South Africa and India. Michelle Williams M.

emerging and the directions that this work suggests. The first set of chapters in this volume focus on the historical connections between India and South Africa, where the flow of ideas, people and merchandise has interlaced the histories in interesting and often unexpected ways. The chapters in this section explore these issues through the circulation of the printing press, maritime flows, interlocking worlds of war, the processes of decolonisation and cultural forms of resistance. The second set of chapters draw our attention to socio-political comparisons that look at iconic struggle leaders, democratic deepening, popular participation, migration and political party ideologies. Through the two rubrics – historical connections and sociopolitical comparisons – the chapters explore the interwoven histories and complex experiences of India and South Africa.

       South Africa/India: Uneasy historiographies

      Despite centuries of interaction, Africa and India today remain largely sundered domains of analysis. Set in relations of opposition by colonial rule and then by a Cold War Area studies map, ‘Africa’ and ‘India/South Asia’ in the academy appear to have little to do with each other. When they are configured, this configuration is usually characterised by uneasy stereotypes of extremity. On one side stand narratives of shoulder-to-shoulder Bandung-style anti-colonial solidarity, especially apparent in accounts of Indian involvement in the anti-apartheid movement (e.g. see Gupta, 2003). On the other are quasi-colonial views to be found in India of Africa as ‘the dark continent’, a view that draws implicitly on older ideas of civilisationism that rank ‘Indian’ civilisation above that of ‘Africa’ (Hofmeyr, 2007:61). These contrasting views offer a stark binary set of explanations, with either too much solidarity on the one side or too little on the other.

      Complicating this picture has been the difficulties of pursuing transnational study in an academy dominated by national and regional frameworks. The two regions that are now South Africa and India have been linked by transnational flows of labour (first slavery and then indenture), as well as intellectual and cultural exchange. The scholarship that has sought to understand these processes was undertaken in a context of nationally based historiographies and the dominance of Area Studies training. This work has necessarily encountered difficulties in asserting the primacy of transnational processes in the face of national and regional models of analysis. However, with the transnational turn in the social sciences occasioned by the processes of globalisation and the emergence of a post-Cold War order, questions of transnationalism have come into their own.

      These frameworks have in turn opened up new possibilities for thinking about interactions between South Africa and India and have permitted revisions of earlier historiographies that addressed the interaction between these two regions.

       Indentured historiographies: The one-way problem

      The movement of Indian indentured labour and then ‘free passenger’ Indians – largely merchants to Natal in the 1860s – has generated a strong tradition of scholarship (Bhana & Brain, 1990). However, as Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie (2007) has pointed out, this scholarship manifests various problems: it tends to homogenise the ‘Indian community’ without looking in detail at its faultlines, and it is primarily social and economic history, with little cultural exploration. A recent major work on indenture by Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed (2007) has taken up this challenge and provides a detailed insight into the social, cultural and religious contours of everyday indenture experience. It also addresses another problem with older indentured historiography, namely that it focusses mainly on ‘Indian experience’. Desai and Vahed (2007:8) narrate this experience ‘against the backdrop of White rule and its oppressive relationship with the Zulu’.

      An additional problem with older historiography is that it manifests what we may call the ‘one-way problem’. Put briefly, studies tend to examine movement from India to South Africa, without asking what implications this migration had back in India. As Dhupelia-Mesthrie (2007) points out, this problem is equally apparent in the fact that the indentured diaspora tends mainly to be studied in the diaspora itself, with comparatively few historians in India turning their attention to this question, a process exacerbated by the strongly nationalist stamp of Indian historiography.

      Fortunately, this ‘one-way problem’ has started to shift through the pioneering work of Tejaswini Niranjana (1999) on Trinidad and John Kelly (1991) on Fiji. Both these scholars demonstrate how the indentured diaspora feeds back into debates in Indian nationalism and is used in a variety of ways. For some early 20th-century Indian nationalists, the indentured diaspora becomes the outer boundaries of the nation, and the maltreatment of workers – and particularly Hindu women – in the diaspora is portrayed as a transgression of the nation. This transgression is used to mobilise sympathy and support for nationalist struggles in India. As Niranjana (1999) argues, the diaspora could also become a conduit for imaginatively and actually expelling the unwanted parts of the nation. Pivoting on the upper-caste/ middle-class Indian women as its imagined centre, Indian nationalist discourse depended on a disavowal of the lower-caste woman. As Niranjana demonstrates, the figure of the undesirable woman could be relegated to the outer reaches of the diaspora, enabling a ‘pure’ concept of the gendered nation to take shape.

      This important work opens the way to reinsert the indentured diaspora into the story of Indian nationalism itself. Such a reconfiguration has occurred in relation to the post-1960s diaspora, which was more middle class and hence generally attracted more attention. Along with the transnational turn in the social sciences, the way is clear to factor the less glamorous indentured diaspora back into Indian historiography, demonstrating how the nation’s peripheries were important in its imaginative formation. Or, as Metcalf (2007:3) notes: ‘Abroad … Indians came face to face with their nationality.’

       ‘Africa’ in ‘India’

      Another body of work that is starting to reverse the one-way flow is that which asks about the meanings of Africa in India. In India itself, there is often a perception that apart from Gandhi, Gujarati traders and Siddis (the latter being Africans who from the 13th century moved from North and East Africa to India as servants, soldiers, slaves, sailors, policemen, traders, bureaucrats and concubines [Jayasuriya & Pankhurst, 2003]), India has little to do with Africa. Indeed, it is not uncommon to find quasi-colonial perceptions in India of Africa as ‘the dark continent’ (Hofmeyr, 2007:61).

      However, as new work is starting to indicate, Africa itself played a formative role in the imagining of India, constituting a boundary for the imagination of the nation. This process is particularly clear in relation to Gandhi, whose pejorative comments on Africans have often been noted. One way to make sense of this discourse is to examine it as part of Gandhi’s imagination of India that began to emerge in South Africa, where for the first time he confronted a cross section of Indian society. Gandhi’s conception of India was initially imagined as a dominion within the British Empire. In this configuration, India shared a boundary with the empire. A primary marker for this boundary was the ‘native’ or ‘Africa’, which came to represent an imaginative boundary of ‘India’. ‘Africa’ hence constitutes one of the limits of ‘India’, a boundary reinforced by ideas of civilisationism (Hofmeyr, 2007).

      Gandhi’s years in South Africa obviously provide a major focus within the historiographies of South Africa–India interactions. However, as Surendra Bhana and Goolam Vahed (2005) point out, this scholarship tends to be dominated by national paradigms of analysis. Scholars in and of India have tended to see Gandhi as ‘an extension of traditions in India’ (Bhana & Vahed, 2005:11). Scholars of South Africa such as Maureen Swan (1985) place him in a South African context, with little reference to the Indian background. Elsewhere, there is a strong awareness that Gandhi’s work in South Africa was central to Indian nationalism (Brown, 1996; Markovits, 2003:78–85), yet this relationship awaits in-depth study. Quoting Markovits, Dhupelia-Mesthrie (2007:23) points out that the South African years represent the ‘real black hole in Gandhi’s life’, an absence in part created by the fact that during the apartheid years, historians in India were unable to visit South Africa.

      Other ways in which Africa featured in Indian nationalist thought are starting to emerge from P. K. Datta’s (2007) seminal work on the depictions of the Anglo-Boer War in India (which is included in this volume). An avowedly international