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Chapter

The Interlocking Worlds of the Anglo-Boer War in South Africa and India ¹⁴

Pradip Kumar Datta

Internationalising national histories

The Anglo-Boer War was an international event. This statement may seem unstartling given the way global events, such as the invasion of Iraq or the attacks on New York and Washington DC on 11 September 2001, keep occurring today. The distinction of this war is that it is one of the first events of this kind. Symbolically straddling the last two centuries (1899–1902), as if it were foreshadowing the contemporary moment of our modernity, the war was notable, among other things, for actively involving people from five continents and for provoking debates in separate political circles, many of them located in countries that had no direct stake in its outcome. It was also international in the simple sense of providing a serious spectacle that was closely covered by newspapers of different countries. The course of the war was sensational. The British – the world imperial power, for whom the Boers seemed no match – surprisingly faced a series of reversals at the outset, a trend that culminated in the ‘Black Week’ of December 1899, when British forces were defeated in three important battles. They recovered, but after having defeated the Boer conventional armies by June 1901 they found the guerrilla tactics of the Boer commandos too difficult to handle by conventional means. British frustration inspired their deployment of catastrophic technologies of violence that included scorched earth policies and the use of concentration camps for Boer children and women, as well as African families.

In small or large measure, the Anglo-Boer War changed lives and histories in different parts of the world. Debates occurred among European socialists on the nature and implications of capitalist colonial transformation of pre-capitalist systems. What effect did colonialism have on capitalism? Was it ‘progressive’? (Kaarsholm, 1988). More immediate quarrels were enacted in countries that participated in the war. Troops were sent from New Zealand, Canada, Australia, India and, of course, Britain, while a small international contingent of volunteers from Europe joined the Boers out of solidarity with their cause.¹⁵ This sharpened political lines in countries that sent the troops. In Canada and Britain, for instance, it produced a gigantic wave of patriotism. In Britain, the volunteer movement mobilised participation in the war among the middle and working classes (Miller, 2005). On the other hand, many socialists and liberals supported the other side. Bertrand Russell, who later became a leading pacifist, recalled that he had supported the Boers (1991:136–38), while Keir Hardie, the Scottish socialist and co-founder of the Labour Party, sympathised with the ‘unpolluted’, ‘pastoral’ Boer world (Kaarsholm, 1988:49). Dissident Christian sects such as the Quakers, together with some socialists, however, mounted brave pacifist campaigns. We know, for instance, the strangely evocative story of Martin Butler, an artisan, pedlar, worker and newspaper editor operating in rural New Brunswick in Canada. A man with Catholic and socialist sympathies, he became convinced of the evils of imperialism after Canada had dispatched its troops and launched a newspaper to pursue his pacifist campaign, at considerable personal cost (Stiles, 2004). In India, British brutality inspired the angry poetry of Rabindranath Tagore that presaged, with uncanny prescience, the apocalyptic conflicts that nationalism promised in the new century.¹⁶

Indeed, there is sufficient material to write a global history of the Anglo-Boer War. However, my intention is comparatively limited – and somewhat different. I wish to look at the histories of South Africa and India and the ways in which these were shaped by the war. This is not a history formed by encounters of travellers that can then be explained by the framework of civilisational encounters. As a regional unit within the international, South Africa/India acquires its coherence and interconnectedness from being a part of the same empire. This is compounded by an inter-imbrication of large populations that is the consequence of the migration of large numbers of people who inhabit an international polity where population is increasingly equated with political power and cultural threat. Indian migrants occupied ambiguous political and social positions in South Africa and occasioned new initiatives in the war. In India, meanwhile, smaller numbers of politically dominant temporary migrants, i.e. the British residents, provided more immediate intensity to the war effort. At the same time, the South Africa/ India region was differentiated by the fact that while South Africa was a settler colony, India was directly colonised. An interweaving thread to stitch together my narrative is provided by the career of the barrister Mohandas Gandhi – later to become the Mahatma – who worked for and with people in both contexts. He vigorously linked the war to the general conditions of the South African Indian migrant indentured labourers and traders, and campaigned for them in an India that, for its own reasons, was concerned with the outcome of the war.

Instead of a global history, I wish to write an interlocking history of the South Africa/India region. What I call interlocking history is in many ways an extension of the conception of connected histories that Sanjay Subrahmanyam has formulated. Like Subrahmanyam, my interest in comparative history is subordinate to a concern with the history of interlinkages between different spatial entities. Subrahmanyam appears to define connected histories in two ways. The first is in terms of an explanation of circulation and spread, which he charts out through the dissemination of millenarian beliefs in the long duration of the ‘Early Modern’ period that spans the period from the 15th to the 17th centuries (Subrahmanyam, 1997a:748). The second focusses on a history of encounters between two cultures/civilisations to work out the ‘dialectical’ relationship between them. This involves a comparison of mentalities and an elaboration of the complexity of the transactions (Subrahmanyam, 2005:11–12).

Interlocking history builds on Subrahmanyam’s insights to make two distinctions. The first concerns the nature of the event. Although the Anglo-Boer War has been seen in terms of the circulation model, i.e. in terms of ‘effects’ and ‘feedbacks’ from contexts other than South Africa (the premise of histories of the war that I have cited above), the contours of the event itself pose a somewhat different challenge, that of conceptualising it as happening in several locations. The key point here is of the simultaneity – or, rather, near simultaneity – of the event and its extensions. The possibility of an event affecting a place outside that of its origin almost immediately, is of course, conceivable only from the late 19th century, after the introduction of the telegraph in the 1870s, which allowed the rapid transmission of information to newspapers, backed up by the ever-increasing familiarity of other spaces owing to the rapid development of transport technology.¹⁷ The near simultaneity of transmission does away with the fundamental distinction between the originative space of the event and the space of its impact. The Anglo-Boer War became an international event not only because it disseminated itself, but also because the rapidity of its dissemination allowed ‘outsiders’ to participate in its unfolding; those outside South Africa responded to the war by using it to make sense of their lives. Obviously, the event does not produce a uniform habitation, for it works on and with separate configurations that possess different political, social and cultural elements. Some of these features may be common, some commensurable and some may or may not make sense in the context of the other. But the event interlocks these configurations, making them address each other, and in doing so changes the internal configuration of each ‘national’ space.

