India and Africa in Parallax: In Conversation with Renu Modi, Shobana Shankar, and Meera Venkatachalam

NEILESH BOSE

Shops in Colaba, South Mumbai, selling African cloth. Photo Navin Narang. Image provided to Borderlines by Meera Venkatachalam

Introduction

In recent years, Mohandas Gandhi’s life and works in South Africa have seen vigorous re-appraisals and critical assessments from a range of positionalities. Movements to remove statues of Gandhi throughout the world (Gandhi Must Fall) as well as various attempts to defend the image of Gandhi have occurred as well. As statues of slaveholders and imperialists have begun to fall in the Global North, what are the larger issues at play in Global Southern histories of Gandhi and his reception across the world? What do we see when we see statues of Gandhi? What actually is destroyed when statues come down?

Gandhi’s life and itineraries straddled the Indian Ocean, and key sites in India and Africa, but also inspired a number of movements and political changes in other regions of the world including the Atlantic world. Building on the particular issue of Gandhi’s reception in the Global South, this conversation places Africa and India together in various ways. It poses questions about how to read entangled histories of race and empire in ways often hard to see in either standard issue histories of particular places or people or politically charged dismissals of older figures.

Given how many histories and critical perspectives on the past Gandhi’s name conjures, his iconic presence prompts a parallactic reading of history and politics in India and South Africa. Parallactic readings uncover histories behind the easily predictable image crowding dominant lines of vision. Parallax and parallactic readings come together in recent scholarship and art, including Pakistani-American artist Shahzia Sikander’s Parallax, an installation composed of hundreds of digitally animated images which focuses on the geostrategic position of the Strait of Hormuz as well as aims to orient viewers to perspectives on modern colonialism and post-colonial politics of the present. Another parallactic reading of history comes in the form of Bangladeshi artist Dhali Al Mamoon’s 2015 Lat Saheber Chair, an installation of a chair made of indigo, representing the conquest of Lord Clive over Bengal, posing questions to viewers about both Mughal and English conquest of Bengal, two sovereign entities from outside the region who indelibly shaped the cultural, economic, and political trajectories of Bengal in a manner that is impossible to disentangle. Kris Manjapra’s 2020 Colonialism in Global Perspective offers a range of “parallactic readings” of various moments in the history of colonialism via interpretations of objects embedded in colonial and postcolonial contexts in North American indigenous sites contextualized within frames comprehensible to historians of Asia and Africa.   

Sikander and Al-Mamoon offer works of art and abstraction whereas Manjapra’s work of global history is informed by such parallactic readings, motivated not only by empirical research but also by visual practices and languages as well as reflections on the limits and possibilities of seeing history through multiple frames. These reflections about history frame a discussion with scholars based in a variety of institutions regarding how concepts of race as well as histories of racialization sometimes get confused between the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean contexts and how we may think about that today. Invocations of and interpretations of Gandhi range from recent fixation on his South African years from 1893 to 1915 as well as an older anti-colonial African emphasis on his methods of politics in the post-South Africa Indian years from 1915 to 1948. What do Gandhi Must Fall movements mobilized around the image of Gandhi in the present day say about the limits and potentials of our various fields, whether the history of South Asia, whether the history of Africa, whether the history of connected, connected histories of colonialism and anti-colonialism?

Lat Saheber Chair”, by Dhali al-Mamoon. Image provided by the artist.

conversation

Part I: India and Africa’s Entanglements across Time and Space

Renu Modi: We have adopted the Area Studies approach in Indian universities. Indian Ocean Studies, African Studies and South Asia Studies are considered as different disciplines. And even within that, there are silos as historians will study the history of the Indian Ocean, economists would study globalization, liberalization, WTO issues, and sociologists and cultural anthropologists study issues such as urbanisation issues or tribes in Africa.

On another note, politics, economics, and diplomacy are usually interrelated. I give you just one small anecdotal example. I'm talking about my visit to Stone Town in Zanzibar, at the House of Wonders Museum. It was such a beautiful, magnificent heritage building building constructed in the late 1880s by the Omani Sultan of Zanzibar. The House of Wonders engenders memory spaces of the old Indian Ocean connections—and the Arab, Asian and African cultures. I saw a big dhow-mtepe displayed there.

One of the American professors, Professor Paul Greenough had referred to a taxidermy crow that was displayed at this museum in the early 2000s. And then it was alluded to that crows that came in dhows with Indian immigrants in the late nineteenth century were filthy and destroying local shambas, or farms.[1] So it was an indirect way of talking about the Indian community. But now India has good political and economic relations with Tanzania that encompass bilateral trade, lines of credit, capacity building initiatives, and scholarships for Tanzanian students, etc. This is just one example of how culture, politics, economics are intertwined. So I feel there is nothing that can be studied in silos, as they are so interlinked.

Now I believe that the crow, and the plaque which mentioned the infamous crow, has been removed from the House of Wonders Museum, a part of which unfortunately caved in earlier this year due to poor upkeep.

NB: I recall you talking about Zanzibar as well as this broader issue this changing memory scape, which is also we see it in other parts of East Africa. There is work done on recent Indian capital and recent Indian relationships with East Africa, where there's this repurposing of older spaces that used to be occupied and inhabited by Indians of earlier eras, that is now seen differently because of the Indian state's relationship to different parts of East Africa.[2] 

Shobana Shankar: I think that was a really important point that Renu made. If you examine Atlantic Africa, what's very significant is that the economic relationship did not exist in a robust way between South Asia and Western Africa until the Indian Ocean interactions were developed. In the Atlantic, there was a cultural economy, however, before there was even a real presence of Indian traders or commercial diaspora in West Africa. Images, texts, and ideas were in circulation. For example, artist and scholar Henry Drewal and cultural studies scholar Dana Rush have traced the resonances of Indian images in the depictions of Mami Wata, a water deity in the Black Atlantic, and Vodun art. So while the British colonies of Gold Coast and Nigeria saw some Indian workers come to work on the railway and other colonial infrastructure in the early nineteen hundreds, even before that, there was West African interest in Indian devotional pictures.

