INTRODUCTION

      The Internal Frontier of the Nation-State

      ON 19 February 1948, the Pietermaritzburg-based journal Inkundla ya Bantu (The people’s forum) published a lengthy piece of news analysis entitled “Bambulaleleni Ugandhi?” or “Why did they kill Gandhi?” At one level, the article offered a disarmingly simple answer: the culprit in question was the Indian people as a whole. India murdered Gandhi because he represented the ideal of Hindu-Muslim equality within a single nation. (The author’s failure to name Gandhi’s assassin, Nathuram Godse, reinforced this attribution of collective responsibility.) According to the article, Gandhi had argued that the Hindu and Muslim “tribes” (uqobo, segments or parts of a totality) should unite in the struggle for independence, but Muslims began to agitate for a separate country when they realized that the Hindu majority would come to power, reducing them to “slaves.” Asserting their right to rule, a younger generation of Hindus began to attack Muslims and, after Gandhi attempted to reconcile the two sides, murdered their former leader as a traitor to their national aspirations. The author apportioned blame equally: Gandhi’s vision had been undermined by the secessionist politics of an anxious minority and the violent retaliation of a majority in ascendance. Consequently, the country—as both a people and a political project—stood under judgment before the court of global opinion. However, if the article initially summoned its readership to identify with this international tribunal, it then shifted perspectives and projected Africans into the position of the defendant. Directly addressing its readership, it admonished Africans to draw from the lessons of division and violence: “The wages of stabbing each other is death. It is a way of running away from the truth.” At this point, the article presented Partition and Gandhi’s death as foreshadowing Africa’s own future, or at least one possible scenario. The world should not, it argued, condemn Indians: “given the opportunity, they can build a great nation.” With these words, the author defended not only the viability of Gandhi’s vision of plural nationhood, but the very possibility of national sovereignty beyond the West and its norms.¹

      This piece was one of hundreds, if not thousands, of items about India that appeared in newspapers written by and for black South Africans in the 1940s. And this profusion of coverage, centered on the changes sweeping the British Empire and their implications for South Africa, was only one moment in a much longer conversation that began in the late nineteenth century and continues to the present. From Gandhi’s first political campaign in Johannesburg in the 1890s to today’s BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) group of emerging economies, India has served as an essential reference point for South African politics and black political thinkers. If Gandhi’s twenty-one years in South Africa are the most well-known episode in this history, they form only one strand of a larger and considerably more complex story. Other major figures of the Indian independence struggle traveled to South Africa, including Indian National Congress president Gopal Krishna Gokhale (who toured the country in 1912), the iconic poetess and nationalist politician Sarojini Naidu in 1924, and a young Indira Nehru during the 1940s. South African journalists, writers, and students journeyed in the other direction; for example, the African National Congress (ANC) leader S. S. Thema (Gandhi advised him that the ANC should abandon Western pretensions and go “about with only a tiny clout around your loins”²), the future president of the ANC Albert Luthuli, and Fort Hare professor D. D. T. Jabavu, who published a book on his experiences in isiXhosa titled In India and East Africa.³ Journeys by intellectuals and anticolonial militants occurred against the backdrop of the legacy of indentured Indian labor in the South African province of Natal, political and administrative linkages between the colonies, and the mass circulation of newspapers, books, spices, religious icons, films, and other culture-bearing commodities.⁴ Most significantly, the two countries were bound by the communities of Indian descent that built lives and homes across South Africa.

      These connections provided a reference and resource for the antiapartheid struggle. In November 1980, the acting president of the ANC, Oliver Tambo, accepted the Jawaharlal Nehru Award for International Understanding on behalf of Nelson Mandela, then imprisoned on Robben Island. Speaking in New Delhi, Tambo praised “the striking role of India in the development of the struggle for national and social liberation in South Africa,” including labor actions carried out by indentured workers in nineteenth-century Natal, India’s case against South Africa’s racial policies at the first meeting of the United Nations (UN) General Assembly in 1946, and Nehru’s statement of solidarity with Africa—Asia’s “sister continent”—at the 1955 Afro-Asian Conference held outside of Bandung, Indonesia.⁵ If Tambo’s remarks conflated the diaspora, the Indian anticolonial struggle, and the postcolonial state by attributing them a single historical agency, they also made India integral to a narrative of South African history based on anticolonial nationalism. Paying tribute to this relationship, Mandela adapted the title of his 1994 biography Long Walk to Freedom from an essay by Nehru that he first read as a student in the 1940s. When Mandela met E. S. Reddy (the chair of the UN Committee against Apartheid and an Indian citizen) shortly after his release from prison, he was still able to recite long passages of Nehru’s writings from memory.⁶ Tambo’s remarks and Mandela’s allusion both produced a twinning effect: they configured South African and Indian histories as simultaneously distinct and inseparable. They also, both historically and symbolically, incorporated this twinning into the ANC’s understanding of nation.

      Internal Frontiers tells the story of this relationship. It argues that it played a fundamental role in shaping the intellectual trajectory of the ANC and the South African antiapartheid struggle during the crucial conjuncture of the 1940s and ’50s. At the moment of Indian independence and the emergence of the Third World, African intellectuals confronted the question of the also-colonized other. Simultaneously oppressed and privileged by the framework of white domination, the Indian diaspora posed a fundamental challenge to the political practice and philosophy of African nationalism. If African nationalism excluded Indians from the antiapartheid struggle and its conception of political community, it risked defining ‘nation’ in racial terms and therefore recapitulating colonialism and apartheid’s dehumanizing categories. However, the inclusion of the diaspora threatened to fragment the territorial unity of the nation or, perhaps more seriously, displace the centrality of the African political subject by subordinating the struggle for national liberation to another politics (for example, the universalizing discourses of Cold War liberalism or Marxism). What conceptualization of nation could incorporate, but not assimilate, a diasporic group that was tied to Africans through colonial oppression, but divided by culture and language, state-sanctioned privileges, and a history of misunderstanding and resentments? Responding to this dilemma, a group of intellectuals, centered in the Indian Ocean port city of Durban, attempted to rethink the idea of nation by privileging a relationship negotiated across difference. What would the practice