The specific supra-regional canvas of interlocking history allows us to attend to a paradoxical double movement of our modernity. What we have in our modernity is the parallel formation of national and international orders of social life. The rise of the national accounts for the idea of defined and bounded contexts: national histories define their embeddedness in the nation by placing boundaries around the context in which events are then located. Often overlooked in the privileging of the nation is the obvious fact that it develops with a sense of inhabiting the world of the international. Indeed, without the latter, there cannot exist a sense of the nation and the particularity of belonging that it signifies and enacts. It is true, of course, that a sense of hierarchy is maintained between the two, by which the nation acquires its privilege. But it is equally relevant to note that the international possesses its own sense of importance that allows the national to map out its needs, ambitions and particularities. This is especially true of the imperial world, where the international is critical to understanding the overdeterminations that shape the world of the colonial masters and which, in turn, hold out important consequences for the way the national condition is thought.

The general contour of this double movement may be understood through newspapers. While dominantly ‘national’ in their coverage, newspapers sometimes privilege international events over it. During the Anglo-Boer War, the balance of political reportage often shifted in favour of the international. Both colonial and Indian newspapers in English gave exhaustive daily accounts of the war, especially during the early months of surprising Boer successes. Anxieties about the outcome of the war, the experience of soldiers and debates about it saw the war become as significant as domestic events within the hierarchy of news space. The space of the ‘other’ became as important as one’s ‘own’ preoccupations; it began to inhabit the imagination as much as the national. This deep sense of connection was consolidated by other forms of writing (and speaking), such as the poems of Tagore.

The intensity of this preoccupation produced a shared public world between India and South Africa. I should add some riders immediately, however. This public world – as is probably true for all internationalised publics, except those that are institutionalised as such – did not possess a consistency that is true of national publics. International publics like this one tend to be produced conjuncturally, through specific issues. The fact that the South Africa/India public produced through the Anglo-Boer War functioned coherently for a relatively long period is in large part due to Gandhi’s initiatives. Indeed, once he returned to India, South Africa tended to become less important a preoccupation in India (although it never became unimportant, especially after the introduction of apartheid). I should also add that the constituent elements of this public were not symmetrically integrated. South African Indians were far more continuously engaged with events in India, as Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie’s story (2004) of Manilal Gandhi’s editorship of Indian Opinion reveals.

I am not interested here in thinking through the wider nature of this public. Rather, I wish simply to examine its conjunctural interlocking during the war. I aim to focus on the idea of the ‘imperial subject’ – specifying its nature, practices and consequences – as the general organising principle of this public. In both countries, the ‘imperial subject’ determined the position and, in varying degrees, the self-definition of the colonised. The ‘imperial subject’ was a critical part of the political identity of the migrant Indians, given their small numbers, relatively uninfluential status and the escalating racist campaign that they faced. Indeed, even as late as 1913 Gandhi invoked loyalty to the ‘imperial subject’, although, after all his disappointments with the imperial authorities, he now visualised the Crown as a purely ideal entity. In India during the internally placid turn-of-the-century period, on the other hand, the idea of the ‘imperial subject’ remained, but its hold became progressively more tenuous. Within this constellation of trajectories of the ‘imperial subject’, the war was obviously experienced very differently and produced divergent effects. For South African Indians whose conditions were rapidly deteriorating owing to a slew of discriminatory legislation, the war was more than a matter of direct involvement in its battles; it was seen to hold the key to their future position in relation to other communities. For Indians ‘back home’, the event came in a discursive shape and hence could not have such serious, practical repercussions. But it did offer a powerful public preoccupation, crystallising an ambivalence towards the colonial authority that deepened scepticism of the Raj. In retrospect, it makes the advent of the Swadeshi movement in Bengal – the first mass movement against the British that was launched in 1905, three years after the war had ended – seem less surprising and sudden. Nevertheless, differences between these two nationalised spaces functioned with a sense of kinship, which came fundamentally from the fact of imperial domination and nationalist concern, with Gandhi a key link. This is an obvious, but enabling observation. Together with the recognition of the differences that mark the two historical worlds, it will allow us to explore the intricacies of ‘imperial subjecthood’ and the problematic configurations of nationalised communities within an internationalised world.

The Anglo-Boer War, Gandhi and the ‘imperial subject’

Studies of Gandhi as a nationalist generally regard his period of volunteer service for the British during the Anglo-Boer War as an illustration of his loyalist phase that preceded his scepticism of British authority and subsequent turn to nationalism. While one cannot fundamentally disagree with this reading of his career, it reduces the idea of loyalism to a simpleminded belief that existed in an asymmetrical relationship with the many instances of discrimination he experienced in South Africa.¹⁸ Gandhi’s loyalist phase is more valuable if it allows us to observe how the norm of the ‘imperial subject’ functioned in the political, social and cultural world of South African Indians. What explains its necessity, and what forms of empowerment does it allow and curtail? These questions become more significant if we take into account the fact that Gandhi’s loyalism had to make sense to his Indian followers, who did not always support his positions.¹⁹ It is also relevant to note that the African leadership of this time supported the British and played a critical military role in countering the Boer guerrillas (Warwick, 1983).²⁰ Thus, I would like to begin my account with the experience of the Voluntary Ambulance Corps formed by the South African Indians, which gave visible proof of their loyalism by hard work. It also involved a substantial risk to their lives.

