Abstract
Sometime in the 1980s, two elderly people embarked on a collaboration; a collaboration that affirmed half a lifetime of political fellowship and personal friendship. The result was an English-language book Gandhi. His Gift of the Fight. The lives of Marjorie Sykes and Jehangir P. Patel gain historical timbre in the interstices of the larger tale they seek to tell. Two lives take shape in ways that unravel the binaries informing taken-for-granted assumptions about the colonial. They offer a case study of cosmopolitanisms that provincialises the European concept. These provincial cosmopolitanisms did not need to reject a sense of patriotism as a pernicious parochialism. Instead, they inscribed patriotism and nationalism into universalisms that challenged the assumed universalism of European imperialism.
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Notes
- 1.
Jehangir P. Patel and Marjorie Sykes, Gandhi: His Gift of the Fight (Rasulia: Friends Rural Center, 1987).
- 2.
Marilyn Lake, ‘Chinese Colonists Assert Their ‘Common Human Rights’: Cosmopolitan as Subject and Method of History,’ Journal of World History 21, no. 3 (September 2010): 375–92, doi: 10.1353/jwh.2010.0011.
- 3.
Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Duke University Press, 2005).
- 4.
Kris Manjapra, ‘Introduction’, Cosmopolitan Thought Zones: South Asia and the Global Circulation of Ideas, eds. Sugata Bose and Kris Manjapra (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 1.
- 5.
Sugata Bose, ‘Different Universalisms, Colorful Cosmopolitanisms: The Global Imagination of the Colonized,’ in Cosmopolitan Thought Zones: South Asia and the Global Circulation of Ideas, ed. Sugata Bose and Kris Manjapra (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 97.
- 6.
Lion M. G. Agarwal, Freedom Fighters of India, volume 2 (New Delhi LISHA Books, 2008), 195; Bal Ram Nanda, Gandhi: A Pictorial Biography (New Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, 1972).
- 7.
Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) was an Austrian Jewish author whose fame was at its height in the 1920s and 1930s. His works were widely translated, although his reputation was never as great amongst English reading publics. He was an internationalist and Europeanist who fled Europe first in 1934 to London, then to the USA in 1939 before finally settling in Brazil where he and his wife committed suicide in despair at the destruction of the European culture they saw as theirs. Leo Carey, ‘The Escape Artist: The Death and Life of Stefan Zweig,’ The New Yorker, August 27, 2012; see also Oliver Matuschek, Three Lives: A Biography of Stefan Zweig, trans. Allan Blunden (London: Pushkin Press, 2013).
- 8.
Romain Rolland (1866–1944) was a French writer, winner of the 1915 Nobel Prize for Literature, he was a pacifist, internationalist and mystic who corresponded with Rabindranath Tagore and published a book on Gandhi; Mahatma Gandhi: The Man Who Became One with the Universal Being, trans. Catherine Daae Groth (New York: The Century Co., 1924).
- 9.
Stefan Zweig, Romain Rolland: The Man and His Work, trans. Eden Paul and Cedar Paul (New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1921), 356.
- 10.
Patel and Sykes, introduction to Gandhi: His Gift of the Fight, 2.
- 11.
Hallam Tennyson (1920–2005) was a ‘pacifist-Marxist’ writer and BBC radio producer, as well as great grandson of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, the Victorian poet laureate. He and his wife spent 2 years in India in the late 1940s, including several months in Gandhi’s ashram, where he met Gandhi and probably Marjorie Sykes who was living at the ashram then. It is unclear whether or when he met Patel. Ann Thwaite, ‘Obituary: Hallam Tennyson’, Independent, January 2, 2006, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/hallam-tennyson-521322.html, accessed 24 September 2016.
- 12.
Hallam Tennyson, preface to Gandhi: His Gift of the Flight, by Jehangir P. Patel and Marjorie Sykes (Rasulia: Friends Rural Center, 1987), ix.
- 13.
Patel and Sykes, authors’ note to Gandhi: His Gift of the Fight, xi.
- 14.
Suresh Sharma, ‘Swaraj and the Quest for Freedom – Rabindranath Tagore’s Critique of Gandhi’s Non-Cooperation,’ Thesis Eleven 39, no. 1 (August 1994): 93–104; T. S. Rukmani, ‘Tagore and Gandhi,’ in Indian Critiques of Gandhi, ed. Harold Coward (Albany: SUNY Press, 2003), 107–128.
- 15.
and Sykes, authors’ note to Gandhi: His Gift of the Fight, xi.
- 16.
Ibid.
- 17.
Patel and Sykes, introduction to Gandhi: His Gift of the Fight, 2.
- 18.
Ibid.
- 19.
Ibid.
- 20.
arZan, ‘The Parsis and the Reserve Bank of India Connections,’ Parsi Khabar (blog), September 30, 2014, http://parsikhabar.net/finance/the-parsis-and-the-reserve-bank-of-india-connections/8556/.