I also examine West African and Indian encounters in the context of pan-Islamic networks, with Pan-Africanists like Edward Wilmot Blyden and the Ahmadiyya missionaries of Punjab.[3]

So I do agree with Renu that African-Indian connections are rich in material and cultural productions together rather than only doing a cultural analysis or only doing an economic analysis because the flows between Africa and India have been really multifaceted.

In fact, one of the points of tension I think, that I trace in my book was the perception and the belief among Africans that Indians did not really want to share Indian culture when they were in Africa.[4] For example, could Indian philosophy or Hinduism be available to Africans? Or could Indians homes be opened to Africans? 

They were segregated residentially, in many cases. Though in South Africa, Africans and Indians often lived in closer proximity than in other areas. Cultural knowledge was also difficult to exchange, though not impossible. One area that has begun to interest me is music beyond Bollywood.[5] Siddis in India are known for devotional music, while Ghanaian singers have developed a unique Hindu soundscape in which the Indian diaspora also participates.[6]

A lot of scholars have worked on cinema, for example, in colonial African cities, and cinema theaters were racially segregated. And so when there were Indian movies that played in Nairobi or Durban, Africans wanted to see those films and they were prevented from doing so. It was thought to be only for Indians, or more conservative African leaders did not want youth to be exposed to films. So the politics of cultural exchange between colonized subjects became intense. Africans were denied cultural recognition and opportunities, whether by the Indian diaspora or by other European occupying powers.

But another area where you can see this is actually through texts. Indian texts that came to Africa were read very intensely by West Africans, and then, in fact, some Indians who lived in West Africa before the colonial period ended were involved with printing newspapers, writing in newspapers, and publishing pamphlets. India has played a significant part in the practices of African literacy. India’s English-language publications were numerous, especially after 1947, and texts in English were in high demand in African colonies.

So I think that looking at the multiple facets of the economy is very important. And these shifting symbols of these exchanges between Africans and Indians, in the symbol like the crow, are significant. In its disappearance and refiguration, I think we can see that in material objects, too, we can trace African-Indian interactions across these regions.

NB: You mentioned at the opening of your comment about Atlantic Africa—would you say that there's something particular about the West African relationship with all of the issues that you mentioned, the material and the cultural, that marks it off as Atlantic that we would say in the Indian Ocean would take on different trajectories, different timelines, different kinds of exchanges? And that makes me think a bit about the point about religion that you mentioned, that perhaps there's something going on with religion in particular that is distinctive. Do you have anything more to say about that?

SS: The Atlantic world, of course, was forged in European expansion, domination, and racialized slavery.

It is not as if those factors were absent in the Indian Ocean world, but Atlantic modernity would not exist without those twin processes and so Atlantic modernity, particularly black Atlantic modernity, also has a very strong African and Pan-African countercultural politics from its very beginning. That's Paul Gilroy's point, and so I argue in my book that India's engagement with West Africa is also an engagement with this modernity.

Indians understood the uniqueness of West Africa’s transatlantic connections over hundreds and hundreds of years through slavery and capitalism, as well as the idea of African return, the return of black people to Africa. The sense of prophecy and that people had been stolen from the continent, combined with the idea of return, redemption, and homeland were animating ideas, important ideas, in discourses, practices like Pan Africanism that could be seen in relation to connectivities of the Indian Ocean.

I'm very curious to hear if scholars of the Indian Ocean see Pan Africanism operating in East Africa as an important factor in the relationship between Africans and Indians, because in West Africa, I do see engagement with thinkers and artists like Leopold Senghor or Kwame Nkrumah. They are Pan Africanists par excellence, and so when people talk about Bandung and the relationship between Nehru and Nkrumah, we have to go deeper into that in an intellectual sense. Senghor, for his part, received the honorary fellowship from the Indian National Academy of Letters/Sahitya Akademi in 1974 for his “bridge of friendship” between continents and his literary and linguistic achievements, including negritude and attention to the ancientness of African and Dravidian languages and civilizations.[7] 

The intellectual and spiritual aspects of Pan Africanism, I think, is very striking for Indians of a certain generation who were also thinking about the Indian diaspora in terms of nationalism and transnationalism, that is to say, an Indian civilizational identity. So I think we could have a broader intellectual history of these connections that takes into account the influence of black thought in shaping Indian thought. I think this point is precisely what has been ignored in a lot of studies focusing on Gandhi in South Africa. How did Black South Africans think about and with Gandhi, and how did they shape his views?[8]

If they didn't that means he was missing a huge piece of the experience of living in South Africa. Meanwhile, other Indians living in Africa and in India have been influenced by Black thought and experiences. We might look further at figures like Iyothee Thass and his son, who went to Natal as an indentured worker and the Sakya Buddhist Society—created to promote conversion of caste-oppressed peoples out of Hinduism—in Natal.[9]

NB: Regarding pan-Africanism, Cemil Aydin mentions a meeting point between Africanists and those who created the idea of the Muslim world in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Indian element of that meeting point suggests there is there were stirrings of such connections before formal meeting points like Bandung.[10]

One other issue is that between the Indian Ocean studies and the Atlantic world’s modernities, let's say, is that I think in the Indian Ocean field, there's been a lot of emphasis on trying to uncover these pre-modern or perhaps early modern spaces outside of only modern European empires that have linked India and Indians to spaces outside of India. Whereas I think what you're suggesting is that there is an intellectual, historical, and cultural-historical link, perhaps a bit more so than the literal links that are often found in the Indian Ocean.

Meera Venkatachalam: Right, I think there are two interrelated points to consider.

First is how Africans have been imagined in India and second is the way in which Africans have slotted into the fabric of Indian society, from pre-colonial times.

From the 15th century onwards, as the Indian Ocean mercantile trading networks developed, there has been a steady trickle in of people from the Horn of Africa to the Deccan in particular, and beyond the Deccan to northern geographies such as the Ganges Plain and as far as contemporary Delhi. Speaking from the vantage point of the Deccan, if you look at the work of historians like Edward Alpers,[11] Richard Eaton[12] and Omar Ali,[13] you get the impression that there is a well-established African element in most Deccani societies—from the Bahmani sultanate and the various factions that would reconfigure into the Maratha Empire.

