Africa in the Indian Imagination: Race and the Politics of Postcolonial Citation
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Africa in the Indian Imagination: Race and the Politics of Postcolonial Citation
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822374138 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/31/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 200 |
| File size: | 477 KB |
About the Author
Isabel Hofmeyr is Professor of African Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg and the author of Gandhi's Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading.
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Africa in the Indian Imagination
Race and the Politics of Postcolonial Citation
By Antoinette Burton
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2016 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7413-8
CHAPTER 1
"Every Secret Thing"?
Racial Politics in Ansuyah R. Singh's Behold the Earth Mourns (1960)
the border
is as far
as the black man
who walks alongside you
as secure
as your door
against the unwarranted knock
Shabbir Banoobhai, 1980
The history of Indians in South Africa turns on several racialized axes at once. The consolidation of a common "settler" identity derived from racially discriminatory treatment under both the colonial and the apartheid state was always already shaped by anxieties about proximity to, and dependence on, Africans. Acknowledgement of these multiple axes requires us to concede that a plurality of racisms undergirds Indians' experiences in South Africa, and that communal identity, albeit fragmented across a range of ethnic and caste differences, operates at least in part as a racializing device. In the context of mid-to late 20th century anti-apartheid politics in South Africa, it also means that we must reconcile a robustly, if contingently, racialized Indian identity with the emergence of a set of cross-racial political commitments among a small but influential set of South Africans of South Asian descent. The events of 1946–1948 epitomize the multi-axial, multiply moving parts of South African racial politics. These years, among the best documented in the historiography of Indians in South Africa, witnessed the mass mobilization of Indians in a passive resistance movement against racially discriminatory laws aimed at displacing their communities from permanent and self-selected settlement and gave rise to the first organized non-European "united front" activities in South Africa — with international ramifications in the short and long term for universal human rights on a global scale. Rather than being incommensurate, the experience of racial identity as Indians and an awareness of the urgency of cross-racial alliances together became the presumptive, if unstable, ground of anti-apartheid politics for those Indians who embraced it in the late 1940s.
Scholars and activists interested in building a variety of historical narratives about anti-apartheid work have had, inevitably, to cite this watershed moment, though most do not linger on the concrete details of why and under what circumstances cross-racial alliances were forged between Indians and Africans. Those who have been concerned with accounting for how (or whether) a cross-racial anti-apartheid movement in South Africa developed in the wake of Indian settler protest have focused on institutional and organizational sources, drawing on memoirs and autobiographical reflections where available — or, as Jon Soske does, on the evidence of shared urban spaces to be found in newspapers like Drum and Ilanga Lase Natal. As a counterpoint and a contribution to that historiography, I read Ansuyah Singh's novel, Behold the Earth Mourns, as a critical history of anti-apartheid struggle in the latter half of the 20th century. Published in 1960, Singh's novel chronicles the birth of personal and political consciousness among those Indians in mid-century Durban who fought a variety of punitive and racially exclusionary laws aimed at suppressing their livelihoods and driving them from the country. It has been hailed as the first novel written by a South African Indian and, in the context of the new South Africa, it is well on its way to being cited as, and assimilated to, a new generic category: struggle literature in the service of heritage history. This phenomenon has been especially visible in the context of 2010 which, in addition to witnessing the World Cup in South Africa, was also the 150th anniversary of the arrival of the first Indian indentured laborers to Natal and the beginning of an organized scheme to deliver what would be tens of thousands of Indian workers to the sugar cane fields of South Africa. A return to Singh's novel in the wake of the sesquicentenary of Indian arrival serves a recovery agenda and a pedagogical purpose for those who, like Devarakshanam Govinden, seek to "reclaim" it for its contribution to "the possibilities for reconsider[ing] ... the politics of identity for a readership grappling with different challenges from those of the 1950s and 1960s."
