South Africa and India. Michelle Williams M.

citizenship provided yet another template of universalism. Such diasporic universalisms have long been obscured, falling outside studies of empire, on the one hand, and studies of the nation, on the other. With the transnational turn in the humanities and social sciences, such networks are moving to the fore and are helping to revise understandings of colonial encounter not as the interaction of the local and the global, but rather as an encounter of different universalisms.

      These distinctive public spheres of the South offer several analytical possibilities. In relation to studies of print culture, this zone of circulation opens up new maps for thinking about textual migration. Frost (2002:940) notes that in 1920 the number of books, pamphlets and newspapers that passed through the Colombo post office to and from other parts of the British Empire was equal to, if not greater than, the number of equivalent items passing between Colombo and Britain. The South–South traffic of books and newspapers matched the equivalent traffic on a North–South axis. What were these books and pamphlets? Where did they come from and where were they headed? What kinds of reading and writing publics did they convene on their oceanic circuits and what kinds of communities of belief did they bring into being? Put differently, what modes of cosmopolitanism did this circulation of print enable?

      This chapter is a very modest initial attempt to draw this bigger picture. Drawing on existing work on the Indian Ocean public sphere, the chapter seeks to build on Frost’s model by asking what the analytical grammar of such an Indian Ocean cultural world might be. Put differently, how in methodological terms might one gain an analytical grasp on a field as diverse as the Indian Ocean? The chapter proposes that the printing presses be considered as a key element in that grammar. One way, then, to think about the Indian Ocean is as a series of interrelated printing presses spread around the port cities. The chapter looks at one such press by way of a methodological experiment. It asks what we might learn by examining the social relationships that developed around the press, the types of socialities it entailed, the ideas of printing and publishing that it generated, and the kinds of audiences it called into being. The personnel of the press were drawn from across the Indian Ocean and brought with them different ideas and ideals of printing and publishing.

       Gandhi’s printing press: A biography

      The International Printing Press (IPP) came into the world in considerable style on the evening of 29 November 1898. An opening ceremony attended by a crowd of nearly a hundred inaugurated the press at 113 Grey Street, next door to the Natal Indian Congress Hall. Proceedings got under way with the Congress organist playing God Save the Queen. Next followed speeches. The proprietor, Madanjit Viyavaharik, told the predominantly Indian audience that ‘[t]he press is not mine alone – it is yours also’. Gandhi then read letters of good wishes and the press was declared open. What the Natal press described as ‘a priest from Verulam [a settlement north of Durban]’ apostrophised the press with some Gujarati verses extolling the virtues of the printing arts and indicated that ‘they had to thank Queen Victoria for the freedom which enabled them to obtain the privileges and blessings accruing from printing’ (Pyarelal, 1980:193–94).

      The IPP itself comprised two hand-operated presses: the first an Albion Press (the most widely used press in the British Empire), the second a platen jobber, as well as 1,000 lbs of English type, which had been acquired second hand in Durban. Hindi, Gujarati, Tamil, Urdu and Marathi type was ordered from India (Pyarelal, 1980:193). The press undertook general job printing. It printed the monthly magazine of the theosophical society and a short-lived newspaper called the Volunteer, as well as booklets and pamphlets (Pyarelal, 1986:434; Natal Archives Depot [NAD], CSO 1735, 1903/6053). From June 1903 the newspaper Indian Opinion was printed at 113 Grey Street.

      The press could do work in a range of languages: Gujarati, Tamil, Hindi, Urdu, Hebrew, Marathi, Sanscrit, Zulu and Dutch, according to an advertisement on the newspaper’s cover on the11 June 1903. Its personnel were multilingual and drawn from across the Indian Ocean and beyond. The foreman, a Mr Oliver from Mauritius, oversaw a staff of typesetters and machinemen. The English compositors included a French-speaking Mauritian; a man from St Helena; and, in the parlance of the day, a ‘Cape coloured’, Mr Mannering. The Gujarati typesetters were Kababhai and Virji Damodar, with Virji doing Hindi as well. Moothoo, a colonial-born Indian, undertook the Tamil composing, while Raju Govindswamy (‘Mr Sam’, as he was known) was in charge of machines and binding (Pyarelal, 1986:434). Also colonial-born, Govindswamy had started his career as a ‘kitchenboy’ in Umkomaas, then moved on to being a messenger on the railways, before becoming an assistant in a printer’s firm at 30 shillings per month, where he was recruited by Madanjit (Meer, 1969:56–57). By Natal standards, wages were generous and ranged from £8 to £18 per month in an industry whose average wage was £12 (Downes, 1952:80).