There’s constant reference to a category of people in precolonial India known as ‘Habshi’, derived from Habesha, the word for Ethiopia. Many very able Habshi people came to India as slaves. Through the institution of ‘elite slavery’, they were able to ascend the military and social hierarchy in such a way that they were able to amass power and prestige. Many of them began their careers in lowly positions in the infantry, or as slaves to various local elites, but their rise saw their incorporation into the fabric of various Indian military houses.[14]

The presence of people from the Horn of Africa was so normalized at one point in India that they weren't actually considered to be a distinct racial category at all. They were very much part of the local framework of society, although people were aware of their non-sub continental origins. So, for example, people like Malik Ambar (1548-1626), who is probably the most celebrated African in India, was towards the end of his life, completely Indianized person. Ambar was so powerful that he emerged as a kingmaker in the Deccan. He features prominently in the historical works of various European travelers; these travel accounts reveal that Ambar’s own army included ten thousand other Habshis, which is evidence of a well-established pattern of migration from the Horn of Africa to India. These people did not just wither away without leaving a genetic inheritance. Given their easy coexistence with Deccanis, and with the Marathas, and various other peoples of peninsular India, there is a good chance that many people in this part of the world today have African ancestry, of which they are simply not aware.[15]

Malik Ambar (1548-1626) born in Ethiopia, was brought to the Deccan as a slave but rose to the rank of prime minister and general of Ahmednagar. From the collection of the National Museum, New Delhi, on display at the special exhibition, ‘India and the World: A History in Nine Stories’, Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vaastu Sangrahalaya, Mumbai, India, 11 November 2017 to 18 February 2018. Photo Johann Salazar [p. 44, Common Threads]. Image provided to Borderlines by Meera Venkatachalam.

The trade routes of the western Indian Ocean, and the political economies of migration, mobility, and trade, evolved to facilitate relations of interdependence between some Africans and Indians, and this interdependence resulted in largely harmonious relations. This condition of coexistence in the precolonial era contrasts with the racial relations in the colonial and postcolonial eras, where Africans and Indians are mainly antagonistic to each other.

Interestingly, the memory of these Africans in Indian historiography is completely obscured. I remember when I was in school in the 1990s in Mumbai when we learned about various Hapshi figures in Indian, and more specifically Maharashtrian history. The only detail about their identities we were provided with was that they were Muslim—their African origins were obscured. The history of the Deccan is a contentious terrain then, as it is now: the Hindu right, at both national and regional levels, have sought to reimagine the past as a series of conflicts between ‘Hindu’ groups and non-Hindu ones, rather than recognize their mutual enrichment of and dependence on each other. But it would seem that there was also an attempt to deliberately obscure the origins of people who came from outside the sub-continent or emphasize the ‘Islamic’ nature of historical figures who did not fit into the narrative vetted by the cultural forces aligned with the Indian political right.

In the Indian imagination, there are degrees of familiarity with Africa—some African cultures and spaces are more easily recognizable than others. There's a small neighborhood of South Mumbai, where you will always see several Somalis and people from the Horn of Africa shopping for luxury goods, cosmetics, and textiles. And the interesting thing is throughout the various partial lockdowns imposed on account of the COVID19 pandemic, none of these sojourners actually disappeared. They continue to travel here. It just shows you that the trading linkages between India and the Horn of Africa are really very old and very robust. And although the modalities of these linkages might have been reconfigured in the postcolonial era, they are too well-established to disrupt. For many societies of the Horn, India is the closest Other, and the most accessible one.

As newer exchanges developed in the colonial economy, a large number of Indians made Eastern and Southern Africa their home. These areas are incorporated into the Indian imaginary largely through the diaspora.  Central and West Africa, are more distant, with smaller diasporic Indian communities, and are less familiar to Indians. So, from an Indian perspective, Indian historical experience conditions how various parts of Africa are imagined.

In the colonial era and the postcolonial era, relationships between India and Africa have been reimagined through Anti-Colonialism, South-South Solidarity, Pan-Africanism, and Afrocentricism. There has been quite a lot of work on how Indians and Black Africans collaborated against colonialism, in different parts of the world.[16] But ideas of southern solidarity are in retreat, and Afrocentricism is coming to inform how some Africans think about India. 

Afrocentrism basically operates on a very basic marker of identity [and therefore ‘race’], which is color. Many African intellectuals will tell you that there are ‘black’ Indians and there are ‘white’ Indians. And if you do a little more nuanced digging into what they're saying, they're actually possibly referring to either: the idea of an Aryan-Dravidian divide, which Shobana discusses in her forthcoming book. Many African intellectuals have referenced the idea of the Aryan-Dravidian divide in their writings and intellectual projects. For instance, Senghor sought to draw Dravidians of southern India into his Negritudinal imagination, by suggesting they were also black, and therefore shared innate cultural similarities with Africans. Also, Indian intellectuals associated with Dalit intellectual traditions have sought to compare the Dalit condition with the African-American situation in the United States, in that both peoples were marginalized by hegemonic groups in their respective countries. The confluence of Dalit and Afro-American solidarities has also influenced how continental and diasporic Africans think of India. These intellectual currents have not attracted the attention they deserve, in the study of India-Africa relations.

SS: In Ethiopia, at the University of Addis Ababa, I saw Ethiopian artwork going back to the reign of Emperor Menelik II (r.1889-1913) that had depictions of Indians soldiers in battle. We have an exhibit about Africans in Indian art, including Mughal and Deccani styles, co-curated by Sylviane Diouf and Kenneth Robbins.[17] But we can also envision an exhibition of African depictions of Indians. During the time of Emperor Menelik in Ethiopia, Indian soldiers were depicted in profile, with only one eye showing. This meant they were not trusted in the time of British incursions into Ethiopia.

On the other hand, Richard Pankhurst has also discussed Indian craftsmen living in Ethiopia who helped build churches and carved elaborate doors, one with the elephant god Ganesh and his guards, for an Ethiopian Orthodox Christian, the future Haile Selassie![18] Thinking about these kinds of depictions—and their reflection of historical circumstances of dynamic African-Indian entanglements—alongside Renu’s example of the crows sent to Zanzibar, it’s clear there are a lot of representational aspects to this relationship.

