affairs, which grew increasingly avid following Sastri’s visit.
After subscribing to The Servant of India, Jeffreys was increasingly able to manage her own reading programme, drawing into her orbit the texts circulating in its advertising pages. In May 1930 she ordered “a life of Gokhale”, followed later that year by Andrews’ biography, Mahatma Gandhi: His Own Story. Through these narratives of individual lives, cut across by affect and produced out of intimate relations (for instance, that between Andrews and Gandhi), she continued to orient herself politically. In the pages of The Servant of India, too, she would have seen reflected across the Indian Ocean the face of the increasingly troubled South African polity. In the years I surveyed (1927–32), South Africa features regularly in the newsletter. The South African Settlement of 1927 is heatedly discussed, while the physical movement of the first Indian agent across the ocean is mirrored in coverage of his speeches, from Sastri’s address in Poona before his departure (10 March 1927) to his lecture on the “Indian problem in South Africa”, presented on arrival in Pretoria (28 July 1927). During his tenure as agent, the newsletter carried fortnightly stories tracing his every move, applauding each success and printing for Indian audiences the speeches with which he was attempting to counter the anti-Indian sentiment of white South Africa. The Servant of India explicitly envisages and evokes a trans-oceanic public when it urges the “speedy withdrawal of the objectionable section” of the South African Liquor Bill that would compromise Indian employment in the hospitality industry “before an agitation on both sides of the Indian Ocean thickens and kills with the frost of recrimination and denunciation the tender sapling of friendship that is being nursed between the two nations” (24 Nov. 1927, 513).
Literary texts joined the news media, political pamphlets, biographies and philosophical treatises circulating across the Indian Ocean and performed a similar function in shaping relations, altering attitudes and interpellating subjects into new communities.6 Rao’s precious copy of Rabindranath Tagore’s Chitra was dispatched across the Indian Ocean by mail boat, in return for which Jeffreys entrusted her treasured Hans Christian Andersen to the high seas, while Rudyard Kipling’s Kim sounded the terms of this reading and writing public in a number of unspoken ways. Print—and these literary texts in particular—profoundly mediated the making and maintaining of this community.
Like Jawaharlal Nehru, Jeffreys counted Kim and The Jungle Book among her childhood treasures and made persistent reference to them, writing of Kim in a letter to Rao that it seemed “to have been in my blood, part of my being, as long as I can recall”. This novel, argues Ashis Nandy (1998, 44–45), “was for Kipling a once-in-a-lifetime break with his painfully-constituted imperial self … baring his latent awareness” of his “biculturality”. Kim spoke to Jeffreys’ newfound sense of identity, which cracked open the closed community of whiteness she had previously inhabited. Finally, Tagore’s Gora, which takes up Kim’s production of a hybrid colonial subject without foreclosing its possibilities as Kipling does, found in Jeffreys a highly appreciative reader. (If Andersen seems out of place in such textual company, his resonance for Jeffreys becomes clearer when she writes to Sastri in 1930, declaring of their relationship: “A fairy-tale it is, come to life.”)
I am equally intrigued by the texts that did not circulate in this triangular exchange—particularly E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India—as I am in those that did. Given Jeffreys’ extensive reading programme on India and given A Passage to India’s shared interest with Kim in the politics of colonial friendship, it is striking to me that Jeffreys did not draw on it as a text through which to shape her epistolary community. Had she engaged this novel, she might have encountered insurmountable challenges in its pages. Whereas transcultural friendship was what initially drew Forster to India, the possibility of friendship is in his novel treated as a vexed question, rather than assumed as it is in Kipling’s “Little friend of all the world”. Were Jeffreys to have grappled with her desire to encounter the “real” India through interpellation by a plot that sees Adela’s quest culminate in “a study of the profound fragility of colonial intimacy” (Suleri 1992, 147), her own self-constructions and her constructions of India and Indians might have been too painfully troubled.
In contrast to A Passage to India, Kim offers Jeffreys imaginative entry into the never-never land of community within empire. Declaring her “tender love for Kim and his Lama”, she models her relationship with Sastri on this literary mould. Addressing herself to him from the outset as his chela (disciple), she adopts Kim as framework for the relationship, inserting herself into the fraternal and filial structures of Kipling’s colonial world as the devoted disciple of the wise guru. Kim’s chameleon quality must have been equally attractive to Jeffreys. His sartorial shape-shifting is reflected in the range of signatures she employs for her different interlocutors and audiences (one of which being “Kim”) and contrasts with the fixed image of white femininity she might have encountered in the mirror held out by Forster’s novel. In contradistinction to Kim, which issues the promise of identification to a reader such as Jeffreys, allowing her to escape her gendered position by projecting herself into the utopian fraternities of Kipling’s world, A Passage to India draws attention to white women as problem in the colonial context, as the wedge dividing the kind of nascent community into which Jeffreys was trying to imagine herself.
“Forster, the eloquent enemy of the Raj,” observes Judith Plotz (1992, 111), “shares with Kipling, its ardent exponent, a concern with friendship across the bounds of race, religion, and nationality”, while famously deferring it to beyond the reach of empire. To the bounds of colonial difference (race, in particular) must be added the equally pertinent one of gender, which Jeffreys had perforce to negotiate in her engagement with two Indian men. The “not yet” to transcultural friendship in the colonial world that Forster’s novel issues resonates with the “not yet” addressed to women desiring admittance into the fraternity of friendship (Forster 1961, 317; Derrida 1997, 238, 281). As Derrida (1997, viii) finds, “the figure of the friend, so regularly coming back on stage with the features of the brother … seems spontaneously to belong to a familial, fraternalist and thus androcentric configuration of politics”.
Such conceptions of friendship within empire underpin Victoria’s Proclamation of 1858, and are reiterated in Sastri’s acceptance speech on receiving the Freedom of the City of London in 1921: “On the highest authority the British Empire has been declared to be without distinction of any kind. Neither race nor colour nor religion are to divide man from man so long as they are subjects of this empire” (Sastri 1945b, 128). The Indian liberal discourse that Sastri epitomised was itself honed through textual traffic. As Abha Saxena (1986, xv) notes, Indian liberalism “derived its inspirations from the writings of English liberals of the nineteenth century like Mill, Bentham, Macaulay and Morley etc”. Late in life, Sastri (1945a, 4) identified his intellectual mentors to be T. H. Huxley, J. S. Mill and Herbert Spencer. More or less contemporaneous with the young Sastri’s reading of Spencer and Mill in India would have been that of a governess on a South African farm, who would become South Africa’s most celebrated writer and feminist: Olive Schreiner, who shared with Jeffreys a vexed relation to the women’s suffrage movement in South Africa, which sought to arrive at the deferred “not yet” by admitting only white women to the political community.7
Gender strongly informs Jeffreys’ sense of community, and both sunders and supports her connection to India. On the one hand, she draws the kinds of analogies familiar in Western feminist movements of the time: “as men behave towards women … so Europeans behave to colour …. Not forever can they do this to us”, she declares to Sastri in a letter of February 1930. Yet, on the other hand, she is keenly aware of the ways in which white women’s liberation is established at the expense of racial liberation, and is outspokenly bitter about the Women’s Enfranchisement Act, which in turn disenfranchised Africans in the Cape: “What a way to get the vote. It makes me sick”, she exclaims in a later dispatch, and writes an article on the subject titled “Women’s franchise and the native in South Africa” for
