South Africa and India. Michelle Williams M.

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.