But I wanted to ask Meera and maybe Renu can also talk about this.

The example of what you learned in school about the Habshi is very interesting to me because it is interesting to think about how much popular Indian knowledge there is about the African roots of different Indian populations, distinct from the scholarly interest in the African diaspora in India.

How this is taught in school, how many different communities discuss this, whether in the Deccan versus other regions, and also if Habesha were called Muslims, or if Muslim Indians know that there are communities who are Muslim Indians who are African descended. And so I was just very curious about how much K through 12 education there is about this Indian history, the Afro Indian history.

MV: Well, as I said before, the presence of Africans and particular Africans from the Horn of Africa was so normalized that they didn't register as a discrete group with origins outside. India was one of the areas where they could actually redeem their slave status and rise within the ranks of various institutional frameworks.

Such people of African origins would have done their best to project an image that suggested that they were in complete harmony with their host environment, and downplayed their roots and their experiences of slavery. So that's one of the reasons for this historical amnesia—Africans themselves obfuscated their origins. Their history starts when they are part of the Indian landscape, which feeds into amnesia. Also, in the 17th or the 18th century, nobody from the Horn of Africa would really advertise themselves as Africans because that was still a concept in the making.

Now, some people work with the idea that India is a more civilizational nation, and most of the country’s cultural inheritance is largely indigenous to the subcontinent—an idea embraced by the Indian right. The biggest enemies for this civilizational nation were medieval Islam, followed by British imperialism, which is Christian as far as they're concerned, and, now, China. There is going to be very little interest in researching such cultural connections as those between India and the Horn of Africa in pre-colonial times, as the very idea of a largescale African presence in medieval India is unsettling to certain political lobbies.

NB: Just a brief aside here, as I also work in Bangladesh and the history of Bengal in Bangladesh, there is in the popular consciousness, there's awareness of in the 15th century, there was a habshi lineage in the Bengal sultanate before the conquest of Mughal empire. And that line, it was very brief in the late 15th century. And the term habchi is part of Bangla vernacular.

Perhaps, unlike India, there is not an interest in avoiding the African origins of so-called habshis. And it is linked to the state of Bangladesh, where there's a paper called one of Bangladeshi studies, which I don't think exists anywhere else in the world, and there they know that Bangladesh was a site where Africans were welcome and that it is linked up to the history of Islam. Of course, these are parts of the nation, the idea of the Bangladeshi nation, which only comes into existence from about 50 years ago. So that's somewhat of a different issue. But it is alive and well in that consciousness, in the popular sphere there. And I'm curious about how, just as Shobana mentioned, and though I don't know how deep this goes, there's a sense of representations of Indians over time in different forms of art in Africa. But I'm not sure how these issues would be understood in Africa today or how India understands Africans in very contested ways, how that would be adjusted today. But anyway, did you have anything to say on this?

RM: Coming back to the earlier point, it's so interesting to read about Leopold Senghor’s and Nehru's vision of Asian-African unity. You could see Senegal had its project on Afro-Dravidians at one time, the color of the skin, our blackness united us. Senghor said ‘black is beautiful’ and that one must be proud of the color of your skin and your civilization and that one must go back to one’s roots. Senghor extended the arc of Africa right from Senegal in the west coast of Africa, right across Africa to Southern India. And the blackness united the Africans and Indians as this was at the height of internationalism and the Non- Aligned Movement and Pan Africanism. These were the early years of the collective fight against anti-colonialism.

But today we see incidents, though sporadic, of racist attacks against Africans. Today, color divides.

The second thing I would like to say is about the knowledge about Africa. There's a total obfuscation about most aspects of Africa, I will share an anecdote. In my earlier society, I have a close friend; I'm referring to the knowledge of Africa even among educated Indians. My friend told me that they had planned a holiday—a Safari to East Africa because it is very popular among Indians to go to Kenya and Tanzania. She said that since there was an Ebola outbreak in Africa, they canceled the trip. The Ebola outbreak was in Liberia, over five thousand kilometers of flight distance from Nairobi!

So that is the knowledge about Africa among an average middle-class Indian. And surprisingly, even though we have such long-established material and cultural connections through the land routes, people-to-people connections existed for the sale and trade of textiles even in the pre-colonial era.

Shobana also mentioned these old connections through textiles. But to date there is no direct flight connection between India and countries in west Africa. But in East Africa, we had direct connections, but not that many either. 

I don't remember reading anything about Africans in our history books. People ask me how I ever became interested in African studies. I remember when I was in the 12th grade or so and we went to a social event in our school. The song ‘In Zaire’, sung by the British pop artist Johnny Wakelin was being played. It is such captivating music. And for the first time, I found out that Zaire (Democratic Republic of Congo) was a place in Africa, in Central Africa.

And we are all familiar with the song, Malaika (angel in Swahili), though we did not know any Swahili. It is a famous love song written way back in 1945 by Adam Salim. We listened to the popular version sung by the late South Africa singer Miriam Makeba, though several international musicians have rendered their versions of the song. I don't know how this song entered my music vocabulary in the small town in Bihar, where I grew up.  But that was one of my early introductions to Africa.

NB: It's interesting that here we haven't really mentioned or dealt with southern Africa or the history of indenture, which is often linked to South Africa, although that is not the only place, of course, where that happened. But it is the most densely documented and has a great role in popular culture in English and also linked to Gandhi. But that hasn't come up in this conversation. And that's interesting.

RM: Or, even Mauritius for example, where over 4,00,000 indentured laborers were shipped from the Khiddirpur Docks in Kolkata. That is the only country where the Indian diaspora are in the majority and are also of the ruling party.

