Violent Texts, Vulnerable Readers: Hind Swaraj and Its South African Audiences
In the first half of 1910, four English versions of Hind Swaraj appeared. The first was Gandhi’s translation taken down by Hermann Kallenbach and circulated in manuscript to a group of friends and associates. The second took shape between Natal, Bombay, and Madras. The Gujarati version of the book, printed at Phoenix, Natal, had been seized in Bombay on grounds of sedition on March 10 and was handed to the Gujarati translator of the Madras High Court. Five days later he had produced a twenty-one- page typed summary in English for the Home Department on the basis of which the governments of Bombay, Madras, and Bengal issued orders of forfeiture ( Parel 2009b: lxiii;1993: 240 – 54).
Back in Natal, the third English version appeared on March 20, hastily produced as a printed booklet at Phoenix in response to the ban on the Gujarati version ( Parel 2009b: lxiii, 5). The fourth version emerged in July in Johannesburg under the auspices of the Transvaal police department. An account of the Gujarati Hind Swaraj had appeared in the periodical The Parsi: The English Journal of the Parsi and a High Class Illustrated Monthly. P. D. Khambatta, a Gujarati translator of the Johannesburg Supreme Court, unaware of the printed English translation, had drawn this report to the attention of the police and was hired by them to do a translation. Between July 16 and 20, Khambatta dictated his translation, which was taken down by Superintendent J. Vernon and Sergeant W. H. Warden ( Khambatta 1910a). These translations all emerged as part of an imperial textual field with characteristic modes of generating documents, and they consequently share certain hallmarks. They are all the product of diverse hands working across lines of language and race. Gandhi’s description of his English translation could as well apply to the process followed by Khambatta and his colleagues: “A European friend with whom I discussed the contents, wanted to see a translation of it and, during our spare moments, I hurriedly dictated and he took it down” ( Gandhi 2009: 5). The translations bear the mark of the colonial state: all took shape directly or indirectly around the idea of sedition, a discursive precondition of the state itself. They were all produced in a rush: sedition precipitates urgency; there is much at stake; the life of the state could be in danger.
This concern with sedition produces a particular conception of the reader as someone who is vulnerable. Such a reader represents a potentially weak point in the fortification of the state and needs to be buttressed lest the boundaries of the state be breached. Such a preoccupation is strong in the case of the two state- sponsored translations: the Madras interpreter recommended banning on grounds that the text might take “hold of the mind of young inexperienced men” ( Gandhi 2009: 5). A covering letter for Khambatta’s translation indicates that only “the most seditious extracts from this book w[ere] translated” ( Khambatta 1910b).
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