       The move to Phoenix

      Like many small printing establishments in Durban, the IPP struggled to break even. The launch of Indian Opinion exacerbated this financial strain. Madanjit Viyavaharik was nominally the proprietor of the paper, but the enterprise was kept afloat by Gandhi’s money and the editorial skills of M. H. Nazar, the newspaper’s first editor.Worried about the press, Gandhi sent Alfred West, whom he had met through vegetarian circles in Johannesburg, to investigate. West reported deep financial chaos. Madanjit, who had been wanting to return to India for some time, ceded the press to Gandhi to settle the debts he had accrued and duly left. In early October 1904 Gandhi caught the overnight train down to Durban to sort out the affairs of the press, and on the journey famously read Ruskin’s Unto this Last, which inspired him to take the radical departure of setting up his first ashram, Phoenix, 14 miles north of Durban. The press was laboriously moved by oxwagon to Phoenix and reassembled in a corrugated-iron shed built from donated material. Those who joined Phoenix were to earn £3 a month and be entitled to an acre of land. If the press made a profit (which it never did), it would be shared among the settlers, as they called themselves. Two press employees, one of whom was Sam Govindswamy, retained their original salaries (Pyarelal, 1986:435–37).

      Directing operations mainly from Johannesburg, Gandhi soon instituted major changes in the press, seeking to fashion it into a utopian instrument that would stand beyond the market and the state. He first stopped all jobbing printing, seeing this as a distraction from the real work of producing the newspaper, and then in 1912 decided to dispense with advertisements, except those promoting socially useful objects (Bhattacharya, 1965:118).

      The changing letterheads of the press reflect these shifts. An early letterhead from March 1904, when the IPP still operated from Durban, presents the press as a commercial operation (‘artistic and general printers’) undertaking jobbing printing of various kinds (wedding cards, visiting cards, ball programmes, etc.) in a range of languages (NAD, CSO 1758, 1904/2954) . By 1907 the letterhead had lost some of its commercial flair (NAD, CSO 1848, 8564/1907). Thereafter, the press’s sole function was to print Indian Opinion (NAD, II 1/180 I 1058/1911). Another barometer of these shifts comes from the memoir of Prabhudas Gandhi (1957:46) who spent part of his childhood at Phoenix. He describes these years of mounting asceticism as a period when there was ‘no more fun and frolic’.

      As several historians have demonstrated, the newspaper Indian Opinion became central to the success of Gandhi’s campaigns. The paper kept people informed, spurred them on and provided the world with information as to what was going on (Mesthrie, 1987:99–126). Equally pivotal was the press itself, which became central to Phoenix and operated as an embodiment of its utopian ideals. At its height, and before satyagraha imprisonments took their toll, Phoenix was home to about 40 people and everyone – adults and children alike – was involved in at least some aspect of the printing process. Typesetting was mandatory for all, some proving more adept than others, with Gandhi describing himself as a dunce (Gandhi, M., 1957:304). All men assisted with operating the press, which sometimes ran on oil engines and at other times was operated by hand. Everyone folded the newspapers, put them in wrappers and pasted on addresses (Gandhi, P., 1957:45; Dhupelia-Mesthrie, 2004:74).

      The press was also a leveller, with everyone undertaking physical labour whatever their caste or religious background: in the words of Prabhudas Gandhi (1957:55), ‘Germans, English, Africans, Chinese, Parsis, Muslims, Jews and Hindus’ laboured together on the press.

      Among