The work of the Ambulance Corps was a grind. After fairly rudimentary training, the volunteers had to work in rough terrain, sometimes without water. Frequently, they had to cover up to 100 miles in five days, usually with their stretchers and heavy baggage that included their water, food and firewood. Initially, the thousand-odd stretcher bearers had to sleep without tents. At times, they went beyond their brief to work at the front, with shells falling in very close proximity. The volunteers were divided into two groups. The first was drawn from indentured labourers, requisitioned from their masters by the army and the administration; they were paid 20 shillings per week, as against the 35 shillings paid to their white counterparts. The other group was the ‘leaders’, some 30 individuals drawn from professional classes and led by Gandhi, who volunteered their services free. The Indian traders declined active participation, but assisted with sizeable donations of money and rations. They even made a substantial contribution to the Durban Women’s Patriotic League, a leading support organisation for the war effort, many members of which had earlier participated in anti-Indian demonstrations. The generosity of the Indians was therefore astounding. Despite this, their initial offer in October 1899 to assist the war effort in any capacity was declined; it was only in December, at the time of British military reversals, that General Buller, the commander-in-chief, accepted.²¹

The Indian involvement in the war dramatised a conspicuous display of loyalty, as demonstrated by the unconditional nature of their offer, the acceptance of discriminatory pay, the unremunerated service of the ‘leaders’ and the risking of their lives. Gandhi unequivocally declared that ‘the English-speaking Indians came to the conclusion that they would offer their services … unconditionally and absolutely without payment, in any capacity … in order to show to the Colonists that they were worthy subjects of the Queen’ (Gandhi, 1960c:129). The Indians appear to have had a point to prove, an anxiety to soothe. Gandhi called the act of involvement a ‘privilege’ (Gandhi, 1960c:114), a word that holds more meaning than the immediate context of its use here suggests.

Taken together, these acts and statements define the peculiar double location of the ‘imperial subject’. On the one hand, it was based on the notion of separate nations, which it was the obligation of imperialism to develop. This was an international system that prompted Gandhi to express his trust in the empire as a ‘family of nations’ (cited in Gandhi, 1960c:viii). At the same time, ‘imperial subjecthood’ also allowed a placeless loyalty (bounded only by the empire) through which people located outside the originative space of their nation could claim a purchase on the land of their new habitation. And this was critical for the Indians, because the claims of the ‘imperial subject’ offered the only substantive ground for the Indians to residence in the new land that many were beginning to regard as their home. It must be remembered that Indians were migrants – consisting of indentured labourers, with a small number of traders and a handful of professionals – who in the 1890s were still newcomers to South Africa (Swan, 1985:1–9). They could not claim to belong to the land by virtue of prior occupation, like Africans; by the fact of settling on it and making it productive, like the Boers; or because they had mastered it, as the British had done. The vocabulary of independent nationalism was one that was not accessible to them. What they did possess was the claim to being an ‘imperial subject’: ‘It was the Indian’s proudest boast that they were British subjects. If they were not, they would not have had a footing in South Africa’, proclaimed Gandhi eloquently (1960c:136).

This purchase had become critical at a time when a rapid offensive was being mounted to remove the South African ground from under the Indians. The threat to Indians was already palpable from the early 1890s, but it reached a climax on Gandhi’s return from India in 1896. Ostensibly made to fetch Kasturba, his wife, Gandhi utilised the trip to mobilise public support in India, which was one of the aims of the Natal Indian Congress (NIC). He travelled across the country from Calcutta to Bombay, giving speeches and persuading the press, especially Anglo-Indian newspapers, to publish sympathetic articles. He also elicited support from Indian National Congress (INC) leaders, including Bal Gangadhar Tilak, the extremist leader who called for ‘Swaraj’, or self-rule, and the moderate Gopalkrishna Gokhale. Further, he wrote the Green Pamphlet, which summarised the injustices perpetrated on South African Indians. This article was misreported by Reuters and circulated internationally. The subsequent outrage in South Africa resulted in the setting up of two anti-Indian organisations in Natal and a campaign that mobilised railwaymen, shop assistants and bricklayers to demonstrate against the landing of the ship in which Gandhi returned. Only through the intervention of an English woman and assistance from a frightened administration (which had been stoking racist sentiment, but wanted control over self-defeating excesses) did Gandhi manage to escape from a crowd that had expressed the desire to lynch him.²²

The demonstration gave impetus to the racist legislation, press campaigns and public statements by white leaders that had begun in earnest in the period that Natal acquired and consolidated responsible government. It provided the sanction of visible popular authority to government policies. Swanson (1983) has drawn attention to the importance of racism among administrators in Natal in explaining the popular onslaught. What probably needs more emphasis is the fear of a growing migrant population, some of whose members were prospering and providing business competition: there was a pervasive fear of being ‘swamped’ by Indian ‘hordes’ and traders.²³ The consequence was a multipronged attack on Indians. While the Franchise Bill sought to remove the claims of Indians to citizenship and political influence through the vote, indentured labourers were legislatively discouraged from remaining in Natal after the expiry of their contracts. The Wholesalers and Retailers Licensing Act curbed the commercial rivalry to whites posed by Indian merchants. A refinement of the Immigration Restriction and Quarantine Act – and its strict implementation – sought to counter the spectre of Asian ‘hordes’.²⁴ Running parallel in a mutually supportive movement were measures passed in the Transvaal. As early as 1885 the government there had passed Law 3, which excluded Asians from citizenship and ownership of land, in addition to placing them in separate locations for residence and business. For its part, the Orange Free State devised a more streamlined solution: it simply banned Indians from trading or owning land. It was a bleak decade for the Indians.

Gandhi was convinced that these measures were designed not merely to ghettoise Indians, but to ease them out of South Africa itself.²⁵ He could not discount the possibility of what we call ‘ethnic cleansing’ today. It was precisely for this reason that he welcomed the Anglo-Boer War as a ‘blessing’ for Indians (Gandhi, 1960c:215), for it allowed formal acknowledgement by the authorities that Indians could assist the empire and work with European subjects. It provided access to a sense of a shared condition, which was reflected in patronising acknowledgement of Indian services by normally anti-Indian settler newspapers.²⁶ The sense of sharing was clearly not based on equality, but nevertheless could be regarded as a precondition for the procurement of more rights. It is somewhat embarrassing today – but also interesting – to note Gandhi’s delighted gratitude as he crowed over the ‘enchanting’ sound of the phrase ‘British subject’ (Gandhi, 1960c:110). His sense of doting wonder can also be read as an expectation of a more substantive promise than the simple satisfaction of knowing that Asians had gained recognition from their imperial master. What was it in the status of ‘imperial subjecthood’ that held out greater possibilities?