- 21.
Yogendra Yadav, ‘Jehangir Patel and Mahatma Gandhi,’ Prof. Dr. Yogendra Yadav’s Blog, The Gandhi-King Community, April 25, 2013, http://gandhiking.ning.com/profiles/blogs/jehangir-patel-and-mahatma-gandhi-1.
- 22.
Sykes has authored a number of written works, primarily books as well as some journal articles. Notable ones include:
Banarsidas Chaturvedi and Marjorie Sykes, Charles Freer Andrews: A Narrative. (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1949).
Sykes, Marjorie, Rabindranath Tagore (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1943).
Sykes, Marjorie, The Earth Is the Lord’s: Shri-Vinoba Bhave and the Land (London: Friends Peace Committee, 1952).
Sykes, Marjorie, The Story of Rabindranath Tagore (Bombay: Orient Longmans, 1950).
- 23.
Martha Dart, Marjorie Sykes: Quaker Gandhian (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1993).
- 24.
Majorie Sykes, In Quaker Friendship: Letters from Marjorie Sykes, ed. Martha Dart (York: William Sessions Ltd., 1999).
- 25.
Ibid, 78.
- 26.
‘About the collections,’ Quakers in Britain, accessed May 30, 2016, http://www.quaker.org.uk/resources/library/about-the-collections. Last paragraph of the subsection ‘Archives and manuscripts’.
- 27.
Carolyn Steedman, Dust (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 154.
- 28.
Leela Gandhi, introduction to Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 3.
- 29.
Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993), 19.
- 30.
Ibid, 36.
- 31.
Patel and Sykes, Gandhi: His Gift of the Fight, 135.
- 32.
Dart, Marjorie Sykes, 5.
- 33.
Ibid, 6.
- 34.
Ibid, 7.
- 35.
Patel and Sykes, introduction to Gandhi: His Gift of the Fight, 5.
- 36.
Ibid, 4.
- 37.
Marjorie was a member of Newnham College at Cambridge, where friends introduced her to what Dart describes as a ‘flourishing university society known as “international teas”’ often held at a friend’s home.
‘Students from all over the world filled the big drawing room; there were many from India, including two or three women from Madras who were to make Marjorie welcome there a few years later. A number of the Indians had been active in Mahatma Gandhi’s first “non-cooperation movement” two years earlier, and the name Gandhi became familiar to Marjorie for the first time’. Dart, Marjorie Sykes, 13.
- 38.
Dart, Marjorie Sykes, 13.
- 39.
The Student Christian Movement was established in the UK in 1889 as a network of students dedicated to missionary work overseas. However, by the turn of the century, it was pioneering Christian internationalisms far more liberal than imperial evangelicalism. It became the largest student organisation in Britain and was a major influence for ecumenicalism in the early twentieth century and was a prime mover for the Edinburgh World Missionary Conference in 1910 see Tissington Tatlow, The Story of the Student Christian Movement of Great Britain and Ireland (London: SCM Press, 1933).
- 40.
Dart, Marjorie Sykes, 16.
- 41.
Ibid, 17.
- 42.
Patel and Sykes, introduction to Gandhi: His Gift of the Fight, 8.
- 43.
Ibid, 6. The book misspells Duleepsinhji’s name. Kumar Shri Duleepsinhji (1905–1959) was from the princely Rajput family of Nawanagar, now part of Gujarat. His uncle, K.S. Ranjitsinhji (1872–1933) was the more famous cricketer but Duleepsinhji played for Cambridge and Sussex in the 1920s and 30s (see his entry in the Wisden Cricket Almanac for 1930, ‘Kumar Shri Duleepsinhji,’ http://www.espncricinfo.com/wisdenalmanack/content/story/154691.html, accessed September 24, 2016). Duleepsinhji went on to become a High Commissioner to Australia from 1951–1954.
- 44.
Ibid.
- 45.
Ibid.
- 46.
The Simon Commission, officially the Indian Statutory Commission, chaired by Sir John Simon, was sent to India in 1928 by the British Government to investigate the possibility of constitutional reform. Public protest centred on its complete lack of Indian representation – all seven members were British MPs – and it was boycotted by the Indian National Congress. Major public protests greeted it at every city it visited as well as strikes. Visually arresting masses of black flags were waved by the throngs protesting against the Commission’s authority.
- 47.
Patel and Sykes, Gandhi: His Gift of the Fight, 32.
- 48.
Ibid.
- 49.
At this time, Rajagopalachariar was a leading member of the INC and served as the Chief Minister of Madras as well as becoming the first and last Indian Governor-General and holding ministries in the national government after Independence.
- 50.
and Sykes, Gandhi: His Gift of the Fight, 45.
- 51.
Ibid, 48.
