In ‘Smuts’ Raj’: Indian Moderates and Monarchy

Set in the Indian Ocean port city of Durban in Natal, home to the largest Indian population outside of South Asia, this chapter considers the ways in which royal visits—1925, 1934, and especially 1947—raised particularly troubling questions of belonging, loyalism, and identity for Indian South Africans whose presence in the city had long been challenged in the form of visceral ‘anti-Asianism’ by white Anglophone city residents, ardent loyalists in their own rights. The 1947 Royal Visit that took place mid-way through the Passive Resistance Campaign (PRC), against the notorious ‘Ghetto Act’ of 1946 that provided for compulsory segregation of Indians, the most concerted political action by this diasporic community since Mohandas K. Gandhi’s departure from the Union. The chapter explores the passionate and contradictory responses of the city’s Indian population to the Royal Visit at this moment of ferment, and the rancorous conflict between ‘Moderates’ (favouring Indian participation in the Royal Visit’s festivities) and the ‘Radicals’ (who campaigned for a total Indian boycott) that came to a head during the royal visit. The intercession in these disputes of both Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru from India, taking opposite stances, highlights the wider significance accorded to the politics of the Royal Visit in the anxious months preceding Indian independence. Close attention is given to the ‘Moderates’, a grouping largely dismissed in a historical narrative that privileges the ‘Radical’ leaders and the tentative politically progressive cross-racial alliances forged with Africans signified in the historic ‘Doctors Pact’ between the leaders of the ANC and Indian Congresses in that year. It thereby sheds light on an alternative if discredited trajectory taken in South African Indian politics that combined a politics of pragmatism with loyalism. It also suggests that there were more commonalities between ‘Moderates’ and ‘Radicals’ than the overheated rhetoric of the day and current historiography suggests.