The South African Gandhi: Stretcher-Bearer of Empire

by Ashwin Desai, Goolem Vahed

Overview

In the pantheon of freedom fighters, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi has pride of place. His fame and influence extend far beyond India and are nowhere more significant than in South Africa. "India gave us a Mohandas, we gave them a Mahatma," goes a popular South African refrain. Contemporary South African leaders, including Mandela, have consistently lauded him as being part of the epic battle to defeat the racist white regime.

The South African Gandhi focuses on Gandhi's first leadership experiences and the complicated man they reveal—a man who actually supported the British Empire. Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed unveil a man who, throughout his stay on African soil, stayed true to Empire while showing a disdain for Africans. For Gandhi, whites and Indians were bonded by an Aryan bloodline that had no place for the African. Gandhi's racism was matched by his class prejudice towards the Indian indentured. He persistently claimed that they were ignorant and needed his leadership, and he wrote their resistances and compromises in surviving a brutal labor regime out of history. The South African Gandhi writes the indentured and working class back into history.

The authors show that Gandhi never missed an opportunity to show his loyalty to Empire, with a particular penchant for war as a means to do so. He served as an Empire stretcher-bearer in the Boer War while the British occupied South Africa, he demanded guns in the aftermath of the Bhambatha Rebellion, and he toured the villages of India during the First World War as recruiter for the Imperial army. This meticulously researched book punctures the dominant narrative of Gandhi and uncovers an ambiguous figure whose time on African soil was marked by a desire to seek the integration of Indians, minus many basic rights, into the white body politic while simultaneously excluding Africans from his moral compass and political ideals.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780804797177
Publisher:	Stanford University Press
Publication date:	10/07/2015
Series:	South Asia in Motion
Pages:	344
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Ashwin Desai is Professor of Sociology at the University of Johannesburg. Goolam Vahed is Associate Professor of History at the University of KwaZulu Natal.

Table of Contents

A Note on Sources 7

List of Abbreviations 9

About the Authors 11

Map of South Africa, 1910 14

Map of Natal, 1910 17

1 The Remains of Empire 19

2 Brown over Black 30

3 The War Within 49

4 Truth as Experiments 66

5 Gandhi's Lieutenants 76

6 Shadow-Boxing on the Highveld 90

7 The Bhambatha Rebellion 101

8 The Black Act 119

9 Union and its Discontents 134

10 Hind Swaraj 148

11 The Moderate as Messiah 161

12 Stalemates and New Openings 171

13 Women on the March 185

14 Border Crossings 194

15 The Rajah is Coming 212

16 Striking at the Heart of Cities 228

17 The Provisional Agreement 241

18 The Adjudication 256

19 Goodbye Mr Gandhi 269

20 Man of Peace, Man of War 280

21 Between Leaving and Returning 296

References 307

Acknowledgements 323

Index 324

Editorial Reviews

"The South African Gandhi finally offers a real and convincing account of Indian life and politics in South Africa, and Gandhi's changing place within it. Its critique of the sanctimonious and nationalistic historiography around Gandhi allows the authors to recover a Gandhi beyond moralism."

Universityof Oxford - Faisal Devji

"The South African Gandhi's detailed treatment of how Gandhi operated in the South African political context is a significant contribution to the growing revisionist literature. Most arresting perhaps to readers familiar only with the hagiography will be Gandhi's persistent attempts to improve the position of South African Indians by emphasising their superiority to Africans and reliability as subjects of Empire."

author of Gandhi: A Political and Spiritual Life - Kathryn Tidrick

"In this impressively researched study, two South African scholars of Indian background bravely challenge political myth-making on both sides of the Indian Ocean that has sought to canonize Gandhi as a founding father of the struggle for equality there. They show that the Mahatma-to-be carefully refrained from calling on his followers to throw in their lot with the black majority. The mass struggle he finally led remained an Indian struggle."—Joseph Lelyveld, author of Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India

"This is a wonderful demonstration of meticulously researched, evocative, clear-eyed and fearless history writing. It uncovers a story, some might even call it a scandal, that has remained hidden in plain sight for far too long. The South African Gandhi is a big book. It is a serious challenge to the way we have been taught to think about Gandhi."—Arundhati Roy, author of The God of Small Things

"The South African Gandhi's detailed treatment of how Gandhi operated in the South African political context is a significant contribution to the growing revisionist literature. Most arresting perhaps to readers familiar only with the hagiography will be Gandhi's persistent attempts to improve the position of South African Indians by emphasising their superiority to Africans and reliability as subjects of Empire."—Kathryn Tidrick, author of Gandhi: A Political and Spiritual Life

"The South African Gandhi finally offers a real and convincing account of Indian life and politics in South Africa, and Gandhi's changing place within it. Its critique of the sanctimonious and nationalistic historiography around Gandhi allows the authors to recover a Gandhi beyond moralism."—Faisal Devji, University of Oxford

From the Publisher

"In this impressively researched study, two South African scholars of Indian background bravely challenge political myth-making on both sides of the Indian Ocean that has sought to canonize Gandhi as a founding father of the struggle for equality there. They show that the Mahatma-to-be carefully refrained from calling on his followers to throw in their lot with the black majority. The mass struggle he finally led remained an Indian struggle."

author of Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India - Joseph Lelyveld

"This is a wonderful demonstration of meticulously researched, evocative, clear-eyed and fearless history writing. It uncovers a story, some might even call it a scandal, that has remained hidden in plain sight for far too long. The South African Gandhi is a big book. It is a serious challenge to the way we have been taught to think about Gandhi."

author of The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy