South Africa and India. Michelle Williams M.

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