Print, Text and Book Cultures in South Africa. Andrew van der Vlies

(dis)affiliations are performed. Like Kim, Tagore’s Gora journeys across India on the Grand Trunk Road; he too is the orphaned offspring of Irish parents. However, unlike Kim, Gora remains utterly committed to India, even as the revelation of his parenthood forces him to redefine his relation to what is unambiguously identified as his motherland. Whereas Kim’s loyalties ultimately fall firmly on the side of empire (see Said 1994, 148), with an attendant narrowing of his world, Gora’s worldview widens as the novel concludes (see Nandy 1998, 46). At the conclusion of his story, Gora steps out of the partisan India he has championed, opting instead for an India cut across and infused by various currents and flows. Thus, while the journey in Kim is from a championing of syncretism to a retreat into purity, in Gora this trajectory is reversed.

      Tagore, moreover, renders intimate relations central to the plot of Gora (first published in Bengali in 1909 and in English translation in 1924). Questions about which community one belongs to, with whom one may fraternise, whom one may love and so on lie at the core of its philosophical enquiry and narrative structure, which unfolds through the prism of romance and the domestic novel, engaging in the production of romantic love, the authorisation of the realm of the heart in political life (see Tagore n.d., 53, 57) and the feminisation of a hitherto masculine national culture (Tagore n.d., 83, 274) (no ‘virility of ideas’ here!). Ultimately, and antithetically to both Kim and A Passage to India (published in the year in which the English translation of Gora was issued), gender difference and love between men and women are presented in Gora as the solution to the narrative crisis and the surest means by which to surmount communal and racial barriers.

      In October 1930 Jeffreys informed Sastri that she could barely tear herself away from Tagore’s novel in order to pen her letter:

      I might as well say I have met those people; known them intimately for years. And the inter-relation of social prejudice and the action of the characters is so clean that, foreign as many of the ideas are to the occidental mode of life, we at once feel with each character, understand his predicament, and acquiesce in the naturalness of his behaviour. I do not know when I have so much enjoyed a book or felt so unbearably aggravated by the vagaries of the people in it, or loved them with such affectionate understanding.

      This enthusiastic response reveals the reader inserting herself into a community in the act of reading, as Jeffreys identifies keenly with the novel’s eponymous hero, whose personal journey sees him travelling away from a dogmatic quest for a pure and untouched India and towards an acknowledgement of his own alterity and a celebration of the fissured—and thus infinitely richer—texture of the India he finally discovers. The India towards which Tagore wrote was one open to the oceanic currents that had previously formed and composed it; elsewhere, in his pamphlet Greater India, first published in 1921, he bemoans that which “has caused us to stop all voyaging on the high seas,—whether of water or of wisdom. We belonged to the universal but have relegated ourselves to the pariah” (Tagore 2003, 26). Like Forster, moreover, Tagore was energised by the problem of colonial friendship: “All of the trouble that we see now-a-days is caused by this failure of East and West to come together. Bound to be near each other, and yet unable to be friends, is an intolerable situation between man and man, and hurtful withal” (Tagore 2003, 87). Here Tagore articulates one of Rao’s abiding concerns; writing from Lake Victoria en route to India in May 1929, Rao posed to Jeffreys the question: “Where does the East end and the West begin?”

      In contrast to Kipling and Forster, the anti-phallocentric friendship towards which Tagore’s and Rao’s writings strove created spaces in which to imagine community anew. Yet, by reinserting the gendered body into his fictions of friendship, Tagore required of Jeffreys that she recast the affect she had thus far modelled on the fraternal. Toward this end, she returned to Chitra (adapted, like Śakuntalā, from the Mahābhārata, and first published in 1914), urging Sastri in a letter of October 1930: “Do read Chitra again, see how she found fulfilment and comradeship.” In the play Jeffreys read a dozen times, Chitra, a woman raised as a son, exhorts the gods to make her “superbly beautiful” for a year (Tagore 1962, 156) in order to secure the heart of the avowed celibate, Arjuna. Having achieved her aim, she shuns her “borrowed beauty”, finding that her “body has become [her] own rival” (Tagore 1962, 162, 163). Yet she fears that, should she stand true in her unwomanly guise, Arjuna will reject her. Unveiling into her masculine attire, however, she is embraced as he declares, in the play’s closing line, “Beloved, my life is full” (Tagore 1962, 173).

      Jeffreys drafted a spate of letters to both Sastri and Rao in which she tries to explicate her reading of Chitra. In them, she articulates the ways in which she is drawing on the play to imagine her community of letters and her position in it. It is unclear which letters were dispatched on the mail boat and which instead found their way into the waste-paper bin; what can be ascertained is that no other text excited such enthusiasm and anxiety as Chitra did, for nowhere else in the letter books is there such a proliferation of drafts and deletions. One entry, addressed to Rao in September 1929, reveals the source of this confusion when Jeffreys confesses: “On reading over my letter about Chitra, I perceive I have written not of Chitra but of myself.” While offering Jeffreys a self-reflective surface, Chitra moreover provided the stage on which she and Rao thrashed out perceived differences between East and West regarding both the aesthetics and ethics of love.