Abstract
India figures strongly in Hilary Sapire’s treatment of issues raised by the 1947 Royal Tour to South Africa, a spectacular event that turned out to be a last hurrah for Jan Smuts as well as the start of soon-to-be Queen Elizabeth II’s personal connection and identification with the Commonwealth. Sapire focuses on the sizeable Indian diaspora in South Africa, its political radicalisation and its growing identification with African nationalist resistance. She shows how the presence of the monarchy in 1947 highlighted divisions within the Indian community between imperial loyalists who commended deference and activists who viewed the monarchy as part of the repressive structure of empire and, by extension, as complicit in South African racial segregation. Sapire argues that the 1947 Royal Visit aroused some of the first organised anti-apartheid sentiment in Britain while also influencing Indian and perhaps South African official positions at the 1949 Commonwealth conference in London. She also reintroduces Gandhi back in to post-1914 South African scholarship, by showing how he chose to back the boycott, by contrast with Nehru who advised only against ‘overt demonstrations’ against the Royal Visit.
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Notes
- 1.
‘Views of Indian and Coloured Writers on Republican Era’, Rand Daily Mail, 2 June, 1961 ‘An Occasion of Genuine Sadness’. Poovalingham (1924–2009) was the son of an indentured immigrant who migrated to Natal in 1896. Influenced by communism in his youth, he joined the Natal Indian Congress (NIC) and was imprisoned during the Passive Resistance Campaign of 1946–1947. Poovalingham was amongst a small group of Indians and Africans who joined the Liberal Party in the 1950s, and controversially, he became a member of the House of Delegates, designed by the late Apartheid state to provide a limited voice for South Africa’s minority Indian community in the early 1980s.
- 2.
‘Afrikaners’ Finest Hour a Tragedy’, by James Matthews, Rand Daily Mail, 2 June,1961. Cape Town-born poet and fiction writer, Matthews was a dissident writer who had established his reputation as a short story writer by 1961.
- 3.
Hilary Sapire, ‘African Loyalism and its Discontents: The Royal Tour of South Africa 1947’ Historical Journal, March 2011, 215–40.
- 4.
Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed, The South African Gandhi. Stretcher-Bearer of Empire (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016).
- 5.
Vineet Thakur, ‘Liberal, Liminal and Lost: India’s First Diplomats and the Narrative of Foreign Policy’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 45, 2, 2017, 232–58.
- 6.
Indian Opinion, 8 May, 1925.
- 7.
Hilary Sapire, ‘The 1947 Royal Tour in Smuts’ Raj: South African Indian Responses’ in Robert Edgar and Cindy McCreery (eds.), Royals on Tour. Politics, Pageantry and Colonialism (Manchester University Press: Manchester, 2018), 234–49.
- 8.
Harshan Kumarasingham, ‘A New Monarchy for a New Commonwealth? Monarchy and the Consequences of Republican India’, in Robert Aldrich and Cindy McCreery (eds.), Crowns and Colonies. European Monarchies and Overseas Empires (Manchester, 2016), 283–308.
- 9.
Philip Murphy, Monarchy & the End of Empire. The House of Windsor, the British Government and the Postwar Commonwealth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 40–48.
- 10.
Goolam Vahed, ‘National Liberation, Non Racialism and “Indianness” the 1947 Visit of Dadoo and Naicker to India, https://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/national-liberation-non-racialism-and-indianness-1947-visit-dadoo-and-naicker-india-goolam; Julie Suares, ‘Engaging with Asia; the Chifley Government and the New Delhi Conferences of 1947 and 1949’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, 57, 4, 2011, 495; 495–510; Vineet Thakur ‘An Asian Drama: The Asian Relations Conference, 1947’, The International History Review, 41, 3, 2019, 673–95.
- 11.