Less well attended to is the role of African characters in shaping the plot structure of Behold the Earth Mourns: the citationary apparatus whereby they enter the novel's history of passive resistance. Though Govinden refers in passing to Singh's treatment of Indian/African interactions, she focuses mainly on the Indian communal story and its links to the Indian subcontinent. She takes up the question of the novel's racial politics by juxtaposing it with other "black" writing before and after its publication or by reminding us of the anti-apartheid struggles unfolding at the time of its publication — strategies of reading and citation I will return to at the end of my essay. Borrowing from the critical framework afforded by Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark, I take the landscape of Singh's novel not as a monochromatic surface across which Indians travel, self-contained, toward political consciousness but as highly racialized topography through which Indians move in concert and sometimes in collision with Africans who, in turn, have a consequential impact on the central plot and on the characters' development in the story. Rather than erupting intermittently along the plotline, in other words, the African characters in Behold the Earth Mourns serve as its superstructural apparatus, its footnotes: they are integral and even indispensable to its forward (and backward) motion — referencing deep genealogies of politics and establishing the epistemological foundations for political action, even resistance. Re-materializing the interracialmodes of engagement on view in the novel via the citationary apparatus that it employs not only destabilizes the story of progressive Indian political development, it helps to underscore the multidimensionality of racial formation in South Africa to which I referred at the start — brown and black, brown over black and even occasionally black over brown — and to complicate the relationship between fiction and politics. And when we consider how the novel's racial politics are embodied in gendered terms we begin to appreciate the political challenges of a critically engaged feminist historical reading as well.
I am emphatically not making a case for the novel as an example of interracial harmony but as a site where interracial interaction — and even co-dependence — has been both cited and archived. Insisting on the material presence of Africans in this fictional account of an Indian merchant family in 1940s South Africa by reading for them and through as actors and agents rather than simply as subjects below the plotline helps to nuance our histories of the development of a self-consciously racialized Indian settler identity which was dependent — in economic, political and imaginative terms — on the literal and figurative work of the indigenous African, and on a set of heteronormative anxieties and aspirations that framed that dependence. Though each of those categories (Indian, African, settler, native, heteronormative) is scarcely monolithic, I compress them here heuristically, for the sake of argument. My aim here is to think Behold the Earth Mourns beyond the bounds of recovery history: to challenge its function as struggle literature only about or for Indians of South African descent and in so doing, to re-purpose it for conversations about how to write and how to read histories of Indo-African connection from the 20th century in the 21st.
The Indian Marriage Plot; or, Making Satyagraha Histories
One hundred years after the arrival of the first indentured Indians in South Africa, Ansuyah R. Singh (1917–1978) published her first novel, Behold the Earth Mourns. It tells the story of the transnational marriage between a Bombay woman, Yagesvari Jivan-Sinha, and a Durban man, Srenika Nirvani. Srenika's father arrived not as an indentured laborer but as a trader who eventually accumulated enough capital to start a small sugar cane farm himself, which would grow as the city took off in the 20th century. Yagesvari, for her part, comes from a well-to-do, cosmopolitan "modern" urban Indian family. The tale of their marriage is set against the tumultuous 1940s, when the incursions of the state into the lives and livelihoods of Indian settlers compelled young men like Srenika into the streets of Durban and Cape Town and Port Elizabeth to protest the Asiatic Land Tenure and Indian Representation Bill (1946). Known popularly as the Ghetto Act, the bill limited the rights of Indians to own or occupy land. It is considered "a landmark in the history of the South African freedom struggle," not least because it galvanized public opinion among Indians in India as well as people of South Asian descent in Africa around the "South African Indian question" — that is, the racial discrimination to which Indian communities in South Africa were subject with increasing ferocity on the threshold of the first National Party government in 1948. Both Gandhi and the working committee of the Indian National Congress joined the South African Indian Congress in a call to oppose the legislation and threatened that if the Smuts government did not suspend it, they would organize a roundtable conference "to consider the whole policy of the Union Government against non-white peoples of the earth."The Ghetto Act nonetheless became law, the Natal and the Transvaal Indian Congresses established Passive Resistance Councils (PRCs), and Indians went to jail by the hundreds for their protest efforts. Especially because of its embrace by Gandhi, but also because of its ideological work in raising transnational consciousness about the fate of Indians in South Africa, in the annals of South African Indian history the passive resistance movement is considered the "Glorious" start to the anti-apartheid struggle of the next five decades.
