Gandhi and South African print culture
ISABEL HOFMEYR
OVER the last few decades, studies of Gandhi have become markedly transnational. Enabled by the wider transnational turn in the academy, scholars have begun to question the strong national imprimatur that has long characterized the field. In addition, the end of apartheid has created conditions for a freer flow of scholars between South Africa and India which in turn has prompted a sharper appreciation of the centrality of Gandhi’s South African experiences to his broader ideas as well as his activities in India.
In a book published last year, Gandhi’s Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading, I took up these transnational themes in relation to Gandhi’s textual experiments during his South African years (1893-1914). These comprised a printing press (the International Printing Press established in 1898); the multilingual periodical Indian Opinion, and a range of pamphlets, the most famous of which is Hind Swaraj.
While some accounts see Gandhi’s printing and publishing activities as unique and unprecedented experiments, I placed them in a southern African context and sought to understand them as part of the various print culture traditions that Gandhi encountered. As an imperial space, South Africa (or what was to become South Africa) was diasporically made with people arriving from many parts of the world and from within the region itself so that Africans, South Asians, Middle Easterners, Australians, Chinese, Europeans and so on, encountered each other.
Many of these people brought different printing traditions with them, producing a diverse print culture landscape. Gandhi’s experiments formed part of this world and his publishing activities took shape with and against these other printing modes. Locating his projects in these worlds of diasporically-made printing allows us to appreciate how he drew on, but also how he departed from them, working within their limits to formulate radical new ideas.
This article (which includes excerpts from the book) proceeds in three steps: we first outline the printing traditions in and around Durban, then turn to Gandhi’s experiments at Phoenix, and finally, draw out some broader conclusions.
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f one had visited Durban in 1903 and wandered through its small business district, one would have encountered just over a dozen printing establishments (Fig. 1). All these were white-owned and managed (although Africans and Indians would have done much of the manual work) and were generally monolingual.
Fig 1: The black dots represent white-run firms. The white dot in Grey Street shows the position of the International Printing Press. The second white dot represents the Indian Opinion office. |
Among these presses was one company that was rather different. It was the IPP and located on Grey Street, in the heart of the emerging Indian business district. The press had been launched in 1898 with substantial backing from Gandhi and offered printing services in ten languages involving seven different scripts (English, Gujarati, Tamil, Hindi, Urdu, Hebrew, Marathi, Sanskrit, Zulu, and Dutch). Five years later, in mid-1903, Gandhi launched Indian Opinion which initially appeared in four languages and four scripts: English, Gujarati, Tamil, and Hindi (with the latter two being dropped two and a half years later). The newspapers offices were tucked away on Mercury Lane but did not remain here long, since in 1904 the press and paper moved to Phoenix, Gandhi’s first ashram-type settlement, 14 miles north of Durban.
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een from the perspective of India, Indian Opinion was probably a novel experiment since most vernacular newspapers in India itself used at most two languages. However, from a southern African perspective, this was not unusual since African newspapers frequently used several languages in one publication.If one ventured outside Durban, one would have encountered three further presses, all related to Christian mission activity. Thirty miles south of Durban lay Adams College (under the auspices of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions) which housed a press. Another press was attached to Mariannhill, a Trappist community which Gandhi had visited and admired enough to write about in 1898 (Fig. 2). The third press formed part of John Langalibalele Dube’s Ohlange Institute established in July 1901. Often known as the Tuskegee of South Africa, Ohlange constituted a unique experiment, ‘an all-African school, free of both mission and state oversight’, as Heather Hughes notes in her excellent biography of Dube.
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Fig. 2: Printing presses outside Durban, 1903. |
Alongside these Christian mission presses were also other religious organizations/people that were active, namely the Arya Samaj and various Muslim evangelizers like Ghulam Muhammed, who arrived from Bombay in 1896 and undertook madrassa and mosque building (not far from Phoenix). While these groups did not have their own printing presses, they were active distributors of pamphlets, booklets, hagiographies, and miracle narratives.