- 52.
The Bar Gymkhana appears to be a reference to the Bombay (now Mumbai) Gymkhana, an elite sporting club founded in 1875 and still in operation. Membership was restricted to Europeans until well into the 1930s. Cricket was a major focus of its activities amongst other sports. Parsees were amongst the earliest communities to take up the sport and play against British teams. It is possible Patel is referring to one of the communal Gymkhanas that were established in Bombay; as Majumdar documents, there were a number of Parsee clubs in Bombay in the early 19th century with cricket as a focus: Boria Majumdar, ‘Cricket in Colonial India: The Bombay Pentangular, 1892–1946,’ The International Journal of the History of Sport 19, no. 2–3 (2002): 157–188. For a recent analysis of the role of the club in colonial society, see Benjamin B. Cohen, In the Club: Associational Life in Colonial South Asia (Manchester University Press, 2015).
- 53.
Chagla was secretary of the Muslim League in 1927–28.
- 54.
Patel and Sykes, Gandhi: His Gift of the Fight, 35.
- 55.
Ibid, 37.
- 56.
Ibid, 124.
- 57.
Originally published in weekly instalments in Gandhi’s journal Navjivan from 1925–1929, it also appeared in English in his other journal Young India. The first book edition was published in 1927.
- 58.
Both Bombay Parsees active from the 1870s in the nationalist movement and the early INC.
- 59.
Ibid, 38.
- 60.
Ibid, 40.
- 61.
Dart, Marjorie Sykes, 21.
- 62.
Patel and Sykes, Gandhi: His Gift of the Fight, 54.
- 63.
Dart, Marjorie Sykes, 29.
- 64.
Patel and Sykes, Gandhi: His Gift of the Fight, 124.
- 65.
Ibid.
- 66.
Ibid, 132.
- 67.
‘…the transformation of human relationships toward healing a wholeness, of human society’ Patel and Sykes, Gandhi: His Gift of the Fight, 135–136.
- 68.
Ibid, 119.
- 69.
Mehta was an associate of Gandhi who founded and ran the National Institute of Naturopathy in Pune, India.
- 70.
Patel and Sykes, Gandhi: His Gift of the Fight, 120–121.
- 71.
Ibid, 39.
- 72.
See particularly the discussion in Bose, ‘Different Universalisms, Colorful Cosmopolitanisms’, 97–102.
- 73.
Nagaland, a region bordering Myanmar and the state of Assam, consists of a number of different ethnic groups under the umbrella name of Nagas. Distinctive ethnically and historically from the sub-continent, the Nagas sense of separateness from India was nurtured under British rule and reinforced by a wholesale conversion to Christianity and education in English. At Independence, the Nagas declared themselves independent from the new Indian state and began a long-running insurgent struggle for national autonomy. Despite Nagaland being made a state of the Indian union in 1963, and numerous peace initiatives and agreements, the Naga insurgency has continued although currently a fragile peace stems from an accord between the main insurgent group and the Indian government signed in August 2015. See Alex Waterman, ‘Premature Prospects for Peace in Nagaland,’ ISIS Voices (blog), International Institute of Strategic Studies, March 4, 2016, https://www.iiss.org/en/iiss-voices/blogsections/iiss-voices-2016-9143/march-71d7/nagaland-peace-process-89fd; and Dinesh Kotwal, ‘The Naga Insurgency: The Past and the Future,’ Strategic Analysis 24, no. 4 (2008): 751–772.
- 74.
Jayaprakash Narayan (1902–1979) was a leading socialist activist in the anti-colonial nationalist movement in India before Independence. After Independence, he helped found the Praja Socialist Party but retired from politics in 1953 to join the Sarvodaya movement for social reconstruction in the countryside, during which period he became acquainted with Sykes. He returned to politics in the 1970s to lead the opposition to Mrs Indira Gandhi and the Congress Party’s anti-democratic Emergency. Brass, Paul, ‘Narayan, Jayaprakash’. Paul R. Brass, ‘Narayan, Jayaprakash (1902–1979),’ in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004–), accessed September 25, 2016, doi: 10.1093/ref:odnb/47755.
- 75.
Dart, Marjorie Sykes, 51.
- 76.
Mahatma Gandhi to Jehangir P. Patel, Bombay, January 16, 1946, in The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, 1945–1946 (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Trust, 1980), 431.
- 77.
Patel and Sykes, Gandhi: His Gift of the Fight, 156.
- 78.
Ibid, 159.
- 79.
Bose, ‘Different Universalisms, Colorful Cosmopolitanisms,’ 99.
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Haggis, J., Midgley, C., Allen, M., Paisley, F. (2017). Provincialised Cosmopolitanisms: Jehangir P. Patel and Marjorie Sykes. In: Cosmopolitan Lives on the Cusp of Empire. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52748-2_4
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