The ‘imperial subject’ idea involved ambivalence and paradox. It allowed a sense of anchorage in the dominion of the empire, but nothing prevented it from aspiring to a status on a par with that of British subjects living under a constitutional monarchy; it presented the promise of citizenship for the colonised subject. This ideal lay behind the many appeals that Gandhi made to British officials and the press, ranging from Christian notions of brotherhood to British standards of character and free trade. Of course, the major, recurrent appeal that Gandhi made was to Queen Victoria’s proclamation of 1858 that had been issued to signal the change to imperial rule in India and which promised equality of opportunity and freedom from discrimination to all subjects of the queen in India. The proclamation was already regularly used in India to demand more jobs for Indians (Ray, 1979:93), but Gandhi treated it as if it were a regulating principle of a constitution.

The plurality of Gandhi’s appeals may show the possibilities for the ‘imperial subject’, but it also underlines its inherent weakness. Clearly, Gandhi could not pretend that he was a British citizen: reverential treatment of Victoria’s proclamation concealed the absence of any constitution guaranteeing citizenship rights, a fact that was ruthlessly underlined by the provisions of the Franchise Bill in South Africa. The ‘subject’ part was not interchangeable with the ‘citizen’ element of the ‘imperial subject’ appeal. At the same time, it was not ontologically divorced from it, for the ‘subject’ occupied a position on a shared continuum with the ‘citizen’. In a letter to the Times of India on 20 December 1901, Gandhi called for Indians to assert themselves ‘and to claim for her sons in South Africa the full rights of a British citizen’. This continuum was a temporal one. All cultures shared in the same history that was measured by the time lag of ‘civilisation’. Some national civilisations were historically more advanced than others. This meant that the ‘imperial subject’ idea was premised on an internal hierarchy between those who ‘represented’ history and those who had to catch up.

As we know, this lag normally supplied the justification for colonial rule, for it allowed colonial rulers to claim legitimacy on the grounds that their rule was necessary to ‘civilise’ the colonised. But what is sometimes overlooked is that the pace of progress is never predicted, and neither does the logic of historical justification for imperial rule prescribe clear criteria for judging when and if ‘civilisation’ has been attained. It is precisely this lacuna that Gandhi – while attempting to expand the scope of rights and recognition – exploited. True, other nationalist figures did the same, but what is interesting in Gandhi’s case is his notion of Indian civilisation. In contrast to orientalist-inspired visions, Gandhi saw it as an unfolding story of achievements that had not been interrupted by the medieval Muslim period. For him, Akbar, the great Mughal emperor who initiated a policy of religious tolerance and consolidated a mixed Hindu-Muslim culture, represented a major achievement. It was a civilisation that changed and absorbed outside elements. Consequently, it appropriated ‘modern’ British contributions such as electoral democracy and could boast of professionals who had reached the higher echelons of the British establishment.²⁷ This narrative of civilisation subsumes the imperial notion of learning from colonial culture within the assumption of an existing and dynamic civilisation. The process of ‘learning’ from the British was not so much a pedagogic act as a part of a longer history of cultural absorption and transformation. Consequently, the hierarchy is maintained, not as a fixed and unbridgeable chasm of standards from the British, but as the formal and pragmatic acceptance of distance. Thus, Gandhi argued the case for inclusion of Indians in the Natal franchise by simply reassuring the settlers that Indians did not have any political ambitions: it was really a matter of self-respect for them (Gandhi, 1960c:101). He did not need to make civilisational claims. In short, the assertion of comparable civilisational standing was accompanied by a self-deprecating acknowledgement of formal subordination, a position that prevented the hierarchical distance from being grounded on substantive, ontological difference.

The Anglo-Boer War and Indian hierarchies

I have explained the importance of the ‘imperial subject’ in claiming anchorage in South Africa. In the light of my discussion on ‘civilisation’, it becomes clear that the ‘imperial subject’ is a peculiarly high-modern phenomenon, in which a form of belonging is claimed by ‘rootedness’ in an internationalised territorial entity defined by the British Empire. What is also interesting is that this anchorage is not embedded in a system of immutable hierarchies. The hierarchies of civilisation are based on the modern principles of social mobility, for they allow access to both a shared and a dynamic schema of time through which the colonised could aspire, if not to equality, then to something akin to citizenship and symmetrical recognition. But it is precisely at this point, where ‘imperial subjecthood’ holds out a promise of acceptance, that it also withholds the offer. This contradiction in the ‘imperial subject’ idea became very obvious to Gandhi in 1903, following his return from India.

Gandhi had stayed in India for over a year, practising as a barrister and publicising the South African question by addressing the National Congress in 1901 and achieving a resolution from it. One possible reason for his prolonged stay was his confidence that South African Indians, after their contribution to the war, would acquire a better deal under the British. The Gandhian leadership had based its strategy on a fundamental distinction between the British settlers and the Colonial Office. There seemed to be sufficient justification for doing so. The two groups had come into conflict on several occasions regarding policy towards Indians. Further, the Transvaal situation opened an opportunity for Indians to identify with the condition of the disenfranchised, mainly British uitlander settlers,²⁸ to claim recognition for themselves.

The role of the ambulance corps in the war had been publicly well received and gave Gandhi renewed hope, but the British victory did not lead to the amelioration of the position of Indians. Instead, discrimination intensified. The British rigorously implemented discriminatory laws, whereas the former Boer republics had been relatively lax in this regard. They also inaugurated an Asiatic Department where there had previously been none. New discriminatory legislation, such as that which sought to place restrictions on the children of indentured labourers in Natal, was introduced.²⁹ What Gandhi had not considered was that the unification of South Africa, set in motion by the Anglo-Boer War, found initial common ground in racism. The 1902 Treaty of Vereeniging, which paved the way for the union, featured three elements: eventual self-government for the republics, safeguarding the Dutch language and the exclusion of blacks from political partnership (Selby, 1973:201). From the beginning there was consensus on racial discrimination – while agreement on the other points was sorted out only later.³⁰ Racism functioned as a surrogate nationalism.

