South Africa and India. Michelle Williams M.

on a unitary voice for the ‘developing nations’ in the United Nations) point to the continued need for collective action among these nations.

      The idea of the Global South, then, will continue to be an important concept that will shape intergovernmental activity, non-governmental organisation priorities and trade agendas. What will its role be in setting academic and research priorities? Taken together, the chapters in this collection provide some answers to this question by probing the limits and possibilities of one set of axes in the Global South, namely the links between South Africa and India.

      On the possibilities side of the equation, the chapters point to the productive and as yet unexplored histories and comparative possibilities within the Global South. The pieces point to new histories of linkage and circulation, whether these be Goan migrants, lascars or typographers moving in and around the Indian Ocean. The comparative possibilities point to new historiographical insights, as histories of labour, social movements and urban governance are placed side by side and as social theory from different parts of the Global South is brought into conversation.

      Yet at the same time, these pieces also point to the growing contradictions within the category of ‘the South’ and its earlier incarnations. As Hofmeyr’s chapter indicates, Gandhi’s cosmopolitanism met its limits in ideas of civilisational hierarchies between India and Africa. While ideologies of Third Worldist solidarity and Afro-Asian cooperation have obscured such divisions, new histories of Bandung are starting to reveal the complexities and struggles within and between different players, ideologies and interests, and how these shaped the contours of these movements (Amrith, 2005; Burton, 2006; Burton, Espiritu & Wilkins, 2006; Chatterjee, 2006b; Abraham, 2008).

      In some cases, the gaps of power between different parts of the Global South are considerable and can constitute what Antoinette Burton (2006:151) has termed ‘semi-imperialisms’. These faultlines and semi-imperialisms will continue to play themselves out, especially as new alliances and competitions emerge in the ‘post-American’ Indian Ocean. In this changing arena, unexpected ‘lateral’ cultural forms will take shape. Hindi film continues to make its way to many parts of Africa and finds new audiences there (Larkin, 1997). Reverse flow is apparent in the South African film Mr Bones, which has been circulating in India. The film comes from Leon Schuster, the king of South African slapstick. Its plot concerns a white boy who falls from an aeroplane and grows up in a ‘tribe’ and becomes a ‘witch doctor’. Translated into a range of Indian languages, the film has been a runaway success in cinemas and on TV.

      In some senses, Mr Bones’ travels are to be expected: slapstick stereotypes travel easily. Yet such examples also seem counter-intuitive: they unsettle the elevated moral agendas of South–South cooperation, in which slapstick does not really belong. Equally out of place would be the growing trend of South–South spying, a phenomenon that is now routine in the Indian Ocean: since 2007, for example, India has opened up listening posts in Madagascar and Mozambique to track shipping lanes and keep an eye on the Chinese. As a post-Cold War and possibly ‘post-American’ world coalesces, understanding South–South slapstick and South–South spying will become increasingly important.⁶ The chapters in this collection seek to lay the groundwork for an environment in which we can start to make sense of new phenomena such as these that will speak to the complexities of a new and confusing world order.

       Historical Connections

      chapter 1-5

       1

      Chapter

       Gandhi’s Printing Press: Indian Ocean Print Cultures and Cosmopolitanisms

       Isabel Hofmeyr

       Introduction

      At low tide from the beach at Porbandar in Gujarat, one can just glimpse the tip of a shipwreck. Originally the SS Khedive, this vessel is the subject of a double legend. The first is that it carried Mohandas Gandhi on one of his voyages between Bombay and Durban; the second is that the ship sank with Gandhi’s printing press on board.⁷

      This is not the only report of a phantom printing press associated with Gandhi. More than a century earlier another account had emerged, this time on the other side of the Indian Ocean, in Durban. Towards the end of 1896 Gandhi was headed for this port on his way back from Bombay. Angry white mobs awaited his arrival, claiming he was organising an ‘Asiatic Invasion’. Rumours circulated that Gandhi had a printing press and 30 compositors on board. According to the Natal media, the lynch mob intended first to attack Gandhi and then the printing press (Natal Witness, 11 January 1897).

      In part, this phenomenon of the phantom printing press can be easily explained. In the Durban case, it had been well known for some years that Gandhi wished to acquire such a press in order to start a newspaper that could speak for the interests of Indian merchants in Natal (Pyarelal, 1986:63–65). The alarm that much of white Natal society felt at this idea expressed itself in the rumour of the imaginary press. White artisans were equally perturbed at the prospect of cheap compositors coming to undercut the market.

      A few years later, in 1898, Gandhi did indeed play a part in purchasing a press that was to print his newspaper, Indian Opinion, which became pivotal in his satyagraha campaigns. When Gandhi returned to India in 1914, newspapers continued to be a key component of his non-cooperation movements. Gandhi, the newspaper and the printing press were closely associated, and hence the memory of his printing press persisting in legend is understandable. Indeed, Gandhi’s press has become something of a minor icon in his life story. A chapter of his autobiography discusses his printing press in South Africa (Gandhi, M., 1957:302–4), while the presses he used feature in exhibitions and museums (Satyagraha, n.d.).

      Yet, pertinent as these explanations are, they do not clarify one important aspect of these stories: both are accounts of a printing press at sea. In the Durban case, the idea of a press coming across the waters from Bombay sparks alarm and aggression. In the Porbandar case, the press remains a symbol of Gandhi, but one that has been lost in the Indian Ocean. Both stories ask us to think about the printing press in the context of the Indian Ocean.

      This chapter takes up this invitation by placing Gandhi’s printing press in the framework of an Indian Ocean public sphere as a way of exploring cosmopolitanism in the Indian Ocean region. As groundbreaking work by Mark Ravinder Frost (2002) and scholars such as T. N. Harper (2002), Sugata Bose (2005), Engseng Ho (2006) and Thomas Metcalfe (2007) indicates, the imperial port cities of the Indian Ocean sustained a distinctive public sphere that flourished from the 1880s until the First World War and supported various modes of cosmopolitanism.

      The Indian Ocean was the site of several overlapping diasporas whose educated classes gathered in the ports around the ocean. As Frost (2002: 937) notes:

      Entrepôts like Bombay, Madras, Calcutta, Rangoon and Singapore witnessed the emergence of a non-European, Western-educated professional class that serviced the requirements of expanding international commercial interests and the simultaneous growth of the imperial state.

      These centres supported intelligentsias drawn from various Indian Ocean diasporas who ‘developed habits of intellectual sociability that become organized and systematic’. Sharing similar concerns for reform, these groups oversaw parallel campaigns for religious revival, social and educational improvement and constitutional change’ (Frost, 2002:937). Positioned as ‘nodal points in an imperial network of steamer routes, telegraph lines and railways’, these cities functioned as relay stations for ideas, texts, commodities and people (Frost, 2002:939).

      To Frost’s map we could of course add other ports, namely Mombasa, Zanzibar, Beira, Lourenco Marques (the modern Maputo) and Durban. Together, these cities constituted a network of textual exchange and circulation that built on, sustained and invented forms of cosmopolitan universalism across the Indian Ocean. Some of these universalisms were religious in character and, as Frost (2002:939) points out, were apparent in pan-Buddhist, pan-Islamic (and, one might add, pan-Hindu) movements. There were also traditions of transnational social organisation, like anarchism or socialism, that were