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he hinterland around Phoenix constituted a brave new world of evangelical experimentation comprising proselytizing Trappists, US Protestants, Zulu internationalists, Bombay Muslim holy men, Punjabi Arya Samajists. Within Durban itself, white printers too were involved in a form of social experiment, in this instance the construction of white racial privilege. For the white working man, printing was central to this project and in their view, its skilled positions should be reserved for white artisans, by violence if necessary. Printers, in fact, formed a visible part of the lynch mob that attacked Gandhi on his return from Bombay in 1897 (Fig. 3). They believed that Gandhi was bringing in a printing press and 30 Indian compositors and thus they first threatened to attack the press and then Gandhi.
Fig. 3: Photograph of lynch mob gathered on Durban dockside awaiting Gandhi’s arrival, 1897. Reproduced with permission of the Local History Museum’s Collection, Durban. |
Yet, whatever their tactics, all these groups pursued similar ideas of self-help, religious (or social) reform, and ethnic regeneration in pursuit of which they printed newspapers, books, and pamphlets. Most obviously white printers defined themselves in opposition to South Asian printers and labourers more generally whom they saw as eroding the racial privileges of the ‘white man’. There were other cases as well where groups used each other as frontiers of self-definition: the Arya Samaj distinguishing itself as much from Muslim holy men as from Gandhi, whom Swami Shankeranand, the leading Samajist famously dismissed as ‘a Tolstoyan’, who did not serve Hindus well.
Likewise, Gandhi and Dube both expounded different versions of ‘race pride’; Dube in redeeming ‘Africa’, Gandhi in nurturing ‘India’. Both men were involved in creating their own miniature ‘continents’, defining themselves in opposition to each other, admiring each others projects from afar, but deprecating each others’ ‘people’: Gandhi was as well known for his anti-African statements as Dube for his anti-Indianism (even while his newspaper carried advertisements for Indian merchants). In this environment, ‘Africa’ and ‘India’ came to function as boundaries of each other.
As is well known, in 1904, Gandhi moved the press and newspaper to Phoenix, making it as much a printing settlement as anything else. The factors behind this decision are normally identified as the ballooning costs associated with the press and paper as well as a growing interest on Gandhi’s part in exploring new forms of community. As we have seen, such experimental inclinations were not sui generis but formed part of the brave new world of social reform and ethnic regeneration in which Gandhi found himself.
Seen in the context of the printing projects discussed above, Phoenix does not appear that unusual and in many ways closely resembles aspects of Ohlange, Adams Mission and Mariannhill. The founding motto of Ohlange, ‘to teach the hand to work, the brain to understand, and the heart to serve’ could as well have described Phoenix. Ohlange also produced a newspaper Ilanga lase Natal: Ipepa la Bantu (Sun of Natal: The Black People’s Paper). Comprising three languages (English, Zulu, Sesotho), the paper has been noted as a possible model for Indian Opinion.
Equally, the printing traditions that Gandhi experienced became a spur for defining what he did not want to do. Hence his experience at the hands of white printers helped shape his ideas of what a press should not be: it should not be a time-driven profit machine, based on ideas of racial or other forms of privilege. As others have pointed out, Gandhi’s observations of white settler nationalism in Natal quickly persuaded him of the limits of nationalism in general. Likewise his exposure to a printing tradition based on white labour supremacy convinced him of the shortcomings of a racially defined capitalist way of organizing printing.
Unsurprisingly for a project of social reform, the founding narrative of Phoenix features the press as a central protagonist. Indeed, the first structure on the settlement was built to house the printing operation. The press followed – four wagons each headed by a span of sixteen oxen carried the printing machinery and equipment, fording rivers and crossing a rugged countryside.
