ISBN: 9788189059736    Publisher: Navayana Year of publishing: 2015     Format:  Hardcover Language: English

"No Indian has cooperated with the British government more than I have for an unbroken period of twenty-nine years of public life. I put my life in peril four times for the cause of the Empire" - M.K. Gandhi, 1920 In the pantheon of global liberation heroes, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi has pride of place. Leaders like Mandela have lauded him as being part of the epic battle to defeat the white regime and prepare the way for a non-racial country. A popular sentiment in South Africa goes: 'India gave us Mohandas, and we returned him to you as Mahatma'. Against this background, The South African Gandhi: Stretcher-Bearer of Empire unravels the complex story of a man who, throughout his stay on African soil (1893-1914), remained true to Empire while expressing disdain for Africans. For Gandhi, whites and Indians were bound by an Aryan bloodline that had no place for the African. His racism was matched by his class (and caste) prejudice towards the Indian indentured. He persistently claimed that they were ignorant and needed his leadership, and wrote their struggles out of history--struggles this book documents. Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed show that Gandhi never missed an opportunity to demonstrate his loyalty to Empire, with a particular penchant for war. He served as stretcher-bearer in the war between Brit and Boer, demanded that Indians be allowed to carry fire-arms, and recruited volunteers for the imperial army in both England and India during the First World War.
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Ashwin Desai is Professor of Sociology at the University of Johannesburg. His previous books include South Africa: Still Revolting, ‘We are the Poors’: Community Struggles in Post-Apartheid South Africa, Reading Revolution: Shakespeare on Robben Island, Zuma’s Own Goal: Losing South Africa’s ‘War on Poverty’ (edited with Patrick Bond and Brij Maharaj), and Race to Transform: Sport in Post-Apartheid South Africa (editor). Goolam Vahed is Associate Professor of History at the University of KwaZulu Natal. He writes on histories of migration, ethnicity, religion, and identity formation among Indian South Africans. He has co-authored, with Ashwin Desai, Inside Indian Indenture: A South African Story, 1860–1914 and Chatsworth: The Making of a South African Township and (with Thembisa Waetjen) Schooling Muslims in Natal: Identity, State and the Orient Islamic Educational Institute. His other books include Monty Naicker: Between Reason and Treason, Many Lives: 150 Years of Being Indian in South Africa.
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