The great philosophical breakthrough of Gandhi’s South African years was the development of satyagraha. Adapted from a suggestion sent in by a reader of Indian Opinion, this term was used by Gandhi to differentiate the strategy of his campaign from the more circumscribed (and English-language) concept of passive resistance.61 Satyagraha combines the Sanskrit words for “truth” and “endurance.” Gandhi also glossed the concept as “truth force.” (Martin Luther King Jr. would later speak of “soul force.”62) In contrast to passive resistance, satyagraha is less a specific political tactic than a set of guiding principles that define the success of struggle: persistence in the face of suffering, absolute nonviolence, and the transformation—rather than the coercion—of the oppressor. Requiring inner discipline and intense spiritual preparation, satyagraha could assume varying forms in practice, including refusal to submit to unjust laws, fasting, economic boycotts, mass political mobilization, and creating alternative communities and institutions. The unifying thread of these different actions was the active subordination of self to the pursuit of justice and divine truth. Sidestepping the assumed community of deliberative reason, satyagraha insists on the recognition of common humanity by placing the suffering and vulnerable life of the satyagrahi in the hands of his or her opponent. Whether the object of protest accepts this responsibility or (generally) not, the opponent becomes a custodian of the other’s wellbeing. Consequently, there exists an enormous potential for violence in satyagraha, but it is a violence shouldered by the satyagrahi in the service of a higher purpose. Most radically, satyagraha entails a conception of struggle as the deepening of the ethical relationship between the two contending parties.63 These ideas—especially Gandhi’s emphasis on sacrifice, his critique of materialism, and the idea of struggle as spiritual conversion—would later interact and combine with the Christian traditions that nourished the intellectual life of the ANC.
Gandhi’s South African career remains engulfed in controversy. These debates center on two related questions. First, during his time in South Africa, Gandhi remained loyal to Britain and repeatedly defined his political goals in terms of the achievement of equal rights for South African Indians. To prove Indian fidelity, he mobilized a volunteer ambulance core to care for British soldiers during the 1899–1902 war between the Crown and the Afrikaner republics. When a section of the Zulu people rebelled against a colonial poll tax in 1906 under the leadership of Chief Bambatha kaMancinza, Gandhi once again offered his services by mobilizing an ambulance contingent. (In this case, he found himself caring for Africans who had been left to die after British troops butchered villages. He described these events as “No war but a man hunt.”64) Given his later status as the most globally recognized icon of anticolonialism, his early career invites accusations of hypocrisy. Desai and Vahed subtitle their searching exploration of these years “Stretcher-Bearer of Empire.”65
Second, not only do Gandhi’s South African writings describe Africans in racialized and pejorative terms (especially by utilizing the epithet kaffir), they also stress the danger of Indians sinking to the levels of “Natives.” Describing his first stint in prison, Gandhi writes: “We were then marched off to prison intended for Kaffirs. . . . We could understand not being classed with the whites, but to be placed at the same level of the Natives seemed too much to be put up with. It is indubitably right that the Indians should have separate cells. Kaffirs are as a rule uncivilized—the convicts even more so. They are troublesome, very dirty and live almost like animals.”66 Statements like this were not simply expressions of common prejudice. Because Gandhi rejected an alliance with Africans, his struggle to obtain rights for Indians as British subjects endorsed the colonial racial order: the “uncivilized” Native served as a common boundary that aligned Indianness with empire.67 It is also true that Gandhi moderated and, after he returned to India and embraced a more radical anticolonial position, eventually discarded these views. At moments in his South African writings, he praised individual Africans, most notably his neighbor John Dube, and imagined a far distant future when a new nation would arise from blacks, Indians, and whites.68 By the end of his life, he lent his considerable authority to a younger faction in South African Indian politics that sought a strategic rapprochement with the ANC. Nor were such racial views unique to Gandhi or his Indian peers. As Franco Barchiesi demonstrates, the early leaders of the ANC expressed similar sentiments about the “ruck of the native,” reflecting their embrace of liberal empire and a politics of inclusion within settler civil society.69 Be that as it may, Gandhi’s outlook helped to cement a conservative tradition in diasporic politics and a rhetoric of Indian civilizational superiority that long survived his departure.
Following Gandhi’s return to India in 1914, the Natal Indian Congress persisted as a small organization, composed mostly of passengers and their descendants, and dedicated to advocacy regarding issues that affected the Indian middle class. When a younger generation won control of the Indian Congress in the early 1940s, these activists seized on Gandhi’s time in South Africa—which since had been invested with the prestige of the Indian independence struggle—as a legacy to be appropriated and reinvented.70 Known as the “Radicals,” this group consisted of South African–born professionals and working-class militants, many of whom were drawn into politics by the Communist Party. It eventually included the dashing Communist and proudly Muslim physician Yusuf Dadoo, the avowed Gandhian “Monty” Naicker, the trade union stalwart and socialist H. A. Naidoo, the courageous medical student Zainab Asvat, and the intellectual firebrand Fatima Meer, among many others. Some of these activists possessed childhood memories of Gandhi’s campaigns or grew up listening to their parents’ stories about the Mahatma. Nevertheless, they appropriated and reworked his legacy for a politics inspired by Nehru, the Indian independence struggle, and (in some cases) the party. Under Nehru’s influence and the pressure of events, this group drew the far-reaching conclusion that the struggle of South African Indians could only succeed as part of a broad alliance led by the ANC. This stance required surmounting the fears, racial prejudices, and structural insecurity of their immediate families and broader communities. Especially after the 1949 Durban Riots, they faced significant opposition from other organizations as well as many working-class and poorer Indians.71 Although they are not the focus of this book, the Radicals appear frequently in its pages. They played an irreplaceable part in the developments that it charts.
POSTCOLONIAL INTELLECTUAL HISTORY
As a history of ideas and intellectuals, Internal Frontiers contributes to the broader project of decolonizing and globalizing political theory. Its main goal is to explore new modes of thought that emerged from the struggle against colonialism and apartheid. In this respect, this book is part of a growing literature of postcolonial intellectual history that has begun to elaborate the implications of Third World nationalism and decolonization—central experiences of the twentieth century by any account—for our understandings of foundational philosophical concepts such as sovereignty, nation, citizenship, ethics, civil society, and alterity. Drawing on the pioneering efforts of Edward Said and Sylvia Wynter (among others), this scholarship insists that the long, many-faceted battle to assert the dignity and equality of the “darker nations”—the majority of the human race—could not fail to transform our understanding of the political in far-reaching ways.72 At the same time, Internal Frontiers adopts a different approach from some recent studies of intellectuals such as Gandhi, Fanon, and B. R. Ambedkar. Grounded in a close reading of texts, these accounts reconstruct the normative arguments of anticolonial figures to demonstrate that they were not only political actors, but important thinkers in their own right. As Hamid Dabashi argues in a key programmatic statement, a powerful set of discourses continues to deny the existence of meaningful philosophical production beyond the West. The “non-European” remains the perpetual object of historical, biographical, or ethnographic analysis—never the universal subject of a truly revolutionary mode of thought.73 While postcolonial intellectual history challenges this positioning in significant fashions, it frequently replicates the mode of “high theory” that remains dominant within the Euro-American university. By reducing intellectual production to a written corpus, the historian can distill a series of arguments that mimic the form of Western political philosophy: disembodied, textually based, and universalizing. At its worse, intellectual