Part II: Ways of Viewing Gandhi Must Fall

Legon Gandhi, Photograph by: Meera Venkatachalam, November 2016

NB: Now on to Gandhi. How do we approach that topic, both of this history, which is not only a history of India or of southern Africa or of the British Empire, and of the connections over time reflected by his life and journeys? He also is shaped by a relationship between India and Africa that predates and transcends his own experiences. When there are statues that emerge, of course, they emerge in the context of the sometimes uncritical, hagiographic celebration of Gandhi, which is not necessary, but those emerged and then the critiques of Gandhi, the Gandhi Must Fall approach. Does that erase some of the histories of India and Africa connections that would be worth revisiting?

This is not to say that we must celebrate Gandhi, but how do we see him, given the Gandhi Must Fall history that we now have, we have some evidence about Gandhi Must Fall as a movement of the twenty-first century. And we have so much evidence of Gandhi now that we didn't have back when he was a figure of great hero-worship in many circles around the world. We know so much. So does it warrant a revision of the India-Africa connection that we know of?

MV: The Gandhi Must Fall movement is really interesting because it shows how aspects of India and Indianness are being reimagined by Africans. 

 I think most people in India were puzzled to see how the recent BLM protests in London and elsewhere played out. BLM is known for its antipathy to white Euro-American hegemony, and for highlighting issues of institutional racism against people of color in the Global North. So, seeing attacks on statues that represented the Confederate memorials; Churchill; Leopold II; Edward Colston, etc., were in line with the broader aims of the movement—to varying degrees, these figures were associated with slavery, colonial atrocities and exploitation, and in general upheld the idea of White Supremacy over non-White peoples.

But Gandhi statues across the UK and elsewhere also came to be targeted. Most Indians found it odd to see Gandhi getting the same treatment as, say, somebody like Churchill, his arch-enemy.  But the protest at the Gandhi statue at Parliament Square in 2020 was by no means the first protest against Gandhi as they have occurred previously in South Africa, Ghana and Malawi, between 2016-18.

However, it was the equation of Gandhi with symbols of colonialism by Africans in particular, which was interesting. It illustrated that there are many versions of an early Indian post-colonial history that have been excluded from the grand narrative—where Gandhi is framed as an anti-imperialist icon. These other narratives frame race and citizenship differently. [19]

The grand narrative of postcolonial Indian history, which is deeply connected to the dominant narrative of India-Africa relations, is very much a narrative developed through an Indian Ocean World lens of history. This version celebrates colonial and postcolonial alliances between peoples south of the international line of color. Aspects of Black and Brown solidarity are reproduced in this narrative, somewhat uncritically. Gandhi’s sojourn in South Africa is hailed as a transformative event, and South Africa [and by extension Africa], is remembered as his karmabhumi, where he realizes his destiny. In South Africa, he perfects the tactics of civil disobedience and satyagraha, and then comes back to India, where he puts these tactics to use to usher at the end of Empire. (In South Africa, he's mainly working for the uplift of endangered Indian laborers, and not at all creating Afro-Asian solidarities, but that is overlooked).

This imagination of Gandhi, and of Indian exceptionalism[20] in the Global South, comes from a tradition of philosophical thought associated by one section of Indian society, dominated by upper-caste men in particular. It was accepted by most of the world for three, four, five, six decades, whereas there are many other countercurrents that really didn't get the attention that they deserve.

But in the Gandhi Must Fall movement, we saw another way of imagining India, which drew quite heavily from intellectual traditions aligned with Afrocentric frames of reference developed in conversation with the Atlantic world.

The Gandhi Must Fall movement attracted a great deal of support within India as well, from various sections of Indian society, most notably Dalit intellectuals, and many who are sympathetic to the fact that the entire project of Dalit emancipation has not been as successful as it should have been. Gandhi’s patronizing attitudes towards Dalits and his inability to recognize the evils of the caste system for what they were/are, was/is deeply problematic to many. There is also no denying that Gandhi held racist views about Africans, and there is no way of knowing whether these views actually changed over time.

Dalit struggles have been influenced by events in the Africana world, through conversations with Africa’s diaspora. B.R. Ambedkar, the very charismatic Dalit leader and the architect of the Indian Constitution, studied in the United States. He constantly drew parallels between the condition of African-Americans in America and their struggles against white privilege, white hegemony, and lack of civil rights, with the Dalit condition in India. So Ambedkar [and a few others] basically gave rise to an argument which would be interrogated by academics for decades after that, as to whether caste is race and whether casteism equals racism. Thinking clinically, caste in India is not the same as race in the Global North as a social category. Race emerged as racial capitalism and colonialism came to define labor/capital relations, accumulation, and status; while caste predates colonialism, though it was solidified and reconfigured during the colonial era. [21] But there is no denying that casteism and racism are both moral failures in that they reduce individuals to generic members of a social group based on an accident of birth. They are embedded in institutional structures and the nuanced and overt manifestations of both of these are very similar.

So essentially, the argument of ‘a line of color within a line of color’ is accentuated—India is fractured along caste lines in the Afrocentric imaginary, drawing from this tradition of thought which has its roots in Dalit scholarship. When seen from this perspective, white hegemony and Brahmanical hegemony look a lot like each other.

NB: On that note of the relation to the Atlantic from the Dalit political perspective, I think we could take it all the way back to Phule and Gulamgiri, as he refers in his text to the U.S.A. in the midst of the Civil War and the idea of emancipation as in the emancipation of slaves.[22] An understanding of slavery and emancipation of slavery was appropriated in the nineteenth century into the anti-casteist context of Indian activism. This approach to both slavery and emancipation was later appropriated by Iyothee Thass and later by B.R. Ambedkar, showing a longstanding relationship to the Atlantic world.

The Indian Ocean versus the Atlantic Ocean version that you mentioned, that's to me like Ramachandra Guha vs. Desai and Vahed versions of Gandhi. And though I think those debates occurred before the Gandhi Must Fall movement, and now we have examples of Gandhi statues being taken down. We have examples of specific kinds of critiques.

Yet is it the case that the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean versions, if we want to call them, are irreconcilable? Nalini Natarajan’s work argues that Gandhi came to his own by dealing with and thinking about subordinated groups within the Indian populations. He has this relationship with the low caste Christian convert and that Natarajan argues, that is really what brought him to where he became. It's a certain kind of relationship to Gandhi studies Natarajan is also claiming—that travel and engagement with the world outside of India fundamentally shaped Gandhi’s own vision.

