of the two terms in the South African context, Jeffreys’ discourse threatens to erase the figure of “native woman”. Yet, embedded in a web of textual circuits cutting across the colonial world, she is also able—in ways similar to the strategies of many anti-colonial nationalists of the time—to draw trenchant comparisons between women in India and women in South Africa. Indeed, her interest in women’s enfranchisement in South Africa appears to have been sparked by “the interesting pamphlets about the All India Women’s Conference” sent by Rao in February 1930. “It comes at a fitting moment”, she responds in March 1930: “Our Women’s Suffrage Bill is in the melting pot.”
Jeffreys’ understanding of the ways in which her gendered identity was deployed within the racialisation of the South African polity is also evident when she reports herself
interested to hear that they have a study circle here of persons of all creeds & colours, but only for men. … I wish they included my sex, but evidently they feel that women might prove a complication! … I do covet the privileges of being a man.
Given the context of this observation, a letter to Sastri in October 1929 that focuses on restrictions pertaining to women and anticipates an imagined future typified by “intermarriage”, Jeffreys is clearly alluding to the ways in which white women have been produced as racial boundary markers: as symbols rather than discussants in the “race question”. It is from such constructions of her subject position that she flees, although never quite successfully, by inserting herself into the fraternal configurations of what Edward Said (1994, 136) has described as Kipling’s “overwhelmingly male novel”.
Kipling, however, ultimately proves of limited value in Jeffreys’ reimagining of community. If his characters charmed her childhood, they could not help her in assimilating the knowledge that her ancestry included two slaves shipped from South Asia; nor would Kipling, with his antipathy towards Eurasians, have enabled her later pioneering efforts within the pages of Drum magazine to represent the apartheid nation as a miscege-nation. In such efforts, Tagore proved infinitely more useful, while at the same time offering Jeffreys the analytic tools with which to grapple with the implications of gender in the community she was trying to construct and inhabit.
Whereas Kipling’s physical and textual movements amongst India, South Africa and England carved out the triangulated structure Jeffreys was attempting to inhabit, Tagore increasingly offered an alternative configuration onto which she could plot herself, enabling her to reconceive this world beyond imperial rule. After all, if Kipling’s jingoistic verses spurred on the imperial mission, Tagore’s songs would be used as the national anthems of both independent India and Bangladesh. Feted in England, while still deeply identified—and identifying—with India, Tagore poetically presented the Indian ocean as casting asunder the intimately related continents of Africa and South Asia in “Africa” (1938): “The angry sea/snatched you from the breast of Mother Asia/Africa” (Tagore 1993, 102).8
Both writers are, of course, Nobel laureates: Kipling was honoured by the judging committee in 1907 for his “virility of ideas”, whereas Tagore was applauded in 1913 for his ability to make “his poetic thought … a part of the literature of the West” (Nobel, 2012a, 2012b). Tagore’s intertextual dialogue with Kipling, moreover, marks literature as an international arena in which filial relations and (dis)affiliations are performed. Like Kim, Tagore’s Gora journeys across India on the Grand Trunk Road; he too is the orphaned offspring of Irish parents. However, unlike Kim, Gora remains utterly committed to India, even as the revelation of his parenthood forces him to redefine his relation to what is unambiguously identified as his motherland. Whereas Kim’s loyalties ultimately fall firmly on the side of empire (see Said 1994, 148), with an attendant narrowing of his world, Gora’s worldview widens as the novel concludes (see Nandy 1998, 46). At the conclusion of his story, Gora steps out of the partisan India he has championed, opting instead for an India cut across and infused by various currents and flows. Thus, while the journey in Kim is from a championing of syncretism to a retreat into purity, in Gora this trajectory is reversed.
Tagore, moreover, renders intimate relations central to the plot of Gora (first published in Bengali in 1909 and in English translation in 1924). Questions about which community one belongs to, with whom one may fraternise, whom one may love and so on lie at the core of its philosophical enquiry and narrative structure, which unfolds through the prism of romance and the domestic novel, engaging in the production of romantic love, the authorisation of the realm of the heart in political life (see Tagore n.d., 53, 57) and the feminisation of a hitherto masculine national culture (Tagore n.d., 83, 274) (no ‘virility of ideas’ here!). Ultimately, and antithetically to both Kim and A Passage to India (published in the year in which the English translation of Gora was issued), gender difference and love between men and women are presented in Gora as the solution to the narrative crisis and the surest means by which to surmount communal and racial barriers.
In October 1930 Jeffreys informed Sastri that she could barely tear herself away from Tagore’s novel in order to pen her letter:
I might as well say I have met those people; known them intimately for years. And the inter-relation of social prejudice and the action of the characters is so clean that, foreign as many of the ideas are to the occidental mode of life, we at once feel with each character, understand his predicament, and acquiesce in the naturalness of his behaviour. I do not know when I have so much enjoyed a book or felt so unbearably aggravated by the vagaries of the people in it, or loved them with such affectionate understanding.
This enthusiastic response reveals the reader inserting herself into a community in the act of reading, as Jeffreys identifies keenly with the novel’s eponymous hero, whose personal journey sees him travelling away from a dogmatic quest for a pure and untouched India and towards an acknowledgement of his own alterity and a celebration of the fissured—and thus infinitely richer—texture of the India he finally discovers. The India towards which Tagore wrote was one open to the oceanic currents that had previously formed and composed it; elsewhere, in his pamphlet Greater India, first published in 1921, he bemoans that which “has caused us to stop all voyaging on the high seas,—whether of water or of wisdom. We belonged to the universal but have relegated ourselves to the pariah” (Tagore 2003, 26). Like Forster, moreover, Tagore was energised by the problem of colonial friendship: “All of the trouble that we see now-a-days is caused by this failure of East and West to come together. Bound to be near each other, and yet unable to be friends, is an intolerable situation between man and man, and hurtful withal” (Tagore 2003, 87). Here Tagore articulates one of Rao’s abiding concerns; writing from Lake Victoria en route to India in May 1929, Rao posed to Jeffreys the question: “Where does the East end and the West begin?”
In contrast to Kipling and Forster, the anti-phallocentric friendship towards which Tagore’s and Rao’s writings strove created spaces in which to imagine community anew. Yet, by reinserting the gendered body into his fictions of friendship, Tagore required of Jeffreys that she recast the affect she had thus far modelled on the fraternal. Toward this end, she returned to Chitra (adapted, like Śakuntalā, from the Mahābhārata, and first published in 1914), urging Sastri in a letter of October 1930: “Do read Chitra again, see how she found fulfilment and comradeship.” In the play Jeffreys read a dozen times, Chitra, a woman raised as a son, exhorts the gods to make her “superbly beautiful” for a year (Tagore 1962, 156) in order to secure the heart of the avowed celibate, Arjuna. Having achieved her aim, she shuns her “borrowed beauty”, finding that her “body has become [her] own rival” (Tagore 1962, 162, 163). Yet she fears that, should she stand true in her unwomanly guise, Arjuna will reject her. Unveiling into her masculine attire, however, she is embraced as he declares, in the play’s closing line, “Beloved, my life is full” (Tagore 1962, 173).
Jeffreys drafted a spate of letters to both Sastri and Rao in which she tries to explicate her reading of Chitra. In them, she articulates the ways in which she is drawing on the play to imagine her community of