Murphy, Monarchy and the End of Empire; Kumarasingham, ‘A New Monarchy’, op cit; Aldrich and McCreery (eds.), Royals on Tour; Milinda Banerjee, The Mortal God: Imagining the Sovereign in Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres, 2018); Saul Dubow, ‘Smuts, the UN and the Rhetoric of Race and Rights’, Journal of Contemporary History, 43, 1, 2008, 43–72; Arianna Lissoni, ‘Yusuf Dadoo, India and South Africa’s Liberation Struggle’ in Anna Konieczna and Rob Skinner (eds.) A Global History of Anti-Apartheid. (St Antony’s Series. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 203–38; Paul M. McGarr ‘”A Serious Menace to Security”: British Intelligence, V.K. Krishna Menon and the Indian High Commission in London, 1947–52, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 2010, 38: 3, 441–69; Essop Pahad, ’The Development of Indian Political Movements in South Africa, 1924–1946’, PhD Dissertation, University of Sussex, 1972; John Soske, Internal Frontiers. African Nationalism and the Indian Diaspora in Twentieth-Century South Africa (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2017).
- 12.
I thank Stuart Ward for his insights on the emotional intensity in the local and transnational conversations about Monarchy; Joanna Lewis Empire of Sentiment. The Death of Livingstone and the Myth of Victorian Imperialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
- 13.
Ben Pimlott, The Queen. A Biography of Elizabeth ll (London: HarperCollins, 1996), 111.
- 14.
World Review, 11 February, 1947.
- 15.
A.I. Meer, ‘Prison Horrors and Indignities in Smuts’ Raj’, Blitz, cited in The Indian in South Africa—Pamphlet 4 (Durban: Durban Corporation, c. 1947).
- 16.
National Archives (Pretoria), Smuts Papers, ‘Indian Boycott of the Royal Family’, 21 February, 1947. On the Passive Resistance Campaign, Ashwin Desai, ‘The 1946–1948 Passive Resistance Campaign in Natal, South Africa: Origins and Results’, Journal of Natal and Zulu History 31, 2013, 54–67.
- 17.
Doulat Ramdas Bagwandeen, ‘The Question of “Indian Penetration” in the Durban Area and Indian Politics, 1940–1946’, PhD Dissertation, University of Natal, 1983, chapter 7, 339.
- 18.
Enuga Sreenivasulu Reddy, ‘Pandit Nehru and the Unity of the Oppressed People of South Africa’, https://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/pandit-nehru-and-unity-oppressed-people-south-africa-es-reddy.
- 19.
Bjawamo Dayal Sannyansi, Abdulla Ismail Kajee (Adarsh-Nager, Ajmer, India, 1941), [pamphlet] 49–50. http://scnc.ukzn.ac.za/doc/B/Ks/Kajees/Sannyasi,_BD_Abdulla_Ismail_Kajee.pdf (accessed 3 April, 2018).
- 20.
Desai and Vahed, Monty, 106.
- 21.
Pauline Podbrey, White Girl in Search of the Party (Pietermaritzburg: Hadeda Books, 1993), 61, 81–82.
- 22.
Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie, ‘Gandhi and Indian Nationalism in South Africa’, Historia, 54, 1, 2009, 13–33.
- 23.
Durham University Library (DUL): Special Collections: Baring Papers, Baring to Machtig, 21 November,1944.
- 24.
Inkululeko, Second Issue, March, 1947; Mesthrie, Gandhi’s Prisoner. The Life of Gandhi’s Son Manilal (Cape Town: Kwela Books), 313–14.
- 25.
NA: BTS 22/2/1434 vol 1 A.I. Meer, Joint General Secretary, Natal Indian Congress to Mayoral Secretary, Durban, 11 September,1946.
- 26.
Passive Resister, 11 November, 1946.
- 27.
NA: BTS 22/2/1434 vol 1 A.N. Baker, Mayoral Secretary to Joint Honorary Secretary, Natal Indian Congress, 16 September,1946; NA: BTS 22/2/434 vol. 1 Minutes of the Meeting between the representatives of the four provinces in the interdepartmental committee of the Royal Visit, Pretoria, 25 and 26 September, 1946.
- 28.
Cape Standard, 15 January, 1947; Indian Views, 26 February, 1947.
- 29.
Times of India, 25 February, 1947.
- 30.
Leader, 15 February,1947; NA: Smuts Papers A1 167 vol CLXVll AP Headquarters, Pretoria Confidential: Mass Meeting (Indian) Durban.
- 31.
Leader, 8 February, 1947; Indian Views, 26 February,1947; Leader, 1 March,1947; Natal Mercury, 19. February, 1947; Cape Standard, 18 March, 1947; Leader, 8 February, 1947.
- 32.
Natal Mercury, 19 February, 1947.
- 33.
Leader, 8 February, 1947; Indian Opinion, 14 February, 1947.