RM: Gandhi is a highly complex and difficult character. There can be many versions about and for understanding Gandhi.[23] Meera gave a contrarian view of what Gandhi is revered for today.

If you talk about Gandhi in South Africa one must read the work of Goolam Vahed and Ashwin Desai, The South African Gandhi: Stretcher Bearer of the Empire, and Professor Isabel Hofmeyer’s work. They refer to Gandhi's racist attitude towards indigenous South Africans, his reference to the Africans, as kaffir is seen as a racist remark and has been highly criticized.

But then Gandhi was so young when he went to South Africa and experimented with the concepts of Ahimsa and Satyagraha. His thoughts evolved and he was seen as an apostle of peace later in history, by stalwarts like Nelson Mandela, Nkrumah, Kenneth Kaunda, and others. His strategy of non-violent protest was adopted by many African countries as a part of their anti-colonial struggles.

“India gave Gandhi to South Africa and got back a Mahatma,” or so the saying goes. If seen only through the lens of his formative years in South Africa one may judge him harshly and call him a racist. Gandhi used his experiences in South Africa on his return to India. He was a transformed man. He was concerned about the underprivileged and the lower caste. Such a version of Gandhi—a highly complex person, is more forgiving and tries to understand him in the context of his times.

With regard to the Gandhi Must Fall: I have often asked this question to various ambassadors who have served in South Africa, Nairobi, etc. I visited Senegal and Ivory Coast last year before the pandemic, and I was very curious to know about this.

There were only three countries where there were sporadic protests against the statues of Gandhi and they were defaced in: Malawi, Ghana and South Africa. But barring these three cases, I'm not aware of any other country where there has been an outrage against Gandhi in Africa. And in these three countries too, not everyone is opposed to Gandhi.

In Senegal, there were exhibitions on khadi and essay competitions on the life of Mahatma Gandhi. Children wrote poetry on him and there are many African leaders there who thought of Gandhi as a symbol of peace. At the Renaissance Monument, the iconic place in Dakar, you have a small bust of Gandhi, and people pay tribute to him. It was the same story in the Ivory Coast. An IT park is named after Mahatma Gandhi.

If you go to the website of Indian embassies in Africa, you have the favorite song of Gandhi “Vaishnav Jan To Tene Kahiye Je,” written by the 15th century Gujarati poet Narasin Mehta. This bhajan has been sung by the local singer and shared on the Facebook page on the Indian High Commissions in Africa.

NB: On that note of Gandhi’s many guises. There's a historical Gandhi. If we dig out all the details of him and focus only on the South Africa period, we have a certain image of Gandhi obviously infused with the language and politics of race at that time. But the actual subsequent history of the appropriation of Gandhi draws on a whole range of politics, myths and ideas that are really from the Indian Gandhi after he left South Africa and developed a set of methods which then are understood throughout the world, not only in different parts of Africa, but in various parts of North America.

The mythic and mythopoetic outlast to some degree the historic Gandhi, though the historic Gandhi is now more and more known. We know exactly what he said. We know exactly where he went. But it doesn't mean, as Renu said, that he is not understood for his contributions throughout various parts of Africa for his contributions after that. And whether or not the Gandhi Must Fall development, which, as you mentioned, are in Ghana, South Africa, Malawi, in particular, Ghana, and also particular individuals represent how broader groups of people in Africa actually understand and approach Gandhi. Is this an Atlantic version of race and racism that is being imposed upon an interpretation of Gandhi?

The vast history of Indian and African connection, exchange, movement, mobility, and politics sometimes becomes drowned out by an inordinate focus on the history of Gandhi as a person, good, bad, or ugly. These other, much more vibrant histories, show hidden political and culturally specific changes and emotional registers, that can’t be encased in a narrative of positive political solidarities with dominant left politics (the anti-apartheid movement as an example) nor a history of tragedy and alienation. In my recently edited volume South Asian Migrations in Global History, one chapter features the life story of Senthamani Govender, a figure who was born just after the end of indenture (so after Gandhi left South Africa) and lived life through and beyond the apartheid period. Her family history shows one that is definitively marked by emplacement in African life but not defined by easy notions of race, nation, or political affiliation.[24]

MV: I've often wondered whether the Gandhi must fall movement was actually not really about Gandhi, but about something else—is it really about the dynamics of emerging power and the onward march of neoliberal capitalism into another geography?

And in order to answer that question, I looked to various other voices in that debate that argued for Gandhi to stand. Most of these voices were, interestingly, West African intellectuals who self-identify as members of the left.

Firstly, they argued that taking Gandhi off a pedestal was akin to an attack on the various multilayered, multidimensional relationships with signify Indianness. Many of these people are invested in ideas of South-South solidarity, and work closely with other southern and Indian partners. Many of these intellectuals found merit in some aspects of ‘Gandhianism’—ideas of self-sufficiency, sustainability, village-based economics, critiques of consumerism, etc., which when translated into non-Indian contexts, serve as a useful critique of neo-colonialism, capitalism, and consumerism. 

Second, they argued that the architects of the #GandhiMustFall movement viewed the postcolonial history of the Global South from the lens of Black American experiences. For them, the equation of an anti-imperialist (however flawed) with slave-owners and colonialists was a distortion of history.

Third, they argued that the #GandhiMustFall movement was ‘neither inspired nor driven by any domestic-initiated process on the continent of Africa towards the liberation of the African economy and political management from the stranglehold of Western-led international finance institutions.

What they were trying to say here, is that the architects of the #GandhiMustFall movement displayed an ignorance of how consumer-oriented, and corporate capitalism have created different categories of marginalization which sometimes overlap with race. These processes work to enrich some, yet exclude and oppress others, irrespective of race. Therefore, any movement against racism is half-hearted, if it does not simultaneously address the fall-out from neoliberal capitalism and its modus operandi in the Global South.