In a fundamental sense, the contrary relationship between co-belonging and equality was replicated in the internal structure of the ‘nation’. The imperial dispensation of South Africa structured a constant tension between the ‘coolie’ and the ‘free’ Indian. One of the key moves made by the settler governments was the attempt to elide the ‘coolie’ into the ‘Indian/Asian’. The word ‘coolie’ was not only a term of contempt; it had legislative standing. Used by various laws in Natal since the 1860s to refer to indentured labour in order to deploy authoritarian measures such as the pass law, it was enshrined in Law 3 of 1885 to equate ‘coolies’ with non-British subjects such as Malays, Arabs and Turks (Gandhi, 1960c:8–10). The use of the term ‘coolie’ was of a different order from straightforward racist stereotypes. Its use normalised the possibility of a legislative reclassification of non-indentured Indians by which their ‘imperial subject’ status would be taken away.³¹ It may be mentioned that its deployment overrode the use of the popular term ‘Arab’ used to refer to Indian merchants. ‘Coolie’ removed the possibility that Indians might attain ‘freedom’. The threat of legislative reclassification was actually enacted in the Transvaal in 1898, when the Location Law transferred the residences and businesses of Indian merchants and traders to the outskirts of Johannesburg on the understanding that they were not British subjects – and this new place was called the ‘coolie location’.

There has been an important debate on the subject of the relationship between Gandhi and the Indian elite. Swan (1985:44) has suggested that the elite were too concerned with distinguishing themselves from the ‘coolies’ to fight racism, while Parvathi Raman (2004) has pointed to the integrative elements that wove together the world of the Indians. It seems to me that both arguments have merit, but it may be more fruitful to locate the general subject within the context of the downward push exerted by the settler governments. The governmental move to elide the ‘free’ with the indentured intensified the desire of the Indian elite to draw on both class distinctions and caste prejudices to distinguish itself from the ‘coolies’.³² At the same time, the general move to institutionalise the discrimination of all Indians – of which this move was a part – appeared to have affirmed connections. Responding to the imposition of legislative restrictions on the freedom of labourers to complain against their masters, Gandhi described them as ‘the kith and kin’ of ‘free Indians’: by virtue of their position, Gandhi thought, the latter could take a ‘dispassionate view’ of the matter.³³ The letter sums up the paradoxical relationship of the elite to the unfree: it acknowledges the sharing of national bonds, but from the distance of the ‘dispassionate view’.

Nevertheless, it is worth emphasising that the pressures of class distinction intensified by legislation had to coexist with national sentiment aroused by the settler offensive and the strong social and economic links between the two constituencies. Many ex-indentured turned to petty trade or kitchen gardening after completing their tenure. Swan (1985:11–13) observes that the new elite that emerged in 1905 included members from this constituency. It should also not be forgotten that they provided the basic market of the Indian traders, who were themselves closely interrelated economically. Consequently, while their interests may have been marginalised by the Gandhian leadership, they were not completely overlooked. To the legalistically minded Gandhi, the cause of the indentured was taken up only in conditions of legal freedom. Thus, the £3 annual residence tax that the ex-indentured had to pay if they elected to stay on was taken up regularly by Gandhi, who appealed to the principle of free trade. The NIC also defended the right of Indians to ply rickshaws in Durban (Gandhi, 1960c:108). Sometimes the petitions drawn up by Gandhi contained signatures of both the indentured and the free (see Gandhi, 1960a:161).

If Gandhi’s relationship with the ‘coolies’ can be seen as a rudimentary practice of ‘nationness’, it is interesting to note that it was part of another set of hierarchies produced by the ‘imperial subject’. Gandhi’s notion of the ‘national community’ based on kinship and distance is posited on active reiterations of sharing through acts of intervention on behalf of labour, but without foregoing hierarchy – and this hierarchy too was not immutable, but permitted an incipient mobility. At the same time, the practice of ‘nationness’ also drew on the imperial map of civilisations to position itself internationally. Hence, Africans were treated as inferior by the Indians; the sense of co-sharing did not extend to Africans. This produced an additional pressure on Indians. In addition to the prospect of becoming ‘coolie’, the free Indians faced the pressure of another downward push, i.e. the prospect of being regarded as the equivalent of Africans. A major objection of Gandhi to the Transvaal’s Location Law was that it would ‘place [Indians], who are undoubtedly superior to the kaffirs, in close proximity to the latter’ (Gandhi, 1960c:75–76). While the criteria of purity-pollution so important to caste hierarchies may be at play here, what is more important is that this adds force to civilisational distinctions. If the British marked the high end of the civilisational hierarchy, the Africans represented its lowest extreme, and these extremes stabilised the intermediate and mobile position of Indians within it.³⁴ Structurally, the ‘kaffir’ was more important to the maintenance of the position of the free Indian than the ‘coolie’.

Hence, it is not surprising that Gandhi did not seek to build solidarities with blacks, even after his disillusionment with the ‘imperial subject’ project. This may have been precluded by the very terms of his disappointment, for, as I have shown, it stems from a reversal of the direction in which civilisational mobility was supposed to move for the Indians. In Hind Swaraj, an admirable text in many other respects, written towards the end of his stay in South Africa, Gandhi questioned the criteria of civilisation that the British offered and dismissed them as materialistic. He counterposed against them the moral achievements of Indian civilisation. Gandhi replaced the historical grounding of civilisation with a matter–moral divide: one hierarchical scheme replaced another, with the position of moral superiority being given to the Indians and the baser one to the West (Parel, 2009:35–37, 60–63). What remains unspoken of is the position of blacks. It is an absence that can be construed to indicate that, as in the other civilisational order, in this one too he exists outside its pale, made patiently to mark its outer boundaries.