- 34.
Mesthrie, Gandhi’s Prisoner, 313; New York Times, 4 February, 1947.
- 35.
NA: Smuts Papers C6/2427/7 ‘Confidential: Indian, Communist and Native Boycott in Connection with the Royal Visit of Their Majesties the King and Queen and Princesses, South Africa, 1947.
- 36.
Leader, 8 February, 1947.
- 37.
Indian storekeepers were already faced by white consumer boycotts in reprisal against the Indian government’s trade boycott against the Union.
- 38.
Leader, 22 February, 1947; Institute of Commonwealth Studies, ANC Papers 1/25 ‘Annexure to Secretarial Report ‘J’ Resolution Passed at Conference Convened by the Natal Indian Congress Held at the MK Gandhi Hall, Durban, 23 February, 1947.
- 39.
Indian Views, 26 February, 1947.
- 40.
Leader, 15 February, 1947.
- 41.
Leader,15 March, 1947.
- 42.
Leader, 15 February, 1947; Natal Witness, 25 February, 1947; Indian Views, 26 February, 1947.
- 43.
Natal Mercury, 17 February, 1947.
- 44.
Natal Mercury, 21 February, 1947; Natal Mercury, 20 February, 1947.
- 45.
Natal Mercury, 19 February, 1947.
- 46.
Guardian, 20 February, 1947; Rand Daily Mail, 17 February, 1947.
- 47.
Natal Mercury, 27 February, 1947; Natal Witness, 20 February, 1947; Sunday Times, 16 February, 1947.
- 48.
TNA: DO 119/1429 Telegram from the High Commissioner for the United Kingdom, Cape Town to the Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs, 5 March, 1947.
- 49.
Natal Mercury, 5 March, 1947; Leader, 15 March, 1947.
- 50.
Dermot Morrah, Royal Family, 86. 82.
- 51.
University of London, Senate House, ICS, ANC Papers, 25, Presidential Address, NIC First Biennial Conference, 31 May–1 June, 1947; Torch, 7 April, 1947; Parvathi Raman, ‘Being Indian the South African Way: The Development of Indian Identity in Durban’ in Annie E. Coombes (ed.), Rethinking Settler Colonialism. History and Memory in Canada, Aotearora New Zealand and South Africa (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 203.
- 52.
The Hindustan Times, 3 February, 1947.
- 53.
Raman, op. cit., 203.
- 54.
Indian Views, 26 February, 1947.
- 55.
Indian Opinion, 28 February, 1947
- 56.
Sunday Statesman, 22 February, 1947.
- 57.
Inkululeko, First Issue, April, 1947.
- 58.
Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed, Monty Naicker. Between Reason and Treason (Pietermaritzburg: Shuter and Shooter, 2010), chapter 9 ‘In the footsteps of the Mahatma’.
- 59.
Times of India, 12 February, 1947.
- 60.
Kumarasingham, ‘New Monarchy’, 295.
- 61.
Times of India, 19 April, 1947. Enuga S. Reddy, ‘No Easy Victories: African Liberation and American Activists over a Half Century, 1950–2000’, www.noeasyvictories.org/interviews/int03reddy.php#ednref2
- 62.
Their Majesties’ Visit to South Africa, HC Deb 27 January, 1947, vol. 432, cc621-3.
- 63.
Passive Resister, 7 March, 1947.
- 64.
Hindustan Times, 28 February, 1947.
- 65.
Hindustan Times, 1 April, 1947.
- 66.
Hindustan Times, 10 March, 1947.
- 67.
Hindustan Times, 10 March, 1947. Abrahams had represented South Africa at the Pan African Conference in Manchester in 1945. See his The Coyoba Chronicles. Reflections on the Black Experience in the Twentieth Century (Cape Town: David Philip Publishers, 2000).
- 68.
Enuga S Reddy: Notes on meeting with Dr. Cassim Jadwat—1997, https://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/enuga-s-reddy-notes-meeting-dr-cassim-jadwat-1997.
- 69.
Murphy, Monarchy & the End of Empire, 38–39.
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Sapire, H. (2020). South African Indians, Monarchy and the New Commonwealth: Transnational Conversations and Perspectives, 1946–1948. In: Dubow, S., Drayton, R. (eds) Commonwealth History in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41788-8_9
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