Srenika's politicization in response to discriminatory legislation, his involvement in passive resistance demonstrations, his imprisonment and his awakening to the ways of the world that result from his political activity — all are emblematic of the coming of age of an entire generation of colonial-born Indians of his class in the 1940s. From the start we witness the pain of Srenika's discovery of racial injustice and his transformation into a street protester, specifically over the question of Indians' right to land and to settlement, now threatened by news of evictions being visited on local people. As he tells his brother Krishandutt, "it is because you have another place to go to — one here, another there, it does not upset you. But what about the other people? Have you ever thought of them? It is all they have got. They are not cattle, nor sheep that you can move from one grazing land to another. Don't you feel ... the aura of mystery, the sanctity, the precious meaning of our home, of their home ...?" Krishandutt is a ready foil to Srenika: he chooses reason over emotion — he is the oldest son, in charge of the family business — and pragmatism over rash action. While he has been "bent over his writing desk, absorbed in his accounts and ledgers," Srenika has been studying government policy and turning a critical eye not just on colonial power but on his family's enterprise as well. He rebukes his brother for focusing on profit, reflecting that "all the laws, the cancerous plans could go on as long as it did not touch him, his family and business. How long did he expect to be untouched?"
Krishandutt acknowledges that their own father had suffered "all the jibes, hurt and humiliation" of being Indian in South Africa, but reminds Srenika that he chose charity for the less fortunate through provisions for a school, beds in hospitals and support for local newspapers. Srenika expressly rejects this route as "soft, sitting back and hoping for something to change." He, in turn, reminds Krishandutt of the stakes of resistance for his own family, recalling how Krishandutt's daughter was seriously injured but had had to wait because parts of the hospital she went to for treatment were for Europeans only. "The whole structure of this system is based on a menacing wrongness. You cannot demand restraint from me ... my being, the whole of me cannot." With that Krishandutt turns to his wife and announces ruefully, "Srenika ... is becoming a Satyagrahi."
Given the longstanding class and caste tensions in the South African Indian community over the question of how, or whether, to resist to colonial authority at the site of law, Singh's staging of the brothers' quarrel is a useful window into the affective dimensions of internecine political struggle. Though it is less well known outside South African historiography, Gandhi's arrival in South Africa in the 1890s and his own satyagraha efforts there up to 1913 created and exacerbated deep divisions between merchant capitalist interests and more radical groups over the nature and benefit of collective opposition to punitive, state-sponsored anti-Indian legislation. The split in philosophy and tactics that unfolds at the start of the novel captures differences that might well have played out across families in Durban in this period, if not also within them as well. Srenika's decision to join the protesters and his subsequent arrest and imprisonment were not untypical for Indians of his class and generation; among the most prominent of the passive resisters in 1946–48 was K.G. Naidoo, whose family also began as traders and whose medical training at Edinburgh (she had a lifelong career as a doctor as "Dr. Goonam") arguably placed her in a different class position, in cultural if not in strictly economic terms, than her family of origin. Of note too is that Srenika's route into passive resistance is via Christ and Buddha as well as Gandhi, as his manifesto on non-violence testifies:
Friends: It is with great happiness that I court imprisonment today in the true spirit of Satyagraha. Passive resistance owes its origins to the deep fundamental truth of Hindu philosophy. It has the foundation of the teaching of Christ and Buddha. It is a truth, a love force endeavouring to uphold non-violence, for violence and force have never solved any problems. They never will. Force must not be used to redeem our freedom as a free people amongst the nations of the world. We believe only in making our cause felt by physical suffering. After deep and serious thought, I have come to the conclusion that there comes a time when the spirit rebels against a way of life based on exercised superiority. Timid and passive acquiescence makes it possible to strengthen this superiority ... the popular road is the path of revolution and violence. If it is bloodshed and massacre — slaughter of the maligned against the maligning, there is insanity. There is no victory for either ... The road of non-violence is harder. It is a disciplined mastery of the physical, emotional and spiritual forces of passivity against any wrong."
