-cultural circulation of high-cultural texts confounds our critical taxonomies even as the transnational status of reprinted texts makes it difficult for us to assimilate them into national literary narratives (McGill, 2003:2–3).
Gandhi’s printing policies certainly conformed to these principles, but extended them even further by seeking to move beyond the marketplace entirely. Gandhi pursued an avowedly utopian cosmopolitan idea of printing, publishing and reading that took shape in the Indian Ocean. For him, the production and consumption of books should not be separated, but should form part of a continuous ethical community in which printers, authors and readers become comrades.
These ideas have not survived the forces of the capitalist market that Gandhi so abhorred. Like the legend of his printing press on the SS Khedive, his textual experiments have disappeared into the archive of lost Indian Ocean utopias. They are nonetheless worth salvaging, not least for the new light they can throw on print culture and cosmopolitanism.
The IPP was avowedly cosmopolitan in its personnel, methods of working, textual products and their envisaged audiences. It supported a form of textual circulation and modes of reading that straddled the Indian Ocean and helped bring into being the universalisms and cosmopolitanisms uniting different groups across the sea. Commenting on the wide range of people who visited Phoenix, Prabhudas Gandhi (1957:58) notes: ‘our jungle school had the atmosphere of an international university.’ His observation reminds us of the remarkable cosmopolitanism of Phoenix, which the press had helped to create. The comment also underlines that like all cosmopolitan projects, this one had boundaries. Prabhudas imagines himself on the Gujarati frontier marked by what he saw as ‘the jungle’ and its African inhabitants. Like the Zulu women erased from Gandhi’s account of the press, however, Africans were never to be numbered among the fraternity of Gandhi’s cosmopolitanism.