SS: The Indian government had assisted in building the Ghanaian presidential palace, a new presidential palace a few years before the Gandhi statue unveiling and the #GandhiMustFall protests. The presidential palace, Jubilee House, built in 2008 with Indian financing and oversight by Indian contractors, has generated controversies.[25] Within this context, it is possible to see how a lot of the critiques by the movement leaders was also about the way that their own government had accepted Indian influences without consideration of Ghana’s own history and culture nor without consultation with university faculty and students and without having a public forum.

And so I think it is important to acknowledge the multiple paths of dissent of Gandhi Must Fall in Ghana and some of those intellectuals are very connected to African studies scholarship on the continent and in the United States.[26]

So there is a very important aspect of national and international critique embedded in the Gandhi statue. As Obadele Kambon articulated, why is India giving us this statue, why not have a statue of Ambedkar?

I think it's also interesting that many of those Ambedkar statues in India have been defaced in different parts of India. A transnational Ambedkarite movement includes Indians and Africans who challenge caste oppression as a broader issue in the global struggle for equality. Older roots of this may be traced to movements like the Dalit Panthers founded in 1972.[28] Therefore, thinking of politics in narrow nationalist frames is not the only way.

For me, the dismissal of #GandhiMustFall, particularly by certain Indian scholars, is revealing of a long-running pattern of a paternalistic view of African politics that it isn't well studied. I think there should be an acknowledgment that African intellectuals may be very well connected to what's happening in the West, in Africa, and in India.

Throughout the African continent, there have been many conflicts over external actors, neo-colonialism, and corruption. For example, in South Africa, the corrupt relationship of the Gupta family to Jacob Zuma’s government has produced many negative consequences for race relations. India and Indians are understood within such larger dynamics, not just Gandhi’s history in South Africa. 

A lot of African leftists have been very critical of their own governments. Being critical of their own governments means being critical of those governments’ relationships to the Indian government and to Indian business and that's true for China and that's true for the United States and other countries. As Meera said, this sort of global capitalist neoliberal expansion is at play. And so in relation to Renu’s point, it may be that ambassadors and high-level people don't share the views of Gandhi Must Fall.

But there's also this tension between let's say the African political elite—including ambassadors, businesspeople, and the like—on the one hand, and African intellectuals, artists, and workers who might challenge their country's pro-business posture towards India. And so I really do come back to this point there are many Indias for Africans and part of Gandhi Must Fall is definitely a reaction to the idea that one India stands for all Africans. Knowledges of India are plural and are coming from so many lived experiences that these might challenge India's projection of itself. 

We cannot ignore, too, the many African students—youth—who study in India and return to their countries with experience-based knowledge of India that contradicts rhetoric, often empty, of equal footing and older uncritical narratives of Afro-Asian solidarity. Just as the Indian diaspora in African countries is not singular, the African knowledges of India and African experiences of India are not singular either

NB: I feel that this is one chapter in the Atlantic link between African understandings of India and Indian understandings of Africa. The Gandhi Must Fall movement and the dismissal of it by certain elements of Indian academia and Indian politics forms a chapter in this history. It fits into a history of the Atlantic world and India in a certain kind of relationship, at some point via appropriation and discourse and at times, specific social, cultural, and material linkages.

SS: I was so surprised in Ghana where I had gone to an Indian shop and was told by a Ghanaian worker there that the political strategies of Karunanidhi, the Tamil DMK leader, should be followed. He pointed to a flower garlanded picture of the leader, who died in 2018, and said, “oh, this is somebody who, you know, we should all be studying.”

And I was shocked about the Ghanaian immersion in Indian politics which might be altogether ignored or unrecognized in the Western media. Those grounded interactions come through in ethnography. Ethnographic experiences should become a part of our research. We wouldn't otherwise be able to capture this very polyvalent political and cultural nexus between these regions.

Instead, we resort to generalizing as Africa and India, and I think it was Renu or Meera or both who made the point that I use, this phrase of degrees of familiarity, degrees, zones of familiarity, generation, generational differences of knowing it's a very complicated set of entanglements.  

I see African and Indian co-constructiveness of their relationship. Instead of simply triangulating it through the West, these two larger groups of people have been understanding themselves through their long-term relationship. Moreover, the relations amongst Africans and Indians themselves have been constituted in relation to the transnational relations. In other words, for example, Indians are divided on issues like racism towards Africans in India, while Africans cannot be all said to see Gandhi through the same lens.[29]

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Neilesh Bose is Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in the History Department, University of Victoria. Bose’s interests include the history of modern South Asia (the Indian subcontinent), the British Empire, decolonization, and the history of migrations. Additionally, bose holds interests in theater, performance studies, and popular culture. His most works include a monograph Recasting the Region: Language, Culture, and Islam in Colonial Bengal (2014), and an edited volume South Asian Migrations in Global History: Labor, Law, and Wayward Lives (2020).

Meera Venkatachalam is an anthropologist & historian concerned with West African coastal cultures, African slavery and Post-slavery, Indian Ocean connectivities, and emerging global powers in Africa. Meera Venkatachalam, co-editor of Common threads: Fabrics made-in-India for Africa.

Renu Modi is Professor and Director of the Centre for African Studies, University of Mumbai, India. She was educated at the Lady Shree Ram College for Women (Political Science; Hons.) and read for her M.A., at the Centre for Political Studies, School of Social Sciences, and M.Phil. and Ph.D., at the Centre for African Studies, School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Modi has most recently co-edited The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary International Political Economy (2019).

Shobana Shankar is Associate Professor in the Department of History at Stony Brook University. Shankar’s work brings together history, anthropology, religion, and public health. Across these fields, Shankar examines belonging, difference, and exclusion, focusing on modern Africa, the African diaspora, and African-Indian encounters. Shankar’s first book, Who Shall Enter Paradise? Christian Origins in Muslim Northern Nigeria, c. 1890-1975 (Ohio University Press, 2014) traces the emergence and disappearance of a religious minority in Muslim Northern Nigeria. Shankar has co-edited two collections of research essays, Religions on the Move (Brill, 2013), and Transforming Religious Landscapes in Africa: The Sudan Interior Mission (SIM), Past and Present) (Africa World Press, 2018)

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ANNOTATIONS NOT HYPERLINKED

[1] For a brief discussion of the history of shipments of crows from India to Zanzibar for both the performance of Hindu funeral rituals as well as to protect the clove crop from insect predators, see Renu Modi, “Indian Communities in Africa” Africa Insight 40, no. 1 (June 2010): 56.

