South Africa and India. Michelle Williams M.

& 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