Indian independence struggle, in contrast, did not symbolize a desired future. It instantiated democratic self-government in a diverse, polyglot, and religiously divided country whose leadership, moreover, asserted continuity with two ancient civilizations, Hinduism and Islam. A world historic event, it had philosophical as well as political ramifications. Indian independence not only challenged the fact of foreign rule, it negated a common assumption of colonial ideology and important strands of liberal political theory: that a developed political economy, experience in modern institutions, and common loyalty to a shared identity—in other words, the normative attributes of ‘nation’ in liberal thought—were the necessary foundations of a sovereign and democratic state.12 Transported and translated into South African intellectual life, India provided African intellectuals with a vehicle to begin to think (both empirically and theoretically) about possible foundations of nationhood beyond empire and settler civil society. This transformed temporality of politics—conveyed most powerfully by Lembede’s slogan “freedom in our lifetime”—created a new conceptual “problem space.”13 In claiming sovereignty on behalf of a subaltern and socially heterogeneous people, the 1940s generation of nationalists inaugurated a new intellectual horizon within which African thinkers would reimagine the grounds and meaning of nation.
THE INTERNAL FRONTIER OF THE NATION-STATE
If Indian independence suggested a new model for the thinking of nation, the Indian diaspora interrupted a central precept of this worldview: the envisioning of nation—to subvert Benedict Anderson’s famous phrase—in homogenous, empty space.14 The postwar map may have been composed of “liberated sovereignties,” emerging states that would ostensibly realize and guard the promise of universal human rights, but this map was far from empty.15 It was transversed by older geographies of empire, capitalism, and the oceanic worlds created by the movement of people, cultures, and ideas.16 These dense histories posed a fundamental problem for the new nationalisms. When anticolonial intellectuals conceptualized the people as sovereign over a territory, they confronted the question of translating these alternate geographies into the imaginary of the nation-state. The “other than national” had to be rendered internal (and therefore governable by an entity with territorial jurisdiction) or foreign—a more ambiguous and exceptional status. The Indian diaspora resisted both determinations. A deterritorialized and geographically dispersed entity, diaspora served as an internal frontier of the imagined political community, a site where the principle of nationhood (however it was articulated) confronted other scales and forms of identity. Things “Indian” permeated the sociopolitical landscape of Natal and, to a lesser degree, other parts of the country. They appeared both in everyday life and material culture (from the atchar sold by the local shopkeeper to the grand minarets of Grey Street’s mosques) and in great events that shaped the course of South Africa’s history (such as Gandhi’s campaigns). India was ubiquitous, part of the very fabric of South Africa. The ambiguity of the term “Indian,” which named both a distant country and a variety of familiar people and places, intensified this uncanny effect.
In his important book Enlightenment in the Colony, Aamir Mufti suggests that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century arguments regarding the place of Jews within Europe—the famous “Jewish question”—prefigured the dilemma faced by ethnic minorities within the postcolonial nation-state. 17 According to Mufti, the secular state, based on the categories of national identity and citizenship, produced the Jewish diaspora as doubly anomalous. On the one hand, the Jew functioned as a figure of premodern, religious particularity that disrupted the universalizing ideal of individual and secular citizenship. On the other hand, the diasporic and cosmopolitan character of Jewishness, which European nationalist intellectuals frequently associated with the elusive attributes of transnational capitalism, threatened the Romantic ideal of a solidly rooted and holistic national identity. Reading the place of the Muslim in contemporary India through these earlier debates, Mufti concludes that the contradictory imperatives of secular nationalism, rather than demography, produce the cultural-political status of the minority. If nationalism institutionalizes a territorial identity through the establishment and policing of external boundaries, the category of minority allows the nationalist project to replicate this structure of demarcation within its territorial body: the minority group is included inside the space of the nation in such a way as to protect both the putative universalism of citizenship and the underlying exclusivity of a singular (cultural, linguistic, or racial) national subject. This mode of incorporation renders the minority precarious and vulnerable. In the process of unifying a collective territorial subject, nationalism “makes large numbers of people eminently unsettled. More simply put, whenever a population is minoritized—a process inherent in the nationalization of peoples and cultural practices—it is also rendered potentially movable.”18 Mufti’s concept of minoritization usefully marks the distinction between “minority” as a political status produced by majoritarian nationalism and actual groups of people, who can understand their relationship to and within nation in a multitude of ways.
In developing the concept of internal frontier, this book follows Mufti’s insistence that the relationship between nation and diaspora is not predetermined by demography, but is the product of an ongoing process that generates both the majority and minority as interlacing political identities. In its modern form, the phenomenon of diaspora resides at the intersection of the global distribution of certain ethnic or cultural identities—such as Jew or Indian—and an international system based on the territorialization of identity in the form of the nation-state. (It is notable that comparisons between Indians and Jews were a fixture of both popular discourse and the postwar iconography of Indian political struggles in South Africa.) As many scholars have observed, this territorialization is always, necessarily incomplete.19 Political projects of assimilation or ethnic cleansing might asymptotically approach the classic ideal of European nationalism (“one people, one territory”), but the complexity of existing populations and the transnational movement of migrants render its ultimate realization impossible.20 Because homogeneity remains elusive, diaspora functions as a shifting boundary—an interior limit to the project of majoritarian democracy—that destabilizes territorial nationalism and forces the continuous elaboration of a bounded national subject. This dialectic of interruption and reassertion changes, however subtly, the dominant identity over time. As Paul Gilroy argues, the effects of diaspora on a cultural landscape make it impossible to theorize without developing a new perspective on national culture as a whole.21 At the same time, Internal Frontiers extends—and to a degree departs from—Mufti’s argument by raising the possibility of subverting the majoritarian logic of nationalism. Because Mufti accepts that the trajectory of postcolonial politics necessarily recapitulates the Romantic ideal of peoplehood, his critique assumes a tragic structure. In his account, diaspora only ever becomes territorialized through the legal-juridical category of minority. Is it possible to invert this movement and rethink the nature of national community through its essential permeability? What would it mean to leave the internal frontier open?
PHILOSOPHICAL IDEALISM
Both a neighbor and an outsider, unmistakably South African and cosmopolitan, “the Indian” displaced the problem space of postwar African nationalism from within. If the liberation struggle necessitated a unified people, then what was the place of the also-colonized other in the nationalist project? What type of unity could allow for an irreducible plurality of cultural and political subjects? In his enormously influential Provincializing Europe, Dipesh Chakrabarty argues that imperialism and Third World nationalism, by equating modernity with a highly ideological construction of the “West,” universalized a particular subject of history, the sovereign subject of the nation-state.22 Echoing the Indian psychologist Ashis Nandy (and through him Frantz Fanon), this argument suggests that anticolonial struggles emulated the subjectivities, political forms, and normative conceptions of their ostensible enemy, the European colonizer.23 Along similar lines, Mahmood Mamdani claims that African nationalism limited its goals to the deracialization of civil society and therefore left the distinction between the citizen and native (embodied in the institutions of indirect rule) intact.24 In contrast, Internal Frontiers