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he personnel that worked on the press were diverse, comprising different languages, religions, castes, races and genders. Gandhi’s nephew, Chagganlal, oversaw the Gujarati section, and was co-manager of the press with Albert West (a printer from Lincolnshire) while Sam Govindswamy (a locally born descendant of indentured workers) made sure the machinery was in order. By Pyarelal’s account, Govindswamy was one of two press employees (the other not named) who retained their original salaries. They were assisted by a dozen volunteers, mostly non-residents who commuted from Durban. Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie lists these as Virji Damodar Mehta, Mr Mannering, Mr Orchard, Hemchand, Kababhai, Ramnath, Behary, Muthu, Rajcoomar, Harilal Thakar, and a photographer, Brian Gabriel.2As several historians have demonstrated, the newspaper Indian Opinion became important to the success of Gandhi’s campaigns. Equally pivotal was the press itself, which became central to Phoenix, and operated as an embodiment of its utopian ideals. Virtually all residents – men, women and children – were involved in at least some aspect of the printing process. Typesetting was mandatory for all literate members of the settlement, some proving more adept than others with Gandhi describing himself as a dunce. Most men assisted with operating the presses while everyone folded the newspapers, put them in wrappers, and pasted on addresses.
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mongst the settlers at Phoenix were several of Gandhi’s relatives as well as his immediate family. The core functions of the press were family run. In addition to Chagganlal’s wide-ranging responsibilities, Maganlal, another nephew, oversaw composing and did other skilled jobs while Anandal learned Gujarati typography on the job. However, this was not a family business in the normal sense. As Prabhudas Gandhi noted in his memoir: ‘In Gandhi’s ashram the place of blood ties was taken by common ideology and a common devotion to duty.’3 Or as Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph have indicated, Gandhi’s ashrams were modern institutions in which there was entry and exit by choice rather than lineage. This demotic impulse was strengthened by the press, which functioned as a leveller with everyone undertaking physical labour, whatever their caste or religious background. In the words of Prabhudas Gandhi, ‘Germans, English, Africans, Chinese, Parsis, Muslims, Jews and Hindus’ laboured together on the press.4The idea that everyone worked equally on the press was probably something of an illusion. There was a core of people devoted to the running of the press, two of whom earned commercial salaries. Also, it is clear from some accounts that the press, like all concerns in Natal, relied on cheap African labour.
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andhi saw Phoenix as a training ground for satyagrahis, and for prison. There was hence a rigorous labour regime of which the press formed a part. Working a hand operated iron press is noisy, and involves long hours. It is physically demanding, and those who did it on a full-time basis often developed back and kidney problems from the constant strain of pulling the bar of the press. Typesetters too developed aching fingers and felons (painful, pus-producing infections at the ends of their fingers). While the settlers at Phoenix appear to have avoided these ailments, they were nonetheless subject to the labour disciplines of the print shop, which increasingly became part of the project of training for satyagraha.The press functioned as a fulcrum of social relationships at Phoenix, which was at times known as the International Printing Press settlement. When Albert West married Ada Pywell in July 1908, the wedding was reported in Indian Opinion as though the bride was marrying into the printing press.
As part of a settlement run on Tolstoyan and Ruskinian principles, the press constituted a kind of religion, the ideal for which settlers lived and worked. Press work itself was never an end in itself, and initially the idea had been that printing would be a part-time activity fitted in between agricultural work. As matters turned out, the agricultural ambitions of the settlement never took off, and printing became the main occupation. Religion constituted the other important dimension of the community’s life. Daily routine hence comprised plowing, printing, and praying. An average day would begin with work in the fields, followed by a long stint in the printing press, ending with a daily half-hour multi-faith service in which Hindus, Muslims, Parsees and Christians took part.
