record of Rao’s experience of Jeffreys is to be found in his letters, which are detailed, frank and as voluminous as hers; together they thrashed out notions of transcultural connection that would later profoundly inform Rao’s political and personal life.)3 However, as the weight of Jeffreys’ affection for Sastri grew, he became increasingly uneasy. While Jeffreys was charting a course through the complexities Derrida points to in the discourse and practice of friendship, fluctuating between fraternal and filial positions, on the one hand, and, on the other, an overwhelming passion that Sastri began to apprehend, with marked discomfiture, as physical desire, he began to retreat from the demands he imagined were encoded therein. By the time the trio were reunited in 1932, their community had floundered upon these rocks. The impact that their communion had was nonetheless far-reaching, while the role played in it by print media, the circulation of letters and the trans-oceanic traffic in texts is suggestive.
The subject of Sastri’s lecture in November 1928 was the legend Śakuntalā, and its literary travels and translations across the centuries and seas.4 The speech itself does not appear to have been recorded, although a report in Indian Opinion on the same lecture delivered in Johannesburg (19 Oct. 1929) reveals that in it Sastri articulated a liberal-humanist understanding of literature as a medium in and through which to forge new communities, welding the divisions and fractures of the colonial state. His political mission of ameliorating the conditions of South African Indians and of establishing white sympathy for India(ns) was well served by the literary lectures he delivered across South Africa during his tenure as Indian agent: “all high literature”, he maintained, held much in common, and shared a “common appeal” (Indian Opinion, 19 Oct. 1929). The implication of such a statement is the commonality of humankind, yet this apparently global community encompasses only those who are practitioners of “high literature”. Saul Bellow’s disparaging question “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?” (Bellow 1988) is of course evocative of the limits encasing the discourse of Sastri the moderate statesman along with that of the liberal-humanist appreciation of letters that inform this community. As her own sense of location developed, Jeffreys would come to harangue Sastri, albeit gently, for his abjection of the “native” in his strategic South African interventions.
Jeffreys’ second epistle, dated 28 November 1928, highlights the ways in which this lecture established for her a sense of common ground, restoring what she had previously experienced as a fractured world literature:
Goethe’s poem on the Sakuntala I knew and loved many years ago. And before you quoted from the charming English translation I stood there in the aisle, trying to fit together the lovely phrases, which were lying in my mind in scattered fragments. I cannot tell you of the double joy of linking the old sweetness with a new and lovelier song.
Jeffreys recognises Sastri’s act of gathering together the pieces of a text fragmented across divided national and linguistic communities as one in which the construction of a global community of letters—the identification and assemblage of a shared textual culture—is tied to the project of bridging cultural and political differences. This was indeed the task that Sastri assigned himself as agent, whereas for Jeffreys the resonance between a fractured universal textual culture and her own sense of having been cast off from her South Asian ancestry is acute. Thus, resonant imagery appears in her letter book a year later: “I am a tiny chip that was taken off the base of a beautiful vase”, she tells Sastri; “I only want to be joined on again where I belong.”
Jeffreys (n.d.a) writes later that Sastri’s gift to her was “pride and acceptance in [her] twofold heritage”, which enabled her to reconstruct her own fractured history, and, in later years, was partially extended into a “threefold heritage” (Jeffreys n.d.b) as she increasingly drew “Africa” into the weave of subjectivity she was producing (see Samuelson 2007; 2011). In the process, she opened up the bounds of Sastri’s discourse that was founded on the appreciation of belles lettres. Following her immersion in this community of letters, in other words, she is able to begin melding her African, Asian and European fragments into a new self—one that holds together, albeit in a state of tension, the oceanic currents and continental anchor that comprise her location. The letters travelling back and forth between Cape Town and India enable Jeffreys’ reconception of her spatial placing, while letters (those she wrote, those she received and those she typed for others) see her finding herself in another ideological space to that which she had previously occupied. Typing confidential missives for C. F. Andrews, the Christian missionary who became Gandhi’s confidant, and who is drawn into Jeffreys’ “Indian circle”, she informs Sastri:
I enter into the anxieties and the hopes of the Agent and his Staff, I find myself moved to tenderness and to exasperation at the actions of Gandhi; and I find myself at length, in very defiance of my practical instincts, saying: I cannot any longer deny that he may be right. I become in fact with growing knowledge his defender, that was so short a time ago his detractor. Yet, the more I realise the righteousness of his action the more I tremble for those who love him, and also for those whom he loves.
Repositioned into intimate relations athwart the divisions of empire by (being) the medium of type print, Jeffreys’ reorientation had begun more than two years previously when, after meeting Sastri, she had launched on an intense reading programme on India. By November 1929 she reports having devoured “about 30 really good books on India”, concluding: “I am developing tremendous respect for Ghandi [sic], whom I referred to in tones of the deepest contempt and detestation only last year. It is, with me, a time of growth”. Each subsequent letter reports on a book completed or in progress, from accounts by retired Raj administrators to “racy and entertaining” tales. Initially dependent on a North–South axis feeding studies of India into the Cape Town library system, Jeffreys’ “continuous correspondence” with Rao enabled her increasingly to bypass the North and establish an alternative South–South axis of textual circulation.
Writing from Mombasa in March 1929, Rao queried whether Jeffreys had read “Miss Mayo’s book”, urging her, “If you can get a copy”, to “please read ‘Unhappy India’ by Lajpat Rai”. Published in 1927, Katherine Mayo’s Mother India, which cast a jaundiced Western eye on Indian intimate relations, was an international sensation at the time: not only does The Servant of India newsletter host numerous rebuttals penned within India, but it also includes furious responses from the author of the regular feature “Our South African Letter”. Mother India, Jeffreys surmises, was not only informing North–South relations, but was equally shaping those between Indians and white South Africans.5 Thus, she bemoans to Sastri: “My mother has been reading her or someone kindred & warning me about you & your people!” As the South Africa correspondent of The Servant of India points out:
South Africa was never overflowing with sympathy for, and understanding of, India and Miss Mayo’s book has not tended to improve the situation. Her book seems to have a great vogue in this country. A number of its reviews and notes have appeared in all kinds of papers (5 April 1928, 193).
Whereas books on India by the likes of Mayo were widely available in South African libraries (to judge from the list of titles Jeffreys was able to access), the radical Laipat Rai’s rebuttal of Mayo was certainly not. Rao eagerly supplemented the holdings of the Cape Town city libraries with a regular book parcel from India. Early in their correspondence he asks: “Did you read Sister Nivedita (Miss Margaret Noble), her book, ‘Web of Indian Life’? Please do? Published by Longmans, I believe.” Evidently unable to source a copy in South Africa, Jeffreys has one dispatched to her by Rao. In exchange, Rao exacted from Jeffreys a stream of news cuttings and reports that saw him increasingly exceeding the limits of the public that the Agency was attempting to foster; the extent to which his catholic reading habits—far from limited to belles lettres —enabled him to open up to a far more inclusive South–South community is notable. Rather than simply focusing on Indian South African affairs, he was requesting, among other titles, proceedings of the 1929 Bantu-European Conference in Cape Town, and receiving copies of Eddie Roux’s communist newsletter Umsebenzi (with Jeffreys anticipating