What we are left with is a condition of irony. The diasporic, international world of the ‘imperial subject’ does not produce a corresponding openness to international solidarities. The ‘imperial subject’ idea does not do away with the nation so much as make it possible to be reconstituted in places other than its originative space of habitation. The ‘imperial subject’ may not provide an embedded sense of place, but it provides firm boundaries based on civilisation (and on political criteria that remove groups such as Malays and Chinese from the list of possible solidarities) that foreclose the limits within which a new world is to be made and remade in the work of habitation. This does not mean, however, that the nation was simply transportable and replicable, like other things in the newly internationalising world. The South African experience suggested a more complex movement, in which the nation of the colonised is internationalised even as it began to come into its own. What we have is something akin to a diasporic nationalism, something that was to grow and come into its own only towards the latter part of the 20th century. Having said this, it should also be added that this diasporic nationalism was very different from the clearly worked out pragmatic and affective system of distinctions between countries of habitation and of origin that marks it today. Gandhi’s version of diasporic nationalism in particular was indeterminate. As Dhupelia-Mesthrie (2004) shows us, Gandhi appears to have settled for a segmented version. He migrated back to India and yet left behind his son, friendships, solidarities and the foundational part of his institutional life, especially the Phoenix farm. And he kept contact, giving advice and providing interventions, even as he pitched his battle camp firmly in the world of a spatially determinate nation that provided a more successful site for meeting the need for equality and self-respect that he so deeply cherished.

This is a story of the ‘future’; but it also returns me to the Anglo-Boer War. I turn now to look at the way it shaped another configuration, one not dominated by a single figure and hence a much more internally contested space: the war in India.

The Anglo-Boer War in India

The Anglo-Boer War existed primarily as a discursive event in India, although not entirely so. The volume of coverage is surprising – indeed, astonishing. The main site of the enactment of the war was the news space of British dailies. Two elements stand out in the coverage. Firstly, the newspapers produced, through the multiple sources of the reports they carried, an internationally interlocking site. Reports were datelined from many places. In the absence of foreign correspondents, dailies carried news from international news agencies such as Reuters and reprinted articles and reports from other sources in Durban and Pretoria, but also from London and even the United States. Gandhi’s reports as a participant witness played a significant part in the exposure. All these sources enacted out the war as an international event, especially since reports on European responses to the war were given on a regular basis.

The second element of the war news space was its saturating effect. A wide range of newspapers across the country carried daily reports under front-page banner headlines, particularly during the three-month period from October 1899 to January 1900. This was preceded by intermittent, but fairly extensive coverage of the crises leading to the war. What added to the power of the coverage – and this is something that happens particularly with war reportage – was that it took on a serial form. The progress of the war became imbricated into the everyday lives of the people of a foreign land precisely because its outcome was not known. It was not a finished narrative, which intensified the implications of the war and the questions it raised. Besides its immediate consequences for India’s position in Asia and the stability of the Raj in India, there was also a muted, but recurringly enunciated possibility of the war becoming a European one (Hitavadi, 1899a). It is probably for all these reasons that the war moved outside newspapers into other discursive worlds. The most remarkable example of its spread was its circulation in women’s journals. Bharati ran an article with an admiring tone on Boer women combatants (Bhattacharya, 1973:159), while Antahpur did a piece on the Boers.³⁵ Pro-Boer literature and anti-war books and pamphlets, such as W. T. Stead’s Shall I Slay My Brother Boer?, were circulated.³⁶ As I have mentioned, the war even entered the verse of Rabindranath Tagore.

The war circulated in India on two levels. It did not remain confined to the discursive, but was transformed into the performative primarily through the campaign of the loyalists. The British settlers provided the lead through fund-raising activities; thus, Vinolia soap advertised itself to say that the purchase of each bar would contribute a halfpenny to the Vinolia war fund, apart from helping to improve the customer’s complexion (Times of India, 17 February 1900). These were supplemented by morale-boosting events, such as a film of some of the battles shown in Bombay or the hosting of carnivals to raise funds (Times of India, 15 February 1900). The efforts of the British settlers were ably supplemented by two other groups, the titled and the orthodox. Titled dignitaries held meetings in support of the British in places as far apart as Jullundur (Punjab) in the north-west, Delhi, and Murshidabad (Bengal) in the east. Some princes decided to raise subscriptions to send 800 combat horses, while the Maharaja of Kashmir vowed he would equip the whole British army with putties (The Bengalee, 2 February 1900). Their efforts were supplemented by the Darbhanga Raj of Bihar, which initiated a ‘Hindu Voluntary Fund’,³⁷ while the Nawab of Murshidabad hosted prayers for the success of the British at the city masjid (The Bengalee, 3 February 1900). Indeed, hosting prayers for the British – by both Hindus and Muslims – became an established occurrence.³⁸ The role of the Hindu orthodox press, led by the Bangabasi, which was the highest-selling paper in Bengal with a circulation of 26,000, is significant. While it had run a campaign against the colonial administration for introducing the Age of Consent Bill (which had raised the marriageable age of girls) in 1891, it expressed full-hearted loyalty to the British during the war and appealed for funds and prayers. This change of stance may have had local causes related to the political marginalisation of the orthodox by the professional middle-class politicians of a reformist orientation, who dominated the elected bodies and whose main organ was The Bengalee.

Possibly the most interesting and intriguing way in which information about the war circulated was through popular rumours. The Englishman reported with some asperity that the lower classes of the crowded Chandni Chowk market area in Delhi had started to celebrate the defeat of British forces (Hitavadi, 1899b). Meanwhile, in Calcutta, just after the December reverses suffered by British forces in South Africa, the uncertain course of the war had led to the introduction of betting on its outcome. The correspondent also reported that rumours were circulating in tramcars and carriages, some claiming that one Boer had the strength of five men, with others reporting that the British had 250 detectives to spy out anyone extolling Boer valour (Bangabasi, 1899). Even more intriguing was the experience of Edgar Thurston, who carried out an anthropometric survey in South India. Just after the war, in his encounter with a community he called the ‘Oddes’ and who had ‘Boyan’ as their title, Thurston found that they were very scared that they would be mistaken for Boers because of the similarity of their names. They feared transportation to replace the exterminated Boers. Indeed, through a long tour of Mysore province, he appears to have repeatedly encountered a fear that he had been deputed to recruit natives for South Africa (cited in McLane, 1977:35). These rumours, it may be speculated, may have had something to do with news that came back from indentured labourers in South Africa (Madras was the major port of shipment for them), in addition to nuggets of newspaper information that were probably transformed in the process of dissemination. What is significant in all these cases of popular rumours is the suspicion and hostility towards the British and a sense of identification – if not kinship – with the other side.