As a declaration of passive resistance, this manifesto captures the ecumenism of Gandhian satyagraha as well as its promontory view of "the popular," with its equation of revolution and insanity. Given that the African National Congress at this stage was hostile to passive resistance as a strategy, Srenika is carving out not just a political or even a communal identity for himself but a distinctively, if implicitly, racialized one as well.
But if Srenika's political education is the point of departure for the novel, it is his marriage to Yagesvari upon which the rest of the plot turns. In many respects, given his family of birth, his class/caste status and the heteronormative exigencies of both, marriage was always his destination. As he tells Krishandutt, prison "jolted me into maturity" — a jolt that propelled him not toward ongoing political activity in the organizational sense, but directly toward a choice of bride. Having chosen marriage as the next step — into "maturity" and presumably "beyond" politics — Srenika finds himself at the heart of the politics of conjugality in South Africa. As he tries to start a new life with his Indian wife, he discovers that she is barred from entering the country, thanks to a law targeting the mobility of Indian women, and specifically wives, from India to South Africa. What had been largely rhetoric on Srenika's part is now brought dramatically into his own prospective marriage bed. Yagesvari asks for an entry permit and she is granted one, in part by appealing to the border guard. Living under the constant cloud of secrecy and fear of discovery, they manage nonetheless to conceive a child, and Yagesvari returns to India to have a baby girl, Malini. Unable to bear the separation, she returns to South Africa with a passport. In a somewhat confusing scene, she and Malini are ushered off the boat by a friend, and go into hiding outside the city. Eventually Malini is released, leaving a despondent Yagesvari in jail. She attempts suicide and is also eventually released, very unwell, and they live in anxiety because the decision about whether she can by law remain with Srenika remains unresolved. Though it is not expressly stated at the end of the novel, the implication is that she dies broken in body and in spirit by the ordeal, effectively, of her married life.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Africa in the Indian Imagination by Antoinette Burton. Copyright © 2016 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents
Foreword / Isabel Hofmeyr viiiAcknowledgments xiii
Introduction. Citing/Siting Africa in the Indian Postcolonial Imagination 1
1. "Every Secret Thing"? Racial Politics in Ansuyah R. Singh's Behold the Earth Mourns (1960) 27
2. Race and the Politics of Position: Above and Below in Frank Moraes' The Importance of Being Black (1965) 57
3. Fictions of Postcolonial Development: Race, Intimacy and Afro-Asian Solidarity in Chanakya Sen's The Morning After (1973) 89
4. Hands and Feed: Phyllis Naidoo's Impressions of Anti-apartheid History (2002-2006) 123
Epilogue 167
Index 173
What People are Saying About This
"Reflecting Antoinette Burton's fearlessness, scholarly dexterity, and shining brilliance, Africa in the Indian Imagination is an impressive achievement. Burton raises important questions on how to approach historical evidence in the writing of imperial histories, while providing a rich, nuanced, and deep account of the tense relations between Indians and Africans as they emerged from colonial relations. A vital book."
"In Africa in the Indian Imagination imperial historian Antoinette Burton turns her acute moral and analytical attentions to how twentieth-century Indian nationalists used Africa and Africans as reference points for imagining an independent identity. Africa in the Indian Imagination consolidates and extends Burton’s fine skills as postcolonial diagnostician and adds important conceptual devices to the toolbox of geopolitical historiography, not least 'solidarity through friction,' 'tense and tender relations,' and 'postcolonial citation' itself. Powerfully acting on its own injunction to provincialize empire by crossing postcolonial with feminist critique, Burton’s bold and important study redraws the map of inter-cultural relations and trans-nationalist collaboration in the twentieth century."