[2] See the work of Anneeth Kaur Hundle and in particular, her “African Asians and South Asians in Neoliberal Uganda: Culture, History, Political Economy” in Jorg Wiegratz, Guiliano Martiniello and Elisa Greco, eds., Uganda: The Dynamics of Neoliberal Transformation (London: Zed Press, 2018), 285-302.

[3] Shobana Shankar, “Slavery, an African-Indian Conceptualization,” in Prejudice, Discrimination and Racism against Africans and Siddhis in India, edited by Ibrahima Diallo (Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2020).

[4] Shobana Shankar, An Uneasy Embrace: Africa, India and the Spectre of Race, Hurst/Oxford: forthcoming.

[5] Brian Larkin, "Bandiri music, globalization, and urban experience in Nigeria." Social Text 22, no. 4 (2004): 91-112.

[6] Shobana Shankar, “Hindu Devotional Music in Ghana: Singing and Sensing the Unknown,” Yale Journal of Music and Religion, special issued by Margarethe Adams and August Sheehy (forthcoming, 2021).

[7] http://sahitya-akademi.gov.in/library/fellowship_pdf/HE-Leopoid-Sedar-Senghor.pdf.

[8] For context, see Rachel Matteau Matsha, "Mapping an Interoceanic Landscape: Dube and Gandhi in Early 20th Century Durban, South Africa" Journal for the Study of Religion 27, no. 2 (2014): 238-69.

[9] Louis H. van Loon, “The Indian Buddhist community in South Africa: its historical origins and socio-religious attitudes and practices." Religion in Southern Africa 1, no. 2 (1980): 3-18; https://roundtableindia.co.in/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=7569:pandit-iyothee-thass-and-the-revival-of-tamil-buddhism&catid=119:feature&Itemid=132.

[10] Cemil Aydin, The Idea of the Muslim World: A Global Intellectual History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017).

[11] Edward Alpers, “Between Eastern Africa and Western India, 1500 – 1650: Slavery, Commerce, and Elite Formation” Comparative Studies in Society and History 61, no. 4 (2019): 805 – 834.

[12] Richard M. Eaton, A Social History of the Deccan, 1300–1761: Eight Indian Lives (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

[13] Omar H. Ali, Malik Ambar: Power and Slavery across the Indian Ocean (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

[14] Kenneth X. Robbins and John McLeod, eds., African Elites in India: Habshi Amarat (Ocean City, NJ: Grantha Corporation, 2006).

[15] For discussion of a recent traveling exhibition on the topic, see https://thewire.in/politics/africans-in-india-pictures-that-speak-of-a-forgotten-history.

[16] See Nico Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).

[17] http://www.sylvianediouf.com/africans_in_india__from_slaves_to_generals_and_rulers_119627.htm.

[18]Richard Pankhurst, "The Indian Door of Täfäri Mäkonnen's House at Harar (Ethiopia)." Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 1, no. 3 (1991): 389-392.

[19] See Simona Vittorini, “Modi and the Mahatma: the politics of saffronisation of India-Africa relations” in India’s Development Diplomacy and Soft Power in Africa, edited by Kenneth King and Meera Venkatachalam (London: Boydell and Brewer, 2021).

[20] See Meera Venkatachalam, “The Political Right, Soft Power and the Reimagination of Africa” in India’s Development Diplomacy and Soft Power in Africa.

[21] The recent work Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origin of our Discontents (New York: Random House, 2020) offers the most recent comparative framework for studying caste in the historic and contemporary U.S.A., Nazi Germany, and India vis a vis a caste-centric lens toward studying racialized difference in each society. Reviews by Dilip Menon, Suraj Yengde, Sunil Khilnani, Gaiutra Bahadur, Yashica Dutt, Anupama Rao, and Charisse Burden-Stelly all emphasize different aspects of the work but probe the limits and potential insights entailed in equating caste with race.

[22] On Phule, see Dominic Vendell, “Jotirao Phule’s Satyashodh and the Problem of Subaltern Consciousness” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 34, no. 1 (2014): 52 – 66, https://read.dukeupress.edu/cssaame/article/34/1/52/59825/Jotirao-Phule-s-Satyashodh-and-the-Problem-of.

[23] For an approach to Gandhi in this vein, see Ashis Nandy, “Gandhi after Gandhi” Little Magazine 1, no. 1 (2000): 38 – 41. Nandy sketches four Gandhis: the Gandhi the immediate post-colonial state wanted to see, the Gandhi of the Gandhians, the Gandhi of “ragamuffins, eccentrics and unpredictables” (38) and finally the mythic Gandhi as understood by his legatees.

[24] See Devarakshanam Govinden, “A Woman of Peace and Calm: Senthamani Govinden” in South Asian Migrations in Global History, ed. Neilesh Bose (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 201 – 224. Other important work in this genre features Goolam Vahed and Ashwin Desai, A History of the Present: A Biography of Indian South Africans, 1990-2019 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).

[26] Brian Kwoba, Roseanne Chantiluke, and Athinangamso Nkopo, eds., Rhodes must fall: The struggle to decolonise the racist heart of empire. Zed Books Ltd., 2018.

[28] Nico Slate, “The Dalit Panthers: Race, Caste and Black Power in India,” in Black Power Beyond Borders, edited by Nico Slate (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 127-43; Vijay Prashad, "Afro-Dalits of the Earth, unite!" African Studies Review (2000): 189-201.

 [29] Shobana Shankar, “A Tale of Two Gandhis in Ghana,” Black Ambassadors of Politics, Religion and Jazz in India: Afro-South Asia in the Global African Diaspora vol. 3, edited by Omar Ali, Kenneth X. Robbins, Beheroze Schroff, and Jazmin Graves (UNC Greensboro/Ahmedabad Sidi Heritage and Education Center, 2020), 49-55.

*Editorial assistance by Tara Giangrande