These instances of not fully and uniformly pro-Boer, but certainly anti-British, sentiment were probably an important reason why much thought was given by the administration to the control, dispersal and repatriation of the many Boer prisoners of war who served out their term of detention in India. While most of the relevant files (and, judging from the list, there were a number of them) are no longer available at the National Archives in Delhi, the few that still exist are significant. They demonstrate official concern to place the prisoners in several isolated camps throughout India, and included plans to sequester groups in the Princely States³⁹ away from British-administered populations. It is also interesting that officials considered what they should do in case any Boer wanted to remain in India (it is intriguing to speculate if any actually did so) and came to a clear resolution that such Boers would be actively discouraged.⁴⁰ On the whole, the administration appears to have successfully kept the Boer prisoners from exercising any kind of influence on the public debates that sprang up around the war.

While understanding the entire subcontinent’s involvement in the Anglo-Boer War would be an important enterprise, my interest is confined to Bengal, and primarily to its middle-class public. In general, Bengal offered many instances in which international events crystallised and impelled nationalist concerns and mobilisation. A few years after the war, Japan’s victory over Russia electrified the Bengali middle class with the prospect of an emerging East and motivated various public events.⁴¹ But the Boer War offered no such inspirational value. Instead, it did two interconnected things. It strengthened existing ambivalences about the ‘imperial subject’ and, in so doing, thinned out imperial loyalism to the extent that it came close to losing its purchase altogether. Of course, this did not happen uniformly across the social spectrum.

It has been remarked that the Anglo-Boer War, especially ‘Black Week’, saw a sense of despair in Britain that was not matched even by the worst of the First World War experiences (Miller, 2005:692). Given this mood, it is not difficult to imagine the effect of the war on the British residents of India who exemplified the ‘imperial subject’.⁴² McLane (1977:24–25) has argued that the ‘doctrine of infallibility’ that was ultimately based on the simple military superiority of the British had by the late 19th century replaced the pedagogic legitimisation of the empire through the exemplar of the ‘imperial character’. Placed against this horizon of self-justification, the military reverses abroad produced a deep anxiety. The effects of this can be seen in two kinds of movements. The first was an irritable insistence on the limits to which the imperial cause could extract support from the settlers. The tea planters, for instance, strongly protested against the move to extract repeated donations for the imperial cause.⁴³ Secondly, there were anxious attempts to elicit popular support for ‘imperial patriotism’. A long article in the London Times, reprinted in The Bengalee (2 February 1900), tried to show that the uitlanders of the Transvaal were as discriminated against as the Indians (while explaining away the racism of the Natal government as the handiwork of settlers), in an attempt to prove a commonality of interests. Imperial ‘patriotism’ suddenly came into vogue. It was probably for this reason that Anglo-Indian papers such as the Times of India and The Statesman prominently ran Gandhi’s comments, for his loyalties most closely approximated to what the empire needed at that dire time.

As I have shown, the success of loyalism among Indians was confined to the titled and orthodox. This was the consequence of an inherent problem in colonial policy. The government wished to demonstrate the hold of the ‘imperial subject’, but at the same time carefully regulate the participation of Indians in it. Thus, the Lord Bishop of Bombay, bidding farewell to the Lumsden Horse regiment, congratulated the princes on their loyalty, exclaiming: ‘We are all imperialists now.’ He then went on to define imperialism as based on the principles of ‘justice, equality, freedom of thought and speech, intellectual progress, pure religion’ and similar verities. He also took care to subtly disengage the princes from their co-imperialists by stating that these were the principles of the ‘modern Christian world’ (Times of India, 16 February 1900). Actually, the distinction that probably grated the most was the one made between the settler colonies of Australia and Canada, on the one hand, and India, on the other.⁴⁴ This hierarchy became evident in the fact that the British studiously avoided taking Indian soldiers to the front – despite the advice of some ex-India hands⁴⁵ and in spite of repeated criticisms from the Indian press that rightly spotted the long arm of racism at work. Whatever the colonial administration in India may have thought, non-whites were unwelcome to participate formally in the war. Warwick (1983:15–20) and others have shown that the participation of Africans was not acknowledged in the war because there was a formal consensus among the warring parties that they must not be involved. The Africans were, of course, (formally) ruled out because they had historically posed a military threat. This was not applicable to the Indians, who were regarded as peaceful, a recognition that Gandhi kept emphasising in his appeals to the authorities. There was, however, a more fundamental problem of racist legitimacy. British South African spokespersons were clear that the blacks had to be kept out, since they must not be encouraged to regard themselves as being necessary in any way to the government.⁴⁶ The rationale of white political self-sufficiency goes a long way to explaining the bar on Indian military participation. It also explains the even more absurd refusal to deploy Maoris who were a part of the New Zealand contingent.

The visible inbuilt incoherences of the ‘imperial subject’ renewed and deepened the general alienation. It should be noted here that the press was regarded as unfriendly by the government. In 1891 a government survey discovered that 14 out of 19 newspapers could be regarded as hostile (Ray, 1979:94). This characterisation does not do justice to the ambiguity of this press: many of its constituents freely criticised the administration while remaining committed to the belief in the providential nature of British colonialism. Nevertheless, the survey defines the generally critical orientation of newspapers during the Anglo-Boer War. Here the significance of The Bengalee and its editor, Surendranath Bannerjee, needs to underlined. Surendranath, a leading light of the INC, led the turn to constitutional opposition to the British, which at one point resulted in a stint in jail; but he also firmly believed in the providentiality of British colonialism and the gradual progress it offered for transition to self-government. Important British officials regarded him as someone more amenable to negotiation than others. The editor of the Hitavadi, Kali Prasanna Kavybisharode, had a similar career. An INC worker, he was also jailed for five months for publishing a treasonable poem. Both became leading members of the Swadeshi movement.⁴⁷ At this time, however, no agitation was in sight and these publicists were suspended in a state of semi-belonging to ‘imperial subjecthood’.