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s part of turning printing into a kind of religion, Gandhi argued strenuously for the use of hand-operated technology in which printing could be slowed down, and freed from the hasty tempo and alienation of industrial production. Yet, in practice, this probably happened infrequently, and instead the IPP arrived at a compromise between hand and machine power. An experienced printer, West knew that one could not run heavy machinery on manual labour alone, and so he acquired an oil engine. But, to keep the gospel of hand work alive, he invented what was called ‘the wheel’ – a driving wheel with handles on either side that when manually operated powered a long belt, and in turn a machine.The utopian dimensions of the press were strengthened when in 1910 Gandhi decided to stop all jobbing printing, seeing this as a distraction from the real work of producing the newspaper and its associated pamphlets. In the same year he began scaling back on advertisements, and then in 1912 decided to dispense with virtually all advertisements except those promoting socially useful objects, especially books.
The final utopian dimension of the press pertained to copyright practice. While Gandhi objected to plagiarism, he initially regarded copyright law as a form of private property that prevented the free circulation of ideas. Two of the pamphlets produced by the IPP (Hind Swaraj and Tolstoy’s Letter to a Hindoo) explicitly indicated ‘no rights reserved’. In following this policy, Gandhi was in effect seeking a way of operating not only beyond the constraints of the market, but of the state as well. In this respect, he outstripped many of the evangelical presses in the Durban hinterland: records show that Christian mission organizations generally observed copyright legislation studiously.
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n the Indian Ocean port city of Durban, Gandhi and his colleagues experimented with the ways in which printing and publishing could enlarge new kinds of ethical selves. Situated on an ashram (or ashram-like settlement), the printing press, on a daily basis enacted a novel order of community, drawing in different castes, religions, languages, races and genders. Gandhi progressively phased out advertisements from the newspaper and took little notice of copyright legislation, constructing an ideal reader freed from the addictions of the markets and the dictates of the state. As a paper addressed to audiences in Britain, Africa and India, Indian Opinion explored ideas of ‘India’ that were not territorially based but rather existed amongst the individual sovereignties of its readers and the pathways of circulation that linked them.These experiments unfolded in an age of vertiginous acceleration via trains, steamships, and telegraphs, where, with mounting intensity, an industrialized information order bombarded readers with more and more printed matter. Ever-briefer media genres like the headline, summary and extract speeded up the tempo of reading. In Gandhi’s view, such reading ‘macadamized’ the mind (to use an image from Thoreau that appeared in Indian Opinion, 10 June 1911) and reinforced the dangerous equation of speed with efficiency.
Gandhi by contrast sought to slow down reading and textual production more generally. He favoured hand-printing and encouraged a style of reading that was patient, that paused rather than rush ahead. He interspersed news reports with philosophical extracts; he encouraged readers to contemplate on what they read rather than hurtling forward. In effect, he experimented with an anti-commodity, copyright free, slow motion newspaper.
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n exploring these ideas, Gandhi worked with two obvious and everyday truths, namely that serious reading can only be done at the pace of the human body and that each reader must read on his or her own behalf. If we are to read thoughtfully, we cannot speed up the pace at which we read and we cannot outsource the activity to someone else. In a Gandhian world such slow reading became one way of pausing industrial speed and in so doing created small moments of intellectual independence. Reading may happen within the world of industrialized time, but didn’t need to be entirely driven by its logics. This focus on bodily rhythm as a way of interrupting industrial tempo became central to his larger and world-famous critiques of modernity that questioned the equation of speed with efficiency and technology with progress.
Footnotes:
1. Heather Hughes, The First President: A Life of John L. Dube, Founding President of the ANC. Jacana, Johannesburg, 2011, p. 89.
2. Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie, Gandhi’s Prisoner? The Life of Gandhi’s Son Manilal. Kwela, Cape Town, 2004, p. 69.
3. Prabhudas Gandhi, My Childhood With Gandhi. Navajivan Publishing House, Ahmedabad, 1957, p. 18.
4. Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, Postmodern Gandhi and Other Essays: Gandhi in the World and at Home. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2006, p. 55.
References:
Isabel Hofmeyr, Gandhi’s Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2013.
Pyarelal, The Birth of Satyagraha: From Petitioning to Passive Resistance. Vol. 3. Navajivan Publishing House, Ahmedabad, 1986.