What is of interest here is not just the public ambivalence towards the government, but the fact that the precise balance of elements that constituted this ambivalence changed. The Boers themselves provoked ambiguity. Their surprising resistance was compounded by the romantic framing of their lives, dominant in Europe, and in their own self-perception as a people who lived a tough, bucolic life tied to the land. In Europe, this image hosted a series of debates that worked on the contrast between a ‘traditional peasant … with firm hierarchical values confronted with an aggressive, levelling capitalist civilisation’ (Kaarsholm, 1989:110). In India, on the other hand, the striking feature of the Boers was that, despite their ‘historical’ disadvantage, they had successfully challenged the apparently invincible British. This was compounded by the knowledge that the Boers did not have a regular army. For Indians, the Boers demonstrated the power a community could generate by a simple and strong desire for independence.

‘The Boers are determined to lay down their lives for their independence, which is dearer even than life’, exalted one newspaper, saying that their act was an even bolder one than what a madman⁴⁸ would have done (Samiran, 1899). Attachment to the land itself seemed to explain the Boer successes, as the Hitavadi’s contrast between the British fighting in a foreign country and the Boers struggling for their independence and their families suggested (Hitavadi, 1899b). The power of this image needs to be measured by the sedimentation of heroic figures resisting foreign invaders that had been in circulation in literary works and theatre from the middle of the 19th century. However, these figures normally acted in the past against Muslims, ending their careers in tragic failure. This layer of sedimented effects was no doubt stimulated by the Boers, but it now also carried new messages, since Boer resistance was carried out in the present, and very successfully. Naturally, the Boers stimulated a great deal of exemplification and, correspondingly, a sense of the lack of a comparable desire for independence (no doubt heightened by the absence of any major political movement at the time) in the Indians themselves.

This is an economy of effect that, in normal circumstances, may have motivated actual deeds. But the unrelieved story of racist discrimination by the Boers that Gandhi’s newspaper articles publicised prevented them from emerging as an unequivocal source of inspiration. The Hitavadi (1899a) best summed up this ambivalence when it observed: ‘The oppression of the Indians in South Africa has led us to hate the Boers, still we feel constrained to praise their bravery with a thousand tongues.’ The word ‘bravery’ needs comment, since, more than anything else, it was the courage of the Boers that was insistently cited. For Indians, Boer heroism became a convenient way of summarising their impact, for it could simply celebrate a pure character trait and thereby sideline the problematic that the Boers posed between their inspirational resistance, on the one hand, and the realisation that, like other Europeans, their attachment to land made them control and render inferior the lives of other peoples, on the other.

Nevertheless, it was the ambivalence that was important. It produced an ironic version of the ‘imperial subject’. The British military reverses appear to have narrowed down the ‘imperial subject’ to one of simple loyalism alone. Further, they focussed an obsessive attention on British military power, indicating that this was the real source of British domination. This structure of ambivalence was different from the understandable and simple paradox of criticising the government while swearing loyalty to it. Now the groundwork of political faith was getting hollowed out, making it seem more a travesty of its former state. This structure is best embodied in The Bengalee. Towards the end of the conventional phase of the war, it admitted that patriotism was an ‘exotic’ thing in India and that Indians were dependent on the British to weld together the many nations of India into one great nation. At the same time, it defined this dependence as dictated by self-interest, making it clear that the British served a pragmatic function for Indians. The practical uses of the ‘imperial subject’ status were even more tangible in thinking out what could happen internationally as a result of the war. The great fear was that Russia would be emboldened to strike at Afghanistan and invade India. This prospect made The Bengalee (11 March 1900) state that it would back the British, for it was better to have a known than an unknown ruler.

But The Bengalee (25 January 1900) was also clear about its attitude to the British involvement in the war. In response to the refusal of some tea planters to raise additional funds for the war, the paper declared that it was an imperial war that did not in any way involve Indian interests. It made a clear distinction between government and people by saying that the contributions to the war made by India were not given by its people, since they were not even part of the government in a ‘metaphorical sense’. Other newspapers went further. The Prativasi (9 October 1899), a vernacular with limited circulation, ran a story unambiguously entitled ‘Worship of force, pure and simple’ that featured a satire based on the Kali puja (worship). It told of preparations for worship of the goddess of force made by a number of pujaris (priests) headed by Lord Salisbury, with the uitlanders as minor priests; the sacrificial goat was, of course, the Boers, who were told that they were being sacrificed not just because of their crimes, but ultimately for their own welfare. The way Prativasi wrote about the Boer War seems as if it could have been writing about imperial justifications for colonising India. The war provided a displaced site to think about the conditions of Indians themselves.

Gandhi’s refashionings

I have said that the ‘imperial subject’ was both attenuated and hollowed out by the response to the Anglo-Boer War in India. It is interesting to note that Gandhi both played and did not play a role in this sharpening of this loss of loyalty. From what has already been said, it is not difficult to see that Gandhi’s critical understanding of the ‘imperial subject’ lagged behind that of his compatriots in India, and clearly the position of Indians in South Africa had a great deal to do with this. This may have been one of the reasons why he did not make a significant impact at the meeting of the National Congress in 1901. He recalled that he was barely given five minutes in which to sum up what he had to say (Uppal, 1995:174), which was in striking contrast to the widespread interest in the war. At the same time, Gandhi brought a new ethic of leadership into the country that may not have been given any recognition in India at that time, but which later proved to be a decisive element in countering the elitist social ethos of the ‘imperial subject’. This was expressed in his willingness to do sanitary work during the INC meeting, a job that was normally done by the low castes, and in his decision to travel third-class as a way of getting to know the people of the country (Uppal, 1995:174–77). It should be recalled that, just before this, Gandhi had for the first time come into close proximity with the poor and low castes through the stretcher bearers with whom he had served in the Ambulance Corps. Proximity to the generally silenced social groups of India would have motivated his desire to know people who could not easily claim ‘imperial subjecthood’ (Vahed, 2000:212–13).